by Wesley Stace
The storm had yet to break two weeks later, and the theatres reopened, allowing the stars back where they belonged. Echo’s move looked a little premature, and she immediately readied herself for a triumphant and patriotic return to the West End.
Best of all, Joe and I could get back to work to take our mind off Bobbie and Belle’s absence. When the sirens went off in the middle of our turn, the ushers blew short blasts on their whistles. We were to ask the audience whether they wanted to leave and, when they didn’t (they never did), we improvised in front of the curtain until the all-clear. Sitting on the edge of the apron, leading the sing-along, we felt brave. We were doing our bit, ready for action anywhere. Early on, because of an air raid that never was, we found ourselves huddled in an Anderson shelter — two kids, their parents, and us. Half-buried in the ground, protected by a blast wall and steel plates at either end, I thought we’d died and gone to hell, but when Joe and I started to banter, the atmosphere changed, and time passed more happily. The worst circumstances can bring out the best in people.
With the West End reopened for business, ENSA was having more difficulty than ever finding the necessary talent, and held open auditions at their Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, headquarters. Joe and I, who were not known enough to merit an invitation, joined the queue among the comedians and the jugglers, the contortionist-xylophonists, and the unicycle acts. These were the performers hardest hit — no one was going to the seaside, except those who had followed the Pied Piper. Three in front of us, an elderly woman, enamelled, lacquered (and seventy if she was a day), sang “Land of Hope and Glory” with accompanying tap. There was an unmistakable “Oh!” of distaste from the ENSA triumvirate in row M when the old girl spat out her teeth on the climactic “made thee mightier yet.” Our audition went well, and we were ushered to the far side of the stage, where a man called Ranulph Rex, who was not wearing military uniform but wished he were, shook Joe’s hand, flipped through the pages on a clipboard with a newly sharpened pencil, and promptly offered him a position in a travelling troupe. “The show will be called Tonic for the Troops,” Rex announced, gauging Joe’s reaction. “You’re going to fit in nicely.”
“Is there a medical?”
“Inoculations and so forth. Nothing to worry about.”
“Where will we be going?”
“Classified. Expect to hear from us soon, very soon.” He marched back and forth, clipboard underneath his arm. “We go where they go. We’re here for their morale, to let the fighting men, however far away, know they aren’t forgotten. Our work is every bit as important as theirs, as vital as food and rest.” Rex saluted, the knuckles of his extended fingers to his forehead, his palm visible. In the spirit of the moment, Joe raised my hand to my forehead and poked me in the eye. “I like that!” said Rex. “Perhaps the little chap could salute. It would mean a lot to the boys.” He meant the soldiers. “Think how they’d like him if he were in uniform, one of them. Have a word with this fellow.” He handed us the familiar Romando business card. “He’s jolly keen to do his bit, but until now I didn’t honestly know how he could help.”
I fancied getting into uniform, even if Joe couldn’t. He might have failed his medical, but King and Country would have accepted me in a minute — a little chip here and there, perhaps a spot of woodworm, but all eminently treatable: nothing to stop me representing Britannia at the very highest level.
The ENSA medical was a success. Joe returned, his arm a join-the-dots of vaccinations, with a khaki canvas kit bag — the whole world was turning dull brownish green — complete with soap, towel, rations, and candles. He placed this next to his other bags by the front door, ready for his orders. My bag was packed too. The only thing yet to be put inside was me.
Joe worked at his desk as though his life depended on it. Perhaps this was common behaviour, to dot the I’s and cross the T’s, to close the circle, to write a will. He couldn’t wait to be gone. I knew. He seemed satisfied as he filed his writing books away.
One morning, a key turned in the front door, and Frankie came darting into the kitchen, a smudge of red coat and matching scarf. Queenie struggled behind with two suitcases.
“Dada! Dada! I saw the sea!” Frankie buried her head between Joe’s knees, clutching his calves so tightly that he was unable to offer Queenie any assistance.
