by Gordon Burn
‘Whoa,’ Ray said. ‘Whoa there. Whoa! Hey, Eddie, why don’t you just shut your mouth for a minute and give your arse a chance?’ What was exercising Eddie, it seemed, was the fact that the wholesale cancellation by the farmers’ group had left him with a meat mountain to get rid of. What Eddie couldn’t say was that it was ‘moody’ meat bought off a pal for a fifth of the price he would claim for it and that it was already a day past its sell-by.
Ray talked a good fight. He had put-downs to deal with any kind of heckler situation or audience loudmouth. But he hated confrontation. ‘Pagga! Pagga!’ – the cry that went around the playground when a fight was brewing – had always made him feel physically sick as a boy. It set off a loud alarm in his fear centre, right in his gut. He could feel his heart race and his legs weaken underneath him; a dry throat and his heart going crazy. He felt that standing in the kitchen’s thick-walled, room-size refrigerator where Eddie Edmunds had brought him, surveying the hanging carcasses of sheep and pigs, registering the blood smell in the air, listening to the generator fan running. He looked at the larded tattooed sides of beef and thought of Daisy and Dolly roaming Allotment Field, responding when their names were called, harried by dogs, mechanically cropping grass. And then his thoughts had turned to gory gangster films and heavies using beef carcasses as punch-bags and bodies hanging from hooks on moving pulleys, and at that moment somebody had started singing in the club.
Are you lonesome tonight?
Is your brassiere too tight?
Are your corsets just drifting apart?
He had noticed that Eddie was wearing wooden-soled clogs and that the tight cuffs of his trousers made his feet look like pig’s trotters in them. He noticed the rime of sweat around his chef’s paper hat and the pitted, grapefruit-like texture of his skin; the fact that his neck was thick with fat.
Are your stockings well laddered
And shoes wearing thin?
Do you keep up your knickers with a safety pin?
Are your teeth old and worn?
Do they slip when you yawn?
Then no wonder you’re lonesome tonight.
Ray realized he had been gradually manoeuvred into a place where his view of the door was blocked and that the animal bodies hanging within a foot of where he was standing had residual hairs that you didn’t notice from a distance and were giving off what seemed to him a sour bad smell. And he had just gained the impression that Eddie was about to snatch at his cap, exposing the even grid of scars that he had been left with as the result of an early, failed hair transplant (the crown of his head looked like a scrubbing brush that had been worn down to the wood and the stubbiest bristles – a domino with chickenpox, as Jackie described it), when he heard Jackie’s voice in the kitchen and felt time whirr back up to real time and heard cheers and a smattering of ironic applause as the Presley impersonator – he had an idea it was one of the young waiters – came to the end of his song. ‘Thankyouverramush.’ Something solid – a head or a hand – collided with the microphone, sending out a loud amplified crack followed by a squeal of feedback.
‘Is everything OK here?’ Jackie was standing with his legs under him the width of his shoulders instead of spread wide and dug in, which is the mistake that many amateur fighters make. It was all about balance. Balance meant leverage; leverage meant speed; speed meant power. Jackie’s strength as a boxer had always been in his determination, his courage, his will to carry on. It wore opponents down.
‘I wanted to talk to the engineer, not the shitey rag,’ chef said to Jackie, but in a way that indicated he knew the fun was over, and Ray had taken that as his cue to escape from the cold, back into the kitchen where the two boys were still bent over their game and the girl with the duster was busy examining herself in the dimmed surface of an oven and it was as if whatever it was that had happened inside the big chilled room had never taken place. The other girl had momentarily disappeared.
‘I’ve got one forya on the mad-cow disease if you want‚’ the less crater-faced of the two crater-faced boys said to Ray when he was nearly out the door. He had turned red and his acne scars looked sore and livid. ‘There’s two cows in a field. One says to the other, “What d’you think of this mad-cow disease?” The other one says, “It doesn’t affect me. I’m a fucken duck.”’ His friend sniggered, and the boy who had told the joke, exceedingly red now, sniggered as well. ‘Fnarr.’
