The Fun Factory (6 page)

“But you’re not planning to go back and forth to Cambridge every day, are you? In town, I mean, where are you living in town, in London?”

“Actually I haven’t anywhere to go,” I admitted.

Reeves turned to the smoking youth, who was still inexplicably seething at me as though I’d pinched his lunch or something. “Freddie? You’re heading down to Streatham, aren’t you? Take Arthur here to Clara Bell’s. Tell her he’ll be paid at the end of the week. Now run along, there’s good lads. I’ve a thousand other things to be doing.”

The youth Freddie closed his eyes and sighed, as though he’d rather tackle anything else but the onerous chore of taking care of me, then he grabbed a jacket and hat and stalked out.

I caught up with him out on the street. He was striding along unnecessarily quickly, I thought. I really couldn’t imagine what I had done to offend him, and fell anxiously into step alongside him.

“So,” I ventured after a minute or two of sulky perambulation. “I really did meet Fred Karno in Cambridge, then?”

“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?” this Freddie said, a grim set to his jaw.

“Well, why did you say you were Fred Karno, then?”

“I’m Fred Karno junior, that’s it, see?” he suddenly burst out. “You met The Guv’nor, my father, the
famous
Fred Karno. You follow?”

I nodded. I followed. We strode on towards Brixton Hill.

“I work with Mr Reeves on the
administration
side,” Freddie junior eventually offered, managing to make administration sound like cleaning out sewers. With a toothbrush. “So usually when a stranger walks in off the street and asks to see Fred Karno, it’s me he’s looking for, do you see? Muggins. The dogsbody.”

Suddenly Freddie spotted the tram for Streatham going past us and darted after it at a gallop. I followed suit, and managed to leap on board just as it was setting off again. I found Freddie inside and collapsed into the seat opposite him, and couldn’t help noticing that he looked somewhat disappointed that I’d made it.

Clara Bell’s house was actually very conveniently situated for someone working in the theatrical business, particularly for Mr Fred Karno senior’s company. The late-night trams ran down from the West End through Brixton onto Streatham High Road until all hours, so that performers could be sure of making it home whenever their various engagements finished. This meant that this whole part of the world – Brixton, Streatham, Balham – had a significant thespian population.

Freddie didn’t say a word more to me, but I had plenty to look at as we went along. The outskirts of London seemed to sprawl for ever, an endless repeating sequence of shop fronts, gardens, churches and green open spaces.

The tram stopped alongside a wide green common, and I was watching some carriage drivers leading their horses to a row of stone troughs to drink when I suddenly spotted Freddie striding away over the grass. He’d slipped off, the swine, without saying anything. Well, I grabbed my bag and scurried after him.

I could have done without having to rush, as it seemed to stir up the beer I’d had with the railwaymen, which was sloshing around inside me. Halfway across the common, with Freddie hightailing it into the distant yonder, the whole place began to spin like a crazy whirligig, buildings and trees flying past my ale-addled eyes, and I had to sit in a heap on the grass until it all calmed down.

By the time I was able to stand again Freddie had made it over to a three-storey town house and was ringing the bell. I caught up with him before the door was opened, and I leaned heavily against the porch for a moment. As I did so I glanced over at the house next door. Like the Bells’, it was three storeys high, with steps leading down to a basement entrance as well as up to
the front door, and suddenly I was half sure I saw a pale face, a woman’s face, watching me from the window on the first floor. Then the door opened and there stood Clara Bell, a cheerful little woman with her sleeves rolled up, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Hallo, Freddie!” she cried, inexplicably pleased to see the lad. “What’s this? Surprise visit?”

“Delivery,” Freddie muttered, wafting his hand at me.

“Are you not coming in for a cup of tea?”

Freddie just shook his head, turned on his heel and left, the charmer. Clara Bell seemed remarkably forgiving of this behaviour.

“Well,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Alf sent you, I suppose, did he? You’d better come in. I’m Clara. You’ve just missed Charley, I’m afraid, he’s doing three a day. I suppose you can have Ronny’s room, he won’t be needing it any more. You can give me a hand putting his stuff into his trunk.”

As she chattered away Clara led me in, along the hallway and downstairs into the scullery, where she bustled around getting out cups and saucers and a teapot.

“We’ll have some tea first, shall we…?”

“Arthur. Arthur Dandoe.”

