Alma Cogan (7 page)

There was a magic act popular in my time. It involved, as many of these acts did, a volunteer from the audience coming up on to the stage.

For this particular trick, the volunteer was shown a number of books and invited to pick a single title (the books were ‘presented’ by the magician’s assistant, balancing on the balls of her feet and wearing a scooped-out sparkling leotard, in the time-honoured fashion).

Having made his selection, the volunteer would be asked to tell the audience how many pages there were in the volume he was now holding.

He would then be asked to nominate a number (‘Pick a page! Any page!’) between one and the number he had just mentioned. This done, he would next be asked to pick another number corresponding to a line of text on that page and to read the line aloud slowly to the audience.

As he read, the magician would chalk the words on the board, writing rapidly, dotting the ‘i’s noisily and using other bits of stage business to bring up the dramatic tension.

I would sense the hush and hear the urgency of the scrape of chalk on board as I sat waiting to go on. And when I did, I would invariably reach out and turn up the volume on the Tannoy in my dressing-room in order to catch what the odd words, wrenched from their context, were this time around.

The act would be brought to a conclusion by the conjuror removing a cigarette from a silver case, showing it to the audience with a flourish, bringing a light to it, and exhaling a long puff of smoke up into the spotlight to prove it was real.

Then, taking care to ensure that it flashed a semaphor in the light as he produced it, he would take a razor-blade and carefully
slice through the cigarette paper from top to bottom. Finally (drawing back his cuffs conspicuously to show that the hanky-panky didn’t happen at this stage), he would tamp the loose tobacco into the cupped palm of his assistant and pass what was left to the volunteer from the audience.

‘Would you please read what is written on the piece of paper you are now holding in your hand, puh-le-e-e-e-ze!’ And what was written, of course, was what was spelled out on the board which the assistant was now parading across the stage like one of those girls in savagely-cut satin hot-pants who go around with the round-cards at championship boxing matches. Cue walk-off music. Cue applause.

These meaningless snatches of sentences, recited importantly several times in the course of a few minutes, in a disembodied, almost an incantatory way, could be oddly potent. With the repetition, some sort of meaning seemed to coalesce around them.

Many times I would be halfway through the first song of my set and I wouldn’t have heard a word that I’d sung; my mind would still be snagged on some random string of words which, more often than you would think possible, seemed to have a hauntingness or mysterious resonance.

I can now remember only two of them.

The
lights
grow
brighter
as
the
earth
lurches
away
is one.

‘You’ve
dyed
your
hair
since
then,’
remarked
Jordan,
is the other.

Why I should have remembered these two and wiped the rest is impossible to know. But the fact is that they stay lodged, stubborn as meat between the teeth, when many things of much more obvious relevance or significance have been casually flushed away. It has encouraged me to nail my flag to the mast of randomness and chance.

It is something I think about often in the evenings when I find myself idly leafing through a book here in Kiln Cottage, waiting for something to leap out and grab me.

When it does, I might include it in the notebook I keep for the purpose. It was 99 per cent virgin when I came here, as her record company used to boast of Joni Mitchell in the sixties. But
now the covers are ringed from cups and glasses, and some of the pages are stuck to each other with make-up, spilled coffee and dog-slobber.

There is no television in the cottage, but it is well stocked with books. There are full bookshelves either side of the open fireplace in the sitting-room. Books line the upstairs corridor. There are even books wedged under one of the legs of the bed in which I sleep, compensating for the way the floor dips away to the window overlooking the quay – E. Keble Chatterton’s
The
Yacht-
man’s
Pilot
of
1933
; and, on top of this, a dog-eared copy of Arnold Bennett’s
The
Old
Wives’
Tale
, with a cover painting of a woman by Toulouse-Lautrec – only her hair and a hand rather tensely gripping the back of the garden bench on which she is sitting are visible.

If I was ever serious about making good the gaps – the outbacks and Saharas – in my knowledge, the last few years have been the perfect opportunity. The trouble is, I lack the application. I have always been a dipper and a browser; have always enjoyed what in today’s terminology I believe is called ‘grazing’, rather than the full tombstone read.

Books, like churches and classical music, have always made me feel turned in on myself and involuntarily gloomy. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but there’s hardly a book that I’ve started at the beginning and read all the way through.

The only exceptions are the American pulps, the paperback shockers which circulated on the long train journeys we were always undertaking between engagements in the fifties. They completed my education.

Like violets, and small saucers of prawns and whelks, they were sold by men with trays around the pubs in Soho and the equivalent areas of the bigger towns, and this contributed to the sense of illicitness I always felt about them. ‘Any health mags, love stories?’

I always picked them up from where they were lying in a studiedly casual way and read them with a growing feeling of guilt and a packed hotness behind the eyes.

They will always be connected in my mind with stalled Sunday-afternoon rail journeys between, typically, Middlesbrough and Nottingham; with northern industrial light working its way across worn carriage-cloth; and with the unfamiliar, not unpleasant, sensations they started up in me.

Sin
Circus.
Shame
Slave
– She knew the little tricks that fan lust in men and women.
One
Hell
of
a
Dame
– The naked story of lusty-bodied Sheila whose uncontrollable desire put her name in lights.
Resort
Girl
.
Diamond
Doll.
She
Had
to
Be
Loved.
Gay
Scene
– Every time a man had her it was rape. But with other women it was love. Gutters of lust ran wild in this
Sex
Town
.

Along with the American magazines you found on sale at some station bookstalls –
Zipp,
Abandon,
Caress,
Hollywood
Frolics
– these were titles which struck me then as a kind of concentrate of eroticism. (And recalling them now, I have to say, still gives me a certain frisson.)

