by T E Kinsey
The hall was full of Cuthberts arranging tables and organizing the temporary bar that had been set up at the far end. The club was keen to erase the memory of the previous week’s scandal by making this the event of the year.
With everything set up, including the new embroidered music-stand banners, Skins and Dunn retired to the green room to wait for their friends.
Vera was the first to arrive.
‘Hello, boys,’ she said. ‘Sorry if I’m early, only I didn’t want to be late.’
‘No one will ever moan at you for being early,’ said Skins. ‘Help yourself to tea if you want – that’s a fresh pot.’
‘There’s stronger if you want it,’ said Dunn.
‘I’ll get myself a tea in a minute,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind a tipple, but I tend not to indulge before I play. You know that new law they’re talking about? Don’t want to be fined for being drunk in charge of a woodwind instrument.’
‘I don’t think it’s in force yet,’ said Dunn. ‘And I think it’ll apply more to drummers. Though ours never goes on stage with a snootful.’
‘I always say if I’m not fit to drive a car, I’m not fit to play the drums,’ said Skins.
‘You can’t drive a car.’
‘Which rather proves my point – you’ve heard me play. But let me get you a cuppa, Vera. You just make yourself comfy.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘No one in the Foot-Tappers ever offered me tea – they expected me to make it for them.’
Puddle had entered the room. ‘It’s your first day, darling – they’re trying to impress you. Give it a couple of weeks and they’ll be getting you to darn their socks.’
‘All right, Pudds?’ said Skins. ‘Do you want one?’
‘Always, darling. Never been known to say no to a cup of tea before a show.’
They sat around one of the tables that had been left in the room for them.
‘Do you want to run through the arrangements for tonight?’ asked Puddle.
‘I think I’ll be all right,’ said Vera. ‘It all looks straightforward enough, and I’ve seen you play a few times so I should be able to keep up. It’s not simple, mind you, but it makes sense. No wonder you chaps are so highly thought of – there’s some clever stuff in there.’
‘It’s Puddle’s work, mostly,’ said Skins. ‘Puddle and Benny – trombone player.’
‘He’s the handsome West Indian chap?’ said Vera. ‘I think he’s the only one of your mob I’ve not properly met. All the others crop up on the circuit from time to time.’
‘That’s the bloke,’ said Dunn. ‘You’ll like him. Everyone likes Benny.’
One by one, the other members of the band arrived. Instruments were tuned and warmed up. Skins worked through his own warm-up exercises by beating out complex rhythms on every available surface with a pair of drumsticks. Mickey’s vocal warm-ups were supplemented by a cup of hot water with honey.
‘Does that actually do you any good?’ asked Elk, not for the first time.
‘No idea, mate,’ said Mickey. ‘But it feels like it ought to. And that’s half of it, ain’t it?’
At half past eight, everyone was ready, so they decided to go out early and play while the guests were arriving.
As the time approached, the Dizzy Heights drew their overture to a graceful close and one of the club officials from the week before got up on stage, though this time without his ceremonial regalia. A hush descended and he made much the same speech as he had made seven days earlier.
There were to be three dances, he told them, with both clubs dancing at the same time. There had been much debate over whether to include partners so that they might dance something like a traditional waltz, or the new foxtrot, but it was decided to spare the ladies the embarrassment of having to dance with duffers, and to give the duffers no one to hide behind. They would dance alone.
The winner would be decided by a jury of instructors who had been enticed in from local dance schools with the promise of free booze and the chance to recruit fresh students from among the assembled revellers.
It had originally been intended that there should be five members of each team, but due to ‘certain circumstances’, the Alphabet Gang from Tipsy Harry’s could only field four, and the Wags had graciously offered to leave their weakest dancer on the bench.
The prize would be a case of champagne for the winning team and an engraved plaque for their club.
Once the audience had retreated to the edges of the room and the dancers had paraded before them, the master of ceremonies introduced the Dizzy Heights. Everything, it seemed, was in place.
