Still Standing: The Savage Years (10 page)

It wasn’t good to be back and I hankered for the warmth of my Danish garret as the temperature in the flat was below freezing. We didn’t bother to undress, just took our shoes off, slipped into the sleeping bags and, despite being back on the lilos, fell into a deep sleep.

We were awoken four hours later by an attic full of police who were very interested to know what was in the suspicious
sacks that were propped against the wall. As there were no lights the coppers had to use torches to investigate this possible murderers’ bedroom and there was a lot of stumbling around in the dark. Henry added to the chaos. Curious at this unexpected dawn raid, he had flown up the stairs eager to join in the fun and sat happily on top of a none-too-amused policeman’s helmet.

It transpired that one of the neighbours had seen us carrying the costume sacks into the flat and in the wake of the current Ripper paranoia had come to the conclusion that something the shape and size of the sacks could only contain one thing. A body.

A young copper picked up a bin-liner and peered inside, his eyes round as saucers as hastily he beckoned one of his colleagues to ‘come and have a look at this’. The pair of them stood open-mouthed, staring at the contents of the bin-liner like they were witnessing a war crime. Eventually the older one spoke.

‘Do you mind telling us what exactly you have in here, sir?’ he asked a semi-conscious Hush.

Despite the hour, Hush was surprisingly eloquent.

‘They’re wigs, officer,’ he announced grandly. ‘And those sacks that your friends there are pulling apart contain costumes. We’re a cabaret act, you see, and have literally just returned from a four-week tour of Scandinavia.’

‘So you weren’t smuggling bodies into the house in the middle of the night?’ the copper replied, holding up a wig on its polystyrene head.

‘No,’ I growled, not happy at being woken up from a deep sleep by a copper shining a torch in my face, nor was I concerned that half of the West Yorkshire Constabulary were surrounding my lilo and wondering if they’d finally caught
the Yorkshire Ripper. ‘We take the bodies of our murder victims straight through to the back and bury them in the allotment, it saves time.’

‘Take no notice,’ Hush shrieked, laughing nervously and throwing his hands up in the air like a pantomime dame, adding, ‘As if’ and managing in the process to make those two little words sound like we had something serious to hide.

‘We’re terribly sorry for disturbing you,’ the copper said sarcastically, ‘but if we receive a phone call reporting something suspicious you must appreciate that we are obliged to follow it up. We are after all conducting an extensive manhunt.’

‘Well, you won’t find any men in here,’ I snapped, not normally so lippy in the presence of police but still rattled by being woken so early.

‘You speak for yourself,’ Phil said from the top of the stairs, pulling his beige terry-towelling robe closer and pursing his lips indignantly.

‘Oh, shut up, Phyllis, don’t you start,’ Hush admonished. ‘Make yourself useful and put the kettle on,’ and turning to one of the coppers he asked, ‘Do you think we could get up and get dressed, officer?’ forgetting that he was already fully clothed, complete with woollen hat. The police can only have surmised that they’d stumbled across a local dosshouse and as Phil showed them out down the narrow stairs we could hear them muttering and sniggering to themselves as they went.

‘God knows what the neighbours will say,’ Phil moaned when he came back. ‘There’s two vanloads of coppers outside.’

‘Sod ’em,’ I said, from inside my sleeping bag.

‘Exactly,’ Hush agreed. ‘So if you don’t mind, Phyllis, we’d like to get back to sleep. We’ve got a double tonight and I
need my kip and then when we wake up, ladies,’ he added, sounding like the head girl in an Angela Brazil story, ‘we’re going to have it out about this electricity bill.’

I couldn’t wait.

That night we were working the Stone Chair followed by a gay club called the Gemini. We stayed in drag to make the journey from Halifax to Huddersfield as it wasn’t worth the effort getting changed, and as fate would have it we encountered a police roadblock checking all vehicles on a deserted stretch of road.

As we were giving some friends from the pub a lift to the club Hush and I had volunteered to sit in the back of the van instead of up front. We didn’t mind, it was comfortable stretched out on the drag sacks, me swigging a bottle of cider and smoking a fag, Hush sipping from ‘the baby’, a supermarket-sized bottle of Coke mixed with vodka he always took to work with him. Dressed as a couple of hookers, we had the added advantage of sitting in the back that we didn’t flatten the tops of our gargantuan wigs on the roof of the van.