“Hello,” said Queenie coolly, surveying the house and shaking her head with amusement at the wooden shutters Echo had had installed in the front room and kitchen. “There was nothing much happening where we were, and if there’s an invasion, they’ll probably do it straight through Evelyn’s back garden. So we decided to come back from holiday a little early.”
“I saw the sea!” said Frankie, as Joe prised himself from her and scooped her into his arms, bouncing her above his head. She laughed until he put her down. “George!” she said, bouncing me up and down in the same way.
“Strange thing is . . . ,” said Joe, “I joined ENSA. I’m on my way to report now.” His bags were his evidence. “Echo asked me to join the Evacuation Tour, and that was my only alternative.”
“Were you going to leave a note?” asked Queenie, but she was resigned to his silent comings and goings.
“I wasn’t expecting you back. I was going to write.”
“And where are you going?”
“I don’t know. It’s all, you know, hush-hush.”
“Wars have ears,” said Frankie.
Joe knelt so they were at eye level. “I have to go, Frankie.”
“Stay!” she commanded, expecting the rewards of petulance.
“Want to say good-bye to George?”
“Joe,” said Queenie, “you’ll worry her. You’ll be back in a week or so. She’ll only have to say hello all over again then. We’ll see you soon.”
“Bye, George,” said Frankie, and waved.
“Welcome home,” said Joe as he put me away.
They talked for a few moments more, and then I felt myself lifted up and out of the house.
The cold air circulated around me. I heard the click of the door.
We were free.
Tonic for the Troops, a no-name concert party, offered a nostalgic variety entertainment with a little glamour. “Tricks and tunes with a touch of tits and tinsel,” whispered the director when the girls couldn’t hear. The personnel numbered six: Joe, conjurer and ventriloquist; an acrobat called Phoebe; a pianist (the unforgettable Toots Lowery); a Scottish male comedian; a soubrette; and a singer who doubled as our “incomparable compere,” the debonair Jack Heath.
There was great camaraderie from the first rehearsal. There had to be. We travelled in the same transport, with all our props — of which I was one — and a piano lashed to the inside of the van. Joe, despite being the most withdrawn, was well liked, as a man who mucks in without complaint will be. The others joshed him but took no offence when he kept to himself.
During rehearsals in the Methodist church hall, I received my new Romando uniform. Of course they remembered me, the Romandos had said in their reply. How could they ever forget? It was especially made by Nellie herself, with an embroidered label: For our boys. And what a perfect Tommy I made. We admired ourselves in the mirror of the kitchen khazi: the ventriloquist and his soldier. There I was dressed to kill, ready to fight for the cause. I had my first major operation of the war lying facedown on the draining board, as Joe calmly performed reconstructive surgery (without the use of anaesthetic) from instructions sent by Romando. I was soon up and about again, saluting at will. Ranulph Rex was right; the boys did like it a lot.
With the uniform, we finally created the character I had always wanted. I became the boy soldier who won against all odds, who loved his country as he loved his mother, and who always kept his sense of humour about him, not to mention a stiff chamois upper lip. And this is why Joe and I were always in work, why we never went home.
The beginnings of the tour were happy days, driving around from gun emplacement to barracks, endlessly lost (because
the road signs had been removed to confuse German paratroopers — a good tactic because it certainly confused us), and often late. We were working to a testing schedule put together by the head office. They knew the distances but hadn’t allowed for the fact that all eighty-mile van journeys are not created equal, or that directions are useless without road signs. When we arrived, and we always did, we set up wherever we were told. Sometimes we couldn’t even get the piano inside the officers’ mess, and more than once, Toots played al fresco while Jack sang inside. Nissen huts were good in fine weather and terrible when it rained, the clatter on the corrugated steel so intense that the audience couldn’t hear a word. When the sun shone, we performed outside. Our portable stage didn’t prove quite portable enough, and substitutes were as rudimentary as two tabletops secured together. Word filtered down that it was good practice for a time when mobility would be our prime concern: only the small shows could make it to the front. When we were left heaving the piano through a field after an unexpected downpour, we understood.
