The Fun Factory

by Chris England

  THE HOUSE THAT FRED BUILT

  SO it was that I found myself, a blur of a fortnight later, on a train to London, going to seek my fortune.

  My father’s solemn goodbye and firm handshake were accompanied by a rather smug and knowing smirk, as though he had no doubt at all that I would shortly be scuttling back to Cambridge with my tail between my legs begging to be allowed to make beds again.

  My mother and brother were utterly unperturbed by my departure. When I told my mother I was going to London to make a name for myself she greeted the announcement with a casual “Bye bye, then, dear!”, as if I had just said I was going to the market to buy eggs, and then turned straight back to the four square feet of pastry she was just then engaged in rolling flat. Lance barely looked up from polishing the Master’s shoes to grunt the following resonant and emotional valediction, which has remained imprinted upon my memory ever since.

  “Off to be a clown, then, eh? See you when you grow up.”

  To begin with, I hadn’t given much thought to my conversation on the first night with the dapper gentleman in the theatre bar.

  On the last night, though – at a sumptuous drinks party for the cast, hosted by The Rotter himself, to which I was graciously invited … to add myself to the serving staff – I fished the mystery gent’s card out of my back pocket and showed it to Mr Luscombe, whose eyes popped out on stalks. Metaphorically, of course. If he’d been able to do it for real he’d have been sure of a living on the halls for the rest of his days.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “You know who this is, don’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s Karno! Fred Karno, of Karno’s Speechless Comedians. Well, that’s what they used to call them, back when they weren’t allowed to speak. He’s one of the biggest – no, what am I saying, he’s the biggest name in the music hall!”

  Once he’d recovered himself – a couple of brandies and a breath of fresh air later – Mr Luscombe explained his pop-eyed excitement. He was a great enthusiast of the music hall, if a secret one, as his parents and his po-faced brother would never have approved of his wallowing amongst the lowlife of London, as they called it. He reckoned he’d seen all the great names, just names to me then, as he ticked them off for me on his fingers.

  “George Robey – the Prime Minister of Mirth – Little Tich, Gus Elen, Wilkie Bard, Vesta Tilley. And Marie Lloyd I saw once, marvellous fun! Karno, though,” and Luscombe prodded me in the chest to emphasise the point, “Karno is the nonpareil.”

  “Why, what does he do?” I asked, not knowing what a nonpareil was but imagining some kind of novelty act, possibly involving animals.

  “Not he himself, though he is the mastermind. His company performs his pieces, little plays that will make you laugh and will make you cry. The last Karno turn I saw was called The Bailiff, with Fred Kitchen. When he offers his arm to the poor woman who has lost everything there’s not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. And yet when he and his assistant, Meredith, are trying to gain entry to a house, all his little schemes and plots had the place in tucks. Kitchen, do you see, would say, ‘You do such and such, and then I do so and so, and then … Meredith, we’re in!’”

  He seemed surprised that I did not immediately fall about laughing at this.

  “Meredith, we’re in!” he cried again. “That’s the recurring phrase, do you see? And now you tell me that Karno has offered you a start? Why, man, what are you waiting for?”

  Mr Luscombe dictated a letter for me to send to the great Fred Karno, and he was even more wretchedly nervous than I was as we watched the college’s daily postal arrivals for a reply. When it came, a few days later, the envelope contained only another business card, exactly like the one I had been given in the theatre bar except that on the reverse side, in a firm and confident hand, a single word was inscribed in capital letters: “COME.”

  Luscombe was thrilled and heartily pooh-poohed my misgivings. Was not the address right there on the card? “Just take a cab from the station to Coldharbour Lane, and … Meredith – you’re in!”

  The run down to London was but a short hop by train, but I felt like I’d landed on another planet as I stepped onto the platform and looked around at the terminus. Huge black iron arches vaulted way overhead, like a monstrous satanic parody of the college chapel’s ceiling. Everywhere folk rushed, trotted, skittered and ambled about their various business, gentlemen peering urgently at their pocket watches, small gaggles of children tugging their nannies towards an excursion train, and here and there new arrivals with little piles of luggage looking as lost and intimidated as I felt.

