The Fun Factory (5 page)

Trinity cave were having a secret pow-wow, discussing their plans for the big contest on the morrow. Suddenly they noticed that a small shrub was inching towards them, as if to hear better. In a trice I was exposed, I stood up, and I delivered my line, my only line of the show: “I did what I did for the sake of the cave! The dear old cave!”

Brontie let out a terrifying roar (which is to say, a stagehand called Nicholas bellowed into a barrel). This was the cue for everyone else in the scene to scarper, except me. One or two ladies in the audience let out an excited shriek of anticipation.

And nothing happened.

I glanced over, and saw the Rotter frantically lashing one of the ropes backwards and forwards. It seemed to have snagged in its pulley high up in the ceiling. The Rotter waved desperately at
me to fill, and booted young Nicholas up the backside. Brontie promptly let out another, slightly aggrieved, dinosaurific roar.

I remembered something I’d heard, and for want of anything better to say decided to impart it to the audience.

“Uh-oh! That sounds like it might be a brontosaurus, you know,” I said, putting on my best scared face. “Those of you who have been keeping up with your studies will know that the name brontosaurus means ‘Thunder lizard’. So named, I’m told, for its terrifying roar…”

Nick, obligingly, let loose with another blood-curdling bass bellow, and the audience looked expectantly over to the side of the stage. I could see what they couldn’t, though, that the Rotter was still trying to free the snagged rope.

“Although…” I said, and watched the eyes snap back to me. “Since its diet was in fact exclusively vegetarian, some of our finest scientists now believe the thunder may have emanated from the other end entirely.”

The laugh I provoked with this line washed over me like a breaker and I felt the tingle of the Power once again. I could see the white dress shirts and black dinner jackets stretching to the back of the stalls, and the browns and greys and blues of the folk in the upper circle.

I heard the Rotter give a stifled cry of triumph and realised that the rope must be free, but I wasn’t ready to be eaten just yet.

I stepped forwards off my mark and down towards the footlights.

“I spent the morning hunting, don’t you know?” I found myself saying. “Not terribly successful, I’m afraid. I was trying to bag a very tricky kind of dinosaur. The Ran-off-as-soon-as-he-saurus…!”

Huge laugh. I watched it, waited for it, bathed in it.

“What you don’t want, though,” I went on, when the moment was just right, “is to come across one of those fearsome predatory dinosaurs. Something like the He’s-got-it-in-for-us…”

Another good laugh. Suddenly Brontie uttered the most bone-chilling roar. I glanced to my left and saw that the Rotter, his face purple with rage, had grabbed Nicholas’s barrel and was howling all his frustration into it. I quickly reckoned maybe I had pushed my luck far enough, and skipped back to my spot, quaking with pretend terror.

“Ooooh!” went the audience now as Brontie’s massive head lowered itself slowly from the flies, and one or two clip-claps of applause broke out.

“Raaaargh!” went the Rotter.

The jaws slid neatly over my head and shoulders and I reached up to grab Mr Ernest’s clammy hands.

“Ran-off-as-soon-as-he-saurus, that’s a good one…” he was chuckling to himself. The great contraption swung into the air. I could hear the muffled sound of the audience’s applause, suitably impressed. Then suddenly…

Twang
!

Something snapped, something gave, and the head, having moments before disappeared triumphantly into the sky, now hurtled down and smashed into the floor. The audience, startled and unsure as to whether this latest development was intentional, half-laughed, half-screamed. I was thrown out – regurgitated, as it were – and rolled halfway across the stage. Without my weight in it, the dinosaur’s head lurched up again and banged into the metal walkway, which was masked from the audience’s view by the tab. In the wings the Rotter was furiously waving me to my feet, clearly intent that Brontie should eat me once again.

I turned to the audience.

“I told you she was a vegetarian,” I said.

Down came the head once more. Again I grasped Ernest’s hands – he not so cheery, now, in fact rather pale – and we bounced upwards. We made it four or five feet off the floor before slamming violently down again. After a moment we could feel the whole frame shuddering as though someone were jumping up and down on top of us, and then all at once a great rattling, rustling, bumpity-bumping on the canvas right above our heads, and it all stopped.

The audience were laughing hysterically, now, at something. I peered down at the small portion of the brightly lit stage that I could see at my feet and was astonished to see the Rotter sitting there, in decidedly unprehistorical costume, holding his head and moaning. Evidently he’d been bouncing onto the top end of the creature, trying to provide enough counterweight to lift us clear, and had slip-slided all the way down the neck, ending up in a heap in full view of everyone.

Suddenly there was an ominous creaking from above, followed by a snapping, and then the whole mass of wood, and painted canvas, and rope, and pulleys crashed to the ground and splintered around us. The audience hooted with glee. Mr Kenyon crawled out of the wreckage over towards the orchestra pit and then vomited copiously over the kettle drums.

