13

The booth went up like a dream on the Friday after the Easter holiday and May Mitchell walked out on us on the following Sunday.

Pauline didn’t comment when I told her I’d become Jimmy’s partner, but her expression of ‘good luck’ did suggest that I was certainly going to need it.

Tom seemed genuinely pleased; he was crazy about the business and glad to think that I was hooked enough to put my money into it.

Peter Hunter seemed surprised, but he didn’t say anything, while Maria’s congratulations were so obviously packed with jealousy that Pat was embarrassed.

I didn’t really mind what any of them thought. I was busy with my work and, thrilling to the experience of actually owning something. Up to then, I had only ever owned a bicycle, and I had never been concerned about possessions, but a couple of days after Jimmy shook my hand to close our deal, I began to take extra care of the props, and I found that I was examining things with a view to improving them, and already I had started to dream up ideas that would help us put more zip into the show.

It took a week of hard work for four of us to build the booth, which was a wooden structure with a canvas roof. We had hired a field and I nailed and painted, with creosote, my share of the tongue-and-groove timber that made up the side walls, and I also cooked many of the meals we hungrily sat down to.

Not that I fancied myself as any kind of chef, but Jimmy and the Hunters are everything I put on the table, though a couple of times, I found it hard to digest my own cooking.

Our summer theatre was sixty four feet long, made up of eight sections either side, eight feet long by six feet high, with a canvas extension at the rear for the props, the stage and the performers, piano and drums.

About two inches below the top of each supporting , post, a six-by-six inch length was clipped on, and this ran up to a centre bar, which ran the length of the booth.

Over this apex the canvas stretched; everything being clipped into place before we raised the frame, the canvas being hauled over the top afterwards.

This was tied to the brackets on the outside of the walls, which we had painted with a mix or creosote and black paint, and against this the new, off-white canvas looked very effective when he saw the booth erected for the first time.

The stage and frame went up in the usual way, and once we got used to the numbered sections of the booth, we could put it up in an hour and a half, and I think we were all very proud of the result of our Easter holiday.

When Jimmy told me that May was packing her things, I tried to reason with her, but she didn’t want to know. It had been bad enough working with me on the show but she was never going to work for me. I tried everything, but I didn’t get anywhere, and when I said that we could get together, if that was what she wanted, she turned on me, lashing out so fast that I couldn’t get out of the way of her hand.

The blow stung one side of my face and I’m sure I would have slapped her all over the room if I hadn’t seen in her eyes, just how much she hated me. She stood there quivering with temper, and I knew that we were past everything.

‘Forget it, May. I’m sorry for not realising you felt that bad.’

‘I hope I never hate anybody the way I hate you right now,’ she said quietly.

I nodded, trying to appear casual, not wanting her to see how hurt I was, that she, or anybody should ever look at me like that.

Jimmy told me to forget it. She was so talented that he wasn’t expecting to hold her much longer, anyway. He smiled as he admitted: ‘No flannel, Tony, that’s why I was glad to get you as my partner...I wouldn’t have held you much longer, either.’

The summer was long and warm and I enjoyed working under the canvas roof. As always, we all dressed back stage which was no hardship in the fine weather. We had cobbled slatted flooring together that kept out feet off the grass, and with business being mostly good, we were a fairly happy bunch, if you ignored the situation between Pauline and me.

We took on a magician, Neal Mooned, who worked his act with a cool line in patter and I began doubling with Jenny. She played the guitar and we san folk songs, and, as it happened, we were very good together, thanks mainly to Jennie’s willingness to rehearse all day if necessary, to get a number as good as we could make it. Her confidence in me gave me a lot more, so that my solo spot got better, though I much preferred working the double with her.

Neil Mooney didn’t drink at all but he was a gambler born and bred, so that by mid-summer we had a regular poker school going and mostly the money just went back and forth, from one session to the next. Nobody won alal the time, which made for good pals but after I had, don’t ask me how, cleaned everybody out for two sessions, one after the other, I wrote to my mother, sending her ten pounds. I asked her to try and forget how badly I had treated her, trying to make her understand that I simply had to get up and go.

