There were more carts and vans about now and a few more people crossing back and forth over the intersection as the town made its way home from work to have its tea. Women with prams and men with knapsacks, loud boys playing vicious, agonizing games of knuckles with each other while they waited for the conker season to commence, all jostling along the streets that led to the four compass points and crossing over where they joined, doing a hurried trot between the coal trucks and the atolls made of horse muck and, just at that moment, a red tram with an advertisement for Adnitt’s gloves across its front. This came up from the west, along the road that he stood facing down with the inflated, sagging sun behind it, and continued on its iron rail past him on his right to hum away up Gold Street. He was living in a modern world all right, but didn’t always feel like he belonged here, in the first years of this new and daunting century. He thought most people felt as jittery and out of place as he did, and that all the optimistic new Edwardians you heard about were only in the papers. Looking round him at the passing people, from their faces and the way they dressed you wouldn’t know the Queen was dead eight years, but then when everyone was poor they tended to look much the same from one reign or one era to another. Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.
And it never would be, not in England. Look at all the business with the People’s Budget as they called it, where they’d made provisions for some money to be taken from the income tax and spent upon improvements in society, but then the House of Lords had thrown it out. Somebody ought to throw them out, he thought, and fumbled in his jacket for his pack of snouts. England was going down the plughole and he didn’t reckon that this twentieth century was going to be as kindly to the country as the nineteenth had been. There were all the Germans, for a start, making their ugly noises and their ugly ships. Last year they’d bragged about how much ammonia they’d managed to produce, while now they bragged about how many bombs. Then there was India kicking up a fuss and wanting their reforms. Not that he blamed them, but he thought it was a sign there might not be so many pink bits to school atlases in years to come. The British Empire looked as if it was decaying, inconceivable as that might seem. It had most likely died, to his mind, with Victoria, and now was in the long slow process of accepting its demise and falling quietly to bits.
Thinking about the old days, watching while a junkman cursed a grocer’s lad whose bike had shot across before his horse and cart, he was reminded of the first time that he’d come here to Northampton. He’d been nine, so it had been, what, 1898? Taking the box of ten Wills’s Woodbines from his pocket, he extracted one of the remaining six and balanced it upon his lower lip while he returned the narrow packet to his coat. It was this very same theatre that he’d been appearing at, that first time more than ten years back, with Mr. Jackson’s troupe of child clog dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads. He’d stood on this corner with his best friend from the outfit, Boysie Bristol, and they’d talked about the double act that they were going to make it big with, as the Millionaire Tramps, decked out in fake whiskers and big diamond rings. This place had been the Grand Variety Hall back then, and Gus Levaine had still been running it, but otherwise it didn’t seem so different. There they’d been, Boysie and Oatsie, cutting off from their rehearsals to waste time here on this spot and think about the fame and fortune they could see stretched out before them, much the same as he was doing still today, all these years later. Contrary to what he’d thought about his father knowing he was soon to die, it seemed more likely to him now that people just made mostly hopeless guesses at how things would work out. While he couldn’t speak for Boysie Bristol, who he’d not seen in five years, for his part he was fairly certain that whatever roles the future held in store for him, Millionaire Tramp would not be one of them. He took a box of matches from his other pocket, turning to one side and pulling his lapel up as a wind-shield while he lit his fag.
Exhaling a blue plume, the west wind he was facing caught the smoke and dragged it back across his shoulder, off up Gold Street. He was looking at a little patch of wasteland halfway down the hill across the road from him and thinking vaguely of the Eight Lancashire Lads – four of them were from outside Lancashire and one of them had been a short-haired girl, but it was true that there were eight of them – when out of nowhere he remembered. This was where they’d met the black man, the first one he’d ever really seen except for pictures in encyclopaedias.
