Forgotten Dreams (21 page)
Lottie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘How could I when I thought he was leaving Liverpool any minute?’ she enquired. ‘But I’ll write to him now, though I promise I won’t tell him why I’ve not written before. I’ll just say we’ve been hectically busy; he’ll understand. And I’ll tell him I’m pals with ever such a nice girl whose parents are in the show at the Britannia pier.’
Merle’s face brightened. ‘In the show at the Britannia? Well, it ain’t such a good show as ours, but I’d like to meet her. What’s her name? What does she do in the show?’
‘She’s called Angela Capper and she helps her parents. Her dad’s lighting and props, and her mum’s the wardrobe mistress.’
‘Is that all she does?’ Merle said rather contemptuously. ‘I thought you said she was in the show. Who’s the liar now, then?’
Lottie took a deep breath and counted to ten; it was plain that her earlier remark had offended Merle more than she had intended. ‘She is in the show from time to time, because she understudies practically everyone,’ she said rather stiffly. ‘She does all sorts, in fact. She’s in the box office when there’s no one else about, shows people to their seats, sells ice creams in the interval, helps with scenery changes and so on. In fact she’s what you’d call a real trouper because she’s been in the theatre all her life, same as you and me.’
By this time they were approaching the pier and Fred in the ticket office called out to them, for the previous day Lottie had told him that she was dreading her first day at the new school. The girls went over and peered through the glass panel which separated him from the public. ‘Well? How did it go?’ Fred asked. He was a small, white-haired man with a face permanently tanned by the summer sun, for he spent as little time as possible in the ticket booth, much preferring to sit outside when the weather was fine.
‘It was lovely. All the girls were friendly, but there’s one girl from the show at the Britannia, so the teacher sat us together. We’re going to be best friends and do all sorts when the holidays start.’
Fred beamed and said he thought this was a good thing, but as they walked away Merle looked reproachfully at the younger girl. ‘Wharrabout me?’ she enquired plaintively. ‘Now I’ve come clean and you know Baz isn’t going to turn up, I’ll be awful lonely if you just desert me.’
‘We can be a threesome, like the Lacey Sisters,’ Lottie said gaily. ‘Angela’s the same age as me, so I’m sure we’ll all get on famously. Tell you what, if we go straight to the green room we can write a letter to Baz between us and post it this evening. What d’you think?’
‘It’s a good idea,’ Merle said at once. ‘You can write all the interesting bits about what we’ve been doing and I’ll add a lovey-dovey bit saying how I miss him. Oh, and your mam telled me to tell you she’d left us some sandwiches in the green room, a screw of tea, a little jug of milk and some sugar lumps so we can make ourselves a drink. C’mon!’
The letter to Baz turned out to be quite fun, but when they had both signed off Lottie realised that she was longing to tell Baz as much as she could remember of her most recent dream. Yet she felt reluctant to confide in him since she no longer trusted him not to repeat anything she said to Merle. She supposed that it would not matter if Merle knew about her dreams, yet still shrank from revealing them to anyone other than Baz. She wondered whether she might tell Angela, but decided against that as well. The trouble was, the more time elapsed between waking and the present, the fuzzier grew images which had been keen and sharp at the time. No, it would not do. Instead, she decided to keep a sort of dream diary, and the next time Louella handed out her weekly pocket money she spent threepence of it on a notebook in which she recorded all her sleep-adventures, starting with the very first one. She did not write this in straightforward language but made use of a book which she had found in the green room called
Speedwriting for Beginners
. It was quite simple, but an effective way of making sure that anyone who picked up the exercise book and tried to read it would be speedily baffled.
Speedwriting for Beginners
. It was quite simple, but an effective way of making sure that anyone who picked up the exercise book and tried to read it would be speedily baffled.
She knew it was foolproof within a week of starting the diary, when Merle came into their dressing room, picked it up and began to leaf through it. ‘Is this yours?’ Merle enquired after a moment, eyebrows rising. ‘Because if so, you’ve finally gone round the bend. Half the letters are missing by the looks, so it’s double Dutch.’
