The Whicharts

by Noel Streatfeild

  “How dare you turn our bedroom into a church; how dare you!”

  Maimie screamed, she completely lost control. She seized Tania by the hair, kicked her, and might have knocked her senseless, had not Rose and Nannie rushed in.

  Rose was in a quandary. Tania had been very naughty. A cross was a sacred symbol, it was terribly wrong to throw it on the floor. Wrong in any case to throw Maimie’s things about. Yet if you hated show and fuss, how annoying to find an altar in your bedroom. What a climax of aggravation after having borne with Maimie for weeks, in a state of perpetual prayings.

  That night she took Tania to sleep with her. At first she scolded; Tania looked like a mule. Then she said:

  “Tania, dear, if you can’t or won’t see it was wrong, surely you can see it was silly. If you had come to me I could have reasoned with Maimie, found her somewhere else to put it, made her take it all down. Now you’ve made that impossible. It’s you who should be punished. It was wrong of Maimie to hit you, what you did was far worse.”

  “Oh, Howdy, she’s so aggravating.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Tania; it aggravates me, too. I hate slops, and all this religious fervour strikes me that way. But we aren’t all made alike, perhaps it’s a help to Maimie. You don’t suppose that I’ve always liked going to these services with her, they are not a bit the sort of services I like and understand. But I don’t refuse to take her. Instead, I try and see the funny side of it all. I’m ashamed to say I find a lot in that service she goes to that I think very funny, really the oddest things they do. I don’t, of course, suggest you should laugh at Maimie’s prayers, but I’ve found you can bear almost anything if you can see its funny side.”

  The next morning Tania apologised to Maimie, and helped her to rearrange the altar. This she did with the utmost seriousness, but occasionally the corners of her mouth twitched.

  The following Sunday, Maimie, coming home from church, found Tania in their bedroom with Daisy. Tania had a tambourine, Daisy a drum. They were singing in shrill and exaggeratedly nasal voices, “Nearer my God to Thee.”

  “What the devil?” asked Maimie.

  “Ssh,” whispered Tania, “please don’t interrupt. Me and Daisy have joined the Salvation Army. You’ll often hear us having a private service together, I expect. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Maimie bore with the hymn singing, and the tambourine and drum, for three days. Then she removed her altar.

  Rose, who learnt from Nannie what had happened, wondered if she ought to interfere. But instead, she squared it with her conscience by giving Maimie an exceptionally nice white frock for her confirmation.

  Maimie’s religious phase held all through that year, and right through the run of another pantomime, until it would have surprised none of her family if she had become a nun. For during all those months she regularly and rapturously attended her church, made her confessions to Father Sutch, and embarrassed and upset the house by fasting on every conceivable occasion. The fast days were the cause of endless strife. She never knew it was going to be a fast until the very day itself; when she would learn about it from Miss Marmaduke, who, pale and difficult, after an early and fasting rise for Mass, followed by a frugal and hurried breakfast, vented her exhaustion on her class. Maimie, on reaching home, would say with a resigned air:

  “Did I remember to tell you I wouldn’t be taking any meat to-day?”

  Nannie, who was a firm believer in a good solid meat middle-day dinner, was exasperated. And Cook, hurriedly preparing eggs, would mutter: “Religion is as religion does. Givin’ extra work ain’t my idea of religion.”

  But early in the new year all this changed. Her faithful keeping of fasts abated; she no longer insisted on such rigorous church-going; she allowed Tania’s preparation for confirmation by a handy, though Low Church parson round the corner, to pass without a murmur. She seemed her normal self; the whole household sighed with relief, and wondered why. The truth being she’d fallen in love.