“Curtain,” the Rotter moaned in a tiny voice, clutching the area of his kidneys. “Curtain, damn it all!”

The audience leaving the New Theatre that night were thoroughly satisfied. The script had been funny, the songs agreeable, and then
everything had fallen spectacularly to pieces at the death. What could be better? The next best thing, always, to an absolute smash hit is a notable catastrophe.

The Rotter and his engineering cohorts set about rebuilding and repairing their pride and joy almost at once, and I was dispatched up to the theatre bar to fetch drinks for everyone.

I had just finished loading a dozen Scotch-and-waters onto a tray when I heard a sarcastic little cough from behind me.

“That’s a powerful thirst thee’ve got there, young feller,” said a voice with a thick sort of accent I couldn’t quite place. I turned to grin at the speaker, who was a dapper little chap in a sharp suit and very shiny shoes.

“Yes, sir, and I’ll be back for another dozen in a minute. Excuse me…”

When I returned a few minutes later the bar was empty except for this gentleman, who was perched on a stool and, it seemed, was waiting for me. I slipped behind the bar and began pouring out more drinks.

“You were in t’ show just, weren’t you?” the man said, narrowing his eyes at me appraisingly.

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“You were t’ lad in yon creature’s mouth, were you not?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“Now then, that big red-faced feller tumbling down the neck and ending up scratching his head in the middle of the stage. I’m right, aren’t I? That weren’t meant to’appen?”

“Er, no.”

“Pity. That were t’ best bit.”

I’d filled my tray again by this time, so I smiled an end to the conversation and excused myself, but my companion hadn’t finished.

“You know, I came all the way up from London to see that beast. Thought it might be something I could use.”

I realised then that this chap must be one of the Rotter’s theatre contacts, one of the men he was hoping to impress.

“It’s very clever, really, how it works, and it was fine in rehearsals. I’m sure Mr Rottenburg could explain better than I what happened. I’ll run down and fetch him…”

The man held up his hand and said firmly: “No. Don’t fuss yourself. It’s not for me. No, laddo, it’s you I wanted to speak to. Now I’m watching you running up and down stairs carting drinks and I’m thinking you’re not one of these gentleman student types. I’m right again, aren’t I?”

“You are, sir,” I said sheepishly.

“So what are you? Servant of some sort?”

“I work for one of the colleges, yes, sir, general dogsbody work, portering and so on.”

“I see. Well, now listen to me. I saw how you handled yourself on the stage tonight when that whatsit fouled up, and I’m telling you straight that I liked what I saw. Now I’m not saying I’m never wrong, but I will say it hasn’t happened above once or twice since I’ve been in this business.”

I started to grin at this, but he didn’t, so I quickly reined my grin in.

“If you ever decide that you want more than general dogsbody work, portering and so on, you come and see me. You got me?”

He handed me his card, and shook me by the hand. I didn’t know what to say, quite, so I said: “Thank you, Mister…?”

“Westcott. Frederick Westcott.”

Then he popped his hat on his head and looked me up and down in a solemn fashion.

“When you know me better you’ll know I don’t say this lightly,” he said. “But you’ve got it, young feller me lad.”

“What?” I said.

“It.”

And he turned on his heel and left. I looked at the card he had given me and the name Westcott wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The inscription read:

I didn’t know it then, but my life had just changed for ever.

5

THE HOUSE THAT FRED BUILT

SO
it was that I found myself, a blur of a fortnight later, on a train to London, going to seek my fortune.

My father’s solemn goodbye and firm handshake were accompanied by a rather smug and knowing smirk, as though he had no doubt at all that I would shortly be scuttling back to Cambridge with my tail between my legs begging to be allowed to make beds again.

My mother and brother were utterly unperturbed by my departure. When I told my mother I was going to London to make a name for myself she greeted the announcement with a casual “Bye bye, then, dear!”, as if I had just said I was going to the market to buy eggs, and then turned straight back to the four square feet of pastry she was just then engaged in rolling flat. Lance barely looked up from polishing the Master’s shoes to grunt the following resonant and emotional valediction, which has remained imprinted upon my memory ever since.

“Off to be a clown, then, eh? See you when you grow up.”

To begin with, I hadn’t given much thought to my conversation on the first night with the dapper gentleman in the theatre bar.

On the last night, though – at a sumptuous drinks party for the cast, hosted by The Rotter himself, to which I was graciously invited … to add myself to the serving staff – I fished the mystery gent’s card out of my back pocket and showed it to Mr Luscombe, whose eyes popped out on stalks. Metaphorically, of course. If he’d been able to do it for real he’d have been sure of a living on the halls for the rest of his days.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “You know who this is, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“It’s Karno! Fred Karno, of Karno’s Speechless Comedians. Well, that’s what they used to call them, back when they weren’t allowed to speak. He’s one of the biggest – no, what am I saying, he’s
the
biggest name in the music hall!”

