The Urchin's Song (17 page)

She said the words out loud: ‘I’ll do it.’ And then louder: ‘I’ll do it, I will.’

Shirley hadn’t taken her eyes from Josie, and now she said very quietly, ‘Lass, are you sure? I mean, a music hall? Some of them actress types an’ singers are no better than they should be.’

Josie looked steadily at her mother. It was strange, but in this moment she felt years older than the woman who had given birth to her. Her mother had allowed her to go into some of the worst pubs in Sunderland from when she was little more than knee high in order to scratch them a decent going-on, and her father had brought men like Patrick Duffy into their home and moreover started her brothers on a life of crime as soon as they were off the breast, and now her mother was questioning the morals of the performers in the music halls?

For a second she wanted to laugh, and then the well of pity which always accompanied her dealings with her mother made itself felt. She didn’t understand her mam at times, and she would never comprehend how she could have stood by and let Ada and then Dora go down that road, but she was her mam and she loved her. ‘I’m going to give it a go, Mam, and see what happens because I’d regret it the rest of my life if I didn’t.’

‘Well, if you’re sure, hinny.’

‘Aye, I am sure.’

And so it was settled.

Josie smiled and curtsied as she stood listening to the tumultuous applause spilling over the gold radiance of the footlights, and not for the first time she reflected that the music hall was an enchanted place to its patrons. People just wanted to enter a warm world of magic and romance where their troubles were forgotten for a few hours, and who could blame them? She even managed to escape from the real world herself when she was onstage - or at least she usually did, she corrected herself in the next moment as the heavy velvet curtain swung across the stage and she heard the dapper Sidney Potts - in his role of chairman - begin his exposition to introduce the next act.

Josie moved gracefully into the wings of the theatre as the Amazing Lamphorcini Brothers passed her. They were a troupe of five Italian brothers who presented a skilful juggling and acrobatic knockabout comedy routine, including grotesque gymnastics and outrageous innuendo. The youngest of the brothers, a cheeky seventeen year old, winked at her as he caught her eye, and Josie smiled back at him absently.

She was so glad she was finishing at Hartlepool tonight. She needed to get back to Sunderland and see how her mam was. This wretched influenza. All that stuff they had written in the newspapers at the beginning of the year about inventions and suchlike, and yet no one knew how to fight the illness which was sweeping the country and ravaging its occupants. It had already taken old Maud and Enoch Tollett before Christmas.

The new century had been ushered in on the heels of a decade which many had glowingly described as one of unparalleled achievements. The spectacular discovery by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of some kind of ray streaming out of gas-filled bottles when he passed electricity through them (which he’d called X-rays simply because X was the standard symbol for anything scientists didn’t understand) had been hailed as miraculous.

Residents of Coney Island in America were the first folk to try a novelty ride called an escalator; a miracle drug - aspirin - which contained properties to reduce fevers and pain and came in the form of easy-to-take tablets was now available, and most exciting of all - and the hardest for Josie to comprehend - was the birth of radio communications which had been pioneered in Britain at about the same time as she had first set foot on a stage.

When Guglielmo Marconi was granted a patent which met with Royal approval and Queen Victoria herself communicated wirelessly from Osborne House with the Prince of Wales on board the Royal Yacht, the newspapers had been full of it, along with the news that Lord Kelvin had sent the first ever telegram by wireless.

Which was how it should be, Britain’s inhabitants had declared patriotically. Didn’t one in four of the world’s population look to Britain as their ruler? The Empire was the greatest power on earth, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Britain ruled far-flung lands as well as the waves and that this would always be so.

However, as the influenza epidemic which had taken hold in December grew worse, there was less thought about the glory of the Empire and more about who was going to be the next to die in all the towns and cities of Britain. Fifty people a day were dying in London alone, and the illness which had been regarded as something of a fashionable malady when it had first occurred several years before, was now inspiring widespread panic and alarm. Gravediggers were working day and night all over the country, and due to a shortage of nurses and closure of some hospital wards, the situation was getting worse daily.