Ma returned my letter and the money, without so much as a note, and I sat stunned, my street arab’s heart breaking like bread in my chest. But, who could blame her?

One letter with money thrown in to ease my conscience, had been my idea of a peace-offering when it was really yours truly trying to ease his conscience. A big mistake for sure, something I should have worked out for myself, because I knew Ma better than anybody else alive.

---------

A couple of days later, Ma forwarded on a letter from Larry Deegan, my great pal from my insurance office days. He was in Sydney, Australia, and by the sound of things he was living very well. He talked about the dancer he had taken a tumble for when we were a couple of Jack the Lad’s about Dublin city and its pubs, admitting he had wanted to talk to me about it while it was going down, but, he hadn’t been able to do it because he wanted me to go on thinking he was Jack the Lad. I could identify with the scenario, like every other guy - we all waned to be as cool as Humphrey Bogart.

Larry had got the big drop when he proposed to this chick: she was more interested in her career than she was in getting hitched, and she had always managed a carefully ordered sex life, so didn’t plan changing her life. She was a decade or two ahead of her time, and I admired her, since I had grown up surrounded by women that were slaves to the marriage image, and the be respectable at all costs role, at all times, for the sake of your families good name and that kind of thing.

My letter to Larry was so think it cost me half a crown for postage. I told him the lot, everything that had happened since we said goodbye in Dublin. It poured out of me, right down to the fact that I was playing Robert Emmett in the play that night. Larry’ reply was a wild, happy letter. He was managing an office but every minute of his leisure time sounded like one long giggle. He filled two pages about Robert Emmett, who to his mind was the- most loved Irishman of all time.

‘Bobby Boy’ was only twenty when he tried to lead Ireland to freedom. He had been promised arms and men by Napoleon, but things blew up in his face and he had to jump the gun. He wasn’t organised and the uprising never got up; off its knees. No matter who you are, you can’t fight cannon with knives and forks, and that was about all Emmett’s men were short of doing. All the talk, all the idealistic bullshit, was there in plenty but, no proper planning made it a dot on the card that the whole thing would end up in a sad, pointless muddle.

September 20, 1803. Another Black Day in the dark history of Ireland, included Death by hanging for the boy from Trinity College. Robert Emmett, son of the physician to theLord Lieutenant, and sweetheart to Sarah Curran. She wept for her lover but it didn’t take her long to find a shoulder to cry on. Who could blame her? Men that have been butchered make cold lovers. Nobody blamed her,

but her speedy recovery did seem to rub it in that Robert Emmet was a born loser.

‘Don’t fight for things you believe in,

You can’t win a battle with hope

Dear Irishman learn to be English,

Or swing from the end of a rope.’

Larry didn’t say where he had read the four lines but they stuck deep in my mind, and from then on I got much more into, and out of, my interpretation of Robert Emmett. And, I rewrote the play making no allowance for audience preference and making sure that there was no ad libbing in search of a quick laugh,

There was another [phrase in Larry’s letter that I remembered so well. It came at the end of a vivid description if a sex scene that he had taken part in. It was set in Christmas Day on the beach, with birds and booze and a way-out party. I could see his dark face, blue where he shaved, breaking into a smile as he described entering an all too willing babe, with the caption ‘Christmas Pud on the Beach!’

In relation to the play that first night, Maria Maguire took umbrage at being told that her tendency to ad lib had to stop. She was quite clearly appalled to hear this coming from an upstart like me, but Jimmy backed me up and between us we gave her the message that, if she wanted to stay with the show, she had to do things our way, or take the highway. She looked daggers at me for a moment and I thought she was about to give notice that she was going to leave. I was looking at her, without respect in my eyes, and she got the message, her attitude changing instantly and that was the end of that. Yes, she could probably have landed a job with another show but, for all her airs and graces, she wasn’t guaranteed work in a cottage industry that was facing trouble ahead in the shape of Television. And I have to say I was glad she remained with us, she was, after all, part of a dying breed and I admired her overall, even though she was a desperate snob.

