by Jon Pertwee
We were one family now, the family of Madame Penison and her lover. He would preside at the head of an enormous table, with all his ‘children’ around him. That room and board cost me the princely sum of thirty shillings a week(£1.50). From the residue of my three pounds ten shillings I ran a superb Ariel Square-Four motorcycle, paid for on HP at a few shillings a week, and worth a fortune now. I smoked a paper packet of five Woodbines a day, which cost me tuppence, and drank a quantity of rough cider at threepence a glass. As a healthy heterosexual I had many ‘lady friends’ and found that I still had enough left over to escort them out, buy them cups of tea and ice cream, take them dancing at Sherry’s Dance Hall and generally lead the life of Riley.
We had an interesting routine at this theatre, a little policy called Twice Nightly, Twice Weekly, with matinees. You performed two plays a week. You rehearsed Monday morning and afternoon, and then in the evening you did a six o’clock show and an 8:30 show of the play you had rehearsed the latter half of the previous week. On Tuesday you rehearsed in the morning and afternoon and then in the evening performed the usual two shows. On Wednesday you rehearsed in the morning only, not in the afternoon, because in the afternoon you had a 2:30 matinee, and then of course the two evening shows as per, so you performed three shows on that day. On Thursday morning you started rehearsing the play for the following Monday, but in the afternoon did the dress rehearsal of the show you were putting on twice that night.
You can imagine the strain of doing that for a whole summer season, but somehow we managed it. I and some other members of the company used to learn lines by self-hypnotism. We used to take a sheet of cardboard, paint it black and put a pin hole through it. We would then prop it up with a lit candle behind it, put out the room lights and concentrate on the small dot of light, visualising a page of the play at the same time. As the dot got bigger, that would mean that your conscious mind was closing and your sub-conscious mind was opening. It was at that precise point that you could take a form of mental photograph of the page, which seemed on waking, to be imprinted upon the mind. This was fine, as long as somebody gave you the right cue, but if you got a ‘duff’ one, your brain would search in vain for the right picture. In this event there was, of course, bugger all you could do. There would be instant panic and confusion. The prompter et al would ‘scream’ – whisper – the lines at you, and everyone on stage would flap around like legless chickens until it was finally all rustled back together.
This at least was better than working from the infamous ‘cue scripts’ where you were presented with nothing but an inexplicable cue line on the small printed page and then your own line:
Sir John: ‘. . .my daughter.’
Gregory: ‘That, Sir, is an unmitigated inexactitude.’
Sir john: ‘. . . fried on Thursday.’
Gregory: ‘That is as maybe Sir John, but only once, I can assure you!’
And from that you had to understand what your part was all about. These cue scripts contained no description of the play, or your character, and it was only when you actually put it together in rehearsal that you discovered what the hell it was all about. We used cue scripts at Henley Rep, I remember. The only reason they kept that theatre going was that they had a bar-licence. The vulgar fellow that headed the Company made a lot of money from that bar. He didn’t, as he so often told us, give a damn what was going on on the stage, as long as the bar and his customers were filled to saturation point.
I remember once at Brighton I had had a rather alcoholic luncheon with Michael. I said, ‘I must get back, I’ve got two shows to do.’ I was playing the gardener in Love from a Stranger, and, so typical of a young actor in Rep, was woefully overdressed in battered panama hat, striped wool shirt minus collar but with front stud, green-baize apron, cord trousers with string tied under the knees, muddy boots and of course the chin beard and deep lake lines of an ‘Old Adam’ the gardener make-up. As I was waiting to go on stage Rex Lesley-Smith approached me and said, ‘Most interesting, but who exactly are you supposed to be?’
‘“Old Willows”, the gardener in Love from a Stranger,’ I said, jokingly.
‘Are you really?’ he replied. ‘Well, today we are playing Candida, you are playing Morell, and you’re off !!’ (meaning I had missed my entrance).
