Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
The Devil Rides Out (11 page)
‘I know, I know,’ I chipped in to save him any embarrassment. ‘I didn’t expect to stay any longer than a couple of days. You’ve been a real mate for putting me up in the first place. I’ll ring Nina, maybe I can stay there for a while.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Ron said, clearing the plates away. ‘Why don’t you go down to the employment agencies in town, see if there’s anything going, get a job, any job for the time being. You can then tell your mum the weason you came home was because you were offered a job. Pwoblem solved.’ He was right. ‘Now get yourself changed, I’ve got a friend coming wound from my theatre gwoup who I’m absolutely dying for you to meet. She’s divine. She wants to be an actwess.’
He was making her sound like Sally Bowles. The friend in question turned out to be a well-spoken young girl named Angela Walsh. She was a year younger than me and startlingly pretty with soft reddish-brown hair and pale translucent skin. She was wearing a 1920s black velvet evening coat with a matching beret and reminded me of a picture I’d seen in a film book of a young Greta Garbo. We hit it off right away. As Ron had explained, Angela went to the Unity Youth Theatre with him.
‘They’re always looking for new people who are interested in acting,’ Angela told me. ‘Why don’t you come down? We’re reading a new play next week.’
‘Do you get to perform in public?’ I asked, the not-so-dormant showbiz bug rearing its head again.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, skipping around the kitchen, ‘we put on shows at the Everyman. Shame you weren’t here for the
Marat
/
Sade
. I played a lunatic, it was wonderful.’
‘An abattoir? You mean that dirty, filthy lairage down the hill?’ My mother was incredulous. ‘You’re telling me that you came back from your precious London to work in a bloody abattoir? An abattoir? Well, I’ve heard it all now.’
‘I get half-price meat each week, think of that,’ I added feebly, throwing this nugget of information in as compensation.
‘I don’t give a shite if they send you home with a live cow each night,’ she squawked. ‘I’d like to know the real reason you’ve come back here with your tail between your
legs. You’d better not be in trouble with the police again, my lad.’ She ranted on as she stomped from kitchen to front room. ‘And you needn’t think I’m getting you up every morning at half six. I should be taking it easy, not running around after you, cleaning and cooking all day. Jesus, wait till I tell our Annie that you’re back.’
All things considered, the return of the prodigal went down better than I’d anticipated. I was a veritable paragon of virtue for the next few days, getting home at a reasonable hour, keeping the house clean, doing the shopping without complaint, all of which did nothing to allay my ma’s suspicious nature. Meanwhile, life at the abattoir was everything I’d predicted and more. I shared a tiny office with three other people. Dora, a rotund little woman who was in the Salvation Army, went around humming snippets of hymns under her breath all day. She’d been with FMC Meats since the Stone Age when it had been based at Woodside Ferry, as had the elderly man who sat facing a wall and hardly ever spoke a word. The final member of the team was Tony, only a couple of years older than me, who took his job very seriously, which was just as well since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The ever-patient Tony was forever correcting the piles of figures that I’d totted up on the antiquated adding machine even though he had enough of his own work to do.
Our depressing little time warp of an office overlooked the slaughterhouse. I very rarely went down there unless I had some meat to condemn, a process that involved filling in a lot of forms in triplicate and stamping the dead creatures’ flanks with a large rubber stamp that proclaimed ‘Condemned Meat’. The sight and smell of the slaughterhouse made me feel physically sick. I was forever talking through my nose so I didn’t have to inhale the smell of raw meat and blood, and
the slaughtermen must’ve thought I had either adenoids or a permanent cold.
Occasionally a sheep or cow would escape, briefly enlivening the boredom, and make a bid for freedom up the old Chester Road with everyone in hot pursuit. Once a pig ran out of the gates and jumped on to a Crossville bus that had conveniently just pulled up at the bus stop outside. Somehow it managed to climb the stairs and get up on to the top deck, knocking an old woman over. Poor things must’ve been terrified, the pig and the pensioner.
A story that sickens me to this day was told to me by one of the slaughtermen. He was a big beefy bullet-headed hunk of a man, stripped to the waist, his magnificent chest and thighs covered by a blood-splattered black leather apron, a massive turn-on, I suppose, for some gay men and heterosexual women but one that did nothing for me. He had huge hands and swollen fingers with blood ingrained dark red and deep around each fingernail. Standing outside one afternoon having a fag and absently watching a small bonfire at the end of the yard, I wondered what it was they were burning. It certainly stank. ‘Spontaneous abortion,’ a slaughterman told me. ‘If a cow comes in pregnant then we abort it and burn it along with the condemned meat. If the abortion comes out a decent size then we sell it on as veal.’ I’m not sure if that story was true but it was enough to put me off meat for over a year, and even today I’m still slightly nauseous at the sight of a well-stocked butcher’s window.
The Unity Youth Theatre got me through the boredom of the daily grind at the abattoir. I’d been cast in a strange play called
Punch and Judy!
and we rehearsed in a building in an alley off Church Street. We were a mixed bag. There was Florence, small and plump with apple-dumpling cheeks who
appeared to be very intense until you got to know her and made her laugh, then her eyes twinkled and her solemn little face lit up in a smile. Flom, as we came to call her, could play the piano and had been cast as the Proprieter of the Punch and Judy Show. Christina, a delightful redhead who came (according to gossip) from a very good family, played a jolly-hockey-sticks-type doctor. A lad named Dave made an excellent Mr Punch. I’m not implying that his nose met his chin or that he had a hump on his back; no, he was an energetic and inventive performer who threw himself into this peculiar role as if he were playing Lear’s Fool at the National. Angela was his Judy.