Him and Boysie had been skulking here, debating the logistics of their double act, deciding that their diamond rings should be made out of paste until their turn had made them into actual millionaires, when down the hill he’d come upon his funny bike, over the crossroads and towards them. The chap’s skin was black as coal and not a shade of brown, with salt-and-pepper showing up already in his hair and beard so that the boys had thought he must be getting on for fifty. He was riding a peculiar contraption of a sort that neither lad had previously come across. It was a bicycle that had a two-wheeled cart fixed on the back, but what made it an oddment were its tyres, the two on the machine itself and those upon the trolley that was dragged behind it. They’d been made of rope. Fitted around the bare iron rims were lengths of the same formerly-white hawser that had been employed to tie the trailer to the bike, now ridden through so many sooty puddles that their colour wasn’t noticeably lighter than that of the cyclist himself.
The Negro, seeing that the boys were gaping at him as he came over the crossroads, smiled and pulled his bicycle-and-cart up to the curb a little past them down the hill. He did this with small wooden blocks that he had strapped beneath his shoes for brakes, taking his feet from off the pedals so that they hung down and scraped over the cobbles of the road until the wagon was brought in this manner to a halt. Its rider had looked back across his shoulder, grinning at the two boys who had been regarding him so rudely, and called out a friendly greeting to them.
“Ah hope you two youngsters ain’t bin gittin’ up tuh any trouble, now.”
The man’s voice had been marvellous, like nothing that they’d ever heard before. They’d trotted down the hill to where he was and told him they were waiting their turn to perform as clog dancers, which almost was the truth, then asked him where he’d come from. He’d be too self-conscious now, he thought, to just come out and say that to a black man, but when you’re a kiddie you just speak what’s on your mind. The fellow had black skin and had a foreign accent. It was only natural that they should ask where he was from, and naturally was how he’d taken it, without offence or anything. He’d told them he was from America.
Of course, that had set both boys off on a great stream of questions about Indians and cowboys, and if all the buildings in the cities were as tall as they’d been told. He’d laughed and said New York was “purty big”, though looking back he hadn’t seemed half so impressed about his origins as the two boys had been. He’d told them how he’d lived here in Northampton for about a year now, “down on Scarlut Well”, wherever that was, and then after some more chat had said he ought to be about his work. He’d winked at them and told them to keep out of trouble, then he’d lifted up his wood-blocks and careered away downhill, towards where the ornate grey drum of a gas-holder reared against the sky. After the man had gone, the two of them had enthused for a time about America, and then had imitated how the black bloke talked, his own impression knocking Boysie’s into a cocked hat. Then they’d gone back to all their Millionaire Tramp pipedreams, and he’d never thought about the curious encounter from that day to this.
He took a drag that was more like a sip off of his Woody and then blew the smoke out down his nose, the way that he’d seen others do and thought it looked quite stylish. There was now a fair old bunch of people heading back and forth over the crossroads, either riding or on foot, and he stood wondering what else there might have been from those times that he’d just forgot about. Not skull-faced Mrs. Jackson, wife of the Lancastrian former teacher who’d set up the company, sat suckling
her baby son while overseeing the clog dancing troupe’s rehearsals. He’d remember that sight if he lived to be a hundred. Now he thought about it, there were more than likely very few things like that Negro chap, things he’d forgot about by accident, although he knew there were a multitude of things that he’d forgot about on purpose, as it were.
It wasn’t that he was ashamed of where he’d come from, but a lot of what this business was about was how things looked. He had an eye to how he wanted things to be reported if he ever managed to make something of himself. It didn’t hurt to come from a poor background: ‘rags to riches’ was a story everybody loved. The rags part of it, though, that had to be depicted in a certain way, touched up and made more picturesque with all the nasty little details painted out. Nobody would have shed a tear for Little Nell if she’d expired in childbirth or from syphilis. The public had an appetite for sadness and for sentiment, and what they saw as all the colour of the worse-off classes, but nobody liked the taste of squalor. The Inebriate went down a treat for just so long as he was hanging round a lamppost, talking to it like a pal. The skit was cut off long before he shit his trousers or went home and put his wife in the infirmary by belting her until she couldn’t walk.