I instantly fell apart at the seams and croaked ‘Oh my God, no!’ From experience, we always had a young Assistant Stage Manager standing by, dressed as a maid, who, in a moment of crisis, could rush on to the stage with a tray and say, ‘Good afternoon, mum. Would you like some tea? Take sugar, sir? Would you like a biscuit, madam?’ and so she would ‘prattle-and-pad-lib’ on, while back-stage the panics and disasters of the occasion were being set to rights. Meanwhile in the wings, I hastily and painfully pulled the beard from my face, rubbed the gardener make-up into an unrecognisable blur, put my head round the door-jamb and, in my best clergyman’s voice said, ‘I really am most terribly sorry to have kept you waiting but I’ve been somewhat involved with a boll weevil in the antirrhinums. Have some tea, won’t you? I won’t keep you but a moment.’
With that I rushed off back to my dressing room, whipped on the clergyman’s collar and the rest of his clerical outfit, re-applied my make-up and hastened back on stage before the exasperated Stage Manager had to make yet another pot of tea.
*
As the theatre was situated right at the end of the West Pier, in between rehearsals I would sit outside the stage door in the sun, relaxing and trying to get a tan. It was a quiet private little spot and few others found it. But one day, my favourite corner out of the wind was occupied by what my dear housekeeper Mrs Holman is wont to call ‘a darkish person’. He was elderly, small, aquiline nosed, with a fine trimmed beard and a halo of frizzy black hair, and he was sitting in a deck chair staring dolefully out to sea with beautiful jet black eyes. Over his knees was tucked a travelling rug, and on his head a hard wide-brimmed hat, the like of which I had never seen before.
‘Good morning, sir, lovely day,’ I said, and then without thinking made one of those dreadful gaffes that we all make from time to time.
‘Trying to build up a tan?’
He hardly reacted at all except to turn his head slowly in my direction and fix me with frightening black eyes. I was frozen by his gaze as a rabbit is by a stoat, and was quite incapable of movement or speech. He finally released me by saying softly, ‘I think that would be like, as you say “carrying coals to Newcastle”, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir, I suppose it would,’ I replied, and much relieved that he had not been too affronted I sat and talked to this strange little man for half an hour or so before excusing myself and going to work.
‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes I expect I’ll be here,’ he said, adding wistfully, ‘I’ve nowhere else to go.’
And so I struck up quite a friendship with this black man of mystery, for that is what he was, never talking about his past, future, friends or family. We talked trivialities only, whilst drinking endless cups of tea brought to us by someone I assumed to be his companion, a black gentleman who obviously came from the same country, and spoke to him in a strange tongue. This man was permanently at hand in a nearby shelter, reading books in an extraordinary print which I completely failed to recognise.
One day the old man failed to appear and after some weeks absence I could only conclude that he had either died or found somewhere else to sun himself. That is until, over my breakfast table months later, I opened my paper, and there staring up at me resplendent in a high ranking Army Officer’s uniform, covered in orders and medals, was a picture of my old friend. The caption read ‘HM The Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, “The Lion of Judah”, inspects the Brigade of Guards before lunching with his Majesty King George VI.’
What the Emperor had been doing on the end of Brighton Pier, unguarded except by the servant companion, I shall never understand. Perhaps after his tragic exile from Ethiopia no-one cared what ha
ppened to him and he just wanted to be left alone with his thoughts. It is hard to believe that in all the time I spent talking to him, he never dropped the slightest hint of who he was, or where he had come from – although bearing in mind that I talked the hind legs off an elephant, perhaps he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Plainly he was not old at all, nor in any way infirm, for he lived on, to return to his land once the Italians had been ejected and ruled his ancient Christian country for many years until the last revolution once more pushed him from his throne, leaving him to die in exile a lonely, broken-hearted man. To have lived in exile once is bad enough but to experience it twice must have been appalling.
