‘My bones denounce the buckboard bounce, and the cactus hurts my toes…’ Her voice shook a little at first. Her hands went all stiff. Then seeing Eddie’s encouraging smile. A wink. Suddenly enjoyment took over.
‘… And I’m all yours in Buttons and Bows …’
Eddie was singing her praises– literally. Silly Eddie. ‘Hey, look at her … just past seventeen … she’s cute and pert and got that certain– you know the rest…’
‘OK,’ he was saying. ‘Just us two now. We’re going to show how we can put a number across. I got a feelin’ I’m fallin’’
It was easier to sing with Eddie. She saw he wasn’t nervous, just happy as always when he was singing. She did one more by herself. Eddie said, ‘Stringalong. OK?’
‘You may not be an angel, ‘cos angels are so few, but until the day that one comes along, I’ll string along …’
They took a cab home. When Helen saw Maria’s face, she remembered the messy table, the half-eaten bun. She had promised to get the supper ready.
But she had her first professional engagement– with Eddie.
‘She’s awfully young,’ Maria said, over the supper table. ‘And what’s going to happen to the secretarial course?’
‘It’s an evening spot, for Chrissake,’ Eddie said. ‘She can still attend college.’
‘And the homework?’
‘I’ll get that done straight after I’m back,’ said Helen. ‘It’s only for three weeks.’ She thought Maria was being a bit dampening.
It wasn’t exactly the West End, being fifteen miles out of London, but as Eddie said, it was a beginning. Maria and Jenny came to listen. Ronnie was thrilled for her, and brought her parents in a party.
‘You’re getting to be a habit with me,’ sang Eddie. People who remembered him, came up and shook him by the hand. Said, ‘Glad to see you back.’
Somehow in those three weeks, something happened to the secretarial course. To her future. Everything altered. She was the same Helen Connors who’d sung squeakily Someday my prince will come for Mam. It was the same Helen, but now she was good. It seemed some other engagements might come from this one.
Then they heard they could if they wanted do a week at the Dudley Hippodrome and another at the Nottingham Empire.
She cried the last night in the taxi from the station. ‘Mam would be so proud of me,’ she said. ‘I just wish Mam could have heard me.’ Eddie, who she’d noticed wept easily, joined her now. He put his arms round her, hugged her tight. ‘You have a family now, you know,’ he told her. And ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘I love you both so much. And I’m so happy.’ She thought afterwards that she’d wept perhaps from happiness too.
She was happy anyway because Maria had said that as far as she was concerned, it was all right to say goodbye to the secretarial college, and begin this singing career. Helen was worried because she knew the fees had been paid in advance but Maria said, ‘The young too often have their wings clipped.’
‘Were yours?’ Helen asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Maria said, ‘I never tried to fly.’
A few days later, they were singing together at home, when Maria teased him again about his choice of numbers.
‘Smoke gets in your eyes,’ she said. ‘Honestly.’
And he said yet again, ‘She’ll get nowhere without standards.’
‘Nowhere? Where’s she going, then?’ Maria asked, half laughing.
‘Right to the top,’ Eddie said. ‘And what’s more– I’m going with her.’
Helen had sometimes seen film musicals, showing the star’s triumphal progress around the world. Trains rushed towards the audience, names flashed on the screen. Cities, theatres, cinemas, names in lights, a storm of applause. Tired emotional smiling hero or heroine, the world at their feet.
Persistent images … How different from those star-studded biographies was her and Eddie’s life that winter of 1948, spring 1949. Spasmodic engagements. Southport Empire, the Floral Hall, Morecambe, Dundee Palace, the Victoria, Burnley. They played so many palaces that Eddie joked, ‘Half our life is spent in palaces.’ When they were engaged at the Embassy, Peterborough, ‘What’s a mere embassy,’ he asked, ‘to us– used to palaces?’ Helen asked, ‘What about the Hippodrome– didn’t they used to put Christians to the lions there?’ They might do so yet, Eddie said.
Travel in dingy third-class slow-stopping trains, cross-country. Bletchley, Crewe. Looking up digs Eddie remembered from perhaps ten or fifteen years back, or if unlucky, trying to get a recommendation from someone else on the variety bill. And then the bill itself: their placing, low down– but first to perform, to a cold house.