‘What’s happening now?’ Hush groaned as the van came to a halt and we heard someone talking to Phil.

‘Hello again,’ we could hear the man saying cheerily. ‘Do you remember me, I were in your bedroom this morning.’

‘Oh, hello!’ Phil gushed, as if greeting a long-lost old flame. ‘I thought I recognized you, officer. We’re just on our way to work.’

‘Well, do you mind if we have a quick look in the back of the van?’

‘Oh no,’ Hush moaned, squeezing my arm. ‘For God’s sake, Savage, don’t go saying anything to them.’

Phil flung the back doors of the van open and for the second time that day I had a torch shone in my face.

‘Well, well, what have we here?’ I heard one of the silhouettes say. ‘And who are you two young ladies then?’

Without batting an eyelash I slid out of the van with as much dignity as possible when one is wearing dominatrix boots and a leopard-print coat, saluted one of the officers and stated, ‘WPC Savage, sir. Ripper bait.’

Returning home from the Gemini Club at 2 a.m., roaring drunk and still in the blond bouffant and thigh-length boots, I took the opportunity to thank the sleeping neighbours for organizing that morning’s dawn raid.

‘Come out,’ I shouted up to the bedroom windows of Crimble Bank. ‘Come out from behind your bloody nets and fight like a woman,’ a taunt that one of Vera’s aunties had once shouted up to his mother during a slight altercation. The good folk lying in their beds sensibly didn’t respond and after a bit of a struggle and a few more choice words Phil finally got me indoors, whereupon I upended the ubiquitous plastic bucket of steeping mushy peas over his head. No wonder the neighbours crossed the street to avoid us.

The van finally died a couple of nights later as it attempted to make it up a steep hill in Halifax. We got out and pushed (not easy in high heels), much to the amusement and derision of passing motorists, until we eventually gave it the last rites, abandoned it on the road and called a taxi to take us to the venue.

It was impossible to carry on without transport because of the distances that we covered each night, so we had no option but to flog the van for scrap and buy something else that was not only cheap but hopefully reliable. All the motors we went
to look at were way out of our price league until eventually we found a clapped-out old car for ninety quid from someone Phil knew. On our first excursion in it to Birmingham to work the Jug, a club run by a character we loved called Laurie who wore an ill-fitting toupee and called everyone ‘me babbie’, Phil absently filled it up at the garage with diesel instead of petrol, which meant we had to crawl up the motorway at twenty-five miles an hour and arrived in Birmingham hours late.

We had quite a lot of work on that December and Hush was determined to do a Christmas show. He loved Christmas, and had brought his artificial tree and all the decorations and lights for it with him when we moved up north. Trouble was, there was still no electricity so unless we gave in and paid the bill there would be no lights twinkling on his tree, nor would there be any new costumes made for the proposed Christmas show.

Ever resourceful, Hush took his faithful Singer sewing machine with us to the Green Hammerton Hotel, the next venue we were working at, to make costumes. It was like a holiday with pay at the Hammerton, all the acts enjoyed working there; you did your show three nights on the trot in the cabaret lounge to a very civilized audience, stayed in comfortable rooms and were well fed and watered. The owners, the irascible Sid and his more easy-going partner, Dennis, knew the meaning of the words hard graft, having worked their way up through the pub trade before eventually arriving at their own hotel.

Sid had a temper like a Tasmanian devil and when he lost it, which he frequently did, York Minster shook. He also had a heart of gold and was an excellent cook. His homemade soup, stored on the cool larder floor in a huge pan, was
seriously depleted after frequent raids by me throughout the night. It was as addictive as crack cocaine and I couldn’t leave it alone, but Sid didn’t seem to mind. ‘Jewish penicillin, love,’ he’d say, being neither Jewish nor medically inclined. ‘Put a bit of meat on those tin ribs of yours.’

I was a bit shy with Sid at first but instantly thick as thieves with the manager, Nigel, a smashing Geordie who took upon himself the unenviable task of teaching me to fire-eat. Before going into the hotel trade Nigel had briefly been a stripper, incorporating fire-eating into his act. As I was desperate to learn this impressive feat I eventually, after a lot of pleading, wore him down and got him reluctantly to agree to teach me.