Once he’d recovered himself – a couple of brandies and a breath of fresh air later – Mr Luscombe explained his pop-eyed excitement. He was a great enthusiast of the music hall, if a secret one, as his parents and his po-faced brother would never have approved of his wallowing amongst the lowlife of London, as they called it. He reckoned he’d seen all the great names, just names to me then, as he ticked them off for me on his fingers.

“George Robey – the Prime Minister of Mirth – Little Tich, Gus Elen, Wilkie Bard, Vesta Tilley. And Marie Lloyd I saw once, marvellous fun! Karno, though,” and Luscombe prodded me in the chest to emphasise the point, “Karno is the nonpareil.”

“Why, what does he do?” I asked, not knowing what a nonpareil was but imagining some kind of novelty act, possibly involving animals.

“Not he himself, though he is the mastermind. His company performs his pieces, little plays that will make you laugh and will make you cry. The last Karno turn I saw was called
The Bailiff
, with Fred Kitchen. When he offers his arm to the poor woman who has lost everything there’s not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. And yet when he and his assistant, Meredith, are trying to gain entry to a house, all his little schemes and plots had the place in tucks. Kitchen, do you see, would say, ‘You do such and such, and then I do so and so, and then … Meredith, we’re in!’”

He seemed surprised that I did not immediately fall about laughing at this.

“Meredith, we’re in!” he cried again. “That’s the recurring phrase, do you see? And now you tell me that Karno has offered you a start? Why, man, what are you waiting for?”

Mr Luscombe dictated a letter for me to send to the great Fred Karno, and he was even more wretchedly nervous than I was as we watched the college’s daily postal arrivals for a reply. When it came, a few days later, the envelope contained only another business card, exactly like the one I had been given in the theatre bar except that on the reverse side, in a firm and confident hand, a single word was inscribed in capital letters: “COME.”

Luscombe was thrilled and heartily pooh-poohed my misgivings. Was not the address right there on the card? “Just take a cab from the station to Coldharbour Lane, and … Meredith – you’re in!”

The run down to London was but a short hop by train, but I felt like I’d landed on another planet as I stepped onto the platform and looked around at the terminus. Huge black iron arches vaulted way overhead, like a monstrous satanic parody of the college chapel’s ceiling. Everywhere folk rushed, trotted, skittered and ambled about their various business, gentlemen
peering urgently at their pocket watches, small gaggles of children tugging their nannies towards an excursion train, and here and there new arrivals with little piles of luggage looking as lost and intimidated as I felt.

I wandered out into the street, where huge brick buildings thrust up four, five, six storeys high in all directions, and suddenly good old Cambridge, which had always felt so stately and grand to me, seemed like a cramped and claustrophobic warren.

Traffic of all kinds clattered, clopped, parped, crapped and wheezed this way and that. It was dizzying, bewildering, too much to take in. I felt a bit of Dutch courage was called for, and I was a grown-up making his way in the world, after all, so I nudged my way through the door of a public house called the Railwaymen, which was full, pretty much as advertised, with railwaymen.

By mid-afternoon, with a couple of pints (and then a couple more) on board, I was sufficiently confident to ask for directions to Camberwell, and eventually I found my way to the street specified on Mr Karno’s card.

When I finally turned the corner I had to stop for a moment to take it in. I can’t be certain, but I think I may have pushed my hat back in order to scratch my head in amazement.

A row of houses up a short side street seemed to have been knocked together, or combined into one enormous premises with huge double doors at the front. These were flung open wide, presumably to let the summer air circulate, so passers-by could see that inside it was an absolute hive of activity. Outside, no fewer than four double-decked motor omnibuses were parked in a row along the kerb, big painted signs on the sides bearing the legend “Fred Karno’s Comics”, where you might ordinarily expect to see “Bovril” or “Pears Soap”.

I had reached the Fun Factory.

And just at that moment dozens of people of all shapes and sizes began to issue forth. Dapper young gentlemen, elegant young ladies, all dressed to kill, some of the ladies flourishing brightly coloured parasols, they spilled down the short slope and out onto the road, laughing, chattering, greeting one another with exaggerated good humour, and began to pack themselves into the omnibuses until the vehicles’ aching suspensions creaked. On and on they came, a hundred, two hundred of them.

Then some even more affluent-looking middle-aged chaps strode confidently towards waiting broughams, a handful of fabulously dressed women glided miraculously after them, then a couple of stragglers ahoy-hoyed and skipped up onto the buses’ backboards, until the short street was empty of pedestrians, save for a few slack-jawed gawkers like myself.

