A Bed in the Sticks

by Lee Dunne

  Deep breaths are a great thing for the nerves, and that marvellous, bloody awful smell you get from trains was a godsend that morning. I stopped wondering whether I was doing the right thing. And I cheered up when I made my mind up that I had no choice. I didn’t have to sweat about making a decision because I had no alternative but to joining the touring show. Like, I’m the bright spark that walked out on what was thought of as a good job, with thousands and thousands of people on the dole. And I was the guy wouldn’t take dole money from anybody.

  The great engine shuddered, hissing steam; the noise and the smell together reminding me of great shire horses; size and strength; enough to pull down a house.

  The train began to move and I closed my eyes. Just to sit there and feel how it was, to grab it all and hold it long enough to ensure that I’d never forget what it was like. Instead, I saw my mother’s face, and a man I didn’t know, standing on an old chair on a Dublin street, and I heard the pain in him as he yelled his defiance at God.

  The station slipped away and I knew I didn’t want to leave Dublin. It was my town and my father’s and his father’s. I’d never seen The Book of Kells, in Trinity College, and I’d never climbed to the top of Nelson’s Pillar, though I thought the world of Horatio himself. But then, I didn’t have to sightsee - who needs to be a tourist in his home town.

  I shut my eyes again, my lips miming the fuhchuhchuh of the wheels, and I just let the rhythm carry me along. Another train ride. A gang of us like a cage of monkeys, desperate for some kind of action. Good or bad, it didn’t matter, anything to help us prove whatever it was.

  From Harcourt Street station facing the Four P’s. Out to Bray, don’t ask me why. Girls! What else!

  A surfeit of youth, bursting out of our leather! A sort of a dangerous team in one carriage, all balloons, the lot of us! Young and wild and stupid, even dangerous, jumping up and down, dying for it, for something, anything, to happen.

  Dempsey, eighteen, wide as a barn, his great black head like a pot, his dark eyes double dark and wild, the son of good Catholics; the Ma is a daily communicant: her son a young wizard at dropping pints and talking his way between the legs of strangers.

  Boland, nicknamed Turnover since he shared his name with a huge bakery. The turnover being a loaf shaped like a baby’s bootee. I admired Boland, we all did. He was a kind of king because he was good at everything except jiving.

  He was about nineteen and he could swim like a shark. Nobody had taught him what to do and it was the same with his diving. At fifteen he owned the ten metre platform and he used the three metre springboard in Blackrock Baths like it was a

  mattress on the bed. Swallow dives, Jack knives, half screw mickey-tossers, they were all the same to Boland, easy!

  O’Reilly sitting still in a corner of the carriage, broad as a kipper-herring, witty enough to be classified dry as a bone! He was a master of repartee, three score and ten year old wrinkles around the corners of his clerical grey eyes, sneering at McDaid and O’Connor who were lying like stiffs on the luggage racks.

  Another train ride, on another day. Going to Longford with Uncle Jack who wasn’t a real relation, getting Biscuits and lemonade; two very rare commodities; liquorice allsorts and a ride on a donkey cart with an old clay-pipe smoking woman, who was taking home the Porter; two muslin-covered half gallon cans. ‘One for me,’ she said, flashing the gums at Jack, ‘the other for himself indoors.’

  Like a reel of films it flashed before my eyes, all in the short time that it took to lose the smell of Dublin.

  Well on the way, then, with me wondering if, and hoping, that Jimmy Frazer would be a good producer who would know how to get the very best out of me. Innocence, did I ever offend thee?

  Still, it was nothing new for me to dream; right from a kid I had slipped off into my own private viewing room every chance I got. And the pictures were always filled with glamour and colour and I was always the star, never thinking to worry about being a dreamer, this gift being there on its own steam, as natural to me as breathing and it had helped me to recharge my batteries, when the real, pain-in-the arse world was winning too many rounds in the daily fight. Maybe this wouldn’t work for everybody but, time and time again, I bounced back after a tough time, by slipping into one of my fantasies that came free of charge. I admit I never expected fantasy to become reality which turned out to be a wise move, like you hadn’t set yourself up to be shot down.