‘That’s right. Me mam taught me to write double Dutch when I were knee high to a grasshopper,’ Lottie said gravely, and was amused when Merle nodded and said that she’d always wanted to learn a foreign language and wasn’t Lottie lucky to have a mam who could teach her.
‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ Lottie said. ‘But I can’t speak it, I can only write it. It’s that sort of language, you see.’
‘Fancy that,’ Merle said. ‘When did she learn you? I s’pose you wouldn’t like to learn me an’ all?’
Lottie laughed, but capitulated. ‘It’s not a real language, you dope, it’s speedwriting,’ she said. ‘And no one taught me, I taught myself. I don’t see much point in you learning, though, because you’re not even that keen on writing letters, so I can’t see you keeping a diary.’
‘No, you’re right there,’ Merle said, dropping the notebook into Lottie’s lap. ‘We’ve got an hour before we have to start getting ready for the show, so what d’you say we stroll along to the Britannia? The feller in the ticket office will let us in free if we say we’ve come to see Angela, and there’s a stall there which sells ring doughnuts and paper cups of tea.’
‘You don’t want a doughnut, you want to see that Alex fellow, the one who does a ventriloquist act,’ Lottie said accusingly. ‘I’ve seen you goggling at him whenever we meet. If you aren’t careful, I’ll tell Baz you’ve got a fancy man, and then where will you be?’
‘I can’t help it if men admire me,’ Merle said pertly. ‘And he ain’t the only one. That feller in the chorus, the one who sings so nice, he asked me to go for a walk along the sands last time we met only I said no, ’cos of Baz,’ she added virtuously.
‘You said no because Angela told you the chorus boys were pansies and didn’t really like girls,’ Lottie rejoined. ‘Don’t try to fool me, Miss O’Mara.’
Merle and Angela had met and liked one another on sight, though Angela was no more interested in boys than Lottie, and found Merle’s preoccupation with the male sex mysterious. For there was no doubt, Lottie mused as the two girls, arms linked, walked through the Wellington Gardens towards the Britannia pier, that Merle eyed up every young man they passed and most of the young men returned such glances with considerable interest. It won’t be long before Merle takes up with some feller and poor Baz gets dumped, Lottie thought, as they reached the pier and went towards the turnstile and the ticket office. Poor Baz. But he’ll still have me – if he wants me, that is.
The thought of Baz made Lottie remember she had been intending to ask Merle a question for ages. Now she jerked on her friend’s arm, bringing her to a halt. ‘Hang on a minute, Merle, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she said. ‘When you came to the Gaiety to take my place in the act, why didn’t you come and see me in hospital? I mean, I know you were older than me, but you were still only a kid. Weren’t you curious to know what I was like?’
Merle stared at her. ‘I were desperate to see you,’ she said slowly. ‘They had to make new stage clothes for me because your mam said all your stuff was too small, but I really would have liked to visit you, get to know you. There weren’t nobody else in the show anywhere near my age, and to tell you the truth Baz was pretty offhand with me for the first week or two. He’d never met you himself, because you’d come from Rhyl, hadn’t you? He was quite curious as well, but your mam laid the law down. She said as how you were very ill and didn’t remember nothing. She said meeting theatre folk could confuse you and might hold up your recovery. I explained over and over as how me singing your songs to you might help you back, but your mam said it were nonsense and that the doctors said no visitors, apart from your mam herself, that was. So you see, I would have come if I’d been allowed.’
Lottie stared at her companion. ‘Whyever did my mam say that?’ she breathed. ‘I was on a children’s ward, but none of the other kids worked in the theatre and when I was trying so hard to remember it really might have helped to have you there. Mammy sang me the songs and showed me a lot of the dance steps when there were no doctors around, but none of it did any good.’
‘What’s it like to lose your memory?’ Merle asked curiously. ‘I really can’t imagine it; it must be horrible.’
‘It is. It’s a bit like walking along a path you know well and seeing a thick white mist ahead of you, and knowing that if you walk into the mist, it’ll be all around you, holding you back,’ Lottie said with a shudder. ‘I try not to think about it because it’s pretty frightening.’
‘Yes, it would be. I’ve often meant to ask you . . .’
