The Fun Factory

by Chris England

  “Well,” Frank said. “You know my view.” And with that he and Syd left, and Mike returned with a large tumbler full of fiery Scottish anaesthetic. I told him that Charlie Chaplin was on his way to Bolton, and he tutted softly to himself.

  “Oh well, one good thing,” Mike said then, cheerfully. “At least we don’t have all the bother of getting you changed, do we?”

  I looked down, and realised that he was right. Under my coat, I was still wearing my bloodstained jail bird costume from the afternoon before.

  A short while later I stood in the wings waiting for Jail Birds to begin. The whisky had done the trick of perking me up, but the pains in my jaw, my ribs and my head were still humming away.

  Then the front man of the chain gang was shuffling out into the spotlights, and we were under way. The chain tugged at my leg as Mike stepped onto the stage, and then I followed as best I could, lurching along like Quasimodo.

  It was fortunate, I suppose, that the sketch was set in a prison yard, because my bruises and cuts, coupled with my painful doubled-over gait, looked deliberate, part of the scenario. And after a moment or two I realised that I was the one the audience was watching, and I was the one they were giggling at, as little suffering noises escaped inadvertently from my battered lips every time I was obliged to change direction. At last I was permitted to stand still, to be addressed by the prison governor, and a deep sigh of relief brought me another laugh.

  Through my one good eye I caught sight of Syd, at the other end of the line, frowning, puzzled at the audience’s sympathy for me.

  After that I managed to limp through a sequence where we were supposedly breaking rocks, even though I could barely lift the sledgehammer, and just leaned on it. This seemed to strike a chord with the audience, too.

  So far so good, but I knew the difficult bit was coming up. The jail birds hatch an escape plan. Syd is the ringleader, and I had a number of lines to speak during the discussion, making suggestions and so forth, without which, well, there was no scene, no story, no comedy.

  “All right, gather round lads,” says Syd, once the prison guards have gone off, reaching round and clapping me heartily on the back.

  “Aaaargh!” I went, and the audience laughed again. Clearly they enjoyed their torture up there in the hard north. I could taste blood in my mouth.

  “We need to make a break for it, boys. Any ideas?”

  My cue. Here we go, I thought. All or nothing. Death or glory. I gathered myself, took a deep and agonising breath, and came out with: “Awrawr wre reten dobe rarsons!”

  It was loud enough, at least, but nonsense, and lights danced crazily before my eyes. Syd looked at me, and I could see him thinking. He could help me out, or he could simply let the sketch fall flat.

  With a huge effort I gathered myself for another go.

  “Awrawr wre reten dobe rarsons!”

  Even to me it sounded like a dog trying to talk. I felt, rather than saw or heard, the audience begin to shift from one buttock to the other. Syd smirked.

  Suddenly Mike Asher piped up. “What’s that you say, Lumpy?” he asked, cupping his hand to his ear.

  My heart jumped with a sudden burst of hope, like a drowning man being thrown a lifebelt. I grabbed Mike’s sleeve and mumbled my line again, and Mike – bless him – forwarded it on to the world at large. “Lumpy says why don’t we pretend to be parsons?”

  The other jail birds laughed, and the audience joined them. Syd’s eyes narrowed, but he was enough of a pro to see that the sketch could now continue, and what’s more, he could hardly miss the fact that the audience seemed to like the idea of ‘Lumpy’, a prisoner that only his best pal could understand.

  Miraculously, Mike and I managed to get through all of my dialogue, with me groaning along like a sub-human creature, and he translating Lumpy’s noises into intelligible language. We established ourselves as an impromptu little comic double act as we did so. Even Syd seemed to be seeing the funny side by the end of the bit.

  The finale, though, was a different matter. It was a finely choreographed piece of chaos, with prisoners and guards galloping around in all directions at (as you will no doubt recall) breakneck speed.

  There was no hiding place. I simply couldn’t manage a run, and even the effort of remaining standing was taking its toll.

  We reached a point where I was supposed to be the centre of a piece of frenetic action, and I found myself stuck, as if rooted to the ground, right in the middle of the stage. I was supposed to bolt once around the yard and then off into the wings, pursued by silent Albert Austin, my other travelling companion of the day before, playing a prison guard. I was supposed to do this … but my legs simply would not answer.

  I could see the audience clearly. The butcher who had laid me out with his leg of pork was in the middle of the front row, with a gleaming white shirt front dazzling me beneath his shiny chin. It crossed my mind to see if I could spit blood all over it, salvage some small satisfaction from the evening, but then the room started spinning.

  Albert started running towards me, expecting me to flee, but I just stood stock still and watched him. He slowed, he skidded to a halt, he reached out uncertainly to apprehend me, not knowing what else he was supposed to do, or what on earth we would do then, when suddenly I shot up into the air!

  I was as surprised as he was, and he was standing there clutching at his heart! Neither of us had seen Mike coming, and he had just scooped me up in his arms and raced off, once around the yard and then into the wings. My hero! Until he dropped me in a heap by the prompt desk, that is, where I lay, moaning in agony while he clutched at his back, gasping. We caught each other’s eye, then, and burst out laughing.

  “Oh! ’on’t memme raugh…!” I cried, grabbing at my poor ribs, which only made Mike laugh even more.

  “What’s that, Lumpy?” he chortled, slumping down to join me in sprawling on the floor.

  Onstage, Jail Birds reached its raucous conclusion to rousing acclaim. The next thing I knew was that Frank and Syd were standing over us.

  “Well, I don’t know about you,” Frank said. “But I think that will do very well, don’t you?”

  He looked pointedly at Syd, who looked down at the pair of us, gave a little snort.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  Mike helped me to the bar, where I bought him the pint he so richly deserved. Every bone in my body was sore. I hadn’t felt the Power, I had only felt a monstrous swirling kaleidoscope of aches, pains and panic. And there was plenty more of the same to come tomorrow.

