Still Standing: The Savage Years (3 page)

He fiddles with his phone while I throw my arm around Mother, who comes up to my waist and feels like a damp horsehair armchair that still has its plastic covering on.

‘I’ve told her,’ he adds, ‘I remember you from years ago when you were working down the Elephant and Castle, rough as arseholes that pub was and so were you. Smile!’

I resist the overwhelming urge to retort that while his looks have obviously faded over the years, remarkably his feeble mind still seems to be intact, and I smile passively into his mobile phone instead. The mother finally releases me from her vice-like grip and I escape the baleful glare of the son and into the theatre.

I’m supposed to use the stage door, but the front of house is quicker. Besides, I prefer to walk through the empty auditorium and across the stage to my dressing room; there’s a nice feel to it that makes you aware you’re earning your living in a very special way. I still view working in the theatre with a slightly romantic eye. I like to sit in the empty stalls in the older houses before the show and imagine the great names who’ve appeared there on the stage. The Mayflower was built in the twenties, Tallulah Bankhead has trod these boards as has Gypsy Rose Lee and, in later years, Bill Haley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have all played here and now it’s my turn to have my name outside the theatre. If I sit and dwell on it I find the notion of such responsibility extremely daunting and a mild panic can set in if I allow it to, believing that one day the jig will be up and I’ll be caught out, exposed as a talentless fraud and sent back to Birkenhead to work in the children’s home.

I’m early today as I’ve agreed to an interview over the phone with a local newspaper. The ensemble are already in and on stage warming up for the show. I don’t know how they do it.
They can do two strenuous shows a day and still go out afterwards and dance all night, then present themselves the next morning fresh as daisies to do the whole thing over again. I resignedly put it down to youth as I watch them enviously from the stalls manoeuvring their lithe bodies into crippling positions that I couldn’t get into for cash up front. They catch sight of me and wave, in return I let out a low wolf whistle as they lie on their backs and splay their legs apart. I flirt with some of them for fun but they know that they’re dealing with the burnt-out wreck of a once glorious disco and have no reason to worry.

Vera’s already in the dressing room. He was up early this morning and sat in Southampton General because something was wrong with his eye. He’s had lots of trouble with his eyes over the years and numerous operations to repair detached retinas and various other ocular ailments. This morning when he woke up the eye was kicking off again. He said his eye felt like it had a broken milk bottle in it, although how he knows what that feels like is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless he took himself off to the hospital where a doctor told him that the eye had ‘dried out’ as he’d obviously gone to sleep with one eye open. I laugh now as he tells me the doctor’s diagnosis as I can visualize him lying in the dark like a snoring Cyclops, his one dehydrated eyeball staring blankly up at the bedroom ceiling.

‘And d’ya know what he said to me?’ Vera squawks indignantly.

‘No, what?’ I reply.

‘He said, “Have you been drinking?”’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said I’d had a couple of pints after work but nothing that would cause me eyeball to shrivel up.’

I try to ignore the image of him sprawled across the hall floor
at 2 a.m., with me, equally inebriated, attempting to pull him up but failing miserably and ending up on top of him instead, incapable with laughter – but I can’t, so I remind him of it.

‘Oh, well the jury’s still out on that one,’ he sniffs, sitting down and flipping open the
Daily Mirror
. ‘I don’t remember anything like that.’

Vera’s reaction to the post mortems that inevitably follow a spectacular night out on the lash is to take my side of the story with a sack of salt, as his creed has always been thus: if he can’t remember the event then it obviously didn’t happen and if by some chance an incident did take place then my account is a highly exaggerated version and not to be believed.

The fibre-optic Christmas tree that has made numerous appearances in dressing rooms up and down the country over the years is switched on, as are the lights around the mirror. In the background Jeremy Vine is on the radio, chairing an angry debate about wheelie bins, of all things. Vera, unconcerned with such mundane affairs, has turned his full attention to the
Daily Mirror
’s crossword and is hunched over it, sucking the end of his biro and sniffing as he tries to work out the answer to ten across.

I take my coat and sweater off and put my dressing gown on in preparation for the tedious business of ‘slapping up’.

One of Jeremy’s callers is having a heated argument with a woman from the council. They’re getting on my nerves. How could anyone get into such a state over a bloody wheelie bin?

