‘That’s because we are amateurs,’ one brave member of the cast had once informed him.
I was met at the entrance to the school by the caretaker, a sallow-faced, skeletal figure of rather menacing aspect. He wore a grubby grey overall, huge black boots, a greasy flat cap and jangled an enormous set of keys on a long chain. Standing foursquare and ferocious next to him was Daisy, his barrel-bodied bull terrier. The creature, catching sight of me, displayed a set of vicious-looking teeth and growled threateningly.
I had first come across the beast when I had attended a school production of Oliver! some years before, when it had played Bill Sikes’ dog, Bullseye. The creature had stolen the show. The maxim that one should never share the stage with an animal or child rang very true that evening. The actor playing Bill Sikes (the head of the PE Department at the school) had, in the last act, rather foolishly jerked on the rope attached to the dog. ‘Come on, Bullseye!’ he had commanded in a voice as rough as gravel. The dog had lifted its fat, round head, fixed him with its cold button eyes and then had shot like a cannonball straight for him, snarling and slavering. As I entered Castlesnelling High School now, I gave the dog a very wide berth, knowing full well how unpredictable it could be.
There was no friendly word of greeting from the caretaker but an angry, ‘I’ll be glad when this bloody play of yours is over,’ he told me. The dog rumbled as if in agreement. I’ll be glad when it’s over as well, I thought to myself, but I kept my own counsel.
‘Good evening,’ I said, rather overdoing the smile. ‘Bit nippy, isn’t it?’
‘That’s because the heating’s off,’ he informed me bluntly. ‘Friday afternoon after school I always turn it off. There’s never any heating on of a weekend and I’m buggered if I’m keeping all the school heated for you lot. Any road, I should think there’s enough hot air from you amateur fanatics to heat the whole of the bloody Arctic Ice Cap.’
‘In the hall?’ I asked, not wishing to pursue this line of conversation.
‘Aye,’ replied the caretaker, jangling his keys like a warder, ‘and making a hell of a racket as well and, no doubt, scuffing up my floor, dropping litter and leaving marks on my walls.’ He sounded unnervingly like Connie. ‘Times I have to tell that producer of yours to tidy up after you’re done. You’re worse than the bloody kids in the school and that’s saying something. But I might as well talk to myself.’ Perhaps he didn’t realise that he was. The dog growled. ‘I don’t know why you lot have to rehearse here, what with all the other schools there are around. I’ve had to stay on to keep the place open for you lot and it’ll be after nine before I gets home. Why can’t you use another school for a change?’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ I told him, heading down the corridor. ‘I am just a mere member of the cast and a minor one at that.’
The caretaker wasn’t going to let me escape so easily and he and the dog pursued me as I made for the school hall. ‘You were the SS hofficer in The Sound of Music, weren’t you?’
‘I was.’
‘Aye, I thought it was you – the one who had to rush off after the last performance because your wife was in hospital having a baby.’
‘The very same,’ I told him and added, ‘She had a boy, by the way.’
Any normal person might have enquired after the baby, but no congratulations were forthcoming.
‘It was a right carry-on was that,’ he complained. ‘Talk about bloody drama. You rushing about like a chicken with no head and that big woman with the red lipstick and a face like a battleship shouting her head off, and that little producer fellow nearly having a nervous breakdown on stage.’ I speeded up but he kept apace. ‘I didn’t know you were in this play.’
‘Just a small part,’ I said, quickening my step.
‘I said to that producer of yours,’ he told me, ‘I said, why do you always have to do plays about the Nazis. Anybody’d think it was them what won the war. My father was a Dunkirk veteran and a member of the Royal British Legion. He’d turn in his grave to see you lot marching about in German uniforms.’
‘I’m a British soldier,’ I told him.