In the evenings, out for a hurried early supper. Used to Maria’s good, robust cooking, Helen suspected the strong tea, the chips, the Daddy’s Favourite Sauce, were doing nothing for her skin. As were the lack of fresh air and exercise. Between engagements, Maria would express her worry. ‘I want to do it,’ Helen would say obstinately. ‘I must do it.’
For her it was all excitement. It was enough just to be doing it. But she could never forget that for Eddie … Eddie had once been top of the bill.
And then one evening, he got the bird. She had heard of such things, even seen it on the same film screen which had shown the whistle stop tours. But nothing prepared her for the reality.
A bitter cold day in March. They had a date to do the cabaret at a medical students end of term ball. (She wondered afterwards what had led the committee to choose them– straitened finances perhaps?) She fought all day a sore throat and blocked nose, keeping well away from Eddie so that he didn’t catch it. Her voice had been hoarse in the morning. By tea-time it had gone completely.
She, they, weren’t too worried. ‘Just arrange the numbers without me, Eddie. So what– about the duets and the patter–Sing the songs that made you famous … Pretend you’re back in the Rainbow Room in 1935.’
It was wrong from the start. They were a lively crowd, their drinking already several hours old when she and Eddie made their appearance. She came on– only to be taken off as soon as the MC had explained her loss of voice. The first number, Blue Moon, didn’t go too badly except that everyone talked throughout. She felt embarrassed, sitting down in the audience. Then he made a mistake of talking to them. Oh dear God, Eddie, don’t. He told them, with tears in his eyes, of the Rainbow Room, of Al Coleman, of the good old days. The readily emotional Eddie.
‘Bring on the blonde,’ someone called out. Eddie ignored him. Some students at the front struck up their own chorus.
‘Down the lane, down the lane, there’s lots of dirty women …’
‘The blonde, let’s hear the blonde.’
‘Soldiers half a crown, Sailors, half a guinea–
‘Where’s the blonde?’
‘Big fat men two pounds ten …’
Eddie was trying still:
‘… And now I’d like to sing, You took advantage of me.’ ‘I’ll take advantage of her if you won’t, chum.’
‘Give us the blonde popsy …’
‘What would you do, chum, what would you do?’
A group in the far corner struck up in unison: ‘Why was he born so beautiful…’ The chorus was taken up.
The volume of noise increased. Soon it filled the whole room, drowning the band – obliterating completely a gesticulating, ridiculous– yes, ridiculous, weeping Eddie. The MC made ineffectual gestures. Called for order. The rude chorus only surged louder.
‘Why was he born so beautiful…’
Finally Eddie escaped. Except for a couple of students who made a half-hearted teasing grab at her, Helen slipped out after him unnoticed.
In the corridor outside, he was weeping. She stood behind him. ‘I’m here, Eddie.’ Her voice scarcely came out. He said angrily, ‘Go away. Out. Home to bed. Anywhere …’ When she didn’t move. ‘Home – you’re ill.’
She said: ‘Eddie, it doesn’t matter, they’re only silly boys. They’re drunk, Eddie.’
There was a hospital porter to help. Embarrassed, she bundled a tearful Eddie into the taxi. They sat apart. Tears were still streaming down his face. She felt utterly helpless. She wondered if she should put her arms round him. They hugged for good news, why not for bad?
But she felt hurt and rejected. He was muttering to himself, swearing, as if she weren’t there. ‘Berks, just a lot of fucking berks. Is this why I bloody sweated it out down under, to get the bird from a lot of berks? Still wet behind the ears when I was packing them in … I was making records before they were fucking conceived …’
He paid off the taxi, still in this mood. Inside the small hotel they’d extravagantly booked into, he went upstairs noisily, Helen creeping behind. ‘Don’t tell Maria, that’s all I ask,’ he said, opening the door of his room. ‘Don’t you ever tell Maria about this.’
Shivering, feeling now quite ill, she was unable to sleep. She heard Eddie pacing about. Bitter cold outside, bitter cold inside, she was chilled by the realization that perhaps Eddie on his own was not quite enough. That if she’d stood up to sing, it would have been all right. Yet she felt besmirched by it all. When he was mocked, she was mocked too.
