Highgate, 1948
Despite the bleakness and hardship of the post-war years, the Mother Riley Roadshow thrives. Audiences in the small theatres and clubs may be pinched, but besides food they are hungry for laughs, knees-ups and the cheap romance of American pop songs. Harry adds new acts and buys fresh props and costumes and a new enormous leather suitcase to keep them in. On weekdays after school, Pauline pulls the suitcase from the cupboard at the top of the stairs and in the grainy landing light extracts gaudy fabrics and exotic paraphernalia: maracas, two ruby fezzes; a camisa de flamenco in emerald green satin with black cuffs, and a pair of black satin trousers; heavy Hawaiian grass skirts that are worn by a man and woman with pan lids over their chests in a song routine with Barney on guitar. Propped against the wall beside the suitcase are silver-topped walking canes, a shepherd’s crook, and a washboard that Harry plays with thimbled fingertips, accompanying himself as he sings his own adaptations of jazz and music hall standards.
The washboard act is one of several that he also performs solo, and with these turns as well as the troupe, the singing, comedy and drumming, Harry is out entertaining three or four nights a week, sometimes a couple of times on the same evening. Millie, despite having had her fifth child, a daughter named Anne, in 1947, still sings with him. The fees mean that he is among the most well-off men in Highgate, and this is not something he seeks to hide. One weekend in the spring of 1948, Winnie, Pauline, Roy, Millie and Danny, Clara and Ernie are summoned to view Harry’s latest acquisition from Clarry Basinger; a black, highly polished, nine-seater Daimler limousine, complete with running boards, dicky seat and glass partition with a speaking tube between driver and passengers. Second-hand, and possibly once owned by one of the old coal owners or industrialists, it symbolises to Juggler not only his own success, but also the modern pleasures of comfort and mobility that, he believes, can be had by anyone with hard work and verve. He celebrates by putting everyone in it – Pauline in the dicky seat – and driving them to Bridlington, talking to them through the chauffeur’s speaking pipe all the way there.
The Daimler replaces the motorcycle and sidecar as the Roadshow’s and the family’s main form of transport. On a roll, he begins bringing home other new things, clothes, animals and musical instruments, as if determined to fill the house. On Fridays he calls at Goldthorpe police station to ask if they have stray pets that need looking after over the weekend, and he comes home with a carful of creatures and a different instrument borrowed from musician friends. This means that on most Fridays, Winnie struggles into the house with her shopping to find Harry in the sitting room playing a stilted version of a popular song on, say, a trombone, or a piano-accordion, before an audience of cats, Bonzo the dog, sundry mongrels and terriers, and a box of chicks beside the Yorkshire range. He greets Winnie with a long hoot on the trombone, which makes her even more cross, because it is a trick he always has over her – diffusing tension with a joke so he seems the easy-going one and she the trouble-causer. The dafter, the more successful, he becomes, the more she comes across as the stick-in-the-mud. ‘Give it a rest, Harry!’ she says.
‘Take no notice of her!’ he says to the animals, and kisses Bonzo, or perhaps a stray Yorkshire terrier, on the lips.
*
One Saturday a few weeks after the purchase of the Daimler, Harry is out drinking at the club and Winnie is in the sitting room. She has visitors. Her mam has come up to spend the evening with her, and Sonny’s wife May has joined them while the men are at the club. May, twenty-three, is demure and keen to be recognised as a woman of good taste. She doesn’t say as much, but she feels like an outsider in the Dearne Valley. To her it seems a crude and frightening place, full of men who walk around in their vests and women who speak to each other harshly. The backings, with their untidiness, slanging matches and gossip, are like a little vision of hell, though of course Sonny is separate from that, his sobriety and mildness all the more striking for their rough setting. When she is with him, she feels protected and able to enjoy the one Dearne quality she admires: its sense of fun. Without Sonny she feels vulnerable and it is this vulnerability she feels now, as the sudden cries and shouts of people walking in the backings make her wince, and she notices Winnie watching her. (‘I sometimes think our May does it for effect,’ Winnie tells Annie later. ‘I don’t think it’s noisy.’) It is half past ten at night, the hour of coughing men, banging privy doors, barking dogs, buckets of beer, cheerful insults, laughter in the yards and drunks singing ‘Bread of Heaven’. ‘Guide me,/O Thou Great Redeemer,/Pilgrim through this barren land . . .’