  That train ride to Fermanagh was ridiculous with me swimming under water all the way, like, I was the alternative to

  John Wayne and Gregory Peck in movies, with me on the stage in the same town,

  It was a decent enough day, cold, with the wind blustering about as though it owned the place. And though Butlers Town was a thousand miles north of what I had been dreaming about on the trip from Dublin, I was glad to be there. Well, I was, for about thirty seconds.

  Technically, I suppose I was still in the railway station since I was standing on one side of the platform which sat there on the side of the street.

  I say the street because that’s all I could see, as in, there seemed to be just the one. One street, I mean.

  To make matters worse, I had that awful, positive feeling that you get when you know, like you can have it in writing you know that you have come to the right place. Only the place is so far, so very far, from being right.

  This was how I felt and the pointless ‘maybe game’ didn’t help. Maybe it isn’t the right place. But I know, standing there, rooted to the platform, I know, this is it. I had to crush the need to consider that the town might be around the corner? But there are no corners. But, maybe there’s more of it somewhere! Like where? In the back yard!

  The Porter came out and he stood there looking at me with a decent smile on his mouth.

  ‘Is this really Butlers Town, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, aye indeed, sir,’ he said, in his severe northern twang: ‘once seen never remembered!’

  I smiled the way you do when you’re not sure why you’re doing it. ‘Oscar Wilde would be proud of you,’ I said.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he said.

  I shook my head, feeling that I was picking up a very heavy tab for my brainstorm of that recent Friday, when I walked-out of my steady, great prospects, job, and threw the head entirely by taking the Mail Boat.

  ‘Can you tell me where I’ll find The Touring Show?’ I asked your man, if only to stop the self criticism that was growing muscles by the moment.

  ‘Oh, Aye, sure, sure, I should have guessed aye. ‘Tis away

  at the bottom of the village, so it is. You can’t miss it.’

  He made it sound as though the place was longer that a good dinner table.

  ‘In the hall, you can’t miss it. It’s the only one we have.’

  I thanked him and began to walk down the dusty street, my suitcase in one hand, my basket left behind at the station until I found out the lay of the land.

  In the moment, like the Seventh Cavalry, to my mind, Jimmy Frazer came out of a small shop with newspapers tucked under one arm.

  He was in good form, holding his hands up by way of an apology. ‘I’d have been here in time to welcome you, but the woman there, I warn you, it is impossible to get away from her until one of her lungs collapses.’

  He shook my hand. ‘This is no way to start but, I promise you, give it a little time and you won’t regret coming to join my show.’

  ‘Glad to see you,’ I said, with meaning, and he chuckled in an easy going way. ‘That old bird in the shop could do with a good rub of the brush! But God love her, she could haunt houses so, she’s not going to be smiling any time soon.’

  He picked up my basket and waited while I retrieved my big case, and we walked down the street to the village hall. This was just like many, many more I would come to know in the months ahead.
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  It was a grey oblong box about twenty yards long with a double-door entrance. There was also a door halfway along either side, with another at the back of the building. And there were three smallish windows on both sides.

  Not the sort of venue I had dreamed up for my stage debut but there I was, and there I was going to stay, if only because, in truth, I had nowhere else to go. And besides, fuck it, whether I liked the scenario or not, technically speaking I was in show business.

  I hid my disappointment from Jimmy Frazer as we passed on to the digs he had organised for me.

  ‘You’ll be fine with Molly Dale, she takes in lodgers, a night a week, or forever!’

  He gave me a grin that seemed to me carrying a message he hadn’t mentioned, but I let it go in case I was imagining things.

  ‘She’s a decent skin,’ he said, pressing the bell on the front door of a sizeable bungalow that sat in very good condition, in a well tended garden that was alive with flower beds and a well tended lawn.

