by Robert Lock
“Why?”
“Because Dickens had a habit of incorporating characters he met into his books, and George must have been a very strong character.” Colin looked up from his notebook, the tone of admiration in his voice clear. He presented his left hand, fingers held wide, and emphasised each point by tapping the end of a finger with the index finger of his right hand. “One: he was a music hall comic, which wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted. Two: he was a successful music hall comic. Three: he married a lawyer’s daughter. Four: he didn’t go to pieces when his wife died in childbirth. And five: he didn’t go to pieces when his only daughter died. In fact he was top of the bill for another five years before he… before that night. Don’t you think that’s the sort of character Dickens would have been impressed by?”
Edna smiled gently, but her expression was a way of disguising from Colin her grimace and gritted teeth as a shooting pain coursed up her right leg. It was a paradox of her illness that these numbed and useless limbs, which she had, for the most part, disassociated herself from, regularly mocked her lack of governance by generating a brief but intense discomfort that travelled along nerves supposedly silenced. Worse than the pain, though, was its tingling after-effect, which always stirred in her the slenderest of hopes that some miracle had occurred, that the feeling in her treacherous body was returning. Even though Edna knew that, following on from every previous spasm, the tingling soon dwindled, consumed by the heavy silence of her flesh, she could not help but cherish the possibility that this time, against all odds, her paralysis was somehow in retreat.
“Certainly,” she replied, though her mind was elsewhere, traversing the prickling cables which delineated the leg resting on the mattress. Was the sensation lasting a little longer this time? Had the pain jolted some linkage back to life? Oh, grow up Edna, she chided silently. A thought came to her. “Don’t forget the other side of the coin, Colin.”
The archivist pulled a perplexed expression. “What?”
“You’re saying all this about your… you know, your comedian man.”
“Georgie Parr, Mother. Try and keep one or two facts in your head for longer than ten seconds.”
“Yes, him. Well, what I’m saying is, don’t forget about the other side… Georgie’s wife.”
Colin leaned forward. “Katherine?”
Edna nodded. “She must have been a strong character too, you know. Imagine her going to tell her father that she wanted to marry a comedian. I bet she loved her dad, but her love for Georgie was stronger.”
Colin groaned. “For goodness sake, Mother, this isn’t a Barbara Cartland novel.”
“How do you know?” Mrs Draper was surprised by the vehemence in her voice. She realised that it was not the condescension in her son’s reply which had provoked her outburst — she was accustomed to that — but an instinctual protectiveness towards a woman who she sensed had been anything but a submissive or secondary character in her son’s narrative. “Just because you think love stories are rubbish doesn’t mean they never happen. I bet she had to give up a lot to marry him.”
“Alright,” Colin conceded, “alright, so Katherine was strong as well. Perhaps her family cut her off without a penny, but George succeeded on his own after she died, and he had a baby daughter to bring up at the same time. I’d say that was positively heroic.”
Edna let her head sink deeper into the pillows. The tingling had gone, leaving her feeling like the queen termite she had once seen on a nature programme: a tiny creature attached to something bloated and numb. “You just have to get on with it, Colin. When your father died I found a job in a florists that meant I could be home by the time you got back from school. I was dog-tired by tea time, but I didn’t let it show because you’d been through enough already. I made sure you did your homework, I made sure you always had a clean shirt for school the next day, and then I fell asleep by eight o’clock, but I wasn’t being heroic, I was just doing what had to be done, that’s all.”
The archivist gesticulated his frustration. “You see? You’re being heroic about being heroic! It’s not normal behaviour, Mother, it’s above and beyond the call of duty, it’s superhuman.”
“You’d be surprised what you can do when you have to.”
“Well, let’s hope I never have to find out, eh?”
“God willing. And you say she died?”
He returned to the notebook. “On the twenty-sixth of March, giving birth to their daughter Victoria. It was a risky business in those days.”
“That almost happened to you.”
Colin looked up again. What other revelations did his mother have in store, and what was it about the story of George Parr that was proving so cathartic for her? “I’m sorry? I thought you just said I almost died when I was born.”
“That’s what I did say.”
“I see. And you didn’t think to mention this before any time in the last forty-odd years.”
Edna pulled her mouth into a downwards curve. “Haven’t I? I must have. You’ve probably just forgotten.”
“I think I might have remembered that small fact, Mother,” Colin said heavily. “Was it supposed to be some terrible family secret?”
“Not particularly,” Edna replied blithely. “You were just in a funny position, and getting all agitated, and the cord was starting to get tangled up, but the midwife managed to get her hands in and hoiked you out. You were a funny colour, but she got you breathing and you were fine after that.”
“You make it sound so matter-of-fact.”
“Well, I’m sure it was a bit more hectic at the time, but there wasn’t a good deal I could do, not with my legs all akimbo and—”
He held up his hands in horror. “Whoa, too much information, Mother!”