“Pleased to meet you, Arthur. And this…” she exclaimed, as a tiny whirlwind sped in from the garden and thumped into her midriff, “…is Edie. Say good afternoon to Arthur, Edie.”

The little dynamo turned out to be a four-year-old girl, clutching a doll in her little arms. She turned shy at the sight of me and wouldn’t show her face, nor would she let her mother go about her business either, so we all stood together there as I told Clara how I came to be there.

“Aha,” she said. “I expect young Freddie was thrilled to bits to see you, wasn’t he?”

“He hid it quite well if he was,” I said.

“Well,” she said cheerfully. “You’ve landed on your feet, I’m sure. There’s hundreds of young lads up the Corner
4
who’d give their right arm to join Karno’s. Not that he’s much on the lookout for boys with one arm, as far as I know. Well, now since you’ve come from Alf, I’ll trust you for your rent until you get paid on Saturday night,” she went on. “But just bear in mind that Charley, my husband, works for Karno’s and is one of Alf Reeves’s oldest friends, so if you come up short we’ll just get our money directly from your wages the next week, before you even see them. Understood?”

After a cup of tea and a slice of rather heavy fruit cake I was shown up to a room on the top floor. There was a single bed, bowed in the middle, together with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers which were stuffed – sort of half full, actually, as though he’d gone away on a trip – with some fellow’s belongings.

“This was poor Ronny’s room,” Clara said rather wistfully. “Such a shame…”

She tugged a trunk out from under the bed and began to fold poor Ronny’s shirts, trousers and socks and pile them inside. I was wondering what poor Ronny might say if he were to come back and find me in his bed, with all his belongings packed away.

“So he’s definitely not coming back, then?” I said, passing her a pair of rather battered slippers.

Clara shook her head sadly. “Oh no, I should say not.”

Which was all I was going to get on that subject. “I thought I caught a glimpse of your neighbour when I arrived earlier,” I said. “A pale lady, watching me from the first-floor window…”

Clara sucked a loud breath between her teeth and began shaking her head again.

“Poor woman,” she said. “Poor, poor woman.”

And with that she left me alone in the room, to the rather gothic accompaniment of a loud thunderclap from outside that shook the glass in the window frames.

I looked at my new home, which then began to spin slowly. That slice of cake wasn’t sitting very well on all the beer, or else the nervous tension of my unpromising welcome at the Fun Factory was making itself felt. I sat heavily on the bed, and noticed for the first time a brand spanking new gas fire in the fireplace, which was nice. Sitting on the floor in front of it was a bowl of water, as was the custom, to keep the room from getting too dry.

I threw up in it.

6

A NIGHT IN AN ENGLISH MUSIC HALL

I
woke with a pounding head and the dim recollection that I was to start work that day and that I was to be a “super”, whatever that was. A
super
, eh? Not too shabby!

Clara furnished me with some breakfast, not that I could manage much, and I was formally introduced to young Edie’s dolly, whose name, rather splendidly, was Miss Churchhouse. Then the three of them, Clara, Edie and Miss Churchhouse, kindly walked me to the tram stop.

When the tramcar arrived Clara called to the driver to be sure and set me off at Coldharbour Lane, which he duly did, and I found my way back to the Fun Factory easily enough. It seemed deserted, especially in comparison to the hubbub of the day before.

Alf Reeves blinked at me for a moment when I presented myself again at his office, but then he recalled our meeting the previous day and snapped his fingers.

“Dandoe, Arthur Dandoe, of course. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

He led me out into the cavernous workshop and over to the enormous construction taking on the shape of an ocean liner that I’d seen the day before. One or two lads were rolling their sleeves up and just getting to work on it, and a considerable amount of banging was coming from somewhere behind it.

“You see this, lad?” Reeves said, waving a proprietorial arm to take in the whole gigantic contraption. “What does it look like to you?”

“Well, like a part of a great ship, Mr Reeves,” I replied.

“Precisely so. You have heard, perhaps, of the
Lusitania
? Of the
Mauretania
?”

I had, naturally. They were the two enormous and luxurious ocean liners of the Cunard line that had been launched with a great fanfare not long before.

