by Neil McKenna
Ernest was an extraordinary little boy. Extraordinary. He could sing before he could speak, with such a beautiful clear soprano voice. ‘And Ernest was so fond of dressing up,’ she recalled. ‘From the age of six, before he could well speak, he was fond of dressing up and acting female parts.’ He could play a maidservant or a little girl with ringlets and a lisp, or he could suddenly assume the airs and graces of a grand lady and then change, in the twinkling of an eye, to a rude, rough, drunken woman of the type they averted their eyes from in the streets. Nothing was lost on Ernest. He saw it all, he stored it all up.
She always remembered the time when her Mamma was staying with them in Queen Elizabeth Row and they were dining. Ernest came in, dressed to perfection as the parlourmaid, and waited upon her Mamma at table. He served the food and poured the wine and the water beautifully.
‘Mamma did not recognise him in the least,’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton smiled indulgently at the memory. Indeed, her Mamma had been more than usually stern upon the subject. ‘I wonder that, having sons, you have so flippant a girl about you,’ she had said, after Ernest went out of the room.
Ernest was not what you might call a boyish boy, and had never exhibited the least interest in the sports and games that most boys liked to play. Mr Boulton had even gone so far as to suggest that Ernest was a trifle effeminate, something of a mollycoddle. They had had words. She would not dignify such an accusation with argument. Suffice it to say that Ernest had always been extremely delicate, and was extremely delicate still, and what mother worthy of the name would not cosset and coddle such a rare and delicate bloom?
It was, perhaps, a little unusual for a boy to make such a convincing girl and sing with such a beautiful soprano voice, but then Ernest was an unusual and talented boy. She had never worried about him dressing up as a woman to act and sing. She was not narrow. Was it not the rule in the Elizabethan theatre for beardless boys to act the parts of Shakespeare’s heroines? If it was good enough for the Bard, it was surely good enough for her. When it came down to it, it was just dressing up and make-believe and, really, she did not see any harm in it then, and she still could not see any harm in it now – even though there had been all this unpleasantness, all these complications.
D ressing up and make-believe. Stella knew – she had always known, ever since she was a little girlish boy – exactly what she wanted for herself. She was to be an actress – a great actress, it went without saying – in musical comedies and in burlesque extravaganzas. She would be a dazzling dramatic actress, too, and men and women alike – but in her mind’s eye, mostly men – would swoon and thrill as she sang sad songs of love in her perfect soprano voice and weep with pity and wonder at the pathos and power of her performances.
She was to be a queen of the stage: regal, gracious and greatly loved. She would hold her audiences in the palm of her hand. Night after night they would offer their loyalty and their devotion, and in return she would give herself to them, body and soul. Every time she made an entrance a tidal wave of applause would sweep through the auditorium and she would bathe in a rosy hue of love and adoration.
She would be a star. A star shining brightly and beautifully in the magical firmament of the stage. Her image would be etched and reproduced a million times in grainy black printer’s ink in the popular newspapers. And theatregoers, from wealthy young sprigs of the aristocracy to spoony young men and rude shop boys, would queue up and pay two shillings and sixpence for a photographic portrait of her looking beautiful and soulful.
Then there would be her beaux, an endless line of lovestruck admirers, those selfsame sprigs of the aristocracy, wealthy gentlemen and young officers in full dress uniform, all of them darkly, devastatingly handsome. They would send her lovesick notes written on thick creamy vellum and pretty gifts of hothouse flowers in boxes tied up with golden ribands. She would be duly grateful and duly gracious and send charming little notes of thanks written on delicate lace-edged paper scented with orange-flower water. She would try to be kind and try to be loving to each and every one of them. It was the very least she could do.
She had made her public debut at the age of fourteen playing Maria, the beautiful and tragic young heroine of The Brigand, where she sang very prettily and swooned very convincingly as she was abducted by swarthy moustachioed bandits who threatened to rob her of her virtue. She had been loudly applauded and there had been shouts of ‘Brava! Brava!’ from the young men in the audience, and some of them even waved and smiled at her when she made her curtsey at the end, blushing very prettily under her greasepaint.