As with the dreaded typhoid and cholera, the influenza seemed to hit the old, infirm and very young most severely, and this was on Josie’s mind as she walked down the thirty or so stone steps leading from the stage to the dressing rooms.

The room designated for the female performers was long and low, with whitewashed walls and one window. Gas jets gave feeble illumination, but overall it was dark and hot and smelly, two ventilators releasing draughts of unpleasant air. Apart from several wooden forms to sit on and a large wardrobe, the room was empty. An ancient stone sink stood in a corner. The dresser, a blowsy old woman with a permanent dewdrop at the end of her nose, used the sink solely for the purpose of keeping her grey hen - a large narrow-necked stone jar holding a vast quantity of beer - cool, and consequently there was always a pool of water skimming the floor where she’d had to remove it for a few minutes for performers to wash either before or after applying their stage make-up.

Since entering the brassy, rumbustious world of the music hall, Josie had appeared at numerous venues, from halls which were little more than the song and supper rooms which constituted the origins of the music halls, to theatres which had been purpose-built. Certain music halls, she had found, had personalities of their own, but by and large they were all much of a pattern. However, she’d never travelled further afield than some thirty or forty miles from Sunderland, simply because she always felt she must be within easy travelling distance of home, should she be needed. Josie knew her mother was ill, very ill, and wanted to be able to reach her within a couple of hours, should it be necessary.

The fact that this had severely restricted her choice of venues and undoubtedly held her career back had caused Josie some regret but no real dilemma. During the last four years she had been approached by numerous agents, most of whom had made extravagant promises that they would take her to top billing if she was prepared to put herself in their hands, but knowing this would mean travelling all over the country and undoubtedly working the London halls, she had refused them all.

And so, with Gertie by her side, she had done a few weeks here and a few weeks there all over the north-east, comforting herself with the knowledge that she was getting plenty of valuable experience and a good basic understanding of how things operated. Josie knew she was fortunate never to have been without work since she’d first started. Most weeks she would appear at two or occasionally three halls a night in the area in which she was working, earning a certain amount at each per week which added up to her final wage.

She could now command a fee of thirty shillings a week or more at any one hall, but her expenses were considerable. Board and lodging for herself and Gertie, carriages to whisk her from one venue to another several times a night, her costumes and make-up all took their toll, and she sent home regular payments to Vera for taking care of her mother, along with extra funds to cover her mother’s doctors’ bills and medication. Although Gertie was her dresser, in some of the halls the management would insist that the artistes contributed to the wage of the resident dresser, whether they availed themselves of her assistance or not, like this present one.

Gertie was waiting for her when she opened the door to the dressing room and as ever, amid all the chaos and bustle, her sister had contrived to secure a small corner where Josie’s clothes were folded neatly and securely and her hat box and other possessions were in place. ‘Here.’ Gertie handed her a mug of hot, sweet tea. ‘Drink this afore you do anything else, lass.’

Josie took the tea gratefully, remarking, as she did most nights, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Gertie.’

From the moment Josie had put her hair up that first night she had stepped on to Ginnett’s Amphitheatre’s stage four years ago and received a hearty encore, she had no longer felt like a young girl, but a young woman. Sure enough, within the following eighteen months her figure had filled out, she had grown another few inches and now - at seventeen years of age - she had turned into a composed and very lovely young woman. Gertie, on the other hand, had barely changed at all, and at fifteen was still tiny. However, what she lacked in inches she had gained in confidence, and although her health was never particularly robust, Gertie had developed into a force to be reckoned with, Josie reflected fondly, as she gazed into the plain little face smiling at her.

‘You tired, lass?’ Gertie asked her and then, shaking her head at herself, she said, ‘ ’Course you’re tired, hark at me! Dashing about like a blue-arsed fly seven days a week, it’s no wonder. I wish you’d take a break for a few days.’

‘I can’t refuse bookings if they’re there, lass. You know that.’