  I wandered out into the street, where huge brick buildings thrust up four, five, six storeys high in all directions, and suddenly good old Cambridge, which had always felt so stately and grand to me, seemed like a cramped and claustrophobic warren.

  Traffic of all kinds clattered, clopped, parped, crapped and wheezed this way and that. It was dizzying, bewildering, too much to take in. I felt a bit of Dutch courage was called for, and I was a grown-up making his way in the world, after all, so I nudged my way through the door of a public house called the Railwaymen, which was full, pretty much as advertised, with railwaymen.

  By mid-afternoon, with a couple of pints (and then a couple more) on board, I was sufficiently confident to ask for directions to Camberwell, and eventually I found my way to the street specified on Mr Karno’s card.

  When I finally turned the corner I had to stop for a moment to take it in. I can’t be certain, but I think I may have pushed my hat back in order to scratch my head in amazement.

  A row of houses up a short side street seemed to have been knocked together, or combined into one enormous premises with huge double doors at the front. These were flung open wide, presumably to let the summer air circulate, so passers-by could see that inside it was an absolute hive of activity. Outside, no fewer than four double-decked motor omnibuses were parked in a row along the kerb, big painted signs on the sides bearing the legend “Fred Karno’s Comics”, where you might ordinarily expect to see “Bovril” or “Pears Soap”.

  I had reached the Fun Factory.

  And just at that moment dozens of people of all shapes and sizes began to issue forth. Dapper young gentlemen, elegant young ladies, all dressed to kill, some of the ladies flourishing brightly coloured parasols, they spilled down the short slope and out onto the road, laughing, chattering, greeting one another with exaggerated good humour, and began to pack themselves into the omnibuses until the vehicles’ aching suspensions creaked. On and on they came, a hundred, two hundred of them.

  Then some even more affluent-looking middle-aged chaps strode confidently towards waiting broughams, a handful of fabulously dressed women glided miraculously after them, then a couple of stragglers ahoy-hoyed and skipped up onto the buses’ backboards, until the short street was empty of pedestrians, save for a few slack-jawed gawkers like myself.

  Suddenly, all at once, the heaving convoy puffed and chuffed and parped and clopped and wobbled into motion, dividing at the end of the street as half went left and half right, with a few local children who had come to wave these fantastical creatures off trotting along in their wake, bowling their hoops along the pavement.

  And then there was silence. I took a deep breath, tiptoed tentatively up to the big double doors and peered inside … where I saw the damn’dest thing. You’ll hardly believe me when I tell you, but there was an ocean liner in there, just sort of looming up, large as life. The sort of thing that made me wish I had a half bottle of some sort of cheap booze in my hand, so I could look down at it accusingly before forswearing the demon drink for ever.

  In the gloom at the back of the building I saw a light, and there was a little office with windows in its rather wobbly-looking walls. The door was ajar, and a man in shirt sleeves was hunched over a desk inside. I went over and tapped lightly on the glass window in the door.

  “Excuse me, sir…?”

  The man looked up at
me, a harassed expression on his face. He was around forty, I supposed, losing his hair and his temper.

  “Finally! Here take these…” he said, striding over and thrusting a fistful of papers into my hands.

  “What … what are they?”

  “Well, it’s the bills, the bill matter, of course. What are you waiting for? Off you go, chop chop!”

  I had no idea where to go to, of course, so I just stood there like a goof, and the man seemed to gather that he had made a mistake. He looked at me quizzically. “Are you not the printer’s boy?”

  “No, I beg your pardon, sir. I’m Arthur Dandoe.”

  The man sighed heavily, then grabbed his papers back from me.

  “Arthur Dandoe, eh? Is that name supposed to mean something to me? Come on, lad, I’m a busy man. Tell me your business and let me get on.”

  I ventured into his office, where a fresh-faced youth I hadn’t noticed before was standing in the corner smoking a cigarette. This one watched me coolly as I fumbled in my pockets for Karno’s card, which had temporarily gone astray.

  “Well, come on, spit it out,” the harassed older chap said.