“Well, this,” Reeves announced grandly, “is the
Wontdetainia
, ha ha, and God bless all who sail in her.” He banged it with his fist and this made a clanging sound. “It is the set for our newest production, which begins next week, and it’s not a wood and canvas and plasterboard fake. It’s sheet metal, see, just like the real thing, and real rivets, put together special by some laddies from the docks. The end panels are hinged – here…” – he strode along to a point towards the front of the ship, pointing – “…and as the whole thing moves slowly across the stage the bow will fold into the wings out of sight, while the stern unfolds correspondingly on the other side, to give the illusion that we have fitted something even larger than the theatre itself onto the stage.”

I nodded, impressed, and Reeves led me round the back to see the platforms where the actors portraying the passengers would stand, and some fearsome-looking mechanisms concealed there.

“And then behind, look, we have these three hydraulic rams, which will simulate the rocking motion of the sea, backwards and forwards and side to side – port to starboard, I must remember to say, apparently – to make the effect completely convincing. It is all mightily exciting, you agree? It is also the most expensive stage machine that we, or anyone else, have ever constructed, costing upwards of two
thousand
pounds…”

I whistled, staggered by the sum. Reeves grimaced.

“So it had better damn well work, or we shall be ruined. Well, not ruined, exactly, but belts will be tightened, let’s just say that.”

We walked back round to the front and he put his arm around my shoulders.

“When this show opens next week, my boy, you will be a super.”

“I’ll try my best, Mr Reeves,” I said in what I hoped was a businesslike fashion, and waited for him to tell me what a super actually did.

“In the meantime we have only a week before we shift this lot up to the Paragon and it all needs to be painted. So hang your jacket up, there’s a good lad, grab a brush and a ladder and off ye go!”

And with that he strode off to take care of a million other things, all of them more important than me, it seemed.

Great gallon buckets of whitewash waited over by the wall of the scene dock, and there was nothing for it but to pitch in, so I put a ladder up against the flank of the mighty
Wontdetainia
, clambered up and began to slap the paint onto the metal.

To either side of me were young men engaged in the same work, holding their paintbrushes at arm’s length, both of them, as if to keep themselves as far as possible from the point at which
actual manual labour was occurring. Neither deigned to speak to me for a good while, but eventually their curiosity got the better of them.

“What are you, then?” asked the one to my right. “Are you a super?”

“I think so,” I said, but to be honest I still wasn’t sure what a super was.

“What show are you in?”

“Show? I’m not in a show.”

“Well, you’re not a super, then, are you?”

“He’s an ordinary,” the chap on the other side cracked, and they both sniggered.

“You two are supers, then, I take it?” I asked.

“We are,” they replied simultaneously, then waggled their little fingers at one another to avert bad luck.

“Well, what is a super?”

“What
is
a super?” the one on my left repeated, incredulously.

“Yes, if you don’t mind my asking. It’s my first day.”

“A super,” the other answered with a patronising simper. “A super is an
artiste
, my dear. The principals perform their routines. We provide the spectacle.”

“Who is going to want to come and see
this
?” his friend asked, a little indignantly, banging the
Wontdetainia
with a camp little clang. “A great hulk of metal, that’s all it is, but imagine when a hundred people are hanging off it, waving their kerchiefs and throwing down streamers, shouting farewell to their loved ones. We will make it …
magnificent
!”

It dawned on me then that ‘supers’ was a fancy way of saying that they were not especially important. Supernumerary, in fact. Human scenery. Inhabitants of the very bottom rung of the
show-business ladder (not counting the outright unemployed, of course, who don’t have a rung and have to sit on the floor). And I, poor insignificant Arthur Dandoe, wasn’t even important enough to be able to call myself one of them.

Well, that’s just … super, I thought to myself.

Towards the end of the afternoon, as I broke off from painting to flex my aching fingers a moment, I became aware of a growing hubbub behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the scene dock, which had been echoing and empty all day, was filling up once again with exuberant characters, gentlemen and ladies, all chattering away, greeting one another loudly, exactly as they had the day before. One or two looked up approvingly at the progress of the
Wontdetainia
, and hullooed a greeting at a friend they had spotted on the ladders above.

Then I saw that all the men who had been working the whole day on the ship were sliding urgently down and grabbing their overcoats, before joining the swelling throng below to spill out onto the street and head for the buses and broughams.

Silence followed, an eerie, echoing silence, and I was alone.