If it had happened to her, she knew she would never have managed. One reception like that, and I would be finished. Eddie, she suspected, would be all right tomorrow.
And so it was. The next morning, he was calm, a little sulky.
‘I’ll expect an apology. They can bloody well send … It was an insult to you too. They bloody insulted you.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’m very tough.’
Her voice came back a few days later, in time for an engagement in Leicester. While there, they stayed with Eddie’s little sister Rita who had married a Pole in 1941, and now at the age of thirty-nine had a family of five. Helen felt left out and child-ridden as Eddie and his sister shouted and cried and remembered. Sulked and quarrelled too. Everywhere in the house was a sticky trail of Government orange juice. Her sleeves were gummy with it from the arms of chairs. She sat in it, found it staining her handbag and her gloves, trod in it and wiped it off numerous knife handles.
In the spring clothes came off coupons, and Maria bought her a complete wardrobe. Maria had become friendly with Eleanor Dennison’s adopted nephew, Guy. Long letters came from him about his life in Palermo. Maria showed her some (coming as she did from Sicily, they must interest her a lot). Helen remembered the autumn of 1946, and how she had only quite liked his wife, Laura. She suspected Maria of not liking her at all.
Ronnie had finished her course by now and was working for an export firm in Moorgate. So far it wasn’t very glamorous. Her boss was married and unattractive.
The summer of 1949, she and Eddie were busy throughout. The sun shone day after day. There were a couple of weeks at Butlins, Filey, and a week in the Belgian resort of Knokke-le-Zoute (her first time out of England). She carried her journal about but never had time to write in it.
Maria worried that she was not having sufficient time off ‘to be a girl, to have fun’. By that she meant boyfriends. She herself didn’t feel in any hurry. At eighteen she had her life before her, lots of it. When she and Eddie were established, they could take more time off and relax. She knew how easy it all was, if you wanted it. Not just Tim and Bruce, but men and boys who invited her out after performances (remembering Maria’s words to Eddie, she wasn’t sure what he got up to after they returned to their digs in the evenings. But no hint of anything ever reached her. Maria could be proud, she thought).
In October they celebrated a year of working together. By now she wasn’t sure how she saw her future– and tried not to think too hard about it, because she could see Eddie didn’t want to. For now, she was happy as she was, loving the moment when they came on stage, the band struck up, her cue came, Eddie looked over at her and smiled– and she sang.
‘You can throw a silver dollar down upon the ground and it will ro-oh-oll, because it’s row-ow-ound …’
Twice that summer and autumn she was approached to go solo. And an agent had several times suggested she audition for radio shows. Each time she refused. ‘Later,’ she said, ‘when I’ve more confidence.’ But she knew she was no longer afraid, hardly nervous now at all. Only confident, in love with singing. As Eddie had always been. It felt right. Someone wanted to groom her as a café chanteuse. She didn’t care so much for belting out numbers now– her style was growing more intimate. It was suggested someone else take over developing her. ‘I could make you into a second Dinah Shore … no, even a second Peggy Lee.’ Eddie said coldly, crossly, ‘Maybe you could, but this one’s going to be the first Helen Connors.’
She pretended often to Maria that she was in no hurry, that she wasn’t ambitious. Knowing that Maria would worry about her in the great world of entertainment without Eddie to watch over her. But the whole truth was that it was Eddie she was afraid for. (If I’m up and coming, he’s down and, if not out, going. That was the truth.)
They talked sometimes of getting work on one of the liners. Eddie spoke nostalgically of the pre-war days. In 1933 he had gone to South Africa like that. It would be attractive. No digs to find, no meals to worry about, sunshine, sea air, foreign stopovers, luxury. Well-heeled passengers. ‘Who knows, Helen, you might meet a millionaire– marry a millionaire?’ As ever, Helen shook her head, explaining that wasn’t her ambition. Something Eddie could never understand, with his simple hopes and plans for her. (‘You wouldn’t actually say no to a Rockefeller, would you?’)