‘Is there nothing else on, Vera?’ I moan.

‘They’ve fixed your hat,’ he sighs, slowly getting up from the chair, folding up the
Daily Mirror
and shoving it behind the pot containing the orchid that Cilla had sent me as a first-night present. It’s a plant that obviously thrives in the artificial light of the dressing room, if the way it keeps producing
blooms is anything to go by. Cilla is appearing in Aylesbury as Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother while Barbara Windsor is at Bristol giving her Fairy of the Bow Bells in
Dick Whittington
.

We compare notes regularly by phone. Cilla’s back is killing her from the pressure of the flying harness but she is carrying on regardless, while in Bristol Barbara is also flying thirty feet across the stage at the end of a wire. In any other civilized country, if two ladies of an age when they are eligible for a bus pass were swung across a stage on the end of a wire twice daily for the amusement of the general public, there would be outrage. It’s commonplace, however, in the UK. The practice breaks out over the Christmas period in towns and cities all around the country. Meanwhile, up in Birmingham, Julian Clary is in bed with a lime-green duck called Orville. There really is no business like show business.

‘Did you hear me?’ Vera sparked up again, switching the radio over to Classic FM. ‘I said they’d fixed your hat.’ He is referring to the enormous piece of millinery in the shape of a cartwheel draped in reams of black chiffon that I have to wear for the opening scene, set in a Birkenhead graveyard at the funeral of Mustapha Twankey. Unusual opening for a panto, I know, but it was my idea and I claim all responsibility in the face of any detractors. Luckily the audience loved it, especially the reveal when I lifted the veils and showed my face, or rather the visage of Lily Savage, for the first time and I was genuinely gratified to hear by the cheers that the old scrubber still has a few fans out there.

The hat, however, is my bête noire. It’s extremely heavy, vision is limited once the veils are down, it’s uncomfortable to wear and has to be virtually nailed to my head to keep it on.

‘D’ya want a cup of tea, Lily?’ Vera asks, predicting my reply by switching the kettle on. He always calls me Lily, just
as I’ve always called him Vera, and we think nothing of it and so far neither does anyone else.

A couple of the dancers knock on the door. They’ve come to have a look at Vera’s many bruises, which are fast achieving legend status.

‘This one is where I fell on the ice,’ he says proudly, rolling up the sleeve of his jumper to reveal a purple mass on his upper arm. ‘And this one on me other arm looks suspiciously like a pinch mark.’ He directs this statement at me. ‘I wonder how I got that then?’

‘I didn’t pinch you.’

‘No, you never do, yet how come after a night on the bevvy with you I wake up black and fucking blue?’

The dancers are lapping up this private cabaret like kittens with a bowl of milk.

‘He pushed me down a dirty big hole in Church Street once, y’know,’ Vera went on, warming to his theme. ‘Six foot deep – six foot! I could’ve been killed, and this one roaring with laughter in Woolie’s doorway.’

This tale has been told to everyone we’ve come in contact with since the incident originally occurred thirty-five or so years ago. The depth of the hole, I have to say in my defence, has increased dramatically over the years.

‘Show them the bruise on your back, Vera,’ I chip in to try to change the subject, with not much success.

‘The workmen came rushing out of their hut and shouted, “Don’t worry, lad, we’ll get your girlfriend out,”’ he went on. ‘You see, I was very slim in those days – I had a beautiful figure and was often mistaken for a girl. They used to call me Tits when I worked behind the bar in the Triton.’

The dancers are much amused by this last bit of information.

‘Why? Did you have tits when you were a teenager, Vera?’ one of them asks.

‘No, but she has now.’ I get in quick with this as it’s an opportunity not to be missed. ‘They’re those things hanging around her knees.’

‘Cheeky cow.’

Jon Lee, the remarkable young actor and singer playing Aladdin, comes in from his dressing room next door to see what all the laughter is about. Vera is now bent over with his jumper rolled up to reveal a whopper of a bruise on his back. He puts me in mind of Lydia the Tattooed Lady showing off her prize tattoos, only in Vera’s case it’s bruises.

‘And this one,’ he says dramatically, twisting his body round and squinting to see if he can catch a glimpse of his gold-medal-winning contusion in the dressing-room mirror. ‘I got this one when I fell on the ice as well.’

