The Fun Factory

by Chris England

  “Oi!” George hissed from the landing. “Pack that business in, do you hear me?”

  Naturally this only added to our mirth, but we tried to keep the noise down as best we could. Once the first flush of hilarity had passed, the question of the marriage suggestion – or was it a proposal, even? – still hung over our heads.

  “I think…” I started, but Tilly started to speak at the same time, so I stopped.

  “No, you go on,” she said.

  “Well, I think we’d struggle to get the banns read, and a vicar out of bed, and my mother up from Cambridge, and the cake cut, all in time to catch the train for Warrington tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes. That’s true,” Tilly said carefully, neither relieved nor disappointed.

  “So, I suppose all we can really do is make the best of a bad lot.”

  Tilly laid her head on my chest, and I looked up at the ceiling. “It’s like a good old melodrama, isn’t it?” she said. “‘We shall be poor, but at least we shall be together…!’”

  “Ha!” I snorted.

  “It’s not so very bad for me,” she went on. “I’ll get something soon enough, in the super way, or maybe dancing. Oh, but poor you! All the work you’ve put in to make your way at Karno’s, and you’re quite the coming chap, everyone says so. You and Charlie Chaplin, the next big Karno players.”

  There was a pause, a pause during which I’m pretty sure I was supposed to say: “Never mind” or: “It’s not your fault.” Or possibly: “What I have discovered with you matters more to me than my silly old career!” But I lay there thinking about Charlie’s gleeful “Ta ta!” as his main rival flushed his big chance away, and I just couldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  “The thing is…”

  “What?”

  “What Syd Chaplin said to me was that they don’t want this business of ours to be known about, because it reflects badly upon him, and upon the Guv’nor, so…”

  “So what?”

  “So in point of fact, I can finish the tour, this Mumming Birds tour, as long as…”

  Tilly sat up. “As long as I am sacked and sent back to London on my own, do you mean?”

  I shrugged, nodded. “That’s…”

  “That’s about the size of it,” she finished for me. Her face flushed with the sheer drama of it all. “Why that’s even more melodramatic, isn’t it?” she cried. “Choose between your career and your true love! Good Heavens! The rotten so-and-so! And so you told him to take his tour and shove it in his pipe. I wish I could have seen his face!”

  I spread my palms apologetically, and a sudden frost descended upon the little bedroom.

  “You did, didn’t you? Arthur?”

  I said nothing.

  “You didn’t?”

  “You know Karno is coming to Warrington next week, and he’s coming to look at me and Charlie, maybe make one of us up to number one…”

  And I didn’t say this, but I knew that if I did turn my back on Karno, and left the way clear for Charlie, then I would regret that for the rest of my days, and who knows, maybe I’d blame her for it for the rest of both our days, and so really what I was doing was the best thing for both of us…

  “I see,” Tilly said. “Hmm.” She stood, and began to undo some fastening or other in her hair, preparing to go to bed.

  “I don’t think I’m ready to break with Karno,” I said.

  “No, no, of course not. You must do what’s right for you, of course.”

  In the morning, when I awoke from a fitful sleep, she had gone. I dressed and went down into Mrs Budgen’s parlour. The Craigs were already ensconced at the table, munching away at toast and jam, seething. George and Lillie seemed to have taken the strange situation personally, as though our deception had been an affront not only to the state of matrimony itself, but to their marriage in particular.

  “Have you seen Tilly this morning?” I asked. Lillie pinned me with an icy glare.

  “Your wife?” she said, solely for the benefit of Mrs Budgen, who was hovering in the doorway with a teapot. “She had to leave early for the station. Had you forgotten?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, scratching my head. “I haven’t woken up properly yet. She had to catch a train to…?”

  “To London,” Lillie said, turning to explain to our benign landlady. “Mrs Dandoe is taking a part in a new show and must start work on it at once.”

  “What?!” cried Mrs Budgen, stricken. “They’d split up a lovely young couple and send them to work at opposite ends of the country? That’s hard! That’s… Why, that’s inhuman!”