‘Eddie wanted to make it a BSE day,’ the friend said. ‘“Bit of Something Extra”.’ And they were off again, laughing with their mouths closed so that their shoulders rocked and tears welled in their innocent eyes. They reminded Ray of the two fire-lighters on the Moor that morning, which was already beginning to seem an awfully long time ago.
‘The mad-cow disease was last month, son‚’ Ray said, ‘haven’t you heard? Now it’s the foot-and-mouth. But thanks, I might be able to find a way to use it, you never know. Thanks anyway,’
*
It was nearly dark by half past five when the ‘BOBBY’S BACK YEM’ sign stuttered into lurid life, colouring up the dusk. Its blue and yellow neon flourish could be seen from the other side of the river. At quarter past seven a switch was flicked and the tape of an old wireless programme from the palaeolithic age of radio started to be streamed as background into the club.
This is the North of England Home Service [a double-breasted BBC voice announced]. Presenting the people to the people. Bob’s Your Uncle. Featuring Bill Robinson and the Northumbrian Serenaders in the songs that live for ever. [The sound of the Serenaders humming ‘Roses of Picardy’ swelled in the background.] And starring Bobby Thompson in the life and hard times of a plain working man as heard through the ears of his neighbours. Ladies and gentlemen, tossed on a sea of trouble stormy enough to wreck the happiest home, but riding it all with a nod and a wink, meet the comic in a million, Bobby T–
In his dressing-room, Ray rose and touched a button near the Tannoy speaker which faded out the sound of his younger, starchier, painfully ingratiating self, strangely isolated in time.
When he was new to the business and still wet behind the ears, Ray had broadcast with Bobby Thompson from many working men’s clubs, works canteens, corporation halls and drill halls in the North East of England. And it had been his idea to name Bobby’s after the Geordie comedian whose trademarks were a flat cap, a tab that was continually dribbling ash down his sloppy jumper, and a style of comedy that was rooted in his own hard upbringing during the twenties and thirties, when you had to fight for your bite, as the saying went. ‘The Little Waster’, as Thompson became known for his jokes about running rings around the rent man and the Assistance and life on the dole, was bom in 1911 in the pit village of Penshaw Staithes in County Durham, and in a long life hardly ever left the North East.
He was a comic in the great eccentric tradition of Billy Merson, George Robey, Rob Wilton and Frank Randle in a way that Ray Cruddas, for all his national reputation, had never been. But the combination of an impenetrable accent and material that already had whiskers growing on it in the sixties meant that his comedy didn’t travel. He was given a chance to break out of the working men’s clubs when Tyne Tees Television gave him his own sixteen-week series in 1959, in its first ever season. But after a storming beginning, The Bobby Thompson Show rapidly ran out of material and turned into a ratings calamity. It bombed spectacularly, the broadcasters looked like fools and he was an outcast after that, a pariah in the new world of slick patter and canned laughter in which Ray Cruddas was just beginning to establish himself. (It was the period when he was heavily in demand for judging beauty competitions, opening swimming pools in civic centres and giving bouquets to the most glamorous grannies of Hull or Gypsy Hill.)
But back in the mechanics’ institutes and the fag-end, back-of-beyond clubs, Bobby Thompson was welcome. Poor people would always laugh at his well-worn routines. When Bobby said of his wife, ‘Yes’dee I thowt she was havin’ a bubble bath an’ she’d been eatin’ mushy peas,’ he got
howls. When he told the one about how he telephones Neville Chamberlain to see how he can help in the war effort, only to find himself talking to Mrs Chamberlain who responds with the epic line, ‘Can you haad on a minute, Bob, I’ve got a pan of chips on,’ they roared and banged on the tables.
He used his humour to show his deep affection for the people and places he had been surrounded by all his life, and inspired a strong regional loyalty in return. ‘I suppose you could say that I represent something special to people, something that is more meaningful or more personal, because of their background, than history,’ he once said, in a rare recorded utterance. ‘“You don’t know what you mean to my mother … My father was saying your jokes when he passed away …” It’s like they look at me and they see something in themselves they’re afraid they’re going to lose, or mebbe they’ve already lost. I feel almost a desperation in their love for me.’ When everything else got corporatized and homogenized, Bobby Thompson stayed the way he was, preserved in amber.