Careless talk costs lives, they told us. Ironic, really, that I, whose whole life was based on the kind of careless talk and casual quips that represented the antithesis of this patriotic sentiment, was now in a position to advocate its benefits. We did what we could, slipping stirring slogans into our routines as instructed: Britain’ll pull through! Keep Mum! She’s not so dumb! Don’t telephone when a letter or postcard will do!
The material picked itself. I voiced what the lads were feeling; I spoke of them missing their sweethearts, their families. I helped them laugh. It was clear, too, what kind of entertainment they didn’t want. A little sauciness was de rigueur, they expected it, but they didn’t want to dwell on sex. Women were the embodiment of an ideal, the model of fidelity the fighting men had left behind, the perfection they fought to defend — no joke should sully this image. Lines that would have gone down a treat at the Gaiety were scratched. Self-censorship of this type became second nature: it was just a question of knowing your audience. We learned the hard way.
We played for the dashing RAF boys, their last entertainment before the Tannoy sounded. If there was a second show, you couldn’t help checking whether any familiar faces were missing. And we played at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, and Queen Mary’s in Roehampton, where the worst of the burn victims, perhaps yesterday’s RAF boys, were cared for. Their faces mummified and suppurating, some were unable even to see us perform, moaning quietly throughout, smoking cigarettes through holes in their cheeks. Phoebe burst out crying and found herself on the sharp end of some harsh words from Jack. Our audiences deserved utmost professionalism at all times.
There was a hospital somewhere in the rolling fields of Wales where the patients had yet deeper wounds, ones we could not see: these were “the war weary,” the shell-shocked, our quietest audience. As we ran our routines, one of them stared at me vacantly. I wondered what he was thinking and whether he could ever think normal thoughts — Shall I make a cup of tea? — again or whether he was stuck in his world forever, staring but not seeing. This same man was encouraged by the doctor to touch me. There was very little participation of this sort. Joe sat me on the man’s knee. His fingers were soft, and though he put a gentle hand in my back, he hadn’t the strength to move me, so we just sat together, in silence. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t bring himself. Tears welled in his eyes. Joe guided the man’s fingers and showed him, without words, how to pull my strings. He showed him that I cried too, and the man and I cried together.
“My son,” the man murmured by way of explanation, and his hand fell away from my levers. I slumped forwards, and Joe took me from the patient, who was wheeled back to his room.
“His first words since he arrived two months ago,” said the doctor as we walked away. “Your troupe lives up to its name. Come and see us again.”
There was a steady stream of letters from Bobbie: “Dunkirk? Talk about a humiliating withdrawal!! (I’ve had a few of those.) If ever there was a time to surrender on a beach in the dark, that was it!” And in every letter, a private joke from Belle to me, from Bobbie to Joe. These tided me over, kept me going.
They’d gone straight to Bengal, where Bobbie had taken his show to the forces at the end of the line, the arse-end Charlies who got little in the way of entertainment. His drag act — he always preferred “female impersonation” — had become extremely popular among the troops under the jurisdiction of BESA, the Bengal Entertainment Services Association. They appreciated his presence all the more knowing that there were no roads, that he had walked behind his mules and slept rough to get to them. This society excluded women entirely — they could go no nearer the front line than two hundred miles — and Bobbie Sheridan was the best alternative, the substitute object of desire, allowing the men to lust for women while laughing at the urge. There was nothing to be ashamed of, no infidelity involved: Bobbie was just a bloke in a frock. He was a man, the audience was men, and they were all in it together.
Gone were the costume changes, the orchestra, and the scenery, but the act retained its glamour, and the material (unlike ours) needed no adaptation. When Bobbie said, “They asked me to review the troops. I said, ‘I’ll only do it when they’re standing to attention. And I hope for some very high marks,’ ” he got a cheer, whereas a normal comic would have been booed from the stage. A real woman could never have dreamed of saying such a thing.