That was another element that needed getting rid of if you wanted to present your tale of poverty in the right light, all of the fights and beatings. If at some uncertain point in the uncertain future he was asked to reminisce, say for some little magazine on the theatre, why, then he’d talk about Mumming Birds, he’d talk about The Football Match where he’d appeared with Harry Weldon, and he’d even talk about the Eight Lancashire Lads. The years that him and Sydney spent as the performing mascots of the Elephant Boys, though, they wouldn’t get a mention. Not a dicky bird.
A sudden gust along the west arm of the crossroads blew the cigarette smoke back into his eyes so that they watered for a second and he couldn’t see. He waited for a bit then wiped them with his cuff, hoping that all the people passing wouldn’t think that he was crying; that a girl had stood him up or anything like that.
There had been nothing else but gangs all over London back when he was growing up. You didn’t strictly have to be in one of them, and if you wanted to stay out of trouble it was better if you weren’t, but there was something to be said for being friendly with a gang and sort of on its edges. If you picked a mob to hang around who’d got a reputation that was terrible enough, then with a bit of luck the other gangs would see that you were left alone. There hadn’t been a crew in all the city or its boroughs half as frightening as the boys from Elephant and Castle, which was how come him and Sydney pallied up to them.
Him and his elder brother could both sing and dance by that age and had often done turns on the street to earn a penny when their mother’s luck was going badly, as it often was. The Elephant Boys, who’d think nothing of disfiguring or robbing adult men, had been impressed by him and Sydney, shrewdly noticing the brothers’ obvious entertainment value. They’d be called on as the gang’s performing monkeys, either as a means of bringing in some coppers when the funds were low or else to lift morale before and after some hair-raising punch-up with a rival bunch of lads, perhaps the Bricklayer’s Boys from Walworth, somebody like that. His speciality had been to jam his dainty feet into the handles on a pair of dustbin lids, then tap-dance on a metal grating just for all the deafening racket it would make. They’d called it Oatsie’s Stamp. In fact, the Elephant Boys were the first to call him Oatsie, now he thought about it.
It had been a horror. He’d be doing Oatsie’s Stamp with Sydney joining in on spoons or comb and paper, just whatever was about, and there the biggest thugs from out the gang would be, sat by the roadside, studiously sharpening their market-worker’s hooks up on the curb-stones, sometimes looking up and whistling or clapping if they thought that him and Stakey were performing well. Stakey was what they’d called his brother in those days, from steak and kidney. There they were, Stakey and Oatsie, hiding round the corner, watching while the scrap or massacre was taking place, then afterwards they’d both be called back on so he could do the victory dance with a white face at all the business he’d just seen – boys running home with one ear hanging from their head, a lad of fourteen screaming with the blood all down his legs from where a hook had caught him up the arse – and he’d be thinking about all of this while he was stamping on an iron grid, the dustbin tops wedged on his plates of meat making a noise like Judgement Day, with hot sparks shearing from the clattering metal up round his bare knees. He’d been what, seven, eight years old?
If he’d learned anything from all of that it had been that he couldn’t bear the thought of being hurt, of having something permanent done to his body or especially his face. They were the things he hoped would lift him out of all this grubbing round to make a crust. If anything should happen to them, that should be the end of it. Of him. He’d stood and watched once, sick with shame, while Sydney got a thumping from an older member of the gang who’d taken umbrage over something Syd had said. He’d known, and Sydney had assured him later, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to help, but all the same he’d felt a coward over the affair. He could have said something, at least, but then that might have meant that he was next, so he’d just stood there and watched Stakey have his cheek split open. If, unlikely as it seemed, he ever wrote a memoir, none of this would be included.