I wrote a play that summer and Jimmy agreed to allow me direct it. I was thrilled out of my mind, half of me already in Hollywood - pity not the dreamer - with beautiful female stars climbing out of their clothes to get at me and my talent. But, dear God, did I ever come down to earth with a crash when I saw ‘Like a Golden Dream on the stage, directed by me.-

It was diabolically bad. There is no other way to describe it. The plot was such corn that it should have been breakfast cereal - like, the blind hero - he lost his sight while rescuing a small girl from a blazing building in New York -this was an old chestnut that I nicked from any of fourteen old cowboy pictures, substituting tenement for ranch-house. Our hero returns to Ireland, believing that our heroine, his girl, has married someone else. He sits alone by the fireside, dreaming a bit. We get his Voice Over as he imagines the girl standing outside the window. We see her and realise that she really is standing there. She sings Our Song. He reacts. He’s got some imagination but this is too much. He stands up and moves in the direction of the window. He stumbles against a table, falls, banging his head. She rushes in. and she croons sweet words of love. He comes around. Guess what? In moments, he can see. They kiss - she never gave up hope...each day a prayer, a candle lit in the village chapel. You follow this with, what else? Another long kiss and vows of together forever, kiss again as the Curtains close.

Afterwards, Pauline poured me a drink in her trailer with the immortal words: ‘It was awful, Tony.’

‘God, don’t I know it. I must be blind myself.’

She chuckled and sipped brandy. ‘Don’t worry. Put it down to experience.’

‘Jimmy wants to use it regularly, can you believe it?’

‘Well, that mob tonight did love it. Have another drink.’

‘No thanks. I’m going for a walk.’

‘A month from now and you won’t even blush when it goes on.’

‘Because I’m a Showman, is that what you mean?’

‘I didn’t say that. If that was what I mean, that’s what I would have said.’

‘Well, what did you mean?’

‘I honestly don’t know. Oh, go for your walk... I don’t ...I don’t know what I’m saying. Too much hooch!.

‘I love you, Jones,’ I said with feeling, using the nickname that always made her smile.

She smiled, defensively. ‘You and your flannel tongue, honest!’

‘It’s not flannel, and you know it.’

‘Go on! Got take your walk!’

‘Let me stay. Let me sleep with you.’ I was begging, but I somehow stopped myself from saying please.

Something left her face: ‘I can’t, Tony, I can’t’

‘Oh, forget it!’ I went out, slamming the door, and I was so tense and so blind, that I went around the trailer, falling over the tow-bar so hard that I thought I’d broken my shin bone. Need I tell you that all my swear words got a workout, and that it was minutes later before I could risk standing up, after which I took a careful walk to my digs.

The Cribbons family were all in bed, but Jennie was sitting by the fire in the parlour. She’d been reading quite a bit lately, ever since we’d started a new double act - a fun sketch for the two of us. This had led to me loaning her books, and she beginning to read on a regular basis, letting me know how she got along with a mixed bag of fiction. Up to this time in her life - my guess put her at thirty or close to it - she had not been a reader, and I felt good that I had been the one to introduce her to the god sent habit of turning the page.

‘You just missed Tom,’ she said, putting the book aside. ‘We had some laughs...Mrs. Cribbons was on about her son again.

I found myself grinning, despite the ache in my bloody shin. Our landlady for the fortnight, was always worried about her boy, terrified that he’d be eaten or something ‘by all them blacks over there.’

Her son was in Birmingham and I just went on assuring her that he would be right as rain over there, until the day when she showed Tom Hunter and me a picture of the dear sweet lad.

He stood about six feet five inches, and a bigger, wilder looking Irishman I had not seen up to that time in my life.

‘Oh, you’ve not got much to worry about, Ma’am.’

I somehow ignored the snorting and grunting of Tom, who was c hoking on his food.