  “Um, right, yes,” I stuttered. “The thing is, I’m looking for Mr Fred Karno.”

  “Are you now?”

  “Um. Yes, I am.”

  “Well, good news,” the fellow said, burrowing in another pile of papers, looking for something. “You’ve found him.”

  My beer-fuddled brain frankly struggled with this. This was clearly not the same man that I had met in Cambridge.

  “You mean, you’re…?” I said.

  “No, no, no, no, not me,” the man said. “I’m Alf Reeves, if it’s any of your business. That’s Mr Karno over there.”

  Reeves pointed at the smoking youth, who gazed at me enquiringly down his nose. He was quite short and had to lean back quite a way to achieve this. Now I was even more baffled. I think I may have felt something go pop in my cranium.

  “You’re…?” I managed.

  “Yes, that’s right, I’m Fred Karno. What do you want?” the youth sneered.

  I found my tongue, and explained, haltingly, about the conversation I’d had with the shinily shod man in the theatre bar, and how I had come to London from Cambridge to take him up on his offer.

  “Oh, well, that’s just marvellous, that is. That’s just dandy!” he said, in a manner which quite definitely suggested that it was neither marvellous nor dandy. Then he aimed a vicious kick at a waste-paper bin, sending it skidding across the room. Alf Reeves sighed, ran his fingers through what hair he had left and narrowed his eyes at me.

  “If I had sixpence for every time some youth strolled in here and claimed that Mr Karno himself had told them to come and present themselves to me for a career in the musical theatre, do you know how rich I’d be? Eh? Do you have any idea?”

  I felt so deflated suddenly that I could only shrug.

  “Well, not that rich, actually. I’d have about four bob. It doesn’t happen all that often. So you met The Guv’nor, then, did you? Well, well. And what did he have to say to you when you met him?”

  “Actually he said I had ‘it’,” I ventured.

  “And what, might I ask, do you intend to do with ‘it’?” Reeves enquired. “Are you going to eat ‘it’, wear ‘it’, sleep in ‘it’, do a little dance with ‘it’? It smells like you might already have drunk most of it.”

  I just smiled at him, a thin, watery smile, like an idiot. Reeves sat back slowly and sighed, the weary sigh of a man who has been left in charge while whoever is supposed to be making the decisions is off having fun somewhere else.

  “All right, all right,” he said, suddenly bursting to life again and starting to scribble a note to himself on a scrap of paper. “I’ll set you on as a super, no harm in that.”

  At this Reeves glanced up at the youth as if for his approval, and got a surly shrug in response.

  “The pay’s five bob a week,” Reeves went on. “I’ll have you back here tomorrow first thing to make a start. Now, then. Where do you live?”

  “Um … Cambridge,” I said.

  “But you’re not planning to go back and forth to Cambridge every day, are you? In town, I mean, where are you living in town, in London?”

  “Actually I haven’t anywhere to go,” I admitted.

  Reeves turned to the smoking youth, who was still inexplicably seething at me as though I’d pinched his lunch or something. “Freddie? You’re heading down to Streatham, aren’t you? Take Arthur here to Clara Bell’s. Tell her he’ll be paid at the end of the week. Now run along, there’s good lads. I’ve a thousand other things to be doing.”

  The youth Freddie closed his eyes and sighed, as though he’d rather tackle anything else but the onerous chore of taking care of me, then he grabbed a jacket and hat and stalked out.

  I caught up with him out on the street. He was striding along unnecessarily quickly, I thought. I really couldn’t imagine what I had done to offend him, and fell anxiously into step alongside him.

  “So,” I ventured after a minute or two of sulky perambulation. “I really did meet Fred Karno in Cambridge, then?”

  “Sounds like it, doesn’t it?” this Freddie said, a grim set to his jaw.

  “Well, why did you say you were Fred Karno, then?”

  “I’m Fred Karno junior, that’s it, see?” he suddenly burst out. “You met The Guv’nor, my father, the famous Fred Karno. You follow?”

  I nodded. I followed. We strode on towards Brixton Hill.