“She saved your life, that’s for sure,” Edna continued, ignoring her son’s histrionics. “Joan Sexton. I’ll never forget that name. Afterwards she told me she’d only been a midwife for eight months, but saving your life had evened things up for her, because during the war she’d been helping out at the old Salvation Army building when a lad came in shouting for his mother, saying he needed to take her and make her safe. They tried to shut him up, because there’d not been any sirens, but he wouldn’t have it, and eventually his mum agreed to go with him. Well, Joan had heard him talking, and he was going on and on about the starlings, about a message, and she thought he was crazy, but there was something in his voice, how certain he sounded, and before she knew what she was doing, she’d left as well. And you know what? About a minute after she’d left the Salvation Army a bomber on its way back to Germany—”
“A bomber on its way back to Germany found it had one bomb left jammed in its cradle, so they managed to loosen it and decided to drop it on the town they were over, and that bomb just happened to land right on the Salvation Army building and killed seven people,” Colin finished. “It was this town’s worst tragedy of the Second World War. And that lad was Mickey Braithwaite, who’d run all the way from the pier where he was a spotter for the Observer Corps.” He hesitated. “Hang on a minute. Are you telling me that if Mickey Braithwaite hadn’t rescued his mother from the Salvation Army building then I would have died at birth? Is that what you’re implying? That I owe my existence to Mickey Braithwaite’s premonition?”
Edna glanced at the prints on the far wall. Her eye was drawn to her wedding photograph, her most treasured possession. It was the only picture she had from that day, and she had no idea where the negative was, if indeed they had ever possessed it. Malcolm looked so pleased with himself, having finally won his girl from what he always imagined was a long line of potential suitors, a notion Edna had done little to discourage, even though in reality she had loved him from the moment he vaulted over her parents’ garden gate with one hand on the gate-post and the other clutching a sprig of wild flowers he had picked along the lane.
The photograph was in black-and-white, but she remembered every colour perfectly, from the bright red carnation in the lapel of
Malcolm’s grey double-breasted suit to the aquamarine necklace she had worn, an heirloom given to her as her something blue, and which still nestled in her cleavage, just below her delicate gold crucifix.
She returned her attention to her son. “These things are meant to happen, Colin. It’s all for a purpose.”
“Oh, please, Mother, are you suggesting some sort of divine intervention?”
“Why not?”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Because there is no God. It’s just… chance. Luck. Being in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But how did Mickey know?”
Colin tilted back his head and spoke to the ceiling. “He didn’t know. He either heard the bomber approaching or else they got a message on the radio, and he thought he’d better warn his mother just in case. There’s no mystery to it.”
“He said the birds told him.”
Colin snorted. “Oh! Right. And you think that’s a reasonable explanation, do you? Knowing what Mickey’s like.”
Edna looked back to the wedding photograph, stung by the condescension in her son’s voice and unwilling to hold his gaze. She remembered feeling the warmth on her back, which was radiating from the sun-soaked dark red brick of St Michael’s, and the slightly unsteady cadence of the church bells. She remembered the soft material of Malcolm’s jacket sleeve brushing against her bare arm like a gently expressed promise of protection. “You can’t find the answers to everything in a history book!”
The archivist slammed shut his notebook. “Well in that case,” he said, standing up, “you won’t be interested in what happens to George and Hannah, will you?”
Edna closed her eyes and sighed. “For goodness’ sake, Colin, there’s no need to be so touchy.”
“Isn’t there?” he said venomously. “You’ve just demolished my profession… Everything I hold dearest, and all because it doesn’t include warnings about German bombers given by a flock of birds to someone whose only purpose in life is to make sure his deckchairs are all neatly lined up! Bloody hell, Mother, and you wonder why I’m being touchy!”
For once, however, Edna did not back down, did not appease her son. She spoke to Colin, but her eyes were fixed on Malcolm in his wedding day suit. “Don’t you twist things, Colin Draper, that isn’t what I said. I said you can’t find everything in history books. Some things can’t be written down… like faith, or love, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and it doesn’t mean that they can’t make strange things happen.”
“That’s a lot of double negatives, Mother.”
“Well I’m not as clever as you, am I? A fact that you remind me of at every opportunity. But do you know what?” Edna frowned up at her son, willing him to look back at her and take note of the conviction in her eyes. “I’d much rather have my faith than your… well, I don’t know what it is. Is it anything? Do you believe in anything, Colin?”
“The truth,” he replied quietly, genuinely hurt by his mother’s unsparing analysis.
“And who’s to say what the truth is? You? Have you got all the answers?”
The archivist sat back down. He studied the front cover of the notebook in his hands, tracing with one finger the subtle pattern printed into the cardboard. For a moment he glanced up, but the expression in his mother’s eyes, a combination of pity and disappointment, which darkened their normal hazel to the colour of molasses, pushed his gaze back down to the notebook almost instantly. When he spoke again Colin resumed his aimless mapping out of the cover pattern. “No one has them all, do they, but I just need to base my beliefs on the ones I can find. The answers that history provides.”
“There are answers in other places too, love,” Edna said, her voice softening. “Places you don’t expect them to be, sometimes. Maybe watching the starlings drew Mickey’s attention up to the sky and he saw something there, perhaps another bomber much higher up, and being in the Observer Corps he knew it was German and there were likely to be others nearby. Isn’t that an answer?”