  “Well,” I shrugged. “It’s a good chance for her, I suppose.”

  “Sit down, young feller, and I’ll bring you some bacon and eggs, that’ll put a smile back on your poor face. Dear, oh dear, what a shame!” And she bustled off into the kitchen.

  George sniffed. “You’ll be coming with us to Warrington, then, I take it?”

  I nodded.

  “Very well. Just don’t expect to carry on living in the style you have become accustomed to, that’s all.”

  He was right about that. When Mrs Budgen returned she brought with her the last decent breakfast I had on that tour, but it could have been ash and potato peelings for all the mind I paid to it. I barely noticed George and Lillie’s disapproving gaze, or Mrs Budgen’s sympathetic twitterings.

  All I could think was that I might just have made a terrible mistake.

  18

  A VISIT FROM THE GUV’NOR

  THE Wednesday of the following week, I was at the theatre in Warrington, sitting in the dressing room, with my Magician’s moustache stuck on my upper lip and a bottle of Scotch hanging by the neck from my listless hand. I supposed the others were watching the first-half acts. I didn’t know and I didn’t care.

  Has anybody here seen Tilly? T-I-double L-Y…?

  Kelly, not Tilly, it was, of course, in the original. Kelly from the Isle of Man. That’s one of the old songs you do still hear about the place.

  She’s as bad as old Antonio, she’s left me on my own-ee-o…

  Round and round I went, drunkenly murmuring that daft ditty to myself, wondering if I’d done the right thing. Were my prospects with Karno really so rosy? Should I not have put Tilly first? I saw the hurt in her eyes when she realised that she was returning to London alone. I already missed those eyes.

  “Ah, young Dandoe, as I live and breathe!” said a jolly voice from the doorway, snapping me out of my melancholy navel contemplation. Who should it be but Alf Reeves, whom I hadn’t clapped eyes on for a good few months.

  “What ho, Alf,” I sighed, half-heartedly affecting the posh dude greeting that we were all using back then, as a sort of in joke. Made us sound quite foolish to bystanders and passers-by, I’ve no doubt. And to Alf, I suddenly realised, as he’d been in the States and wasn’t in on the gag.

  “How’s America?” I asked quickly, to try and wipe the puzzled expression from his features.

  “Oh, Arthur, lad,” he replied. “Nuggets of gold the size of your fist just lying around on the pavements over there!”

  My eyes must have widened, because he shook his head in pity.

  “America,” I said. “Land of opportunity, isn’t that right, Alf?”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “If you want the opportunity to get robbed or shot.”

  “Hullo, what’s this?” I said. “Oh, you really shouldn’t have…” Alf was clutching in his paws what looked like half a dozen bunches of assorted and colourful blooms.

  “Oh? Yes? What?” he spluttered in momentary confusion. “Oh, the flowers, yes. For the ladies … ahem, the ladies’ dressing room, of course. Which would be…?”

  “Along to the end and left,” I said. “Are they perhaps for one lucky girl in particular?”

  “Oh, well, one could hardly bring flowers for one and not all the others too, could one?” he blustered.

  I knew perfectly well that he was drawn there by the chance to see l
ittle Amy Minister, to whom we all knew he’d taken a shine, and I hoped the path of romance would be smoother for him than it was for me.

  “So the Guv’nor is in tonight?” I asked, and Alf slapped himself on the forehead.

  “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say, was I? Never mind. Make it a good ’un, all right?” He shrugged the bunches of flowers in his arms, grinned and disappeared.

  Performing was the very last thing I felt like doing just then. I had hardly slept since the weekend, not only because of the devastation of breaking with Tilly, but also because Syd and George had gone out of their way to find me the least hospitable digs imaginable, miles from the theatre and with a ten o’clock curfew, worse than useless for a theatrical. I had spent the last three nights in a costume hamper right there in the dressing room, which had given me a coating of dust on the roof of my mouth that the Scotch simply couldn’t shift.