He wasn’t going to be put off. ‘We’ve had Cabaret with black shirts goose-stepping all over my floor, Sound of Music with the Gestapo chasing nuns all over the place and now we’ve got the SS taking over the Channel Islands. It’ll be a musical about Hitler next. Why do they always do plays about the Nazis?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said again, finally leaving him behind. ‘I don’t pick the plays, I merely act in them.’
The caretaker shouted after me, ‘Well, tell that producer of yours to leave the place as he found it and you have to vacate the premises before eight.’
In the hall, a knot of people, wrapped up in thick coats with gloves and scarves, was standing on stage with Raymond. The producer was encased in a bright red duffel coat, a woolly hat was pulled down over his ears and he was wearing multicoloured woollen gloves. He was barking out instructions and the group didn’t look particularly happy. I stood at the back to watch.
‘I know it’s cold, my lovelies,’ Raymond was telling them, ‘but the sooner we get moving about, the sooner we will get warm. Now, from the beginning of the act, please, and Cecile, darling, your line is: ‘That young soldier’s at the door, madam, with a message for you’ and not ‘with a massage for you’. There is a subtle difference.’
‘But I’m try in’ to do mi French accent,’ said the girl peevishly, moving from one foot to another to keep warm. She was a large young woman swathed in a vast khaki anorak with fur-lined hood and wearing substantial brown boots. She looked as if she could be auditioning for the musical version of ‘Eskimo Nell’. ‘It sounds more sexy to ’ave a French accent,’ she said. ‘Anyway, my mam says that if I was called Cecile I would be French and I’d ’ave a French accent.’
‘And tell me, Sharon,’ asked Raymond, controlling his obvious irritation, ‘does your mother have qualifications in performing arts, dramatic production and theatre direction?’
‘No.’
‘Did she perhaps study at RADA?’
‘Rather what?’
‘And is your mother producing this play?’
‘No,’ replied the girl, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
‘Well, I am,’ he told her, raising his voice, ‘and what I say, goes. Comprenez?’
‘Eh?’
‘This is not a Whitehall farce,’ groaned Raymond. ‘It is a deeply poignant drama about the triumph of courage and perseverance over tyranny and oppression and there is no place in it for a sexy French maid. This is one of the last rehearsals before the dress rehearsal, so it’s not the time to suddenly try something new. So – stick to the English accent, please, but try not to make it so Yorkshire.’
‘It’d liven things up a bit,’ observed one of the actors, ‘a sexy French maid and a German soldier offering the Dame of Sarka massage.’
‘I could do with a massage,’ announced a tall man in a black overcoat, black leather gloves and a black trilby, sitting in one of the seats at the side of the hall. ‘I can’t feel my feet, it’s so ruddy freezing. It’s colder than a morgue in here – and I should know.’
The figure in black was George Furnival, proprietor of Furnival’s Funeral Parlour in Collington. He was a tall, cadaverous and sinister-looking individual with short black brilliantined hair parted down the middle. He had played the part of Herr Zeller, the Gauleiter, who came to arrest Captain von Trapp in the previous production of The Sound of Music. I had thought at the time how perfect he was for the part of an official in the Nazi secret police with his long pallid humourless face and cold grey eyes. Here he was again in the role of the sinister Dr Braun, covert Gestapo officer. He suddenly caught sight of me standing at the back and loudly announced the fact.
‘’Ey up, Colonel Blimp’s arrived,’ he called up to the stage. ‘All we need now is the pantomime dame and her husband and we’ve very nearly got a full packof cards.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘the meeting went on rather longer than I thought.’
‘This is important you know, Gervase,’ Ray said sharply. ‘This is one of the last opportunities we have before the dress rehearsal to get it right and it still is far from perfect.’
‘Well, shall we get on with it, then?’ called George from where he was sitting in the hall. ‘The sooner we do, the sooner we’ll be on our way. I’ve got an extra-ordinary meeting at the Rotary tonight, so I can’t stay much longer.’