‘Eee, aa’ll tell yiz. Yi naa why I keep the tropical fish, diwen yiz? So aa’ve somethin’ entertainin’ to watch when Ray Cruddas is on the tellyvision. He should buy a barra an’ orn a decent livin’.’ Bobby had said this on one of the last occasions the two of them shared a bill together. The local press had tried to make something of it and build it up into a bitter feud. But Ray felt sure that nothing was meant; that it was just part of the professional give-and-take. He remembered the occasion well. It was in 1961 or ’62, the bridging period between the hard, sombre days of the war and rationing, and the more dashing, mobile times that were to come. There was a feeling of modernity and adventure. People were buying their first car and booking their first Continental holiday. DIY was starting to boom. Young couples were putting hardboard on doors to cover up panels whose edges were dust-collectors, and pulling out old Victorian mouldings and sconces. People were trying to bury the past, and all the reminders of deprivation and poverty. And Ray felt he reflected the new spirit in his clothes.
On the night in question he had been wearing one of the new Terylene drip-dry, non-iron shirts in a pale buttercup yellow, with a metallic, fat-knotted tie and a pale metallic suit with double vents and a faint windowpane undercheck. This had naturally raised suspicions that he was a bit light on his toes. (A wolf-whistle greeted him as he walked on.) But what drew most comment among the audience of miners and their families was his shoes. These were made from the softest kid leather of the sort only ever usually used for making ladies’ gloves and, as with gloves, you could make out the faint outline of his toes. They had concealed tongues and parallel lacing and an almond-shaped toe. What was most startling about Ray’s shoes, though, was the colour. They were a delicate dove grey, and then somehow overlaid on the grey was the kind of pearlized sheen that was just starting to be seen on the new laminated bathroom and kitchen surfaces. In an area where most footwear was utility-wear, protected against corrosion and fierce industrial processes and, even when it was being bought for ‘best’, was bought for durability rather than appearance, Ray’s shoes were something.
He had been booked to appear with Bobby that night at the Miners’ Club and Institute, Percy Main. It was a benefit for spina bifida. He could remember clearly them being in the committee room, which had been set aside for the use of the artistes, as a pencilled sign said on the door. There was a lot of dark wood panelling and heavy, dark oak furniture and a round port-hole window with rich stained-glass and leaded lights. ‘Nice ti naa if I gan oot there the neet an’ die, like,’ Bobby said, ‘thi can bring iz back here ti the chapel a rest.’ He had black boot polish in his hair and kippered nicotine fingers and was eating the ‘bait’ of clammy beetroot sandwiches that his wife, the fearsome Phyllis, had put up for him and that he slurped like poor man’s oysters, the white bread dissolved into a purple paste on the slippery purple beets, shhhlurrrrrrp, through his best teeth.
His whole attitude to life was distilled in a one-liner he borrowed from probably the most famous case of a comedian who was idolized in the North but who remained incomprehensible to a southern public, the Wigan-born Frank Randle: ‘She says to iz, she says [assuming his still Geordiefied version of a cut-glass accent], “Ew, you’re not polished enough, Berbby.” So aa gans, “What di yi tek iz for, like? A coffin?”’
For his first set of the night at Bobby’s, Ray put on a sharp suit and a wide tie and a pair of pale shoes made from ostrich or emu or crocodile or salamander, selected from the long row of shoes lined up along one wall of his dressing-room.
For his second set, he pulled on a flat cap with a lick of Brylcreemed hair fixed to it, a baggy Fair Isle jumper with a hole in the elbow, a pair of baggy trousers and some soft-soled carpet slippers shiny with grease. Just before he went on, Jackie passed him the Player’s Weight that he had started for him in order to authenticate his impersonation of Bobby Thompson.
An irony not lost on Ray was that, in the last years, the Bobby Thompson who put on the cap and the jumper and the flattened gutter snout was by then a wealthy man with a fine house at the seaside, a car with a driver and whose greatest pleasures, indulged at every opportunity, were days at the races with a full wallet in the jacket of his bespoke silk suit with the satin Paisley lining, and nights at the gaming tables playing roulette and blackjack.