‘Aye, but they’ll always be there for you; folk know a good thing when they see it. There’s another of them agent types been asking about you, by the way; old Aggie just told me. He was here earlier, apparently. I tell you, lass, if you let one of ’em look after you, you’d be making a mint in a little while. You’re too good to kill yourself haring from one flea-pit to another.’

The sisters had had this same conversation a hundred times, and now Josie answered as she always did, ‘There’s Mam.’

Aye, there was Mam. Gertie’s voice was brisk now as she said, ‘Sit yourself down an’ let’s get that hat off.’ Josie’s stage clothes were elaborate and on the gaudy side, and not at all what she would wear outside. As Gertie moved behind her sister, carefully extracting the hat pins and lifting the concoction of lace and feathers off the golden-brown hair, the younger girl was frowning.

She’d been in this business nearly as long as Josie, having started travelling round with her sister as soon as she had finished at school, and one thing she knew was that you needed an agent. The music hall was a world within the world; it had its own managers, agents, scouts, touts, newspapers, slang, fashions, and no one - no one - got anywhere without an agent; they didn’t even take you seriously for a start. Josie could be earning three, four times what she was on now, even playing the same halls if she had an agent behind her, but no - there was Mam.

‘Stop frowning,’ Josie said suddenly.

‘How do you know I’m frowning?’ Gertie asked, quickly straightening her face.

Josie swung round on the bench and stared up at her sister. ‘I can feel it,’ she said softly. ‘And I’m not daft, lass. I know we need an agent but I’ll get one when I’m ready. You know how bad Mam is; she . . . she could go any time.’

‘We’ve been thinking that for the last two or three years,’ Gertie retorted, and then added quickly, ‘Oh I’m sorry, lass, I don’t mean that nasty, but it’s true. Sometimes folk hold on for years an’ years in Mam’s state, an’ you’re missing opportunity after opportunity.’

This was where Gertie normally said she wasn’t getting any younger, Josie thought, as she rose from the bench and, with Gertie’s help, stripped off the satin and brocade dress she had been wearing. She knew her sister meant well, but they were poles apart in their thinking on this. Perhaps it was because their mam had always been ailing and Josie, herself, had been more like Gertie’s mother - protecting her, watching out for her and generally mothering her - but Gertie didn’t seem to have any deep feeling for Shirley. Or for anyone else for that matter, apart from her big sister.

‘Bloomin’ ’ell!’ The dressing-room door opened and in came a big blonde woman who was billed as a classical and exotic dancer; swathed in veils of crepe de chine, her feet were bare beneath her diaphanous costume. Everyone turned and glanced her way. Lily went under the name of Madame de Vonte, but she was a Newcastle lass born and bred, and something of a card. ‘You heard that new ’un who’s supposed to imitate the sound of a harp? Harp my backside! You know what old Sidney said on the quiet?’ Lily struck a pose and imitated the la-di-da voice of the chairman as she said, ‘“That woman has grossly libelled the instrument if you ask me.” ’ And as everyone fell about laughing, she added, ‘He did, he did! I nearly died. An’ Madam had just finished warbling her first song and that lot in the gallery were shouting and heckling when some bright spark in the stalls shouted, “Knock it off! Give the poor cow a chance!” An’ you know what she said? “Thank you, kind sir. It’s good to know there’s
one
gentleman in the audience.” ’

Pandemonium reigned for a few moments, and Josie, wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes as she continued dressing, thought, Oh, I’m going to miss Lily when I’m back home. I’ve never laughed so much as these last twelve weeks and it’s better than a tonic. It had even put Gertie in a good mood; the young girl was chattering quite happily as the two sisters stepped into the greasy street ten minutes later, where, through the steadily falling rain, loomed the carriage they’d ordered to transport them back to their lodgings some streets away.

‘Miss Burns?’

Josie nearly jumped out of her skin as a figure materialised seemingly out of the brickwork at the side of them, and she knew Gertie had reacted the same when her sister’s voice came in a sharp snap, saying, ‘An’ who wants to know?’