‘Give me strength,’ said Raymond. ‘Why do I put myself through this? Why do I bother? On stage, please, Gervase. I’ll read in the lines of the Dame. Cecile, you enter stage right with Colonel Graham behind you. And can you not stomp on to the stage like a constipated elephant? Lightly, lightly does it. You stride into the room, Gervase, the conquering hero, having just taken the German surrender. You look pretty pleased with yourself. You smile, lookaround, nod knowingly. Then you salute and extend a hand to the Dame and bow your head. I’d like to see a little more gravitas in your manner, Gervase, than I have seen to date. At the last rehearsal, you tended to be a bit louche.’
‘Louche?’ I repeated.
‘Remember you command a crack Scottish regiment,’ Raymond told me.
‘Will he be wearing a kilt?’ asked George.
‘No, he won’t,’ I said quickly.
‘Or tartan trews?’
‘Definitely not!’ I told him.
‘Now that’s not a bad thought,’ pondered Raymond, tilting his head to one side and looking at me as a professional photographer might examine a model before taking the picture. ‘It might be quite colourful for you to appear on stage, Gervase, in a bright tartan. It would have to be a kilt, of course, you don’t really have the buttocks for trews.’
‘Raymond,’ I said firmly, ‘there is no way I am wearing a kilt or tartan trews.’
‘Will I have a uniform this time, Raymond?’ asked George. ‘I had to wear a dirty old raincoat in The Sound of Music and everybody else was in uniform. Even the nuns got to dress up a bit.’
‘We will discuss your wardrobe, George, all in good time,’ said the producer, still staring at me with the thoughtful expression on his face.
The rehearsal continued until, ten minutes later, the redoubtable Mrs Cleaver-Canning made her grand entrance followed by her husband, Winco. He was an elderly, slightly stooping man with thin wisps of sandy-grey hair and a great handlebar moustache and he was struggling with a large hamper. The Dame of Sark was attired in a substantial fur coat with matching hat, puce leather gloves and knee-length black boots.
‘Come along, Winco,’ she said.
‘Righto,’ he growled.
‘Margot!’ exclaimed Raymond, throwing up his hands. ‘You’ve arrived.’
‘With some hot soup and little nibbles to keep us going,’ she said.
Despite Raymond’s protestations, the whole cast descended on Winco chattering like a bunch of excited school children.
‘I give up,’ he moaned, flopping onto a chair. ‘I give up.’
When the rehearsal was finally over, I declined the invitation to join the rest of the cast to go for a drink. I was keen to get home – not that I was going to spend it quietly reading or watching television. I knew I still had quite a bit of preparation to do for the forthcoming English course, and a couple of school reports to proof-read that evening.
I was heading down the corridor towards the front entrance, when a stentorian voice echoed behind me.
‘Hold up!’ It was George Furnival. ‘I want a word.’
Now what, I thought. ‘Yes, George?’ I waited for him to catch me up.
‘You, my friend, might very well be the answer to my prayers,’ he told me, hurrying down the corridor to join me.
This sounded ominous. ‘I am not carrying a coffin,’ I said.
‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ he said. ‘I have all the pallbearers I need. Anyway you haven’t got the right features for a funeral assistant. You have to have a mournful expression, a sorrowful countenance, and a sombre outward bearing to carry a coffin. You lookfar too fit and happy.’ I didn’t feel it at that moment. ‘I’m in search of a speaker.’
‘No, no,’ I began, ‘I know nothing whatsoever about funerals.’
‘Listen a minute,’ he said, extending a thin white hand, which he placed around my shoulder. His cold grey eyes looked into mine and I could smell the rather sickly odour of embalming fluid. ‘I was just telling Margot Cleaver-Canning about the dreadful fix we’re in over the Rotary District Governor’s Conference in the Memorial Hall tomorrow. That’s why I’m rushing to this extra-ordinary meeting now. It’s crisis time. We’re short of a speaker. We have tried a number of people already but they’re all booked up – inevitable, really – and I was asking Mrs Cleaver-Canning if Winco might fill the slot with memories of his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot, but they’re going to be in London for some big Air Force do, so that’s no good. Anyway, to cut a long story short –’
I knew full well what I was about to be asked and made to move off. ‘Goodnight, George. I really do need to get home.’