L ife, alas, did not run smooth for Mrs Mary Ann Boulton. The wine trade fell rather short of its early promise and the family was forced to retrench and to move to a smaller house in Peckham Rye.
With careful housekeeping, with much scrimping and scraping, with a great deal of ingenuity, and a few small godsends of gifts of money from her family, Mrs Mary Ann Boulton had just about managed to keep up appearances and ensure that Ernest and Gerard had ‘everything they required’, everything that two young men from a good family would expect and might be expected to have.
‘I never allowed any cloud to fall upon my children,’ she declared proudly. ‘Whatever troubles we have had, I have always shielded them from everything.’
Things went from bad to worse. Mr Boulton continued to suffer ‘reverses’ – in truth, ‘great reverses’ – in business, so much so that he was obliged to cut his losses and look about him for a new opportunity. Only a small legacy from her departed Grandpapa kept the family afloat. The vexed question of Ernest’s profession could not be put off for much longer. Ernest was nearly eighteen and had done very little since leaving school except act and sing and mope around the house. With things as they were, they could not afford articles for a profession, so what was Ernest to do with himself?
Ernest was adamant that he did not want to enter a dreary profession. He wanted to sing and to act. But his father was equally adamant that no son of his would ever work in the theatre. Dressing up and make-believe were no life for a boy, he said. Private theatricals were one thing. But he could not, would not, countenance the theatre as a profession. It was not a fit place for a young man starting out in the world.
Quite apart from the unsuitability of the theatre, it was a question of money. Ernest would always have a home with them, but a boy of his age needed money of his own.
‘If he asked his father for anything, he always gave it,’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton said. ‘I daresay he had upon an average, a pound a week pocket money and sometimes more.’ It was a not inconsiderable sum, and it pressed hard upon their slender and straitened means. Mr Boulton said Ernest needed to earn his living, and the sooner he started work, the better.
As Ernest’s mother, she found herself in a difficult position. Of course she agreed – she always agreed – with Mr Boulton. She had the greatest respect for his judgement. He knew the world and its manifold snares for the unwary and the naive. But it was hard to see Ernest so unhappy and so pale. There had been scenes and tears, and it was all very upsetting.
T he London and County Bank in Islington was a very long way from Peckham, and each morning Stella would have to rise shortly after six to make the tiresome journey. Sometimes she would take the train from Lower Knights Hill to Victoria and then catch an omnibus, or when the weather was kind she would walk some of the way and pocket the money.
She had agreed, with the greatest reluctance, to become a clerk at the London and County Bank at a salary of £50 a year. Papa had arranged it. The prospects, her fellow clerks assured her, were excellent. In due course, Stella would become a fully fledged counter clerk and might eventually rise to the dizzy heights of a senior clerk. Stella could barely repress her yawns. If Mr Lewis, the chief clerk at the Islington branch, was anything to go by, she would rather die, she was sure, before turning into such a fussy, fiddling, pernickety dried-up stick of a man. She was bored and exhausted by the time she arrived in the morning, and she could
hardly wait for the majestic mahogany timepiece to chime six times and let her make good her escape from the terrible clockwork monotony of the bank.
M rs Mary Ann Boulton blamed herself for Ernest’s illness. It was really very extraordinary that Ernest’s ill-health should have so exactly coincided with his work at the bank. The hours were far too long, and there was that terrible journey, there and back, five – sometimes six – days a week, and in all seasons. It was all too much for him. He was delicate. ‘He was consumptive – three doctors had said he was consumptive – and he had a constant cough,’ she said. It was no wonder that Ernest was so continually absent from the bank. And if the cough and the colds and the weakness of his chest were not enough, he developed that terrible abscess, that fistula, in such an unfortunate and indelicate area, which caused her poor boy so much pain and discomfort, so bravely borne.