*
One of my additional duties in Rex’s Rep Company was prop-finding, and for a plug in the programme most local shopkeepers were more than willing to help. We badly needed a fur coat and I went to the only decent furrier in Brighton, ‘A. Dudkin, Quality Furs’, to see if he would lend us one. His reply was a succinct ‘No’!
‘But everybody else lends us things.’
‘Then go to everybody else.’
‘We’ll put your name in the programme.’
‘I don’t want my name in your programme, I don’t like your theatre, and I don’t like you.’
‘Mr Dudkin,’ I said, ‘don’t beat about the bush . . .’
But he would have none of it, and Peggy Lesley-Smith was forced to settle for a woolly cardigan.
Revenge was sweet, however. In the early hours of the morning, armed with an extending ladder, we crept up to his shop and added a beautifully matching letter ‘S’ made by Rex’s sister ‘Frecks’, to the furrier’s shop sign, which, by the time we had left, read ‘A. Dudskin, Quality Furs’.
*
One day I noticed an exciting advertisement in the Evening Standard. It read, ‘For sale, fast hydroplane, airscrew propulsion, powered by 500cc twin Douglas motorcycle engine from a Bluey Wilkinson Speedway Machine. Snip at £5. Will deliver. Reply Johnson, 3 The Vale, Norwich.’
My five pound postal order was off by the next post and I anxiously awaited delivery. Within a week it was sitting on its trailer outside Ma Penison’s, awaiting its first introduction to the sea. Mr Johnson had assured me that the little beauty was in excellent working order, handled like a dream and that although he had only driven it on the river, he was quite confident that it would be equally manoeuvrable at sea. The very next Sunday, aided by a friend, I trundled the trailer down to the water’s edge, prior to launching. Here I filled its tank with petrol and gave it a thorough inspection. It was a small flat hull, built of half inch marine ply, with a tiny cockpit, in which the driver would kneel over his steering wheel. This wheel controlled the five foot high canvas fin at the rear of the hydroplane, which in turn controlled the boat’s direction. just forward of this fin was a strong frame on which was mounted the Douglas twin with its two open exhausts, that drove the dangerously unguarded aeroplane propeller. The only controls, other than the steering wheel, were an exhaust lift, an accelerator and a mixture-control lever. The machine was started by a removable starting handle which engaged directly with the shiny flywheel, so distinctive of all Douglas engines. Duly inspected, the boat was launched through the surf and I jumped aboard. After a quick tickle of the carburettor and a touch of choke, I swung the starting handle. The compression was so great that when she momentarily tired, the starting handle kicked back and nearly took my thumb off. The strangled cries to the heavens that followed this momentary setback would not have been appreciated by the Bishop of Brighton. The second attempt, with the use of the exhaust lift, proved more successful, and the engine burst into life with a crackling roar. Throwing the handle into the well deck, I slid myself down behind the steering wheel and slowly eased the machine out to sea. After a few slow, testing turns I opened the throttle and with a prayer on my lips, felt the little boat rise up on its step and start on its bouncing, leaping way. At about 30mph I roared up the shore-line filled with elation. ‘This is the life,’ I thought. ‘Who is this Sir Malcolm Campbell anyway? After five minutes or so I began to get the feel of the thing and decided to thrill the holiday-makers crowding the West Pier with a demonstration of skill and daring, by shooting underneath them at speed without hitting the piles.