  The interval drew close, and the time when all Karno hands would be turned to assembling our set, our fake theatre boxes and whatnot, behind the tabs. Suddenly there was an almighty kerfuffle in the corridor, and George, red in the face and dabbing a flop sweat from his big red forehead with a big red hanky, was shoving Karno personnel into the room for all he was worth. In came the glee club, the Terrible Turkey, the naughty boy, the aunt, the flappers, the supers and all, baffled and bewildered, and George held both his arms above his head for quiet.

  “Listen, everyone. Listen. Terrible thing, just terrible…!” he gasped, trying to get his breath back.

  “Whatever is it, Mr Craig?” one of the girls asked.

  “It’s Syd, Sydney, Mr Chaplin – he’s terrible poorly all of a sudden! Green to the gills and limp as a wet rag! Mustn’t be moved from his hotel room!”

  George seemed to feel faint at the thought of it, and sat heavily in a chair, which had the effect of making him suddenly invisible in the crowded room.

  A murmur went around, confused and concerned in roughly equal measure. What on earth was wrong with the man…? Whatever it was sounded awfully serious. The pressing point, however, everyone realised at once, was what was to be done about the performance that evening? No Fred Karno company worth its salt would ever scratch a show, even without its leading performer. Jimmy Russell and Johnny Doyle were the number-two stars, both had played the ‘Swell’ before, and they got their heads together quickly and practically.

  “No, gentlemen,” George interrupted firmly. “The solution has been decided upon by Syd himself from his sickbed.”

  A pause perfectly honed by the old ham’s many years on the boards, then: “His brother will stand in for him.”

  As one, the company gasped. Russell and Doyle both opened and shut their mouths wordlessly, as though trying to work out whether to be offended or relieved. For the rest of us it was the most exciting thing that had happened for weeks, and when Charlie himself stepped into the room, timing perfect, already clad in his brother’s costume, and suddenly reeled about ‘drunk’ against the jamb of the door, it was almost too much for us to take in.

  “Come along, come along, the set won’t assemble itself!”

  The room emptied briskly with an accompanying hubbub of chatter, and Charlie slipped over to a mirror to add a finishing touch or two. I slid along next to him and saw he was trembling feverishly with excitement as he applied some black to his eyelids. Not a time to be trembling, by the way.

  “You’re taking over from Syd?” I hissed. “You know Karno’s in?”

  “Of course I do,” he whispered out of the side of his mouth.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  He turned and faced me, his purple eyes boring into my skull.

  “Listen, Arthur. I’ve been a supporting player for well over a year. Syd was a number one in three months, you know? It’s time I stepped up. I’m going to show him. The Guv’nor, I mean. Show him I’m up to it.”

  His concentration was frightening, and the audacity of it fairly took my breath away.

  “So Syd is…?” I managed.

  “Fine, he’s fine,” Charlie hissed. “It wasn’t hard to put the fear of God into old George. A bit of green make-up we borrowed from that girl who sings the song about the frog prince, and a hot water bottle under the pillow.”

  I whistled.

  “Well, the best of British luck,” I said, as you would to a man facing a firing squad.

  Needless to say he did brilliantly. In my opinion Mumming Birds that night was better than it had ever been. The amount of adrenalin pumping around that stage has rarely been surpassed in the history of British theatre, I dare say. It certainly cleared the cobwebs from my head. Charlie’s Drunken Swell was everything that Syd’s had been, and more. The falls were breathtaking, the timing heart-stopping, the audience in helpless paroxysms of joy. Of course, at bottom, it was a pitch-perfect imitation of Syd’s performance, but with a fluency and virtuosity laid on top of every move and gesture that Syd himself would have cheerfully killed for.

  For my own segment of the act, the faulty Magician’s turn, well, it was the purest pleasure. Playing it opposite Syd, more often than not, was like a wrestling match, struggling to get my best moments out before he trampled all over them. With Charlie, that night, it was, I don’t know, it was as if we saw into each other’s minds and each had a share in controlling the other’s actions. His movements dovetailed so perfectly with my own, and the timing was so exhilaratingly immaculate, that I felt I had time to just look out into the audience and watch them enjoying us. This was The Power in action, all right, and we both knew it.