Colin looked up again, surprised and touched by his mother’s reasoning, which he realised was entirely for his benefit. She didn’t believe in so prosaic an explanation because it did not fit her model of the world as an interdependent and meaningful work of creation, and yet she had formulated it nevertheless. It was an offering of such generosity he felt tears well up in the corners of his eyes. He smiled. “It certainly is. Plausible, logical, rational… everything you’re not!”
Edna chuckled, pleased that her peace offering had been accepted. “I surprise myself sometimes.” She paused. “So, what happened to Georgie after his wife died?”
Colin flicked through several pages of notes. “In the 1871 census George and his daughter Victoria had been joined by George’s sister-in-law Emily Tindall, who was described as a governess, so I assume she’d stepped into the breach while George was busy in the music halls.”
“That was good of her.”
“Indeed. And she must still have been with them when Victoria died in 1875, because she was the official informant named on the death certificate, so George must have thought very highly of her. I should imagine he relied on her for support quite a lot, especially when Victoria died.
“Georgie Parr appeared in halls and theatres all over the country for the next few years,” Colin continued, “building his reputation. His ‘Corporal and Four Privates’ song was as well-known and popular at the time as ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘My Old Man’ were later on; they used to queue round the block whenever Georgie Parr the Camden Clown was in town.”
At the mere mention of their titles Edna could not help but sing the opening lines of both songs to herself, but she could not recall anything of George Parr’s. “I’ve never heard of that other one,” she admitted.
Colin smiled ruefully. “You probably won’t have. It might have been a hit with the audiences, but the ‘Corporal and Four Privates’ was a very controversial song for its time. It didn’t go down well with the authorities, or the church. They tried to get it banned as a moral outrage, and George was even arrested once outside the Britannia in Glasgow when he encouraged the crowd waiting to go in to sing his song. The headline in the Herald read Appalling Scenes of Decadence as Music Hall Star Soils Glasgow’s Pavements with Loathsome Act.”
“Goodness,” Edna exclaimed, “what on earth was all the fuss about?”
“Well, it wasn’t really a song about soldiers, Mother. It was metaphorical, and fairly heavy-handed at that, though that was how the music hall audiences liked their songs.”
“Well what was it about, then? Come on, Colin, don’t keep me in suspenders.”
He squirmed in his chair. “This is very embarrassing—“
“Colin!”
“Masturbation!” The word breached the defences of his tightly closed lips, which in addition gave added impetus to its first syllable and propelled the word out into the bedroom with a vigour and comedic brio that Georgie Parr himself would have appreciated.
“He was singing about masturbation. There, satisfied now?”
Mrs Draper mouthed a silent ‘oh’. “And did everyone know that that was what he was singing about?”
“Of course they did! That was why it was funny.”
“It all seems like a lot of fuss over nothing, if you ask me,” she remarked. “I mean, everyone’s done it, haven’t they? At some time or another.”
Colin’s eyes widened. “Mother, you never cease to amaze me. This is not a subject that we should be discussing. It isn’t relevant, anyway.”
“Of course it is,” Edna contradicted. “If that song was what he was most famous for.”
“It was until he met Hannah Goodwin. After that the song was more or less forgotten; no one had the heart to sing it again.”
“And he was here, on the pier?”
The archivist nodded. “Georgie Parr was a big name, and one of the first to get a long-term contract in one venue. Before that top of the bill usua
lly meant dashing about all over the place, particularly if they were performing in London, but George must have liked the seaside because he came back here several times, and then like I say he managed to negotiate a contract that kept him at the pier theatre. Not the one that’s here now, the old one… the one that looked like an Indian palace.”
Edna looked again at her wedding photo. “Your dad took me to see Jessie Mathews there not long before they knocked it down. It must have been just before the war. I remember the seats were terribly uncomfortable.”
“But that was the same stage that Georgie Parr stood on,” Colin said, a note of censure in his voice. How often had he spoken to generations before his own and witnessed the envy he felt towards their direct contact with what he could only ever experience through documents or photographs turn, often within seconds, to annoyance, as they recalled some ridiculous or trivial aspect of that irretrievable world?
“Well I didn’t know that then, did I?” His mother protested. “I’d never heard of him. All I knew was that the place looked old and tired and the seats gave you a numb bum.”
“Philistine.”
“Well they did!”
“Georgie Parr brought the crowds flocking in,” the archivist continued, “but he was nearly fifty by now, which was pretty old by their standards, and all those years of touring must have taken their toll. I wonder if he was thinking how much longer he could carry on.”
Edna sighed. “Perhaps it took his mind off the empty house that was waiting for him.”
Colin looked at his mother. “Is that how you felt… after Dad died?” he enquired cautiously.
“Oh, love, it’s how I feel now.” She saw the hurt expression and quickly continued, “And that isn’t meant to be horrible about you, before you start. You’ve been a wonderful son to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been around, but when someone you love so much is taken from you before… before you’re ready for them to go, that pain never goes away. Never. Poor George lost his wife and then his daughter as well, which must have been unbearable. Perhaps that’s why he was still working.”