Author’s Note
The Music Hall actually goes back to Mediaeval times. In the Dark Ages tumblers and musicians entertained the aristocracy, while minstrels either sang or recited the news of their exploits to the common people.
The Elizabethans were entertainment-minded and their toughness and enterprise was tempered by a love of wit and beauty.
It was not until 1860 that the first professional female singer appeared at the more respectable song-and-dance supper-rooms in Covent Garden.
The first real Music Hall was Charles Morton’s New Canterbury, which opened in London in 1854. Fifteen hundred enthusiasts could eat, drink and make merry beneath the enormous gas-lit chandeliers.
Seven years later, Morton built himself The Oxford and then he transformed the decrepit Old Mogul Theatre at Cambridge Circus into The Palace, the most stylish of Metropolitan Music Halls.
This story is about The Oxford, which was open every evening and on Saturday afternoons and was exceedingly popular for many years.
The premises were later acquired by John Lyons and were transformed into The Oxford Street Corner House.
Chapter One - 1867
Isla heard a knock on the front door.
Quickly putting down the bowl in which she was preparing supper, she ran into the hall.
She knew from the way the person outside had knocked that it was her father.
She pulled open the door and he walked in. With his top hat at an angle, he looked exceedingly smart, but she knew with a sinking of her heart that he had been drinking.
“You are back, Papa!” she exclaimed. “I was afraid you might be late.”
“It’s not surprising that I am,” he replied sharply.
He put his top hat down on a chair and moved towards the sitting room.
The house was tiny and it made Keegan Kenway look taller and more broad-shouldered than he actually was.
At the same time he was an exceedingly good-looking man.
He was so good-looking that the crowds outside the stage door cheered when he appeared and his admirers never failed to turn up whenever he was performing.
He was, however, not as young as he used to be and only Isla knew how much he had deteriorated since her mother had died a little over a year ago.
He had seldom had too much to drink when she was alive, even though it was difficult to be abstemious in the world of the theatre. There was always somebody celebrating a success, drinking because they were depressed.
Now nearly every evening when Keegan Kenway came home, he was slightly unsteady on his feet and slurring his words.
Then Isla knew that she would have to help him up to bed.
Otherwise he would sit with his head in his hands and the tears rolling down his cheeks as he told her how much he missed her mother.
That was true, but, although she loved him, she could not help feeling that it was an over-exaggerated expression of self-pity.
It was not only because he was so unhappy but also because he had drunk too much.
Now, as he flung himself down in an armchair in the sitting room, she said brightly in a tone that was meant to cheer him up,
“Supper will be ready in a few minutes, Papa, and I am sure you are hungry.”
She glanced at the clock as she spoke and saw that it was fifteen minutes past midnight.
This meant, since the theatre usually closed before eleven, that he had been drinking with one of his cronies before coming home.
Sometimes he went out to supper with friends and then he was always insistent that Isla should go to bed early and on no account come downstairs when she heard him arrive home.
In the last few months, however, she had been aware that it was often three or four o’clock in the morning before he returned.
He would then sleep late the next morning and she would creep about the house so as not to wake him.
Now, even as she spoke and would have returned to the kitchen, something stopped her.
It was perhaps her father’s attitude or the expression on his face, which was not his usual one when he was missing her mother.
It was somehow different.
She ran to his side to kneel down by his chair.
“What is the matter, Papa?” she asked.
“I have lost my chance of being able to perform for the benefit tomorrow evening,” he answered, “and God knows I need the money!”
“But why? What has happened?”
It flashed through her mind that he had been sacked, but that was impossible.
She was well aware how popular her father had become since he had given up performing in what was called the ‘legitimate’ theatre.
Instead, he had joined Charles Morton’s New Canterbury Music Hall, which had opened in Lambeth thirteen years before.
Her mother, however, had been rather shocked by his decision. She had never visited a Music Hall and certainly had not allowed Isla to enter one.
The money, however, was good, and Keegan Kenway, from being no more than a fairly well-known actor had become almost overnight what was known as a Lion Comique.
The term, Isla was aware, meant ‘an upper class swell’.
Dressed in the smartest fashion, complete with waxed moustache, silk hat and cane, he was the talk of London.
The songs he sang and he had a very good voice, were whistled by every errand boy and the younger actors in the theatre all tried to copy his appearance.
After some years at The New Canterbury, Keegan Kenway had moved to The Oxford Music Hall, which had been built in Oxford Street in 1861.
His performance there was acclaimed by the newspapers, and there was no doubt he was now a draw that the owner, Charles Morton, greatly appreciated.
Nevertheless, Keegan Kenway seemed to be always in debt and Isla worried, as her mother had done, as to how they could pay their bills and there was always the wages of the woman who came in daily to scrub the kitchen floor.