I could hear his exact turn of phrase in every line of his letters, see his arched eyebrow in every double exclamation mark: “They love my ditties. And they should. I made them myself!! Wait till I whip out my Londonderry air!! (Think about that one!)” Somehow, despite the weather, the diet, and the constant struggle with dysentery, described in microscopic detail, Bobbie dazzled everywhere. In that part of the world, there was no bigger star.
And where was Belle, my Belle? She was with him every step of the way, in her scruffy suitcase, bouncing on the back of some beast of burden. But when would I ever see her again?
London had become unbearable, and Echo, after her belated return, had quit the city for a funk hole. She earnestly did not want to go where there were still troops to be entertained (distant places like North Africa and India, Persia and Iraq — there had been none in Europe since Dunkirk), and another bus tour of England would be thankless and arduous, so she secured herself a house in the Cotswolds, in the village of Northleach. Here she would either come up with another plan or see out the war entirely.
Queenie, however, didn’t care to leave London again. The need for party entertainment hadn’t dried up, and The Auntie Queenie Show rolled on, though she now performed purely out of the kindness of her heart: to ask for two guineas from single parents and orphanages felt like extortion, to deny them entertainment unpatriotic. Queenie had initially been rejected by ENSA, but with resources severely stretched during the blitz, she was welcomed on reapplication as an honorary member. Armed with nothing but matchsticks, magic painting, and my handsome doppelgänger, she descended to entertain the little ones. Reg, still her regular driver from Fleet, had found an old projector in a bombed-out cinema, and at her suggestion, he took it down to a shelter. She brought a sheet and some drawing pins, did some tricks, and christened the entertainment “The Magic of the Movies.” (The real magic, she wrote, was where he got the movies from.)
One night, they nearly died. Huddled in the crowded shelter, showing the scratchy Western serial Reg had unearthed, they hadn’t even heard it coming. Suddenly they were under water, spitting dust, shouting and still not being heard, looking at each other to see where they were bleeding. The Hillman that had taken them to so many parties was wrecked, but they hadn’t given up. Reg rolled the projector around in a custom-made pushcart constructed from a pram and a fruit crate, steered with a skipping rope. Just the job.
Queenie wrote to Joe, but it was a one-sided conversation she was hard-pressed to keep up. His excuses were see-through: the mail was bad, he was busy, he wasn’t
allowed to be specific about his location. What was he meant to say? She implored him to write to his daughter, but he never could.
The blitz was nothing to Frankie. She was having the time of her life and every night was bonfire night. At the long-distance suggestion of Echo, and with her financial assistance, Queenie enrolled Frankie at the Franca DeLay stage school. This led to her being cast as a film extra, and then to her first speaking role in a patriotic Capital Studios comedy called Heil Who? starring Tommy Bright, “the Bright Spark” himself. At a pivotal moment, an unnamed street urchin, played by Frankie, sings the first verse of the national anthem, bringing a drunk Bright to his senses with the realization that every man must do his duty. After this, she was cast in Britain’ll Do It, Church Bells Will Chime Again, and The Headmaster Heads Abroad, in which she played her whole scene in great discomfort, too embarrassed to mention that she had wet herself. Frankie wrote that she was seeing the world — she’d been to Paris, Egypt, and New York without ever having left film studios in the London suburbs. Increasingly, Frankie accompanied Queenie to her engagements too, taking her mother’s part in the mesmerism act and often bringing the show to a close with her popular version of “God Save the King.”
“Mummy is still smiling and loving and I am going to start being good,” she dictated to Queenie, her amanuensis.
Rumour had it that Tonic for the Troops was going away, much farther away, and this was confirmed when they suffered their next set of inoculations, for diseases Joe hadn’t even considered.
Granted two days’ leave, he strapped me on the back of a motorbike and we drove over the downs to Northleach, where Frankie was staying with Echo. He sat outside a local, fortified himself with a beer, tidied me up, took a deep breath, and headed for Echo’s front door. By now, we were both in uniform: Basil dress they called his, after the leader of ENSA. We were both Tommies.