The first pass was a bit tentative, but on the second and third I shot through at full bore, doing at least 35mph, which on water seemed like ninety. At each pass, crowds would rush from one side of the pier to the other, shouting and waving as I whizzed beneath them. Amongst my many fans that day were ‘Younkman’ and his entire gypsy orchestra enthusiastically waving their violins. After some twenty minutes of beating up the West Pier, I bade farewell to my gesticulating audience and roared off to entertain everybody on the Palace Pier. Half an hour later, well pleased with my first sortie, I headed back to the ramp where I had left my trailer, to find two officers of the law patiently waiting for me. Lying off some twenty feet from the shore I courteously enquired if there was something I could do to help them. Yes, there was, they would be very grateful if I would kindly step ashore, where they could more easily arrest me, on (at a rough estimate) some ten charges. Amongst others, there was committing a Public nuisance, disturbing the peace, and causing ‘Younkman’ and his orchestra to pack up and go home as no-one could hear a note they were playing. So ‘Younkman’ and his boys had not been cheering and waving at me after all! They and everyone else on the piers and promenades were being driven mad by the cacophonous racket of my open exhausts and had been frantically signalling that I should go away and leave them in peace. I was bitterly disappointed at this turn of events, and having no desire for a holiday in one of his Britannic Majesty’s renowned establishments, I spurned the officers’ kind invitation to step ashore and made for the nearby haven of Shoreham Harbour instead. There I tied the offending little beast to a friend’s motor launch and made my way sheepishly back to my digs. ‘Well hello!’ said Alan Bromley, the Rep’s leading man, ‘Had a good day in your speed boat?’
‘How did you know I’ve been in my boat?’ I enquired.
‘How did I know? Good God, everyone in Brighton knows, I was listening to the bloody thing for two hours!’
As Ma Penison’s pension was well over a mile from the seashore, I dreaded to think what the inhabitants directly along the front must have suffered.
The next time out, I took more care and headed away from Brighton towards Worthing. The sea was rougher that day and I found that the craft was much less manoeuvrable. Unlike a boat with a propeller in the water, this craft had nothing but the rear fin to hold it on a straight course. Once at speed the undulation of the waves bounced the hydroplane about alarmingly and irrespective of its course and pitch the airscrew pushed it on unremittingly. It should’ve been obvious to anyone that disaster was about to strike, but I pig-headedly pressed on regardless, leaping, yawing, and pitching my frenetic way along the coastline. Suddenly, hitting a wave, the boat soared into the air, as if it was an aircraft taking off. The wind got under it, the airscrew kept pushing and I rose inexorably up and on until on reaching stalling speed the nose dipped and still going full chat, I headed down towards the surface of the sea at an angle of 45 degrees. Paralysed, I made no attempt to ease off the throttle, with the net result that the boat and I plunged into the sea at 30mph disappearing beneath the surface, like a cormorant after a kipper. A foot or so down the boat flattened out and my head rose above the surface to cleave through the water like the periscope of a submarine. From the shore it must’ve been a most laughable sight. It was not to last long, however, for after a few moments, to the undoubted relief of thousands, my ill-fated machine sank slowly to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen by human eyes again.
The long swim home gave me cause to think, and in retrospect it is my considered opinion that the watery death of the noisy little bugger was all that it deserved.
*
‘Gentleman’ Cliff Warner, my wrestling friend, came to visit me from time to time, and one nig
ht after the show we were involved in a unique situation. It was late as we left, for we had been sitting in my dressing room chatting, and making light work of some excellent claret that Cliff had brought down for our mutual consumption.
On walking the final stretch of the pier we heard from beneath our feet, faint cries of alarm and panic. Getting to our knees we peered through the slats to observe the shadowy figures of a young couple lying on the beach some thirty feet below.
‘What’s up, can we help you?’ called Cliff
‘Yes, for Christ’s sake help us! We’re stuck!’ came the agonised reply.
‘Hang on,’ I cried. ‘We’re coming.’
Bearing in mind the circumstances, I could’ve put it better.
Running at once to the spot we found the two lovers lying locked in the act of coitus in an agony of pain and embarrassment. As dogs when mating are inclined to lock together so did this unfortunate couple. The more he tried to withdraw, the more was the pain for his poor inamorata.
‘What about a bucket of water?’ I whispered to Cliff
‘Don’t be bloody silly! That’s only for dogs and that doesn’t often work. We’ll have to get them to the hospital,’ he replied.