Isla had always known that her father was generous, but he had never been so overwhelmingly generous to his friends when her mother was alive as he was after her death.
In fact Isla had meant to ask him for money when he came home tonight.
The butcher had been surly when she shopped earlier in the day and asked for what she bought to go on their account and the fishmonger had said he was a poor man with his own commitments to meet.
The shopkeepers could not imagine that anyone as famous as her father was ever short of money or came home night after night with empty pockets.
If Isla protested, he would always answer,
“I only stood the boys a drink! After all, they are my closest friends!” or “there is a girl in the theatre who is literally ‘down on her uppers’. She had been left in the lurch by somebody she trusted. I had to help her!”
Money slipped through Keegan Kenway’s fingers not so much like water as like champagne.
This was somehow appropriate, since he sang songs that made the newcomers to London believe that the streets were paved with gold and no man-about-town would even drink anything but ‘bubbly’.
But whatever it was that Keegan Kenway drank offstage was making his dark eyes, which had beguiled so many of the women in his audience, bloodshot.
His voice too was much thicker than it had been and there was a suspicious slackening in the line of his chin.
He was still exceedingly handsome, but at forty-eight he did not look the same Adonis he had been twenty years earlier, when he had married her mother.
“What has happened, Papa?” Isla asked anxiously. “Why can you not be in the benefit?”
She had been counting on the benefit. These were performances that took place frequently at most theatres to supplement the salaries of the perfo
rmers.
The performers in the Music Halls did not earn as much as the actors and actresses at Drury Lane or Covent Garden because it had to be divided among many more of them.
Nevertheless, what her father would have received would have been extremely welcome and there was a note almost of despair in Isla’s voice as she said softly,
“Tell me – about it – Papa.”
“Letty Liston collapsed after the performance tonight and the doctor insisted that she should go to hospital!”
“Oh, Papa, how terrible!”
Isla knew exactly what this meant.
Although she had never seen Letty Liston, she knew that she was very attractive and a big success in the present show at The Oxford when she appeared as a woman in a picture.
Dressed in a large white crinoline with a wreath on her fair hair, she sat in a frame on an almost dark stage.
Then Keagan Kenway would come swaggering home after a party. Wearing his top hat at an angle and twisting his cane, he was the handsome raffish ‘Smart Johnny’ whom all the girls loved.
He would look up at the picture and then in his deep baritone voice, which could still make the heart of any woman who listened to him flitter, he would beg her to dance with him.
Surprisingly the picture would come to life, Letty Liston would step down onto the stage, her father would put his arms around her and they would waltz round and round.
As he stopped, held her close and was about to kiss her, the curtains would close.
Then they opened again and Letty was back in the picture frame.
It was then, in a voice that brought tears to the eyes of all who listened to him, that Keegan Kenway would sing It Was Only a Dream.
It was a very pretty sentimental song, and because his voice, which had been magnificent, still retained much of its earlier tone, the theatre would be absolutely silent.
The diners and the drinkers never moved until he had finished.
In all her eighteen years Isla had not seen him on the stage, but she had read the notices in the newspapers and he practised the song at home.
She would play the piano and, although she knew the song by heart, it was easy to understand how much more effective it was when he exerted himself in the theatre.
For Keegan Kenway it was the triumphant moment of the evening.
Not to perform at the benefit, Isla knew, would disappoint not only him but all those who had paid to come to see him.
“Surely it would not be difficult to find somebody to take Letty’s place?” she asked.
He laughed and it was not a sound of amusement.
“The only women I could get at this late hour,” he said, “are the ‘has beens’ who hang about the theatrical agents hoping for a walk on part.”
“Then what can you do, Papa? We need the money!”
“Do you suppose I am not aware of that?” her father asked savagely. “And I signed an IOU for George Vance this afternoon.”
“Oh, no, Papa!”
“I could not refuse the chap.”
“But what will happen to us – Papa, if you give all – your money away?”
There was silence.
Then, as if she felt she must make an effort to cheer him up, she said,
“Come and have some supper. Perhaps you will be able to think of something after you have eaten.”
“Give me a drink first.”
“No – Papa. You know it is bad for you and Mama always made you have something to eat when you came off the stage.”
Isla rose from the floor and, taking her father’s hand in hers, pulled him to his feet.
He struggled up with what she knew was an effort and walked with her across the room and brushed his shoulder awkwardly against the doorframe as he passed through it.
She did not say anything, but led him into the dining room on the other side of the hall.
As he sat down in his chair, she ran to bring in the soup, which she had kept warm on the stove.
She had cooked it very carefully as her mother had taught her and it was nourishing as well as well-flavoured.
As her father started to eat, she told herself that things could not be as bad as they appeared.
