At My Mother's Knee (33 page)

Two of the leading lights of the Carlton Players were
Reg Triplett
and
Betty Begley
. Reg was considered a versatile actor
who could play everything from low comedy to high tragedy.
He looked upon the Little Theatre as Olivier did the Old Vic,
and like most of the others he lived and breathed theatre. He
wore a car coat and carried his scripts in a leather-bound folder
with his name embossed on the front. Betty Begley had the
distinction of having been a professional actress, appearing in
her time in a Norman Wisdom film – or so Halifax told me.
She'd retired from a life in front of the camera to bring up her
two children, Sally and
Kim
, who, like their mother, were
active members of the Carlton Players.

Betty was a very attractive woman. She fancied herself as a
Margaret Lockwood or
Honor Blackman
type. She strode
around the rehearsal room in a fur coat and leather boots,
script in one hand, pencil in the other, proclaiming, 'Dahling,
do you rrreally think Eleanor of Aquitaine would say it like
that? She is after all one of the world's most powerful women.
I'd rather try a different approach if you don't mind, something
with a bit of wallop in it.'

The Carlton Players' production of
The Lion in Winter
caused quite a stir among the patrons of the Little Theatre.
When Betty, as Eleanor, dressed in a cloak and cowl that had
previously been worn by the Wicked Queen in a Christmas
panto, lifted a necklace up to her bosom just before the end of
Act One and announced in her ripe, throaty voice, 'I shall hang
this from my nipples,' an audible gasp of horror went round
the audience. A few of the outraged even threatened to withdraw
their membership.

Richard the Lionheart's homosexuality caused a few more
raised eyebrows and tut-tuts among the more conservative of
the blue rinses, even though the subject had been dealt with 'in
a most discreet and delicate fashion'. I was helping with props
in the wings and had hoped that the Carlton Players were
going to break down barriers by allowing a modicum of heavy
petting and a little light sodomy in that scene, but it wasn't to
be – maybe Birkenhead audiences weren't quite ready for that
just yet.

At Christmas the company put on a show for members and
friends of the theatre, a frightening bunch of people who
thought that just because they'd made a financial contribution
to the place they now had the God-given right to swan about
as if they owned it. The play, complete with musical interludes
and comic monologues, was set in Victorian Birkenhead and
involved a convoluted tale of three washerwomen from the
North End taking a trip to Oxton to visit the daughter of one
of the women who was in service in a big house there. Harold Rowson himself played the master of the house and his wife,
Dame
Norma
, came out of retirement to execute the role of the
grand matriarch. The setting was a Victorian drawing room
where a refined musical soiree to celebrate Christmas was in
full swing, Betty's daughter Sally, a real beauty, played the
youngest daughter of the house. I thought she looked enchanting
in her Alice in Wonderland costume and developed an
instant crush on her. Her brother Kim, who had a fondness for long suede waistcoats and wearing his jeans tucked into his
knee-high boots and seemed like he had a very high opinion of
himself, played the young army captain. Betty was the
Glamorous Music Hall Artiste whom the eldest son, a bit of a
roué swell and general cad about town played by Reg, had
brought home in an 'ansom from the Argyle music hall, for a
bit of supper. The role gave Betty carte blanche to get her
ample cleavage out and give her all as cockney tart. She warbled
a rendition of 'I'll Be Your Sweetheart' at the piano with
the male members of the family gathered around her, lustily
joining in the chorus while the womenfolk looked on unamused.

I had been given the part of youngest son, which involved little
more than sitting stage right in a chair throughout the entire
performance, miming having fun. I didn't care; it was showbiz.
I longed to do more, but for the time being was grateful to sit
half hidden by the curtain and display a range of emotions
from ecstatic joy to sorrowful recollection each night. My face
was inch-thick in numbers 5 and 9 of the sticks of Leichner
greasepaint that I'd bought from Owen Owen's and kept in a
cigar box like a real pro. You blended these colours into your
face until you'd achieved the healthy glow of a severe angina
attack. After finishing it off with a light dusting of powder, a
speck of carmine and a dab of clown white on the end of
a hairpin for the corner of each eye, and a dash across the eyebrows
with a black pencil, you were ready to hit the green.