Sonny comes in, beery but still quite sober, and sits on a chair at the sitting-room table and tells them who he has seen at the club and what the men’s gossip is. Winnie jumps up and hides Psychic News under a cushion because when Harry catches her reading it, he laughs, and when he’s had a drink or two he never stops. She puts on a pinny over her brown, crêpe-de-Chine dress and goes to the kitchen to prepare the bread and dripping, and listens to Sonny telling May that he hasn’t seen Alf, because Alf went off to watch Juggler do a couple of songs at a pub in Bolton. ‘I saw our Millie though,’ he calls to Winnie. ‘She said she’d come round with Danny a bit later.’
‘A bit later?’ says May. ‘It’s a quarter to eleven!’
Minutes later there is an eruption in the kitchen and the sound of two men, wheezing with laughter, falling through the door and collapsing on the floor. The yellow bone-handled knife from the dripping clatters onto the lino beside them. It is Barney and Eric Roe, one of the singers.
‘Ayup Winnie,’ says Barney. And Eric says, ‘Sorry about that knife.’
And then Danny is coming in, stepping over Barney and Eric with a drinker’s over-carefulness, and starting to sing ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’. ‘We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way . . .’ Barney and Eric, still on the floor, harmonise. Then Barney grabs his guitar and begins to accompany him. ‘We’re little black sheep who have gone astray –’
Winnie tenses slightly. Sonny, her brother, the gentleman, recognises this in her and comes into the kitchen and puts a hand on her shoulder, while joining in the singing.
‘Lovely voices,’ May says to Annie, thinking these men, they talk so roughly, they are so proud of their hard and filthy work, and yet when they sing it is as if their sweet, soft voices transform them; as if the brass bands, the harmonic male voice choirs and the musicians are part of a kind of spell.
In the silences between lines, through the open door comes more shouting in the backings as the men make their way home: ‘Gentlemen songsters off on a spree! Damned from here to eternity!’ The sweet tenor of Juggler Hollingworth, oiled with Vicks VapoRub and pumped loud and clear with adrenaline, cuts through the sour, smokey air of the yard, and elicits cheers from the men on the floor, and from Millie who comes in behind him.
‘Hello, Millie,’ says May.
‘Ayup, May love,’ says Millie, entering the sitting room. ‘You should’ve come wi’ us tonight, we’ve been wi’ a right crowd.’
‘Give us a kiss, my love,’ calls Danny, as Millie is called back to the kitchen.
‘Get off me you drunken swine,’ says Millie.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, my lovely wife!’ says Danny.
The sitting room is full: the troupe, friends, family, neighbours, a couple of turns they’ve met, and Roy who has crept downstairs from his bedroom. Every now and again someone mentions the troupe’s new chauffeur-driven ‘lim-o-zeen’, and Harry, standing in front of the range in his new, bespoke suit and pointed shoes, promises to take people out for rides in it. He shouts into the kitchen to ask where the flaming beer’s got to, and then as someone begins to play the piano, he invites Annie to stand up and give them a song.
In the kitchen, Winnie is furiously sawing at the loaf and spreading the thick, uneven slices with dripping, while Millie takes platefuls of food into the sitting room. Alf comes in carrying a bucket of beer from the beer-off and sets it on the sitting-room table so that everyone can dip in glasses grabbed from Winnie’s kitchen or sideboard. Through the doorway, Winnie watches Alf, and notices that he scoops up only half a glassful.
May asks Sonny to come outside to get some air with her. As they go out, two men May does not know, carrying brown glass bottles of beer, are waiting to be let in. ‘We’ve come for t’ sing-song,’ says one of them.
In the yard May and Sonny lean against a wall. Voices from the backings, silver stars. A toilet flushes and Reg Spencer from next door comes out, weaving slightly. Sonny affectionately tells him to get to bed.