For forty years, up to his death in 1988, the Little Waster was locked in a love embrace with the North-East working class.
‘Your voice’, somebody, an important man in the industry, reaching for a compliment, had once told Ray, ‘has a little quality of being reassuring in it.’ This, he knew, is what he amounted to.
*
Counting the house was an old tradition, and one that Ray, a traditionalist in most things, nightly observed.
Every night around eight o’clock he walked the few yards from his dressing-room and inserted himself into the space between the blackout cloth at the back of the stage and the high rear wall of the club. The back flat was studded with lights which objectively everybody knew were plain household bulbs coated in a thin layer of dust but were nevertheless prepared to accept as a representation of a twinkling, starry sky. The back of the flat was a confusion of spaghetti leads and electricity ducts, and Ray climbed on to a platform of wooden crates to press his eye against the peep-hole that had been inserted in the cloth slightly above the part of the stage where the band sat.
From this vantage point he was able to encompass the entire panorama of the club: the communal tables arranged in rows radiating out from the circular dance area in the well of the room, with smaller tables, each one with an amber lamp glowing on it, rising in tiers; the long brass-rail bar stepped down the right-hand side of the club in all its promise and bottley glitter; the five-hundredweight chandelier hanging on tension wires anchored high up in the roof; the faded Coronation-era bunting and colours; the waiting staff assembled at their stations all along the middle tier, clean and scrubbed and ready to go. From day one they had stuck to a hiring policy that discriminated in favour of workers who had been made redundant from the old heavy industries, which meant a preponderance of men and women in their forties, fifties and even sixties, most of them without any previous waiting experience. But it seemed to work. They were less inclined than the waitresses and bartenders that Ray had come across in other establishments to treat the customers as turkeys to be housed, fed and stripped clean with a minimum of violence. He had watched many former rivet-slingers and conveyor-belt overseers develop performance skills and learn to project a character in keeping with the nostalgic tone of Bobby’s and earn big tips.
Occasionally, standing on his platform of splintered pallets and crates, listening to the band play an old standard from his youth, Ray would allow himself to be engulfed in a fondness and a nostalgia for his own life. Nostalgia, or homesickness, is never about the past but about felt absences or a sense of something lacking in the present: even primitive peoples are said to dream of an even more primitive past – the original,
unspoiled season (described in so many myths). And, watching from the secrecy of his blackout screen while men in corduroy britches and bicycle-clips and canvas braces like his father’s and women in hairnets and curlers and sensible sandals like his mother’s were brought to their tables, Ray could sometimes imagine he was seeing a parade of dead relatives descending the tiers like players at the final walk-down in a pantomime – uncles who worked as lightermen and emptying the bins; grandmothers who pushed wicker baskets and zinc bathtubs of washing up to the wash-house on old bogeys and prams on Mondays and laboured for hours in the life-sapping heat and steam.
He was also constantly surprised by the number of young people who came dressed in ways they could never have seen, except in period TV dramas and faded family pictures. A related phenomenon was the local talent competitions Ray was asked to judge which were invariably won by teenagers impersonating people – Bobby Darin, Matt Monroe, Norman Evans, Sammy Davis Junior – who had been dead before they were born.
By eight o’clock, he normally expected to see the bar brimming with people and the main room beginning to fill up with buzz and noise. Tonight, though, he could hear the brushes and the kick-drum of the drummer, who was immediately below him, with the eerie clarity of a record and, in the quieter moments, hear the band cracking wise among themselves. Even with one eye he could see that the bar was about a third as full as it was supposed to be.
Blanche usually supplied him with a crib sheet which set out the who and where of the party bookings so he could work some local or topical reference in during his first spot of the night. Most nights this didn’t tax him. The hen parties and ruby-wedding groups, the sewing circles and pigeon-fanciers and stags; the domed eccentrics of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association and the nervous nellies from the vast Ministry of Pensions gulag to the east of the city – these were all easy, requiring one or two one-size-fits-all gags from his mental Rolodex. But the Ephphatha League of the Deaf posed trickier problems.