In the end she put her foot down and insisted that Ernest could not continue. Which was just as well, because Mr Lewis had written a very serious letter to Mr Boulton about Ernest’s absences and even suggested, none too tactfully, that he might be temperamentally unsuited to the London and County Bank. From the very moment he resigned, Ernest’s spirits soared and he declared that he would devote his life to the theatre. There was little they could do to dissuade him.
‘I was always rather opposed to his acting,’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton said later, her voice thin and querulous. ‘But I did not forbid it. I would rather he would have done anything else, but he always had such a penchant for it that I was almost compelled to give my sanction.’
F or as long as Stella could remember men had always taken notice of her. In school and out of school, at the theatre and at concerts, in church on a Sunday, on the streets, out shopping with Mamma, sitting on the omnibus and walking in the park, she had felt the hungry eyes of men of all types and all conditions upon her. There were the usual sniggerings, catcalls and whistles, and a quite bewildering array of lewd and shocking suggestions and gestures from the army of coarse and common young men thronging the streets as she made her way to and from the London and County Bank. She had been mortified at first and had cried into her pillow at night, but her Mamma had comforted her, smoothed her brow and lulled her into sleep.
And then she had started answering the rude men back, and sometimes she made them laugh. It did not take long to learn the difference between the hostile men and those whose suggestive banter was nothing more nor less than flirtation. She could see and feel the shiver and ache of desire in the flashing eyes of these young men. And some of them were quite handsome, really very handsome, in a common sort of way, and she was sometimes surprised to find that they provoked an answering shiver, an answering ache within herself.
Then there were the respectable men, mostly married, who would fall quite naturally into polite conversation with her at the bank and on the bus and in the park and at the concert hall. One thing would lead to another, and she would accept their invitation to luncheon, to tea or to supper. She would be modest and polite and smile boyishly or girlishly and sometimes look at them intensely from the depths of her blue-violet eyes and, when she saw them tremble, she knew what it was that they wanted.
And often, quite often – in fact, more often than not – she gave them what they wanted, in small, strange hotel rooms; in little out-of-the-way lodgings; in small houses where wives and children and maids-of-all-work were out; in parks and garden squares, after dark, behind trees and bushes; down alleyways, along towpaths; in closes, courtyards and crooked ways; in urinals and cubicles and public conveniences; in the dark, always hiding, always hidden; always watching, always fearing; always ready to fly when danger threatened.
Sometimes they told her that they loved her and they wanted her. Sometimes they said nothing. Only a few ever kissed her. Which disappointed her. Most only wanted one thing. They would hug and hold and squeeze her and then fumble clumsily with her trousers until they were down and off and then the deed was quickly accomplished. They would spend in her mouth or in her hand, and sometimes between her buttocks. If she felt like it, if she had that curious feeling, like an itch but not quite an itch, if they were not too big – or even if they were – she would let them penetrate her and spend in her bottom.
Afterwards they would wipe themselves and wash themselves vigorously, as if they were ashamed of what they had done. She was surprised at how many would start to cry. Sometimes they would kneel and pray for forgiveness from God. And sometimes they would hand her a golden sovereign and beg her forgiveness. Stella never knew what she had to forgive. But she said she forgave them nonetheless because it made them feel happier, and she always pocketed the golden sovereign.
Thankfully they were not all like that. Some men wanted to stay, to talk, to kiss, to embrace. And a few, more than a few, said they wanted to see her again and seemed to mean it. Such ardent swains could be very persistent and very cloying. Some of them begged her to share their lives, begged her, with tears in their eyes, for her love. But such love affairs were doomed, Stella concluded. They did not so much want to love her as to possess her, to own her as their plaything, as a china doll to be dressed up prettily in a suit or a satin gown.
Some of the coarse young men from the uncharted erotic swamp of nameless streets and alleyways, the working men, the soldiers and sailors and dark-skinned foreign men, just wanted to fuck her again and again until she could hardly bear the pain. She would leave drenched in the smell of their sweat and their seed and she would feel different. She would feel replete. And again and again she found herself drawn back to these men, drawn back by their feral bodies and their feral smells and, through the strange alchemy of lust, find rest and repose.