This turned out to be the routine. The Fun Factory would be a hive of activity all day and then, come teatime, the place would fill up with assorted performers and supers who would bustle around, chattering and gossiping, until the time came to be carried off to theatreland, leaving me on my own without so much as a “Cheer-o!” or a “See you tomorrow!” I would then make my solitary way back to the Bells’ house in Streatham, where Clara and Edie would share their supper with me, and then I would either end up playing with Edie and Miss Churchhouse, or, if I was quick enough (please, God), escaping upstairs to read one of my penny bloods in peace.

By the end of the week I was heartily fed up with this show business, to be honest, and ready to slink back to Cambridge. My hands were cramped into claws from painting, and the whitewash was so dazzling in the summer sunshine that even after I’d left the cursed
Wontdetainia
behind for the day I could still see it as an after-image burned into my retinas, little dark portholes floating about in my eye water.

It wasn’t just the tedious work, though. After all, if I’d remained at the college for the summer I’d have been whitewashing the walls of staircases O to T. It was that the fun folk at the so-called Fun Factory had made me feel about as welcome as Jack the Ripper. Even Lance was better company, and he could go days without speaking to me at all.

In due course I met my landlord, Clara’s husband, Charley Bell, and you couldn’t exactly call him a cheerful advocate for a life on the boards either. He was working three shows a night, playing in a Karno sketch called
London Suburbia,
in Balham, then Chiswick and then Highgate, and so was usually still in bed when I left in the mornings, and gone out by the time I got back to the house.

One morning, though, he appeared, bleary-eyed, in the doorway of the scullery as Clara, Edie and I were having breakfast, and we were introduced. Perhaps it wasn’t the best time to catch him, but he seemed a man of few words. When asked about the previous evening’s performances he ventured that Balham was “thin”, Chiswick “as good as could be expected” and Highgate “rowdy”.

Charley had been with Karno for years, and had played the original “Naughty Boy” in the sketch
Mumming Birds
– about which much
much
more later – so I was eager to ask him about
the company. Most of all, though, I wanted to hear something, anything, that would make me feel it was worth hanging around for. He shrugged and poured himself a cup of tea.

“It’s a job, I suppose,” he said. “No better nor no worse than plenty of others.”

I sipped at my own tea, contemplating the miserable prospect of painting another half acre of metal panelwork, and decided that this particular job was not all it was cracked up to be.

By the end of that gruelling afternoon, muscles aching, pores clogged and ears untroubled by even a half-friendly conversation, I’d pretty much made my mind up to pack it all in. I’d stay long enough to get paid for what I’d done, but that was that. To Hell with the blasted Fun Factory! It was all Factory and no Fun, it seemed to me. Mr Luscombe would be disappointed, but, well, he’d just have to learn to live with it.

Once the mob had left and the hubbub had subsided, I was clambering down from the side of the accursed
Wontdetainia
, ready to wend my weary way back to Streatham, when Alf Reeves came bustling out of his office, wrestling his arms into his jacket as he hurried along. For a moment he looked surprised to see me, but then seemed to place me in his mental scheme of things.

“What are you…?” he began, and then: “Oh yes, I recall. You have no show to do yet, do you?”

“No, Mr Reeves,” I said. I suppose I must have looked pretty fed up. He cocked his head to one side, thinking.

“Tell you what. Would you like to see some turns this evening?”

I reviewed my plans for the evening, which revolved mostly around trying to escape from playing with a small child and her dolly, and said that I wouldn’t mind.

“Wash up, then, quick as you can. I’ve to go up the Mile End Road. Bit of business to take care of. Come and see what we’re up against, eh?”

Outside Alf was waiting for me by his motor car. I’d seen motor cars close up before, of course, even though they were still something of a rarity on the streets. Several of the more affluent and fashionable young gentlemen at college had purchased them, and very proud they were of them too.

It was a gleaming new Ford, which, as the saying went at the time, came in any colour “so long as it’s black”. (This one was blue.)

Reeves fiddled about with some switches or knobs inside the machine and then emerged with a starting handle, which he handed to me.

“You do know how to use this, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” I replied. His face fell.

“Curse it all!” Reeves took the handle back from me and shoved it into a socket low down at the front of the vehicle. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this. I really dislike it – it has a kick like a mule if you don’t get it just right. All right, now watch me, and then next time you’ll know what to do, won’t you?”