As promised, Ellie was on the dance floor as the Alphabets’ coach. Once she was satisfied that her boys were ready, she gave Skins the nod and he counted the band in for the first number.
The dancing, as had been widely forecast, was a hilariously chaotic frenzy of arms and legs with very little actual skill in evidence, but with the addition of a pantomime horse. Alfie and Ernie had given the horse a policeman’s helmet to wear in honour of its role in the capture of a notorious jewel thief and his murderous fiancée, and the crowd loved it.
The judges were less impressed, and between them awarded the Alphabets eighteen points out of a possible forty, while the Wigglers managed to scrape a slightly more respectable twenty-three.
The second dance was a straightforward Charleston, and was most definitely the Alphabets’ strong suit. They’d worked out a tricksy routine involving doing the ‘Bee’s Knees’ with the horse’s legs. With Alfie and Ernie crouching slightly, Bertie and Danny reached across and put their hands on the ‘horse’s’ knees to look as if the knees were moving through each other. Always a crowd-pleaser, and even better on a pantomime horse.
It got a massive laugh, and helped to boost their score for that dance to an impressive twenty-seven. With the Wigglers maintaining their mediocre standard and earning twenty-two points, the teams were tied going into the third and final dance at forty-five points apiece.
It was all to play for as Skins counted in the final number. The Wags started strongly, stepping neatly in unison and executing their turns with uncharacteristic precision. It looked as though they had it sewn up, but the Alphabets had one last trick up their collective sleeve. Unbeknown to everyone, including the band, Alfie and Ernie had been secretly working on a tap-dance routine. As the song reached the middle eight, Bertie and Danny stepped aside to give the horse room and off they went.
It was a massive hit. No one noticed that Ernie was out of time or that Alfie kept getting the sequence of steps wrong. It was a tap-dancing horse. The crowd went wild, the judges were on their feet, and the scores, when they came in, reflected everyone’s enthusiasm for the dance. The Wigglers were awarded thirty-six points, with the head judge commenting especially on their synchronicity. But for sheer entertainment value, as well as the demonstration of a skill the other team didn’t possess, they gave the Alphabets thirty-seven points and declared them the evening’s overall winners by just one point.
The room went wild. Men cheered, ladies whooped, champagne corks popped, and the band played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.
It was all over bar the celebrations, and they continued into the small hours.
Cuthbert, Cuthbert, and Cuthbert were sweeping up the streamers and mopping up the spilled champagne as the band packed away their instruments. They had been joined on stage by Ellie, who was helping Skins dismantle his drum set, and by an unknown woman who was talking to Puddle. There was definitely a family resemblance, though the newcomer had longer hair and wore a more expensive dress.
‘Everyone?’ said Puddle. ‘This is my sister, Katy. I’m pleased to be able to announce that she’s accepted the job, and is now the Dizzy Heights’ new manager.’
The band applauded and offered their welcomes and congratulations. Eustace wasn’t quite so enthusiastic as the others, but even he was secretly pleased that they finally had someone to make sure there were beer and tow
els in the green room.
‘Thank you, everyone,’ said Katy. ‘I know you’re taking an extraordinary gamble in taking me on as manager, but I won’t let you down. And by way of demonstrating my commitment, I’ve already secured a new booking.’
The Dizzies reacted with some astonishment at this news.
‘Next weekend,’ she went on, grinning broadly, ‘you’ll be playing at the Midsummer Ball at Bilverton House in Oxfordshire. I’ve booked a charabanc to pick everyone and their instruments up on Friday morning.’
Above all the astonishment, the ‘Yes, but what about . . . ?’ and the ‘Blimey, that was quick work . . .’, one voice asked the most important question.
‘How much are we getting?’ asked Skins.
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ said Katy. ‘I could only manage to get you a hundred guineas.’
There were gasps.
‘You, madam,’ said Eustace, ‘are most definitely hired. Welcome to the Dizzy Heights.’