There was a party on the last night and everyone got very
drunk and luvvy.

'A huge hit. It'll run for years,' Reg shouted over to Betty,
toasting her with his glass of mulled wine. It did in fact run for
years for Betty and Reg; they took their final bows on the Little
Theatre stage twenty-two years later in 1993, in a production
of
The Right Honourable Gentleman
.

Feeling brave after a couple of drinks, I told
Sally Begley
that
I thought she was a great actress and that she should be on a
professional stage. She threw her arms round me and kissed
me. 'Thank you, sweet boy,' she whispered theatrically.
Carpe
diem
. It was snowing outside and I asked her if she'd like to see
it. She said that she would. The planets were aligning in my
favour at last.

It really must be Christmas, I thought, standing there in the
softly falling snow with my tongue down the lovely Sally's
throat. I made a silent promise to God that I'd get up and go
to early mass in the morning.

I floated down Grange Road West. It was deserted, covered
in a blanket of virgin snow. The stars were bright and the air
was still and silent. The combination of mulled wine and cider,
the gently falling snow, the Christmas lights hanging overhead
and the potent spell woven by the combination of the stage and
Sally Begley's kiss was a powerful enchantment that bewitched
me, and transformed this normally unremarkable street into
something truly magical. I didn't want the moment to end.

P
REDICTABLY, MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE THEATRE, OR AT LEAST
the Carlton Players, was short-lived. It wasn't that the
Players weren't welcoming; they were, once we'd got to know
each other, but I still felt like an intruder from another planet.
I didn't know what to do with myself; I was not part of the
enviable group who were rehearsing for the forthcoming production,
nor was I often needed or welcome backstage, apart
from one occasion when I stood in the wings and opened the
curtains for a local dance school who'd hired the theatre for
the night to stage their 'Dance Extravaganza'. This was a very
long, complicated production that went on for about fifteen
hours, or at least it felt like that. My concentration would
occasionally lapse, as it did during 'Clair de Lune' when I
brought the tabs in a fraction too early, resulting in a tirade
from a nine-year-old étoile who wiped the floor with me, calling
me, among other things, predictably 'unprofessional'.

I hung around the green room pretending to be absorbed in
the contents of the noticeboard or tidying up the magazines
and emptying the ashtrays. Out of sheer boredom and
frustration I volunteered for front-of-house duties, a bad
decision as this was another closed shop ruled over by two
antique harpies who after a while condescended to let me show
the patrons to their seats, a thankless task as the faithful piled out of their minibuses, stampeded into the theatre and sat
where they liked. It was first come first served, and with ten
tons of crimplene bearing down on me I thought it was prudent
to get out of their way and let them get on with it.

Once the curtain had come down on the infamous production
of
The Lion in Winter
I got my coat and went home. There was
no point hanging about here any more so best take my square peg
out of their round hole and find another diversion.

I'd been transferred from Steers House back over the water
to Birkenhead. It was not a move I was happy about, even
though I was bored stiff at Steers House. I couldn't see
Horden House
being an improvement. After all, it was the same tasks,
just in a different workplace. I'd miss getting the ferry over to
Liverpool; it made the start to the day an event. It would have
been easier and a lot quicker for me to take the underground,
but there was something special about going to work on a
boat, taking your
morning
promenade on the top deck, enjoying
the bracing estuary air and the view across the Mersey to
an approaching Liverpool, and following it with a corned beef
sandwich and a cup of tea made with condensed milk in the little
café below deck. The underground was mundane in
comparison and I always went to work on the
Mountwood
or
the
Woodchurch
, enjoying it every time.

No more ferry boats. It was up and at 'em after the usual
prisoner-of-war-camp wake-up drill.

'Paul, it's eight o'clock. Get up or your head'll go flat.'

'I'm up.'

'It's ten past eight. Are you getting up or what?'

'I'm up.'

'This tea's going stone cold down here, and your toast's rock
hard.'