Stella loved them all. She knew that she could saunter on to the streets – in drag or out of drag, as Stella, Star of the Strand, or as plain Ernest Boulton – and that sooner or later a man, or several men, would proposition her. She drew notice. She compelled notice. They told her she was beautiful and that they desired her. They wanted her, they needed her. And Stella knew that it was within her power to make them happy.
In her mind, Stella compared going with men – for love or for money – with her life as a great actress. Were the two things really so very different? She was kind to men, she gave pleasure to men, to many men, to lonely and unhappy men. She brought joy to their lives, and they returned the favour with pretty gifts. She gave everything she had. She gave herself, body and soul. She performed – consummately – for each and every one. Each encounter was magical and memorable, and until the time came when she would find fame and fortune and marry the younger son of a Duke, she lived in a rosy hue of love and adulation.
7
Becoming Fanny
And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay,
We call it only pretty Fanny’s way.
Thomas Parnell,
‘An Elegy, to an Old Beauty’, 1773
N umber 35 Wimpole Street was a house of sorrow, and the early years and youth of Master Frederick William Park, or Miss Fanny Winifred Park as she invariably thought of herself, were tinged and tainted with grief.
Sometimes Fanny would sit quietly in the drawing room and solemnly turn the stiff, gilded leaves of the album of family photographs, and she would feel a lump in her throat and tears pricking at her eyes when she came to the photographs of those three of her brothers and two of her sisters who had died in their infancy. As the youngest of twelve children, she had not known these early departed brothers and sisters and she would often wonder how they would have been had they lived.
But Fanny had known her brother Atherton for all her short life. She was seven when the news of his death was received, and she could still recall how 35 Wimpole Street was plunged into a dark and terrible passage of grief, and how her Papa turned suddenly into a frail old man. Lieutenant Atherton Allan Park, so handsome in the full dress uniform of the 24th Bombay Native Infantry, so proud to serve his Queen and country, so cruelly cut down – hacked to death – a
t Jhansi under the burning Indian sun. Fanny shivered and shuddered at the thought.
Her tears would flow even more strongly when she looked at those precious few photographs of her poor Mamma, taken from them when Fanny was not yet three. Fanny herself could only remember her Mamma in fragments and feelings, as if from a half-waking dream. But Lucy, Sissy and Atherton (until he was so cruelly taken), and Alexander and Georgina – even Harry (though he was only seven at the time) – could all remember Mamma and could all tell Fanny about her and the way she was.
And then there was Mary Batson, who had nursed all twelve of them and had been her Mamma’s nurse when she was a little girl. Mary Batson was still with them after all these years, and Mary knew everything there was to know about Mamma. Fanny would sit and listen to Mary’s stories about the old days, about life in Merton Grove, when Wimbledon was a charming small village, about the balls, the parties and the love affairs, and about the time Papa and Mamma got married.
Everybody, from Mary Batson to Papa, to Lucy and Sissy and Georgina, agreed that her Mamma had been sweet-tempered and kind, with never a harsh word to say about anybody or anything.
She was also very devout, and it was she, Mary Batson said, who had introduced morning and evening prayers into the house. Even after Mamma’s early departure from this world, the tradition had continued, though now only in the mornings, and for as long as she could remember Fanny had knelt in the crowded drawing room for what seemed like an age as Papa led the household in prayers of exhortation and supplication. (Not that any of it had done much good, Fanny reflected, given the catalogue of griefs and sorrows that had been inflicted upon them.)
Number 35 Wimpole Street was a house of women. Counting the servants, there were no fewer than thirteen women to three men and two boys. When he was at home, Papa was usually in his study. Atherton was away with the Army in India, and Alexander, who was eleven years older than Fanny, was away at school. Which left only herself and Harry in a houseful of women.