  Afterwards the backslapping and congratulations were so enthusiastic that the stage manager had to come round and hush us all up, as there were still acts trying to follow in our footsteps.

  We quickly stripped off our costumes and packed away our paraphernalia, and then adjourned to the pub next door. Most of us were a little overwhelmed, I think. Bert Darnley, who had been seething mutinously at Charlie since being supplanted as the Yukon poet, was clapping him on the back and buying him a drink. George Craig slumped in the corner, positively smelling of relief. The three girls, Amy, Dolly and Sara, chattered away at Charlie’s elbows – obviously two of them were having to share an elbow. Even the seasoned veteran Johnny Doyle was falling over himself to propose a toast and predict the brightest of futures for the younger Chaplin.

  I was reflecting to myself, as I began to calm down from the thrill of it all, that if Charlie and I were indeed rivals, then he had surely stolen a march on me that evening. Most of my thoughts, though, were elsewhere.

  Has anybody here seen Tilly? T-I-double L-Y…?

  Finally that familiar dapper little figure pushed through the pub doors, and Karno was amongst us. He glanced around the establishment with the air of a man who very rarely set foot in such a place, and then came over to our group, which hushed and spread open to admit him.

  A little cough.

  “First of all … a good evening to you all,” the Guv’nor began, receiving a murmured “good evening” in reply. Another trademark little cough, and Karno continued. “Well now, I have seen Heaven knows how many performances of Mumming Birds in the past five years, and I have to say – and I don’t say this lightly…”

  You could feel the whole company tense as he held the moment. Charlie held his head high, trying hard not to beam with self-satisfaction.

  “I have to say … ahem … that that were the finest rendition of the Magician that I have yet seen.” He nodded at me and said: “Arthur.”

  With that, Karno turned on his heel and left.

  There were gasps. Everyone looked at me, as though I had done something unspeakable, but I was just as stunned as they were.

  Then Charlie crumpled, like a man whose skeleton had just been removed. Solicitous hands helped him to a chair, where Amy undid the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie. George peered closely at Charlie’s bloodless face, and pressed a palm anxiously to his forehead.

  “I hope to
God he hasn’t got what Syd’s got,” he said.

  You wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time with Charlie for the next few days, weeks even. He sank into a black depression, and it was all we could do to get a grunt of greeting from him for many a moon. Syd was dreadfully worried. Charlie only became animated onstage. He’d reverted to the Naughty Boy role after his single night in the lead, and to look at him during the act you’d think he was his old self, but once the curtain went down the oranges or buns or whatever missiles it was he was flinging about would drop from his nerveless fingers, and he’d slope off to his hotel room to wallow in more misery.

  He was laying it on a bit thick, we all agreed. We’d all seen Karno cut him down to size on the night of his visit, and we all thought it was mightily unfair, to be sure. Unlike hapless old George Craig, the Guv’nor had seen clean through the subterfuge of Syd’s illness. He knew Syd would certainly have painted his face green if he’d thought it would advance Charlie’s career. The Guv’nor, quite simply, didn’t like being led by the nose, and he decided to stamp his immaculately shod foot down.

  I had troubles of my own. Every town we went to seemed grimmer and greyer than the one before it, and I could not wait for the tour to be over so we could get back to London and I could try and patch things up with Tilly.

  Has anybody here seen Tilly? T-I-double L-Y…?

  I wrote letters to her, of course, but the trouble was I really hadn’t a clue where to send them. It hadn’t occurred to us that we would need to know addresses when we were spending all our time together on the tour, but when she left without saying goodbye I realised I had no idea how to get in touch with her to apologise or explain.

  Then one evening I was sitting in a corner of the dressing room, writing another plea for forgiveness, when Amy Minister popped her head round the door.