‘He looks a very sensible chap.’ I said, despite the need to shriek with a laugh large enough to do me damage if it exploded inside me.

‘Oh, I’m so relieved to hear you say it, Mister O’Neill. He can be a bit awkward at times.’

I nodded, under some strain from holding down the need to explode loudly enough to break the windows, at the same time, actually feeling a bit sore from repressing the need to simply erupt, but somehow, not falling apart until she had left the room.

‘Oh, he’s only a lad,’ Tom mimicked the land lady, ‘Ah son, how do you like your beef?’

‘On the hoof, Ma, please!’

She left you some cocoa,; Jenny said. ‘Will I get it for you?’

‘Thanks. It might help me sleep. What’re you reading? Ah, Mister Norris Changes Trains.’

‘Oh, Isherwood’s marvellous...You don’t mind me, helping myself to the books?’

‘Of course not, take whatever you want.’

She smiled: ‘I’m a bit slow. I never was much of a reader.’

‘Well, you’re reading now, which is great. Gary helped me develop the habit, loaned me books, delighted I was into the printed word...so, I’ll do the same for you as long as you are interested.’

She smiled and I found myself holding out my hand to her. She put her hand in mine and the moment we touched for the first time, I realised that we had wasted an awful lot of time.

‘Jenn,’ I managed to say, my throat tight in a grip that was exciting.

Her eyes were on mine and for the first time that I could remember, he eyes didn’t look sad, and I said, ‘Will you take me to bed?’

Her fingers crushed mine. ‘Oh, Tony, if you only knew how I have dreamed of us together.’

She stood up and we held hands on the way upstairs and I knew she didn’t want to let me go for even one second. The soft tips of her fingers seemed to burn my skin and I could hardly breathe by the time I slipped into bed against her cream soft body.

Up to that moment, Jennie had been a substitute for Pauline, but when I kissed her, I knew that I wasn’t using her the way I’d used May. She was like a sanctuary to me, and my lips and my body were to her more than just instruments to relieve the physical need to have sex.

She was passionate, with the fierce appetite of a woman who had been hungry for a long time, but her words were love, and she reached me in every pore of my body, while my heart felt warm and safe.

Through those first hours of taking each other, my feeling for her changed, in the sense that it got stronger and better and cleaner. She was my friend and my mother and my mistress... she was everybody I had ever cared for in my life as she came towards me with every breath, and in each moment she was her mouth seemed like a blessed orifice, a fountain spraying love up and out to the four winds.

We seemed to move as one, rolling and tumbling in and out of each other, until we fell down together, down and down, tumbling, spinning, slithering down and down, deeply into the quiet, love to me...’

Her fingers touched my lips gently. ‘You owe me nothing, Tony, ‘but I want you to know that I belong to you for as long as you need me...I don’t want anybody else.’

I kissed her and she moved under me, and I took her again, fiercely, loving her and really wanting to disappear, to just melt into the warmth of her, going in deeper and deeper, away from everything and everybody, back to the safety of the time before my journey began.

For the next eighteen months, Jenny and I slept in the same bed and she kept her promise never to make any demands on me. This was her own wish even as she looked after me every day, even down to the details, darning socks, whatever, my only problem being that I didn’t love her the way she deserved to be loved.

I tried to stop loving Pauline, even making lists in my mind that would help me in that direction, but I found no way to gain any sort of release from the prison cell of my feeling for the piano player with the droll wit. No matter how I tried, I had no success at all, in fact, I lost hands down, simply unable to shake one drop of Pauline off my raincoat.

It was like she was glued to the parts of me that were for keeps and though Jennie knew, she never said a word to try and influence me in the opposite direction. In a way, this made me feel more guilt than before. Jennie, being totally feminine, left it to the male to make decisions, and because she was biased by her feeling for me, she thought of me as a man, If only she had known, if only she had been able to see clearly, she would have realised that my preoccupation with her breasts, beautiful though they were, was something deeper, something more sadly significant, than the prelude to sexual intercourse.