The two girls had been standing just outside the ticket office and now the Britannia pier attendant came out of his booth and spoke to them rather impatiently. ‘Are you two comin’ in or not? There’ll be a bleedin’ queue formin’ behind you in a minute. C’mon, shift yourselves.’
Hastily, the two girls made for the turnstile. ‘We’ve come to see Angela Capper. We’re from the Welly,’ Merle said.
The man laughed and clicked the turnstile so that it swung free and let them both through. ‘Ah, go on with you; you’ll find something on the pier to spend your money on, I don’t doubt,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Enjoy yourselves!’
Chapter EightBy the time the summer holidays arrived, Lottie’s fear that Merle would find herself a boyfriend had proved to be well founded. He was not a holidaymaker, neither was he with the theatre. His name was Jerry and he was with a firm of contractors who kept both piers and a great many of the other Marine Parade attractions in good repair. He had been repainting the Wellington pier when his undoubted good looks had caught Merle’s attention, but at first he had not seemed particularly interested in any of the girls, though friendly with them all. That had been rather nice, since it meant that when Jerry joined them they became a foursome rather than a threesome, for despite Angela and Lottie’s making every effort to include Merle they were uneasily aware that sometimes she became bored with their talk of school and schoolfellows. However, as August progressed, it became clear to Lottie that Jerry liked her pal, and she was glad of it. She thought him a big improvement on Alex, though she was uneasily aware that Merle was still seeing the ventriloquist from time to time.
Jerry, being local, was a fund of information. One of the first things he had told them, painting away busily at the railings, was that the firm no sooner finished doing one job on the pier than it needed another and this went for the Britannia as well as the Wellington. ‘Of course, we do most of the maintenance in the winter when the piers are closed to the public,’ he had told them. ‘But holidaymakers being what they are, there’s usually something which needs mending or replacing during the season itself. So my father – he’s Bill Green, and owns the business – sets me and my brother Ted to work because, being as how we’re family, he knows we’ll do a good job and won’t try to claim more hours than we’ve actually done.’
‘That’s nice,’ Lottie had said approvingly, for she had noticed that though he talked and laughed with them his brush never ceased applying paint in long, even strokes. ‘What else do you do, Jerry?’
‘Oh, all sorts; I’m a jack of all trades, same as Ted,’ Jerry had said airily. ‘In the old days there weren’t much work for a mechanic, but with all the new rides on the pleasure beach I’ve had to learn a good deal about engines, most of it from Ted, who’s got a real grasp of such things. He’s ten year older than me, with a wife and family, so o’ course Pa pay him more than he pay me, ’cos that’s only fair.’ He had cocked a dark eyebrow at the girls, for all three of them had been present at the time. ‘I come and saw your show last week; the SM give my dad a couple of comps.’ He had nodded to Merle and Lottie and had then turned to Angela. ‘But I couldn’t spot you, though I did me best. If it were the pantomime season, I’d reckon you were the backside of the horse, but since thass midsummer I must ha’ bin looking away when you come on stage.’
The girls had laughed and Merle had explained that Angela was actually at the Britannia and was only on stage when she understudied a member of the cast. Jerry had nodded, using up the last few drops of paint and picking up the empty can. ‘Got to go now to get more supplies,’ he had said. ‘But I shall finish here in half an hour. Want to come up to the pleasure beach for a go on the scenic railway or the helter-skelter? Just until your show start, o’ course.’
They had gone with him willingly, enjoying his company and the speculative glances from girls they passed. They had loved both their trip to the pleasure beach and several other outings, but it soon became apparent that it was Merle who interested Jerry most and by the time the school term ended they had split into two couples, Merle and Jerry going off in one direction, Lottie and Angela in another.
Lottie thought little of it until one night when she, Louella and Max were walking home after a show. It was a lovely night, with a full moon that turned the streets to black and silver. Max and Louella strolled along, their arms linked, talking earnestly about a new trick which Max was working on. It involved two identical white doves and would, Max thought, be popular with audiences, who always enjoyed seeing animals apparently perform, though it was usually just clever timing. In this instance, Max and Louella got the audience to choose a figure between one and twenty, and would then tell them, after they had chosen, that the brilliant counting dove would work out how to release himself from his cage and would flutter across to perch on Louella’s shoulder when the count reached the number the audience had picked.
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