They had some work over Christmas, although she had turned down a panto offer because it didn’t include Eddie. Then at the end of January, they had a stroke of luck. A couple who were to sing with the resident band at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira were involved in a car crash serious enough to put them out of action. Helen and Eddie were offered the job.
It was all a great rush. Except for the week in Belgium she had never been abroad before. She was delirious, sick with excitement. Maria remembered that Sybil’s sister Molly had gone to Madeira for her honeymoon in the ‘twenties. It was a beautiful island, stopping place of cruise ships, winter sunning place for the rich. Tubercular people settled there (if only Mam had been able to get somewhere like that, Helen thought). Made from a volcano, a jewel off the coast of Africa, as the brochures said. A floating garden in the Atlantic.
The night before they left, she dreamed she was at Moorgarth. Maria was sitting beside her bed, just as she had once used to, a book on her lap. She said, ‘You’re going to be famous soon, Helen. You won’t want me reading to you.’ Helen said, ‘Read the Golden Lion.’ But Maria shook her head. ‘I don’t want to think about the Lion,’ she told Helen, ‘the Lion has a heart of stone.’ Helen asked, ‘Does that mean he’s hard-hearted?’ She saw to her horror that Maria was crying. ‘No, it’s you have a heart of stone,’ she said. ‘You– Helen. Successful Helen.’
She was shaky when she woke. She felt certain, the dream told her so, that she was to be a success, at Eddie’s expense. Remembering Maria’s tears, that shan’t be, she thought. We are a team, we are partners, or we are nothing.
They flew out direct, by seaplane, a service which had begun only a few months before. Leaving winter-cold England her excitement grew during the journey. Then her first sight of the harbour, white buildings set on the mountainside beneath a blue sky– which even as they were looking, changed to mist and low-hanging rainy cloud. Then by the time they had been driven up to Reid’s, it had changed back. The sea once more lapis-lazuli blue.
The sixty-year-old Reid’s Hotel, on the western sea front, had had a new east wing built just before the war. To Helen, after the succession of digs, often in rain, fog or cold, it seemed a dream. Their rooms were at the top. Helen’s, on the corner, had a view of the sea. As soon as they’d unpacked, they walked in the terraced gardens. The sun was just going down. The flowers dazzled her– bright red poin
settias, garish bird of paradise flowers, lilac- and rose-coloured bougainvillea tumbling, yellow mimosa, the extravagant red hot pokers.
Inside, guests were sunk deep in armchairs or on sofas, while gloved waiters wheeled tea-trolleys laden with sandwiches, plum cake, madeira cake, iced ginger cake. Everything to make the wartime child’s, the austerity adolescent’s mouth water. Some were eating on the terrace, where the sparrows fought for crumbs.
She and Eddie ate a light supper in the restaurant just before the guests came down, then went up to change in the hour or so before dancing began. Maria had bought Eddie a new dinner jacket. She had also made Helen a dark green velvet strapless dress which showed off her tiny waist and was kind to her small bust. She had brought with her two favourites– a hyacinth blue taffeta cut down from one of Maria’s pre-war frocks, and a red chiffon off the shoulder. She had new make-up, a complete set of Helena Rubinstein, and scent, Quelques fleurs of Houbigant, all bought her by Maria.
She tingled with excitement.
‘let my heart fall into careless hands,’ she sang. ‘Careless hands that broke my heart in two.’ She did not once transpose her words. Her hands behaved as if taken over– someone else moved them, perfectly. Open wide, like Eddie’s.
‘I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China, all to myself alone.’
Eddie, smooth, back on form. Eddie singing to an audience not so unlike the audience of his heyday. Tonight wasn’t for him 1950, but perhaps 1930.
A woman in black satin, with hennaed hair and a trumpeting voice, asked for his autograph. ‘If you knew how I adored you as a girl. When you sang Torn Sails– I used to weep so frightfully …’ She introduced her husband, Colonel Maitland, ‘who can’t dance, poor darling, because of a gammy leg’. There were another couple in the party, and she and Eddie sat with them for a quick drink.
Colonel Maitland remarked, wasn’t it quite astounding the sudden rise to popularity of this Donald Peers? Grown women swooning. By a Babbling Brook. ‘Middle-aged plump Welshman. Odd, eh?’
The Golden Lion Page 39