  It happened at the end of the run of the pantomime. Dancing off the stage one night, with the rest of the troupe, she caught her foot, and slightly sprained her ankle. It wasn’t bad, but she made the most of it. There came to her aid, to carry her upstairs, the young man who played The Count. The Count not being an important role in a pantomime, Maimie had hardly noticed the young man before. But now his kindness, together with his large brown eyes, won her heart. His name was Eric Ericson. “What a beautiful name,” thought Maimie, “and how suitable for so handsome an actor.” Unaware that outside the theatre he was known as Sam Rosenblaum, and that he was a hard-working young man, doing a nice trade in cheap dresses and silk stockings, and that pantomime jobs were only a side line, found for him by his uncle, Moses Shultz, who was an agent dealing with such things. Maimie, not knowing all this, thought him not only a very handsome young man, but a great actor. Secretly, she boiled with indignation at the way “The Dame” and her comic son got all the laughs even when Eric was on the stage. The audience even went on laughing when Eric was speaking, such a shame! When a person had so few lines, they ought at least to be heard.

  Eric was completely unaware of Maimie’s admiration for him. To him she was just a nice little kid. “Damn pretty, too!” He considered her a baby, and would have been quite shocked if he had known that by two or three kind words, and a look from his large brown, eyes, he had made her grow up. She ceased to be a petted child, and aped the manners of the grown-up chorus girls. She found chances to stand about in the wings, away from the other children and the matron, in the hope that he would come, and speak to her. Sometimes he did. He would say:

  “How are we to-night, Kiddy? Foot all right?” or, “Enjoying yourself, Kiddy?”

  Desperately she would try and think of answers to these questions, bright interesting answers, that would hold him a minute. One night, greatly daring, she blurted out:

  “Do you live far from here?”

  “Down Russell Square way,” he answered casually, and walked on to the stage.

  The next morning at school Maimie, studying a map of London, learnt that the British Museum wasn’t far from Russell Square. The pantomime was nearing its end, there were only three matinées a week now, that meant three free afternoons, for her dancing classes were suspended during the weeks she worked at night. So at dinner she said: “This afternoon I should like to go to the British Museum.”

  Rose looked at her, horrified. Was high art to follow high religion? Were she and a weary Nannie to trail after Maimie to every museum and picture gallery in London?

  Nannie merely asked comfortably: “And for why, dear?”

  “Well,” Maimie explained, “it’s the sort of place everyone ought to go to.”

  “An’ so you shall some day,” Nannie agreed, “but to-day there’s me takin’ Tania an’ Daisy to the dancin’, an’ Miss ’oward ’as a ’eadache. But I tell you what, you’re gettin’ a big girl now, you can go by yourself to the Victoria an’ Halbert.”

  Maimie set out, in her hand she clasped a shilling. Steadily she walked up the Cromwell Road, until she reached the turn for Gloucester Road Station. There she boldly took a ticket for Russell Square. She spent from half past two till four o’clock wandering round Russell Square, andSo the little roads behind it. Three times she passed the shop where her Eric was serving customers with cheap silk stockings. But she never looked in. At last, very bad-tempered, she went home to tea.

  Before the pantomime finished, she screwed up her courage and asked Eric for a photograph. He promised he would bring one, but he kept forgetting. She was in a perfect fever of anxiety. Then on the last night he remembered:

  “There’s a present for a good little girl.”

  And he gave her not just a postcard, but a large shiny photograph, and on the corner he had written, “To little Maimie from Eric”; and underneath in smaller writing, “Count your blessings,” one of h
is few lines from the pantomime.

  Maimie persuaded Nannie to take her to Woolworths’, and there she found a handsome imitation silver frame. She put Eric in it, stood him in the middle of the mantelpiece, and hung about self­ consciously for Tania’s exclamation of envy and admiration. Tania exclaimed all right, but all she said was:

  “My God! what an Ike.”