'I'm up,' this time accompanied by throwing a leg out of the
bed and banging haphazardly on the bedroom floor with
the foot.

'Are you having a fit?' Mother's voice sounds too close to be
coming from downstairs; I open one eye and see that she is
standing menacingly over the bed, grimly observing the leg
action. 'UP!' Curtains flung back and window opened wide
accompanied by usual monologue. 'You needn't think that
you're lying stinking in your pit all day, my lad. You can get
yourself out of that bed, down them stairs and out of this
house for work double bloody quick.'

Camp Commandant retreats downstairs. Breathe sigh of
relief and crawl under the bedclothes to evade arctic blast
coming from open window. Enemy returns with secret
weapon; plugging it in she leaves it running on the landing,
right outside my bedroom door, until I am forced, screaming,
unable to bear the noise any longer, out of my warm bed and
across a freezing bedroom to switch it off. This was below the
belt. Worse, it was an extreme and inhuman form of abuse that
would've been frowned upon by Amnesty if they'd been aware
of the torture by Electrolux vacuum cleaner that was occurring
in Holly Grove.

I'd also got a parttime
bar job
in the
Royal Air Force Association club
in leafy Oxton. During the week I served in
the little bar downstairs with
Audrey, who was the quintessential
barmaid
of a certain age found on Bamford postcards.
At weekends the ballroom upstairs opened and the members
danced with their wives to a Palm Court trio who played the
same limited repertoire week in week out; there was always
'Ramona' played in the tempo of a rumba, 'The Street Where
You Live' as a perky foxtrot and 'Martyr' to the beat of a strict
tango. On Saturdays when the joint was jumping the band
threw caution to the wind and went with something a little
more contemporary. The room rocked as a sea of geriatric
ravers gyrated to the strains of 'Rock Around The Clock' and
'Let's Twist Again'. These days I'd see the irony and enjoy it, probably join in, but in 1972 I found it as painfully and embarrassingly
naff as the shapeless maroon nylon jacket and
matching bow tie that I had to wear behind the bar. I can't say
I liked many of my customers. The majority of the male
patrons of the club were fusty old snobs who congregated at
the bar with their large Scotches and cigars and condemned
everyone from 'the Blacks' to the damn government for the
abolition of hanging.

'I'm glad it's been abolished,' Audrey piped up in her 'wickle
girl voice' from her permanent position wedged on a stool at
the end of the bar, 'because now I can shoot my ex-husband
and get away with it.' Much merriment and fussing of Audrey
from the gentlemen of the bar.

'Get this young lady a drink.' Audrey had the men eating out
of the palm of her Thumbelina-sized hand.

She'd worked for some years in a golf club before divorcing
her husband and coming to the RAFA. She carried a torch for
the days when she'd stood behind her elegant bar with fifteen
different kinds of malt whisky and held court to a bunch of
well-heeled, Pringle-sweater-wearing, randy middle-aged
admirers instead of the boring old men that she had to put up
with in this unsophisticated, fuddy-duddy fossil hole, waiting
on a league of gentlemen who surreptitiously leered at her
when their wives were about but tried to paw her when
they'd left them safely at home. She was tiny and doll-like with
a mass of viciously teased up and backcombed hair in four
dubious shades of red framing her ageing baby-doll face,
giving her the look of a Busby Berkeley chorus girl dressed as
a poppy.

She belonged to the Aunty Chris School of Maquillage and
adhered to the golden rule that you never appeared in public
without your make-up. Audrey's technicolour paint job
made Aunty Chris's face look well scrubbed. She kept
vanishing to the Ladies every five minutes to touch up, pausing on the way to do a bit of subtle touching up of a different
nature with some of her regulars.

I walked into the snooker room to collect glasses one quiet
night, and found her pushed up against the snooker table by a
member of the committee, trousers round his ankles and his
saggy old buttocks flapping as he gyrated his hips like two
tired old pillowcases drying in a breeze. Her skirt had ridden
up to reveal an expanse of wobbly white thigh hanging
obscenely over the top of her black nylons, strangely reminiscent
of a pint of Guinness with an overflowing head.