  As the woman opened the door, I was ignoring my feeling that Jimmy had been marking my card about the availability of the landlady, and I have to say that she seemed to me, at that first meeting to be a no nonsense kind of woman, who made me feel welcome in the moment.

  The ease with which Jimmy hefted my basket into the house and on into my room helped me realise he was taller than I was and in very good shape, though he had been losing his hair for a while, without this making him look like an old guy.

  I guessed he was in his early forties, a guy who could handle himself and I got the impression that my landlady found him attractive.

  Molly hardly noticed me beyond the commonplace welcome speech she rattled off, her attention on Jimmy from the moment she opened the door, and within ten minutes I was accepted as a boarder for the week.

  In no time at all, she produced tea and a sandwich, for which I was grateful before I left the house, as I had to go back to the hall with Jimmy where, I would meet the other actors and

  Run through the songs I’d sing in the first half of the nights programme.

  Jimmy explained that the entertainment opened with an hour of variety, songs, sketches, he doing a Stand Up each night as the Funny Man in the set up.

  He explained that, of course, like everybody else, he played parts, and sold raffle tickets, and gave the after-show plug for the next nights offering, before bidding the punters good night, and a safe journey to bed, with a joke to send them out of the hall barking with laughter.

  Jimmy covered all this without reaching for effect. It was just a plain run-down of what was on offer to the potential customers who, living seriously in-the-sticks, might well come to the show every night that it was available.

  ---------

  Had it been empty, the interior of the hall would have been just as sad as the dismal exterior, but there was enough action happening that it seemed to paint the hall with its energy, and I have to say that any reservation I had, well, it just vanished and I wanted to take my coat off and pitch in, get working, to really feel like one of the gang of people I hadn’t even met.

  There was a stage about four feet off the ground. Two men were erecting a frame from which would hang the many sets of curtains. A different coloured curtain pulled across by an actor working in the dark, and you had a change of background in about ten seconds. This and much more I got from Jimmy who whispered in my ear, and of course, within a few days I would be one of the team, and learning the tricks of the trade.

  Another two men were sorting baskets and orange boxes that were all crammed with props and other gear. There was a piano to one side and somebody was playing ‘Come Back to Sorrento’ with a light, liquid touch, I couldn’t see whoever it was because the keyboard was turned away from were I stood. A couple of women came in and Jimmy introduced me to Pat O’Shea, a redhead with fine breasts and a disarming smile.

  A gentle tilt at the edges and her eyes, fairly pale green, suggested that she had a kind nature. Her mother, a slim little woman of about sixty, with dark, lively eyes, shook my hand firmly, not at all sure she liked me.

  ‘Paddy, meet Maria Maguire, one of the best character actresses ever to tread the boards... ladies, our newcomer, Paddy Maguire.’

  Somebody called Jimmy away and he left us for a minute. I made weather talk, trying not to look like I fancied Pat, which I very much did, despite her wedding-ring.

  Jimmy came back and came straight to the point. ‘We have to do something about your name, Paddy.’

  Maria smiled: ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘It’s the same as Maria’s’ Jimmy said, which hadn’t occurred to me, illustrating how nervous I was behind my mister cool mask.

  ‘Think about it yourself.’ Jimmy took my arm and led me in the direction of the piano where some very gifted musician was making my heart sing in appreciation with a rendition of my favourite song ‘As Time Goes By’.

  This was, to my mind one of the all time great songs and, just thinking about working with somebody who could play that kind of piano, had me purring inside that things were just getting better and better.

  I was surprised to find a girl, a blonde with a cigarette dug into a corner of her mouth. Her eyes were closed as her lovely hands made it all happen, and she remained like this, playing for at least ten seconds after Jimmy had yelled ‘knickers’ into her right ear.

  ‘Comedians,’ she whispered disdainfully, slowly opening her eyes. And, my God, what eyes they were and what a lovely girl she was.