‘Not much of a part really,’ she said airily, in the manner of a seasoned actress who had done the rounds, over a half of cider in the pub after rehearsals. ‘Couple of lines and then I get hit over the head with a stick. I think I’m going to play her Irish, she sounds Irish with a name like Judy, don’t you think?’ I could only bring to mind the Judys Garland, Holliday and Carne (this last Judy from
Rowan & Martin’s Laughin)
and none of those seemed remotely Irish to me but I caught Angela’s drift and nodded in agreement like an old pro. In addition to Judy she was also playing Lola, Joey the Clown’s assistant. I was never off the stage, playing the roles of both Joey and the Hangman as well as appearing as chorus in a couple of numbers. I was in seventh heaven and if Ron, who’d introduced me to Unity in the first place, was a little put out that he had only been given the part of the Illustrious Gentleman, which he wasn’t very keen on, then he was big enough not to show it.
The part of the policeman went to a lugubrious chap with a face like Deputy Dawg whose name I can’t remember, and then there was Christine. Christine was understudying the
women’s parts and also appeared as the Ghost. She was tall and wan, slightly old-fashioned and prim in appearance with her cardigans and pale pink lipstick, and we were surprised to hear that on the nights this shy creature wasn’t rehearsing for
Punch and Judy!
she was a hostess at the Vernon Johnson School of Dance in Bold Street, substituting as a dancing partner for those lonely souls who’d arrived at the studio unaccompanied.
Christine was an excellent ballroom dancer who completely transformed herself when she entered the doors of Vernon Johnson’s. With her sensible little hairdo teased into a coif of mightier dimensions and her shimmering ballgown with yards and yards of peach tulle underskirt to make it stick out, Christine was a knockout. She had a fabulous figure and was a real marvel when it came to dealing with her shy and clumsy protégés, who looked upon her as a goddess. She encouraged me and Angela to join up. We did, and for ten bob a lesson we learned how to samba, tango and do the American jive.
Our director at the Unity was an excitable and slightly hysterical fellow with a bright orange tongue that flicked in and out of the side of his mouth like a nervous lizard with a tic. However, he allowed us to improvise and include songs and sketches in this otherwise dreary production. Christine and Flom wrote a song called ‘Did Somebody Call For A Doctor’ and, surprise, surprise, I managed to get something from
Gypsy
in – ‘May We Entertain You’ as an opening number for Joey the Clown and Lola. We were in our element.
To prepare us for this epic the cast were treated to a private viewing of a real Punch and Judy show by the maestro himself, Professor Codman, a showman whose family had been presenting Punch and Judy shows on Merseyside since the
late 1800s. I remember his booth outside St George’s Hall and no, before you start, it wasn’t in the 1800s, it was the late sixties. Punch and Judy fascinated me when I was a little kid and I’d have hung around the booth in the gardens of the Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton, all day if I’d been allowed. In the end my dad made me my own miniature booth, complete with puppets. He even fashioned a link of sausages out of one of my ma’s old stockings stuffed with cotton wool and tied up with pink wool at regular intervals to form the links, and I performed shows for my mate Steve Davies, who lived at the top of the Grove.
Most of the costumes for
Punch and Judy!
were borrowed from Unity’s wardrobe store. Angela and I wore tatty old Pierrot and Pierrette costumes for the clowns, which she tarted up with a bit of sequin trim she’d bought in Blackler’s, but for the Hangman I had other ideas. A guy I was having a fling with made leather trousers for a shop in Church Street and he gave me a brown leather pair with matching waistcoat. They were a bit on the large size and what with me not having much in the way of a bum they hung in folds behind me like a pair of Odeon curtains, but I didn’t care. I thought I was the dog’s bollocks up there on that stage, head to toe in saggy brown leather, my chin smeared with black greasepaint to represent stubble, a veritable testosterone-fuelled killing machine.
In the Policeman’s number, three of us acted as chorus, dressed as coppers in ill-fitting uniforms poncing up and down behind Deputy Dawg, who was executing (literally) a shambolic dance routine while he tried to remember the words to ‘A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One’. I had a flash of what I considered comedy genius, fleshing out my part by doing it in drag. Just before I went on I quickly
shoved one of the doctor’s coats down my tunic as a makeshift bosom, gave my already enormous barnet a quick backcomb, rolled my trousers up and smeared my gob with red carmine, not subtle but surprisingly effective. I drew on the dancer I’d seen playing a wonderfully deadpan tart in Lindsay Kemp’s
Flowers
for inspiration and went for it.
‘It wasn’t what we wehearsed,’ Ron sniffed, purse-lipped when I fell into the dressing room after the number had finished. ‘It’s not vewy pwofessional behaviour, y’know.’ I didn’t care, I was high as a kite on the laughter from what few punters were out front.
Despite all the hard work and effort we’d put into this ill-fated production – Angela and I had nearly been arrested illegally fly-posting homemade posters all over the city centre –
Punch and Judy!
wasn’t a hit. The odds were against us from the start as we didn’t go on until 10pm, after a play called
Female Transport
, about a gang of women who were being transported to Australia. This was a time when most sensible theatre-goers were on the bus home or in the pub, and hardly anybody came to see it. Of course it could have been a crap show but in our youthful optimism we could see nothing wrong with it, preferring to view
Punch and Judy!
through heavily rose-tinted spectacles.
‘That’s showbiz, kid,’ Ron said philosophically in his best Liza Minnelli manner as we retired to Sadie’s for a cider and the after-show post-mortem.