Author’s Note
The Aristippus Club (Tipsy Harry’s) is entirely fictional, as are the Wags Club and the Augmented Ninth. The nineteenth-century jewellery theft is made-up, too.
The Lamb and Flag just round from New Row on Rose Street is real, though, and still exists. The Coach and Horses on Avery Row in Mayfair is now known as the Iron Duke.
There was a Barratt’s sweet factory in Wood Green, and my mother grew up on Coburg Road just round the corner – in the house occupied in the story by Barty Dunn and his landlady Phyllis Cordell. The house no longer stands, but I do have vague memories of being taken along the street of Victorian terraced houses as a child and shown where my mother had once lived.
I have similarly vague memories of being shown an off-licence (‘liquor store’ for American readers) on New Row in Covent Garden, which my parents ran in the early 1960s before I was born. The shop still stands – though it’s no longer an off-licence – and the street hasn’t changed a great deal.
It’s for these sentimental family reasons that both locations (Wood Green and New Row) appear in the book. I have no connection with Mayfair, though I have walked through its streets many times as a way of getting about while avoiding Oxford Street. To date I’ve never seen a nightingale in Berkeley Square, much less heard it sing, but that’s probably because nightingales are now incredibly rare in central London, and there’s not really anywhere suitable for them to live in Berkeley Square even if they do venture into town. No one in the story would think to mention this improbable bird, either, because the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ was written in 1939.
The original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police was at Whitehall Place, with a rear entrance on Great Scotland Yard. This became the public entrance and the HQ became known simply as Scotland Yard. By the time of our story, New Scotland Yard had moved to the Norman Shaw Buildings on Victoria Embankment, just up the road from the Houses of Parliament. In 1967 it moved to a tower block on Broadway, and in 2013 moved back to Victoria Embankment in the Curtis Green Building, next door to Norman Shaw Buildings.
Superintendent Sunderland first met Skins and Dunn in the first Lady Hardcastle Mystery, A Quiet Life in the Country, which is set in 1908 when he was an inspector with the Bristol CID and they were the rhythm section in Roland Richman’s Ragtime Revue.
The average height of a working-class British man in 1914 was 5’2”, while aristocrats stood at 5’6”. The British Army had a minimum height requirement of 5’3”, though, which might account for the average height of a British soldier in WWI being 5’7”. Incidentally, the minimum height requirement excluded many physically fit volunteers in 1914 and so ‘Bantam Battalions’ were quickly set up to accommodate them. At 4’9”, Henry Thridgould was the shortest corporal in the British Army.
Lyons Corner Houses were three popular restaurants in central London from 1909 to 1977, offering a slightly less casual dining experience than Lyons cafés. They were also, according to my mother, famous for their quick service and fast turnaround. Whenever a waiter took her empty plate after what she considered too short an interval, she would declare, ‘It’s like a bleedin’ Lyons Corner House in here.’
To this day, bands usually leave drummers to carry their own equipment, and often complain loudly about the amount of time it takes them to set up. I’m not bitter.
The alpacas appear at the Aristippus Club as the result of a challenge laid down in the bar at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in 2019. The conversation had arrived at the subject of alpacas (I shan’t trouble you with the tortured journey we took to get there) and someone suggested that we should all attempt to mention one of the adorable creatures in at least the first draft of our next books. Would our editors notice, we wondered? (Mine would – he was standing next to us while we giggled over it like schoolchildren.) I knew exactly how to go about it and agreed enthusiastically. If you see alpacas in any crime or thriller books published between the middle of 2020 and the middle of 2021, you’ll know I wasn’t the only one who managed it.
Lady Hardcastle makes a show of knowing which years produced the finest champagne. There’s an argument to be made that there’s no such thing as bad champagne, but she’s right that 1921 and 1915 were declared ‘vintage’ years. So, as it happens, were 1914, 1919, and 1920, but she can’t be expected to know everything.