  Chapter 8

  THE following Christmas, 1925, was Tania’s first pantomime. She was one of a troupe of twelve speciality children dancers. She was not in the same pantomime as Maimie, and had no friends in the troupe. They were playing “Red Riding Hood” twice daily, in a theatre in South London. The whole thing was a misery to her. Ever since her twelfth birthday last June, she had known it must happen; she kept saying to herself, “Next Christmas I’ll be for it.” Yet when the pantomime auditions started she still hoped. Perhaps she’d be too plain. She got a stye on her eye; she was delighted; surely no manager would engage a child who had styes on its eyes. But when the manager of “Red Riding Hood,” who was incidentally the manager of dozens of other pantomimes, engaged her troupe, he never looked at Tania. He just stood in the stalls, with a large cigar in the corner of his mouth, and a handsome Astrakhan collar on his coat, and while they danced gave an occasional groan. Sometimes he looked at their legs, more often he stared at the ceiling; Tania wondered which caused the groans. She was very hopeful that they wouldn’t be engaged, he obviously wasn’t enjoying himself. But when they had finished he said sadly to Madame:

  “I suppose they’ll do. Look a bit better when they’re dressed up.”

  The whole business of playing in pantomime she found a bore. She hated the depressing and smelly neighbourhood where they played. She hated travelling on the Underground with such an obvious troupe of child performers, with their skinny bare knees, and gum boots, and small attaché cases. She hated the interval between the matinée and the evening performances, when they had tea, and rested in their dressing-room smelling of grease-paint and hot clothes. She would bring down a book, and, following the adventures of speed-kings, would try to forget her surroundings. The Matron was very kind to her, found her a quiet corner in which to read, and scolded the other children if they bothered her. She would often talk to the child on their journeys to and fro, and took a real interest in her. It was a help, but it couldn’t stop Tania loathing the pantomime.

  She never complained about it to Rose, for Violet had told her they needed the money. But to Maimie at bed-time she unburdened her heart:

  “I know you like it, Maimie, so it’s all right for you. But I hate it, hate it, hate it! Oh! how I wish I was old enough to say I wasn’t well, and get a day off sometimes.”

  In March the pantomime came to an end. Tania went back to her round of lessons and dancing classes. Then in the following autumn auditions began again.

  That December Maimie reached the advanced age of fifteen. She ceased to be a juvenile; she was too tall. So Madame got her into a chorus. This changed her. The position of the chorus in a pantomime is so different from the position of the children. The children are so supervised and watched. The chorus utterly free. Maimie felt this change at the first rehearsal. It was unexpected. She had never realised it would be like that. She was just going into the chorus instead,of joining the children, because she was so tall. Then she grasped that the doors had opened. She was free. Away from Matron. Earning her own living. A grown-up person.

  When the pantomime finished she told Rose she was sick of school; if she could get another job she wouldn’t go any more. Rose protested:

  “You are only fifteen, darling. I’d like you to stay another two years at least. You needn’t work. I am glad you can get pantomimes at Christmas because it means you’ve something saved, but as far as the school is concerned I can afford the fees.”

  “It’s the money I want. And the sooner I put myself in the way of getting some, the better. You know, Howdy, it seems to me that having money is the only thing that really matters. If you’ve got money you can do what you like, go where you like. People always seem extra nice to the rich. If you’re poor people are kind to you. Who the hell wants kindness!”

  “Money can’t buy happiness, you know,” Rose said softly.

  “Oh, my God, Fancy handing that slop out to me. If ever people ought to know that money is happiness, it’s us. Look at us! Taking in boarders. Too few servants. Too few clothes. Us children dancing to help things out. Then look at some of the girls at school. Everything they want. Money poured on them. And they taking it as their right. Why not us? I swear to you, Howdy, I won’t be poor. I don’t care how I get money, but I’ll get it somehow.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t feel like that, Maimie; money is not so important as all that. I’ve enjoyed a lot of my life, and I’ve never had any.”

  “Oh you! You’re one of ‘The Saints of Earth,’ who ‘in concert sing.’ Look at you! You could have had just enough to be bearable if you hadn’t adopted us three.”

  “My dear, I’m very far from a saint. You and I look at life from quite a different angle.”

  “We do,” agreed Maimie with fervour.

  “But I hope you’ll see things differently when you grow up.”

  “You watch me!”