Arguments or shouting matches, those he was all right with, but a fight was something he’d try anything he could do to avoid. Some of the older entertainers that he knocked about with on the circuit reckoned things were looking bad between England and Germany and thought sooner or later there might be a war. He’d be just twenty-one next April and then he’d have the key of the door, never been twenty-one before and all of that, but he’d still be of army age if anything should start. He didn’t fancy that idea at all, and still hoped there was some way he could be safe in another country, if and when it happened. He’d been booked in for a month to play at the Folies Bergère for Karno earlier that year and he’d enjoyed it so much that he hadn’t wanted to come home. He’d seen more lovely women than he’d ever dreamed of, which was saying something with his dreams. He’d met Mr. Debussy, the composer, and he’d had the only real brawl of his life with the prize-fighter Ernie Stone in Stone’s hotel room after too much absinthe. Stone had won, of course, but he’d not done too bad considering and had surrendered only when the lightweight boxer hit him in the mouth so that he’d thought that he might lose his teeth. Returning to the old routines of Mumming Birds and touring gloomy northern towns after all that had been a disappointment, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he got to go abroad again, preferably not in a tin hat as a conscript of the army. Karno had been going on about America, but then Fred Karno talked about a lot of things and only some of them would ever come to fruit. He’d keep his fingers crossed and see what happened.
Oatsie took a few more quick puffs on his fag, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out beneath a swivelling boot before he kicked it off the curb. The crossroads’ gutters brimmed with empty cigarette packs, Woodbines, Passing Clouds, and an unappetising salad of dead leaves. He had to squint about a bit before he caught sight of the trees that these had evidently fallen from, some way along the crossroads’ westward route so that he only saw the tops of them, gold in the setting sun. Now that he looked he saw that there were also saplings sprouting from a couple of the chimneys closer to him, rooted in the dirty brickwork, like the one he could see growing up above the roofline of the public house across the street, the Crow and Horseshoe. Noticing a street-sign bolted up on the far corner and made near unreadable by soot and rust, he saw the slope he stood on was called Horseshoe Street, which helped explain at least the second part of the pub’s name. And if those further trees whose tops he could just glimpse were standing in a graveyard then that might explain the first part, he supposed. He pictured chubby carrion birds all perched there screeching on their tombstones where the
names had been erased by moss, and then he wished he hadn’t.
He was only twenty after all. He didn’t need to think of all that morbid business for a long time yet, although there’d been lads killed in the Boer War a good sight younger than what he was now. For that matter, there had been kids in Lambeth who’d not got to their tenth birthdays. He wished he could still believe in God the way he had that night in Oakley Street, down in the basement where he was recovering from fever, when his mother had performed the most dramatic scenes from the New Testament to keep him occupied. She’d put all of the talents from a stage career she’d only recently abandoned into the performance and had almost done too good a job, with him left hoping that he’d have a relapse in his fever so that he could die that night and meet this Jesus who he’d heard so much about. She’d been that passionate, he’d never doubted any of the stories for an instant. Mind you, that had been before him and his brother were dragged through the workhouse with her, and before she had been put in the asylum for a spell. He wasn’t quite so sure today about the heaven that he’d heard described that night, so vividly he couldn’t wait to touch it.
These days, though, he’d lowered his sights and if he thought about what might be after death at all it was in terms of how he’d be remembered, or else how he’d be forgotten. What he wanted was his name to live on after him, and not just as a character from pubs around Walworth and Lambeth, how his father had been posthumously labelled. What he wanted was to be well thought of and well spoken of when he was dead, the way that someone like Fred Karno would be. Well, perhaps that was a bit ambitious, given Karno’s stature in the business, but at least he’d like to be recalled as someone in the same division, even if he was a fair sight lower down in people’s estimation than what Fred would be. Considering the future, when there’d be more people everywhere, he could see how the Music Hall would be much bigger and much more important than it was today, and Oatsie thought there was a chance that he’d get written up somewhere as a contributor to the tradition’s early days, at least if he could manage not to get killed in a war before he’d got his break.