Suddenly, all at once, the heaving convoy puffed and chuffed and parped and clopped and wobbled into motion, dividing at the end of the street as half went left and half right, with a few local children who had come to wave these fantastical creatures off trotting along in their wake, bowling their hoops along the pavement.

And then there was silence. I took a deep breath, tiptoed tentatively up to the big double doors and peered inside … where I saw the damn’dest thing. You’ll hardly believe me when I tell you, but there was an ocean liner in there, just sort of looming up, large as life. The sort of thing that made me wish I had a half bottle of some sort of cheap booze in my hand, so I could look down at it accusingly before forswearing the demon drink for ever.

In the gloom at the back of the building I saw a light, and there was a little office with windows in its rather wobbly-looking walls.
The door was ajar, and a man in shirt sleeves was hunched over a desk inside. I went over and tapped lightly on the glass window in the door.

“Excuse me, sir…?”

The man looked up at me, a harassed expression on his face. He was around forty, I supposed, losing his hair and his temper.

“Finally! Here take these…” he said, striding over and thrusting a fistful of papers into my hands.

“What … what are they?”

“Well, it’s the bills, the bill matter, of course. What are you waiting for? Off you go, chop chop!”

I had no idea where to go to, of course, so I just stood there like a goof, and the man seemed to gather that he had made a mistake. He looked at me quizzically. “Are you not the printer’s boy?”

“No, I beg your pardon, sir. I’m Arthur Dandoe.”

The man sighed heavily, then grabbed his papers back from me.

“Arthur Dandoe, eh? Is that name supposed to mean something to me? Come on, lad, I’m a busy man. Tell me your business and let me get on.”

I ventured into his office, where a fresh-faced youth I hadn’t noticed before was standing in the corner smoking a cigarette. This one watched me coolly as I fumbled in my pockets for Karno’s card, which had temporarily gone astray.

“Well, come on, spit it out,” the harassed older chap said.

“Um, right, yes,” I stuttered. “The thing is, I’m looking for Mr Fred Karno.”

“Are you now?”

“Um. Yes, I am.”

“Well, good news,” the fellow said, burrowing in another pile of papers, looking for something. “You’ve found him.”

My beer-fuddled brain frankly struggled with this. This was clearly not the same man that I had met in Cambridge.

“You mean,
you’re
…?” I said.

“No, no, no, no, not me,” the man said. “I’m Alf Reeves, if it’s any of your business. That’s Mr Karno over there.”

Reeves pointed at the smoking youth, who gazed at me enquiringly down his nose. He was quite short and had to lean back quite a way to achieve this. Now I was even more baffled. I think I may have felt something go pop in my cranium.

“You’re…?” I managed.

“Yes, that’s right, I’m Fred Karno. What do you want?” the youth sneered.

I found my tongue, and explained, haltingly, about the conversation I’d had with the shinily shod man in the theatre bar, and how I had come to London from Cambridge to take him up on his offer.

“Oh, well, that’s just marvellous, that is. That’s just dandy!” he said, in a manner which quite definitely suggested that it was neither marvellous nor dandy. Then he aimed a vicious kick at a waste-paper bin, sending it skidding across the room. Alf Reeves sighed, ran his fingers through what hair he had left and narrowed his eyes at me.

“If I had sixpence for every time some youth strolled in here and claimed that Mr Karno himself had told them to come and present themselves to me for a career in the musical theatre, do you know how rich I’d be? Eh? Do you have any idea?”

I felt so deflated suddenly that I could only shrug.

“Well, not that rich, actually. I’d have about four bob. It doesn’t happen all that often. So you met The Guv’nor, then,
did you? Well, well. And what did he have to say to you when you met him?”

“Actually he said I had ‘it’,” I ventured.

“And what, might I ask, do you intend to do with ‘it’?” Reeves enquired. “Are you going to eat ‘it’, wear ‘it’, sleep in ‘it’, do a little dance with ‘it’? It smells like you might already have drunk most of it.”

I just smiled at him, a thin, watery smile, like an idiot. Reeves sat back slowly and sighed, the weary sigh of a man who has been left in charge while whoever is supposed to be making the decisions is off having fun somewhere else.

“All right, all right,” he said, suddenly bursting to life again and starting to scribble a note to himself on a scrap of paper. “I’ll set you on as a super, no harm in that.”

At this Reeves glanced up at the youth as if for his approval, and got a surly shrug in response.

“The pay’s five bob a week,” Reeves went on. “I’ll have you back here tomorrow first thing to make a start. Now, then. Where do you live?”

“Um … Cambridge,” I said.