‘What about that nice fresh one on your side?’ I chip in again. ‘There’s no ice on the floor of the flat, is there? And that looks suspiciously like the result of the early hours of this morning’s carry-on when you fell in the hall and banged your back on a doorknob.’

‘I was pushed.’

‘Who by? There was only me in the flat at the time and I was on the lav. I heard the thud as you fell, I had to come out and help you up. The evidence is conclusive. I rest my case, your honour.’

‘Haven’t you got an interview to do?’ he says, smartly changing the subject. ‘You’d better get a move on, you haven’t got your make-up on yet and it’s nearly twenty past. You know what you’re like if you have to rush.’

This is a cue for everyone to leave the dressing room. I root around on the make-up shelf for the bit of paper with the journalist’s
phone number on it, which is buried somewhere under a mountain of beads, bangles and packets of spare eyelashes.

‘I’ll fly round to Coleman’s and get a couple of sarnies, eh?’ Vera says, pouring the hot water from the kettle into a mug with lipstick stains around the rim. ‘What d’ya fancy? Corned beef and tomato? Or ham salad?’

Usually I opt for the corned beef but today I fancy the ham salad on white with a good dollop of Heinz salad cream. Coleman’s is a shop close to the theatre that at first glance appears to be nothing more than a newsagent, yet on closer inspection reveals a small back room where a couple of cheery ladies turn out an array of spectacular and extremely tasty sandwiches and rolls of the type rarely found in a British shop today. Cheese and pickle, ham rolls, beef and onion and my favourite, the
spécialité de la maison
, corned beef and tomato on white bread that has been gently caressed by a knife bearing a layer of Daddies sauce. Heaven, especially when accompanied by a polystyrene cup of their piping hot tomato soup. Those chains of coffee houses can keep their walnut, avocado and Brie on ciabatta and soggy BLTs, give me the comfort food of Coleman’s any day.

‘Get me a cup of soup, Vera, as well, will you,’ I shout after him as he leaves for Coleman’s wrapped up in enough scarves and gloves for an Arctic expedition.

Dusty, my dresser, comes in with the aforementioned hat and lays it carefully on the bed. She’s worked at the Mayflower for years and is everything a good dresser should be. She’s also a lot of fun and extremely likeable.

‘I’ll be outside if you need me,’ she says quietly in the manner of a dresser in an old Hollywood black and white movie, closing the door behind her.

I drink my tea and ring the journalist. She sounds very
young and slightly nervous. After the initial small talk about Christmas and New Year resolutions we get down to business.

‘So how have you enjoyed being in Southampton then?’ she asks, suddenly adopting a brisk manner.

I was glad to be able to answer truthfully that I’d had a ball, had thoroughly enjoyed being back in the insanity of panto again and would be genuinely sorry to pack up and say goodbye to the cast when the show closed at the end of the week.

‘I remember watching you as Lily on
The Big Breakfast
when I was getting ready for school,’ she chirps down the line, instantly making me feel as old as Methuselah.

‘Yes …’ I reply, my voice tailing off as I make a halfhearted attempt at a laugh.

‘Tell me,’ she asks after a little pause, ‘how did you get started?’

Now if there’s a question I’ve been asked a million times it’s that one, by every interviewer, chat show host, cab driver and bloke in the pub.

I give her the old tried and true reply which gets shorter with every telling, trying to sound enthusiastic as I rattle it off, but to my own ears my voice has automatically taken on the monotonous tone of the robot you hear in talking lifts that tells you when the doors are closing and what floor you’re on.

Obviously not totally satisfied with my answer, she tries another angle.

‘But how did you make the transition from social services to pub drag act to where you are now?’

I look around and apart from wigs and costumes I see a vase of dead flowers that has sat on the shelf since we opened,
a bunch of bananas still enclosed in their plastic bag but now mottled with age and slowly decomposing, bits of broken jewellery, make-up, hair clips, elastic bands, old Christmas cards and next to a bottle of Sanderson’s Specific a slightly battered tin of Fray Bentos corned beef sent to me by Malcolm Prince, my Radio 2 producer, as part of an emergency food hamper in case I forget to eat. The detritus of a dressing room, or mine anyway. The Land of Corned Beef and Panstick.