The band’s joke mottos – ‘Don’t get your hopes up’, ‘Prepare to be disappointed’, and ‘Music for people who are too drunk to know any better’ – were all coined by my bass-playing friend Jim Randell, for the band in which we both play: Macaroni Penguins. We’re not as bad as we like to make out, but it does help if the audience has had a glass or two before we start.
‘The Bluebird of Somewhere’ who Skins and Dunn vaguely remember was the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, ‘The Bluebeard of Gambais’, who murdered at least eleven people (possibly more) between 1915 and 1919. He was executed in 1922. Obviously they wouldn’t have known him as a ‘serial killer’ – according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that term is first recorded in print in 1967.
It’s inordinately difficult to work out the changing value of money over time. Many websites exist to make the conversion, and they use many different strategies based on inflation, purchasing power, average wages, etc. I got very bogged down in all this and ended up just plumping for one. The source I used has £25,000 in 1918 being equivalent to £1.4m in 2019 (the time of writing).
Barty Dunn’s calculation of his own value in gold is based on the easily obtained value of gold bullion and the more-or-less fixed values of sterling and the US dollar in 1925. The diamond value is more of a fudge. Gemstone prices are less well recorded, but I did manage to find a reference in the US Geological Survey’s archives to historical values. They have normalized the values to the value of the US dollar in 1998 so there was some wild, wild approximation on my part, but I still think the number he comes up with is reasonable.
Using the same calculation, I worked out that the amount of diamonds stolen by Grant in 1917 would, as Puddle suggests, have weighed as much as a squirrel.
‘The Third Disgusting Fusiliers’ is a reference to a regiment mentioned in the 1950s BBC radio series The Goon Show. I discovered the Goons as a child in the mid-1970s through LPs released by EMI and then the BBC. Spike Milligan’s absurdist humour has always hit the spot for me and I often try to sneak in Goon Show references when I can.
The “phobias” bit in Chapter Seven came from an email exchange in the mid-1990s with my friend Henry Phillips, while we were working on a variety of comedy projects that never quite took off. I don’t know how it started, but I still had the list in a file on my hard drive. No effort is ever wasted.
If you’d like to know more about the work of nurses during the First World War, I recommend A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton by Edith Elizabeth Appleton (Simon & Schuster), and Women in the War Zone: Hospital Service in the First World W
ar by Anne Powell (The History Press).
In March 1916, all medically fit single men in Britain between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were automatically conscripted into the armed forces. In May this was extended to married men. There were exemptions for ‘scheduled occupations’ – clergymen, teachers, and some industrial workers producing essential supplies – but everyone else had to serve. Local tribunals would decide other applications for exemption from service on a case-by-case basis, and those men would be issued papers and a brass badge to prove their status. These exemptions were rare and it would have taken some string-pulling from some very influential people to ensure that Oliver Sunderland and Edwin Cashmore remained on the Home Front for the duration.
Charlie’s quote about plans not surviving first contact with the enemy is usually attributed to Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke. It’s no wonder none of them could remember his name.
They meet two men in Soho arguing about the Football League. Arsenal had finished third from bottom at the end of the 1924–25 season, narrowly avoiding relegation. Against Barty Dunn’s partisan prediction, though, they finished the 1925–26 season in second place. His own team, Tottenham Hotspur, continued to prop up the middle of the table.
The idea of conscientious objectors serving as ambulance drivers in WWI is a popular one (it was even included in an episode of the popular British sitcom Dad’s Army), but actually it was quite rare. Still, I liked the idea of Danny being an unsung hero, so I let him join the RAMC.
Vera mentions ‘the new law’ and talks about being ‘drunk in charge of a woodwind instrument’. The law was the Criminal Justice Act 1925, which made it an offence to be found drunk in charge of a motor vehicle on any highway or in any other public place. It was the first UK law specifically prohibiting drinking and driving. It was not passed until December 1925, but, obviously, it had been discussed a great deal – and a clued-up person like Vera would have been well aware of it.