‘Go on, pet, shove it in your gob,’ he’d say as I stood in the car park holding two rods made from wire coat hangers with blazing tips of cotton wool that had been bound with cotton and then soaked in lighter fuel, the flames seemingly enormous and dancing dangerously in the breeze. ‘You wouldn’t be so slow if it were a pint of cider.’

Even though my early attempts resulted in frequent blisters on my tongue and an assortment of burns on my arms and hands ranging from first degree to ten, I persevered, determined to master this not surprisingly dying art. He instructed me always to use pure cotton when tying the cotton wool to the rods as polyester would melt, and taught me how to do a ‘tongue transfer’, moving the flame from one rod to another using your tongue. The very first time I managed a ‘blowout’ – spitting the petrol through the flame and creating a fireball – I very nearly died of fright as I couldn’t quite comprehend how I’d managed to produce such a volcanic emission, worthy of Etna at her angriest.

Nigel was more than a little wary of the force he’d unleashed.

‘I can see it now,’ he sighed. ‘Hotel burns down. Three hundred killed. Drag act and hotel manager arrested.’

While we were doing this three-day stint at the Hammerton, Hush barely left his room except to eat and do the show. Instead he spent his day bent over his machine, running up a succession of amazing costumes with fabrics bought from market stalls and Bradford shops that specialized in materials for saris.

As it was Christmas we thought we should open this show with a suitable number dressed as Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters, and for this Hush made me a fat suit.

It was a crude prototype of
Little Britain
’s Bubbles character, only mine, far less sophisticated, was made from thick lining fabric stuffed with a ton of multicoloured foam chips and an industrial-sized zip running down the back that was an absolute swine to pull up and down once I’d managed to get myself into it. Over this body I wore an enormous tent dress which, after a lot of jumping up and down as any kind of terpsichorean movement with my elephantine legs was extremely limited, I stripped out of to the strains of ‘The Stripper’. The not-so-body-beautiful underneath had by now taken on such a powerful personality all of its own we’d christened it Biddy. Once out of the frock, there was a bra the size of a hammock containing Biddy’s pendulous breasts, each one the size and weight of a large pouffe and complete with an upholstery tassel hanging from the nipple. Underneath the ship’s sail that called itself a G-string Hush had stitched a heart-shaped piece of hair cut from an old wig and on one of the buttocks I’d drawn an anchor with a blue marker pen.

I hated Biddy as apart from the prude in me finding it grossly obscene I was forever repairing its bursting seams that
spilled foam chips in every venue we worked at. It also took up most of the back seat of the car so that whoever travelled with it, which was invariably me, would have to sit buried underneath the monster.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t dump it as Biddy went down a storm. Since we got a hell of a lot of bookings out of the bloody thing we had to live with it, even to share the attic bedroom with its all-dominating presence as there was nowhere else to store it. Now, each time I see the Disney animation
The Little Mermaid
and the octopus villainess Ursula, I’m reminded of Biddy and taken back to that Christmas.

While Hush stitched in his room I’d take myself off into York on the bus, mainly to have a mooch around but also to buy zips (‘Don’t get plastic!’), cottons and all the other accoutrements required for the drag-making factory in room number 3.

I spent the afternoon investigating the antique and curio shops, even though I didn’t have a hope in hell of affording anything that I took a shine to, and impressed a party of Americans in The Shambles at the shrine of Margaret Clitheroe with my knowledge of this unfortunate woman. I knew all the gory details of how she’d been stripped, laid under a door and then crushed to death with rocks, thanks to my mother, who knew everything there was to know about the lives of the saints and martyrs and how they’d met their maker.

When I got back to the hotel, a very concerned Sid and Nigel were waiting to greet me.

‘I’ve got a bit of bad news for you, love,’ Sid said, busying himself arranging ornaments on the shelves behind the bar.
‘There’s been a terrible death. We’ve only just heard, haven’t we, Nigel?’

Nigel nodded solemnly in agreement.

My stomach turned over and the room seemed to close in on me. Had Hush stitched himself to death? Had his overworked machine blown up? Or worse, had something happened to my mother? I momentarily went deaf, the only sound the sudden rush of blood pounding in my ears, a tidal wave drowning out what Sid was telling me.