  “I work with Mr Reeves on the administration side,” Freddie junior eventually offered, managing to make administration sound like cleaning out sewers. With a toothbrush. “So usually when a stranger walks in off the street and asks to see Fred Karno, it’s me he’s looking for, do you see? Muggins. The dogsbody.”

  Suddenly Freddie spotted the tram for Streatham going past us and darted after it at a gallop. I followed suit, and managed to leap on board just as it was setting off again. I found Freddie inside and collapsed into the seat opposite him, and couldn’t help noticing that he looked somewhat disappointed that I’d made it.

  Clara Bell’s house was actually very conveniently situated for someone working in the theatrical business, particularly for Mr Fred Karno senior’s company. The late-night trams ran down from the West End through Brixton onto Streatham High Road until all hours, so that performers could be sure of making it home whenever their various engagements finished. This meant that this whole part of the world – Brixton, Streatham, Balham – had a significant thespian population.

  Freddie didn’t say a word more to me, but I had plenty to look at as we went along. The outskirts of London seemed to sprawl for ever, an endless repeating sequence of shop fronts, gardens, churches and green open spaces.

  The tram stopped alongside a wide green common, and I was watching some carriage drivers leading their horses to a row of stone troughs to drink when I suddenly spotted Freddie striding away over the grass. He’d slipped off, the swine, without saying anything. Well, I grabbed my bag and scurried after him.

  I could have done without having to rush, as it seemed to stir up the beer I’d had with the railwaymen, which was sloshing around inside me. Halfway across the common, with Freddie hightailing it into the distant yonder, the whole place began to spin like a crazy whirligig, buildings and trees flying past my ale-addled eyes, and I had to sit in a heap on the grass until it all calmed down.

  By the time I was able to stand again Freddie had made it over to a three-storey town house and was ringing the bell. I caught up with him before the door was opened, and I leaned heavily against the porch for a moment. As I did so I glanced over at the house next door. Like the Bells’, it was three storeys high, with steps leading down to a basement entrance as well as up to the front door, and suddenly I was half sure I saw a pale face, a woman’s face, watching me from the window on the first floor. Then the door opened and there stood Clara Bell, a cheerful little woman with her
sleeves rolled up, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Hallo, Freddie!” she cried, inexplicably pleased to see the lad. “What’s this? Surprise visit?”

  “Delivery,” Freddie muttered, wafting his hand at me.

  “Are you not coming in for a cup of tea?”

  Freddie just shook his head, turned on his heel and left, the charmer. Clara Bell seemed remarkably forgiving of this behaviour.

  “Well,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Alf sent you, I suppose, did he? You’d better come in. I’m Clara. You’ve just missed Charley, I’m afraid, he’s doing three a day. I suppose you can have Ronny’s room, he won’t be needing it any more. You can give me a hand putting his stuff into his trunk.”

  As she chattered away Clara led me in, along the hallway and downstairs into the scullery, where she bustled around getting out cups and saucers and a teapot.

  “We’ll have some tea first, shall we…?”

  “Arthur. Arthur Dandoe.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Arthur. And this…” she exclaimed, as a tiny whirlwind sped in from the garden and thumped into her midriff, “…is Edie. Say good afternoon to Arthur, Edie.”

  The little dynamo turned out to be a four-year-old girl, clutching a doll in her little arms. She turned shy at the sight of me and wouldn’t show her face, nor would she let her mother go about her business either, so we all stood together there as I told Clara how I came to be there.

  “Aha,” she said. “I expect young Freddie was thrilled to bits to see you, wasn’t he?”

  “He hid it quite well if he was,” I said.

  “Well,” she said cheerfully. “You’ve landed on your feet, I’m sure. There’s hundreds of young lads up the Corner4 who’d give their right arm to join Karno’s. Not that he’s much on the lookout for boys with one arm, as far as I know. Well, now since you’ve come from Alf, I’ll trust you for your rent until you get paid on Saturday night,” she went on. “But just bear in mind that Charley, my husband, works for Karno’s and is one of Alf Reeves’s oldest friends, so if you come up short we’ll just get our money directly from your wages the next week, before you even see them. Understood?”