‘Hold on, hold on!’ said George, gripping my arm. ‘Mrs Cleaver-Canning said you’d be just the ticket.’
‘I’m busy tomorrow,’ I said quickly.
‘Let me finish,’ he said. ‘This isn’t any old meeting, you know. It’s the highlight of our Rotary calendar. There’ll be upwards of five hundred people there. One of the speakers – Chuck Wiseman from Seattle, he’s the International President’s representative, by the way, and we were so over the moon to have secured him – well, he was to speak but he’s had to cancel. Well, he hasn’t had to cancel as such, but his widow has. I was looking forward to meeting Chuck and comparing notes because he is, or was, I should say, in the same profession, running a very successful funeral business in the States, very successful. You might have heard of it – the Primrose Path Bereavement Parlour. They’re way ahead of us in embalming over there, you know. Anyway, as I was saying –’
‘This is all very interesting, George,’ I told him, looking at my watch, ‘but I really can’t help.’
‘It’s only a paltry ten minutes,’ he said.
‘Well, I can’t.’
‘He was carrying a casket out of the Heavenly Meadows Chapel of Rest to the strains of Elvis Presley singing “Return to Sender” and he just keeled over.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Chuck. Heart attack. Best way to go, in my opinion. Fortunately, the bearers managed to hang on to the coffin – they call them caskets over there – otherwise it would have been even more tragic if they had dropped the corpse as well. There’s nothing worse at a funeral than dropping the body. Anyway, he was going to speak.’
‘Well, I’m not!’ I said firmly. ‘I have things planned for tomorrow.’
‘Come on, it’s only ten minutes of your time,’ he persisted. ‘We’ve got a really good speaker before you, a brigadier with experiences of commanding front-line troops. Since you’re playing a colonel in the play you could pickup a few tips.’
‘No.’
‘It’s not that it’s a dinner where you would have to sit through the meal, and then listen to all the other speakers. It is just ten minutes of light-hearted banter before the District Governor rounds things off.’
‘Light-hearted banter!’ I repeated. ‘I’m not a comedian.’
‘I know that and, as I said to Mrs Cleaver-Canning, a s
chool inspector isn’t likely to have us rolling about in the aisles, but we are desperate and she said you’d spoken at her Golf Club Dinner and you were all right. She also said you didn’t charge a fee and so they were able to afford a really good speaker for the following year.’
‘That’s good to know,’ I said, accepting the back handed compliment with a wry smile. ‘I’m glad I was ‘all right’.’
‘I mean, we don’t want anything smutty, mind. Rotarians are professional business people. They don’t like risqué material. We had a blue comedian once who used the DG’s wife as the butt of his jokes. We don’t want a repeat of that.’
‘There won’t be anything smutty, risqué or otherwise, George,’ I told him, ‘because I am not doing it. Much as I would like to help, I can’t. I am really busy tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ he said, looking deflated. ‘Well, you can’t say I didn’t do my best. As I said, it would only be ten minutes of your time which doesn’t seem much to askand we would, of course, be prepared, if you insisted, to give a donation to a charity of your choice and we are desperate. I understand the Committee has tried everyone else, but if you won’t do it…’ He looked at me expectantly.
Malleable, Julie had called me and malleable I was. ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ I sighed. ‘Go on, then, but ten minutes only and not a second more.’
‘You’re a gentleman and a scholar, that’s what you are,’ he said, clapping me on the back, ‘and if you are ever in need of my funeral services, I shall be happy to give you a good discount. The conference starts at nine thirty but you needn’t be there until eleven.’
I heard the jangling of the keys that signalled the arrival of the caretaker and a moment later he appeared like the Ghost of Christmas Past around the corner.
The Heart of the Dales Page 25