Keegan Kenway finished the soup.
By the time Isla had brought in a steak, which was just as he liked it, he had taken a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard.
One look at the glass by his side told Isla that there was very little soda with it.
She made no comment, but when he had drunk down the whisky and looked at the steak, he demanded a glass of claret.
“Red wine with red meat,” he said. “That is the rule. There is some claret left that I brought home last week.”
“Only half a bottle, Papa,” Isla pointed out. “You drank a good deal of it last night.”
“I expect there is more where that came from!” Keegan Kenway replied.
Isla knew that he was thinking of the rich patrons of The Oxford, who occupied the comfortable boxes and sometimes sent him a case of wine.
They sent the ladies in the show flowers and jewellery, but Isla knew her mother had often wished where Keegan Kenway was concerned that they would not be so generous.
The drink he received was the one thing he did not give away.
Isla brought the bottle of claret to the table and poured him out a glass, but he stopped her from putting the bottle back on the sideboard.
“I think you have had enough, Papa, and you know very well that it will not do you any good.”
“Nothing can be worse than the mess I am in at the moment,” her father replied angrily. “What am I to do, Isla? What the devil can I do?”
“I am sure you can find somebody to take Letty’s place,” Isla said confidently. “What about the pretty girls in the show? The newspapers say they are the best-looking women in London!”
“That is true enough,” he replied, “but they have their own acts and will not take part in mine!”
“Why not?”
“Because when they are on the stage they want the applause for themselves and don’t want to share it with me.”
“That seems rather selfish – when you do so much for them,” Isla murmured.
She was well aware how much her father spent on the women in the Music Hall, but she was not quite certain why they were so expensive.
She only supposed that, when she found powder on his evening clothes when she brushed them, they had been expressing their gratitude for the money he had given them.
It was strange he should be so generous to women because she was sure that it was something that had never happened in her mother’s lifetime.
He would say, if she questioned him, that the women were actresses who were down on their luck, had struck a bad patch or were hoping for better things tomorrow – a tomorrow that never came.
Her father seemed to help them all and she told herself that if he did not get a benefit, he would have to borrow to keep the house going until the next one.
Keegan Kenway finished his supper and the bottle was empty.
“You should go to bed now, Papa,” Isla suggested.
“How can I sleep when I am worrying about tomorrow?” he asked irritably. “Give me another drink.”
“There is no more – and you have had – enough!”
For a moment she thought that he was going to defy her.
Then slowly he rose to his feet and, holding onto the table and then to one of the chairs, he reached the door.
He did not say goodnight.
She heard him stumble up the stairs, go into the front bedroom that he had shared with her mother and slam the door behind him.
She wondered if she should go after him and help him out of his clothes.
Once or twice he had been so incapable that he had just thrown himself down on the bed and slept as he was. Isla had then had the trouble of pressing his clothes until they looked smart enough for him to wear them again.
Then, with a dee
p sigh, she decided that he was best left alone.
She carried the plates and cutlery into the kitchen and, because she was tired, decided that she would leave them in the sink and wash them up tomorrow.
She turned out the oil lamps in the room they had been using and went up the stairs very softly.
She paused outside her father’s door to see if she could hear him snoring.
There was, however, silence, and because she was worried she opened the door very quietly.
As she suspected, he had not blown out the candles she had lit beside the bed just before he came home. He had undressed, but his clothes were lying on the floor.
She thought that he must be asleep and she walked on tiptoe into the room, picked up his coat and his stiff-fronted shirt and put them on an armchair.
His black trousers and his waistcoat went on another.
Then, as she moved towards the bed to blow out the candles, she realised that he was not asleep but watching her.
“You are awake – Papa!” she said in a low voice.
“I was thinking you are very like your mother,” her father answered, “and for a moment when you came in, I thought she had come – back.”
The pain in his voice was unmistakable and Isla said gently,
“I know that wherever she is, Papa, she is thinking of you and loving you.”
She put her hand over his as it lay outside the sheet and said,
“I am sure she will help us and perhaps think of a solution to our problems.”
Her father looked at her with what she thought were bleary eyes.
The light from the candle made her hair very golden and it haloed her small pointed face.
“You are lovely, very lovely,” he said in a thick voice. “Why should you not take Letty’s place? You are far prettier than she is!”
Isla stared at him in astonishment. Then, as she was about to reply, she realised that he had closed his eyes and, as if he had found a solution to what was worrying him, had fallen asleep.
For some seconds she stood just looking at him.
Then she blew out the lights and, leaving the room, shut the door very quietly.
In her own bedroom Isla thought that it was a very strange thing for her father to have said.
Although, of course, he did not mean it, it was something, if she could do it, that would enable him to claim his share in the benefit.
Only a Dream Page 1