  ‘Paddy, this is Pauline, the penis, Jones, the ghoul of the two-tone music box.’

  Pauline’s mouth curled a fraction in the shadow of a sneer and she stood up to shake my hand. ‘His play on words is a fungus that grows on you, Paddy.’

  When her fingers closed around mine, an electric shock scored my funny-bone.

  ‘She smiled and I released her hand. She sat down and I stood, just looking at her.

  ‘Welcome to Butlers Town,’ she said, her eyes on mine, ‘what there is of it.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Jimmy said, winking at me, ‘the greatest thing since Napoleon and Josephine.’

  I smiled and Pauline blushed despite herself. ‘He’ll work in the gag about the boots now, ‘they’re only Wellingtons, y’know!’

  Not knowing what to do, I shrugged and Jimmy leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She wiped her face and for a moment there was a twinkle in the lustrous green eyes.

  ‘He’s been at the embalming fluid. You can always tell when he gets passionate.’

  Her accent was well-educated-Dublin, but if she’d had a mouthful of rusty razorblades and a cleft palate to go with it, I would have enjoyed listening to her just the same.

  ‘I’ll send him back in a minute,’ Jimmy said. ‘Run him through a few numbers.’

  Pauline nodded and I took my eyes off her as Jimmy walked me up the hall. I just wanted to stand there at the piano: I’d never seen anybody so lovely before, and she was sharp with it. I bit my tongue to stop myself asking Jimmy all about her - for all I knew she could be his bird.

  ‘What about Tony O’Neill?’ Jimmy said.

  His voice only missed making me jump and he grinned.

  ‘Sorry’ I said, ‘I was a million miles away.’

  He went on grinning; ‘By the piano,’ he said. I nodded, not bothering to deny it since he was such a mind reader.

  ‘What I said was ‘how do you fancy Tony O’Neill?’

  We turned and started walking back. ‘Great,’ I said, feeling a bit shy. ‘I’m tired of Maguire, anyway.’

  My pal Larry had called me Tony whenever we’d be out on the rampage together. He always said I looked more like a Tony than a Paddy.

  He used to say, ‘Paddy sounds like a human cement mixer in McAlpine’s Brigade, home for a holiday from the
building site. Tony is, well, slick! Suits you.’

  ‘Okay, Tony O’Neill,’ Jimmy said. ‘Come and meet the others and then I’ll leave you to work a few numbers with the lovely Pauline!’ He nodded: ‘Yeh, Tony O’Neill, perfect!’

  4

  I was back at the hall by seven o’clock and I stood just inside the door, marvelling at the way it had been changed; shaking my head in admiration for the know-how that had turned it into a little theatre.

  Just a few hours before, when I left to hit the digs and take a bath and have a rest, it had seemed like a shambles. Jimmy had said it would be spot-on in plenty of time but I couldn’t see it.

  I should have known that it would be; there were posters all over the village advertising Opening Night and, so Jimmy assured me, posters on trees and walls, handbills placed in houses of several other small towns and villages within a ten mile radius, country people, so many of whom didn’t even have electricity, willing to travel to see a show by pony and cart, by bicycle and any other means of transport, many walking two or three miles, night after night, when a show came within a reasonable distance. Not forgetting the valuable publicity given by the priest in the local church - a small fee accepted - to help a show that never failed to donate decently, and gave people a few hours of relief from the rigour of living in the countryside.

  To me as I stood there in the hall, the setting was like a little show in itself, when I considered the shambles that had existed when I’d been there a few hours earlier.

  I stood admiring the straight lines of seats either side of the centre aisle, two small watt lamps softly lighting the pale blue curtains - these were called Tabs - and she Side Stage masking of the same material. This was draped over lengths of rope tied close to the top of the front upright of the frame, secured to the wall either side by a strong hook.

  All the baskets and the boxes and the piano were out of sight back stage - there was a small card table with admission tickets on it by the front door, and it was all so warm and cosy that I almost felt it would be a shame to turn on the lights to full power.