As the fifties drew on and the profession started attracting a higher percentage of what Fay called ‘strollops’ and professional good-time girls, I was dimly aware of scenes from the covers of
Shame
Slave
and
Sex
Town
– spectacular cleavages (the breasts very boldly shaped and divided) and Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls; rippling torsos and luxuriant chest wigs – playing themselves out in the digs around the country where we stayed.

Despite the standard rule about no ‘take-in’, these places were alive with sexual activity: Atomic Armfuls … Bikini Bombshells … sexsational sex romps and hi-jinks … dolls on dope … daisy-chain dollies … The News of the Screws got it more right more often than probably it even realised.

When I returned to London at the end of my first hike around the provinces, I recall my mother taking me firmly by the shoulders (she had to propel herself on to her toes) to give me the third-degree. ‘That’s it,’ she wailed after an interval. ‘I knew it. It’s happened. You’ve changed. You look hard already.’

I was always promising myself that I was going to read something more nourishing. I appeared to have plenty of time at my disposal. The problem was that it was effectively dead time – too
long to do nothing in, but too short to do anything in particular.

Every day was geared towards the evening’s performance. I was obsessive about protecting my voice. I was always detecting coughs and infections. For years I endured breakfast-time (that is, lunch-time) witticisms about what I was hiding behind the foulard scarves with which my throat was lagged. Most nights, as I think I’ve mentioned, I was sick until my ribs ached before I had to go out and be the vivacious little miss with the bubbling personality. Books never had any place in this programme.

The countryside represented one of the holes in my knowledge of which I was most conscious.

‘Country’ to me was the sleepy boring bit between the incident-filled narrative of the cities; the nothingness spreading out beyond town boundaries, where the trolley-wires terminated and real life dwindled to an incandescent dot, and then quickly faded to nada, like television at the close of transmission.

I only knew the flowers everybody knew. I didn’t associate flowers with the seasons. Roses were something that arrived wrapped in cellophane, with a small white pill in an envelope to prolong their life. It remained the case even when I became a variety advertised in the bulb and seed catalogues myself.

In the days when it was as much a part of the celebrity ritual as being hi-jacked for
This
Is
Your
Life
and being greased up by that old phoney Roy Plomley on
Desert
Island
Discs
, I had a rose named after me: a pale tangerine-coloured tea-or damask-or old-rose that turned slightly less anaemic-looking when (perhaps it was well-named after all) it became bloated and blown.

The naming ceremony took place at the annual flower show at Chelsea and was performed by the Queen Mother. She was wearing one of her Monet-print floaty outfits with a major hat and a flesh-coloured elastic bandage under her stocking on one leg.

We passed a happy few minutes talking about digging in manure and bonemeal and how to deal with root rot, and ‘the incredibly beautiful Madame Alfred Carrière, and her cousin, Mrs Herbert Stevens’, who I gathered just in time were both
roses like myself. The whole conversation could have been in Gujarati for all I understood.

These details feel real: I can also remember (I think I can) the satin scalloped lining of the tent, the sickening thick aroma of the exhibits and the music of a pipe-band.

But the occasion is one of hundreds in my life which I am more and more convinced I can only have read about or seen on television and which must have actually happened to somebody else.

Some of my most dream-like recollections involve the royal family (and are therefore made more dream-like by the awareness that they are the country’s favourite fantasy-figures). The most dream-like of all – it plays itself back in SloMo shot through medium gauze – involves the present Queen.

I performed at Windsor Castle several Christmases running. There was a show in a private chapel, converted for the occasion, followed by high-tea and a party for the staff and the family. My first visit is the visit I remember most vividly.

Edmundo Ros, the Latin specialist, provided the music for dancing that year (it was almost certainly 1956 or ’57). And the evening wound to a close with everybody snaking around the state-room in which the dance was held doing a ragged, high-spirited conga.

But for reasons of etiquette or protocol (I didn’t know the reason) the Queen found herself excluded. She was still a young woman then, as of course I was, slim and pretty. And I happened to look up at one point and see her standing alone under a Flemish tapestry of Actaeon being torn apart by dogs, smiling happily and clapping in time with the music.

On an impulse, I dropped out of the conga-line and approached her. I might have curtsied first – a quick dip – but the next thing I remember is placing my hands on her waist and steering her on to the floor to join the dancers. She was wearing a suit which was double-layered – coffee lace over blue – and I remember thinking even at the time that it felt like net curtains against windows to touch.

I was aware, in the short time that I maintained this taboo contact, of my whole system going into overload in an effort to accumulate all the information it could – the look, the feel, the smell (I was almost certain I recognised ‘Miss Dior’); all the data ordinary subjects are unable to access – and running a flash-check on it against what I knew of these properties in other women, including myself.

I wanted to know, I now realise, what the hungry stage-door touchers and gropers were always wanting to know about me: if, and in what way, I differed from ordinary mortals. Whether the close eye-balling, the constant exposure, the incessant reproduction of the image had added to, stolen from or in any way affected the composition of the in-the-round, blood-and-guts person.

Was I in any essential way different from them? Was Elizabeth II, great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, direct descendent of Dick the Shit and Henry VIII (true? – history is almost as much of a black hole as nature studies), was she in any tangible way different from me?

I look at myself sometimes when I’m out walking in the country. at the waxed jackets and bush hats, the warm-up trousers and sights-of-Roma headscarf, the army surplus mittens and vinyl trainers and other items borrowed from Kiln Cottage, and wonder whether it’s possible to read in my present appearance anything about what I once was.

Do I look like a woman who witnessed a violent disfigurement, was the subject of
This
Is
Your
Life
and conga-d with the Queen in the same brief span of her life? Or do I look like all the other women out walking their dogs along the edge of the cliffs on the coast path – thick-thighed, unhurried (nothing to hurry home for), of indeterminate age and sex until they come within polite ‘afternoon’-ing distance?