‘Crikey, Sonny,’ says May. ‘Hellzapoppin!’ Hellzapoppin is the name of a film they saw just after Sonny came back from the Merchant Navy.
‘Mighty fine party,’ he says.
Sonny says ‘mighty fine’ a lot, it being a favourite phrase of his hero Bing Crosby.
Suddenly they hear shouting from a house in the next yard down. A man curses, a woman cries out, and there is the sound of something scraping on the floor. Sonny tells a startled May that it will be Arthur Copper laying into his wife, Peggy. He always gives her a good hiding on Saturday nights.
‘Somebody should stop him.’
Sonny sighs. ‘Whoever does, she’ll go tomorrow morning and tell them to keep their noses out.’
Another cry, scraping, a bump.
May’s eyes fill up. ‘Wait here,’ Sonny says, and he opens the door and calls into the sitting room. ‘Juggler!’ Stiltingly, clumsily the singing peters out. ‘Come and sort Arthur out. He’s giving Peg some right hammer.’
‘What have I got to do wi’ it?’
Harry is not known as a fighter, but he is sometimes asked to help out because he is tall.
‘She’ll gi’e me hell in t’ morning,’ he says, but he is going now, with Alf following, steam rising from the heat of their bodies as they step into the night air. Some of the guests come out and peer over the wall as Harry goes into the next-door’s yard and slaps on Arthur’s door.
‘Gi’o’er Arthur! Leave her!’
A guilty pause: quiet in the yards, quiet in the backings, everything still beneath the stars.
‘Bugger off Juggler.’
Harry, followed by Alf and backed up by Sonny, pushes open the door. In the yellow-gold rectangle of the kitchen light, May can see a woman holding her face. She hears the rush and clatter of fighting as Harry seizes Arthur and Alf throws a saucepan of water over Arthur’s head. The scuffling subsides and soon all anyone can hear is Harry telling Peggy to get to bed and leave her husband where he is.
Harry and Alf adjust their collars and ties as they go back to the party, and Harry complains that he has a wet patch on one of his best shirts. ‘Come on, Nance,’ he shouts to Annie, ‘leave thy crystal ball alone and let’s have a song!’ and everyone follows in behind them, and says what a bad ’un Arthur can be when he’s drunk. Harry and Annie sing ‘Beautiful Green’, and then he and Millie sing ‘Till We Meet Again’. Winnie sits on the sofa, somehow apart, watching. She always feels awkward at parties, unless she is making the sandwiches, or tidying up. She cannot banter; she likes to talk about things, but the men and women in the room don’t really talk in the way that she likes, and so she just smiles, and tries to look content, as a lady in a novel might do. As Harry, Danny, Barney, Millie and her mam sing and lark about in the centre with everyone watching them, she looks on from the margins, moving her thumbs in circles around each other.
Alf comes back in from using the privy and sits beside her on the arm of the chair, and says what a daft lot they are, and what a wonder she is, making sandwiches for them all. And when she talks to him about the parties, and the tidying up there’ll be to do tomorrow, Alf looks at her and listens. These brief conversations they have are her only ones that are not about the house and family, or making food, or ironing the costumes from the flaming trunk. They are as much an indulgence to her as the beer and the singing are to Harry, who is now in the middle of the room scolding Danny and Sonny for talking about work.
‘When tha’s at t’ pit tha talks about boozing, and when tha’s boozing tha talks about t’ pit! Can’t tha talk about summat else for a change?’
‘Can’t tha get thy dress on and pull us half a pint of beer from up it?’ says Danny.
Sonny drains his glass and he and May say goodbye to everyone and move towards the door, to cheers and jeers from the room. As they leave, Winnie is talking to Alf again, while Harry and Danny, centre stage in front of the range, have recommenced ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’. When May turns back to shut the door she sees Alf moving closer to Winnie, so close that their knees are touching, as Harry sings the last words in his ugly but beautiful gap-toothed tenor:‘God have mercy on such as we! Baa baa baa.’
The party ends at three. The next morning, Peggy Copper comes round and tells Juggler to mind his own flaming business.