  In the end Maimie remained on at school, as she couldn’t get another job. But to the dancing classes she would not go, saying she danced every bit as well as she had any need to, and goodness knows she’d been at it long enough. She made Rose miserable by insisting on drawing out all her savings from the bank. She was over the school-leaving age, she couldn’t be prevented. But it seemed the most heartbreaking waste of the earnings of three pantomimes, to see it spent in a week on rubbishy showy clothes. But Maimie bitterly resented interference, she wanted a good time. And a good time was going out with boys. She adored ‘boys.’ Some of the ones she knew had cars; they all had enough money to take her to the pictures. In her new showy clothes she was a great success. Rose asked her to come in early, not to go out again after supper. But it only made her cross: “Oh, don’t fuss, Howdy. You put me on the stage when I was twelve, so it’s too late to keep me in cotton wool.”

  “Let ’er be, Miss ’oward,” Nannie advised. “If we tries to look after ’er too much, next job she ’as she’ll be off on ’er own. She’s the wild kind. A bit of ’er father and ’er mother, too, I should say.”

  That Christmas of Maimie’s emancipation Tania worked hard in another pantomime. It was under the same management as “Red Riding Hood,” but it was “Dick Whittington” this time. Except for the title, it was extraordinarily the same as the one before. She did the same dances, with the same children, wearing almost the same clothes, and singing songs which, though very new, had exactly the same themes. She hated it rather more than the year before, if that were possible. After the last performance she came home so glowing with happiness that Rose asked her what had happened. Tania answered with the last lines of the pantomime:

  “And now we’ve had enough of this and that, Let’s say farewell to Whittington and Cat.”

  The rest of that year was full of exceptionally hard work for the two younger girls. Tania was training as one of a speciality quartette of children acrobatic dancers that Madame hoped to place in a west-end pantomime. It was Daisy’s last year of consistent training. By the next spring she would be old enough to start work. After that, although of course she would work and practise all the years she remained on the stage, her actual lessons and training would be necessarily interrupted. Madame was enormously proud of her, and worked her very hard. The child, except for school and her daily walk, was seldom off her toes. Madame would watch her with tears in her eyes:

  “Goo’ gir’, goo’ gir’, goo’ gir’,” she would breathe ecstatically.

  Tania slogging away with her quartette found all this admiration for “The child marvel” hard to bear. She didn’t exactly grudge Daisy h
er success, but why had God picked on Daisy’s legs as the ones to do even the most impossible exercises with no effort at all? If it was extra hard work that made Daisy so brilliant, she could have borne with it, but it wasn’t; it was merely the result of the most blatant favouritism on the part of heaven.

  “Oh my goodness! that child is the prize poodle of the academy,” she sighed to Maimie.

  “You wait till she really starts,” Maimie said. “The Child Wonder! The little Star! There’ll be no holding her back.”

  Tania’s year of hard work was rewarded. After several nerve-racking auditions the quartette got their contract for a west-end pantomime.

  “Thank goodness!” Tania said joyfully. “No trailing out into the tiger country this year. Twenty minutes from door to door. That’s the job for this child!”

  Maimie got into the chorus of the same show. It was “Aladdin,” and a far more elaborate entertainment than any of their previous efforts. All the dances were to be produced by Dolly Kismet. His was a name notable in the theatre world, for he produced the dances for practically every musical comedy and revue in the West-End.

  Dolly spotted Maimie at the first rehearsal.

  “How old are you, Kiddy?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “All right, Baby, we must keep an eye on you.” He put her in the centre of the front row. She didn’t know it, but he watched her. Her work he placed at once. Very well trained, but no special ability, and less ambition. But the girl herself! What a looker! What a cute baby! Rather young of course—still he liked them young—looked innocent—but then you never knew—he hoped she was innocent—more fun that way—he loved teaching a babe.

  The next day he kept her back after rehearsal, to show her a step, he said, that she hadn’t got just right. He put his arm round her, and they danced it together. He let his hand slip casually further up her body. Yes, she was innocent all right, all right; didn’t know a thing.