  But I was a Karno comedian.

  PART II

  12

  IT’S A MARVEL ’OW ’E DOOS IT BUT ’E DO

  WHO knows? Maybe if Charlie Chaplin had taken my place in his brother’s Jail Birds company, maybe he’d have had my life and I’d have had his. There’s something to think about.

  Maybe I would have become the most successful and popular comedian the world has ever seen, with my mansion in the Hollywood hills and a full-sized Wurlitzer organ in the hallway, while he would be living in his granddaughter’s box room in Streatham.

  Maybe Ronny Marston could have been the pre-eminent comic actor of his generation, if only… Poor Ronny Marston.

  When the two-month Jail Birds tour finished, I was on tenterhooks to know what Mr Karno’s plans for me were. I had hopes that Syd Chaplin and Frank O’Neill would have had good things to say about my contribution. Those bits of business involving the prisoner Lumpy, which Mike Asher had brilliantly improvised, had proved so popular that I’d had to continue to make myself up to look beaten to a pulp even once my various injuries had healed completely. And although tinkering with the script (such as it was) was generally frowned upon, surely I’d been given some credit for that.

  Anyway, whatever Syd and Frank had to say, it must have done the trick, because over the next few months Karno began to groom me for bigger things. He began to team me up with his oldest and most trusted hands, so I could learn the
tricks of the trade. To begin with, he put me with Fred Kitchen in a well-tried sketch called G.P.O. Kitchen had a distinctive lisping delivery that seemed to make everything sound funnier. He had a curious shambling walk, too, onstage and off, a sort of shuffle, with the occasional little skip-step in there. The Guv’nor, you can be sure, had worked out how to make the most of this, by ensuring that Kitchen always wore shoes that were a couple of sizes too large.

  G.P.O. featured Fred as Perkins, which was pretty much a catchall name for the many lead characters created for and by Karno’s leading man. He’d also played a Perkins in The Bailiff, the sketch that Mr Luscombe had so enthused about, and so I wrote to my erstwhile mentor that I was appearing opposite the great man at the Met on Edgware Road. The very next day he appeared at the stage door, bubbling with excitement.

  “I say, Arthur,” Luscombe jabbered, as I took him (or, more accurately, let him take me) for a quick drink before the show to calm him down. “Appearing with Fred Kitchen! You know what…?” He dealt me a healthy slap on the back. “Meredith – you’re in!”

  And I was. I did another stint then with Billie Ritchie as the principal comic. Ritchie was a wiry little chap, with a mop of black, curly hair and a little toothbrush moustache bristling away on his top lip. Onstage he was wont to wear trousers that were a couple of sizes too large and a jacket that was a couple of sizes too small, and he walked – well, waddled, more like – with his flat feet at ten to two and his knees spread bandily apart. He always carried a cane, a springy one, which he liked to twirl, and often used to prod an antagonist in the chest or behind, and the whole effect was generally topped off with a battered derby hat. His stock in trade was the downtrodden underdog everyman, battling the injustices of the world with his unquenchable spirit.

  Sound familiar? I should think it does.5

  I learned plenty from those shows and those old hands, and Karno also made sure that I saw other acts that could teach me a thing or two. Little Tich, T.E. Dunville, Mark Sheridan, George Robey of course, Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd – all were weighed and measured.

  But the man I learned the most from was the Guv’nor himself. I picked up all sorts of pantomime techniques, a whole dictionary of mime gestures, from Karno. When a man is amazed, for example, he tips his hat back and scratches his head. When he is thinking, he frowns and scratches his chin. I used to wonder how such exaggerated moves came to mean the thing that they meant, but obviously, originally, they must have come from life, mustn’t they? I always used to get a kick out of seeing someone, in real life, scratching his head in amazement, or wringing her hands in dismay, not because they wanted to convey these things to an audience, but because that’s how their very bodies reacted in these situations, because that was the truth.

  One key element to Karno’s comedy was a quality he called “wistfulness”. Time and again in rehearsals at the Miracle I remember him slowing down a scene, and murmuring: “Wistful, keep it wistful…” – reminding the actors to tug at the heartstrings as well as going for the funnybone.

  He himself had been a performing gymnast as a young man, so when he made the transition to pantomime he brought a whole range of specialist skills with him. One time, I remember, tired of trying to explain, he demonstrated a flawless rolling fall for us, right there in his smart suit and shiny shoes, bobbing up to his feet again with the spring of a sixteen-year-old.

  “There,” he said, brushing the dust from his sleeves. “That’s how we used to do it.”

  I was fascinated by this glimpse of the Guv’nor’s former career as a performer, and after the rehearsal I plucked up the courage to ask him about it. He cocked his head on one side and regarded me with half a smile for a moment.

  “Come over to t’ house,” he said then, to a background of astonished gasps from those close enough to overhear, and I followed him as he trotted over the road from the Fun Factory to his home at number 28 opposite.

  Inside he led me into the kitchen, and I sat there at the table while he trotted upstairs to look something out. I didn’t want to do anything to tarnish the moment, so I sat very still with my hands on my knees, like a schoolboy waiting for the headmaster.

  As I listened to the Guv’nor’s footsteps clicking to and fro across the wooden floor upstairs, I suddenly became aware that I was not alone. I risked a glance over my shoulder, and there, almost on top of me, as if he had just materialised out of thin air, was a wild-looking elderly man. His hair was white and wild, sprouting in all directions at once, with odd-coloured bits in it, and he was wearing only a dark tartan dressing gown, beneath which his bony shins and bare feet were visible.

  “Aaaagh!” I gasped, as this apparition smiled, revealing at most three teeth, and reached out to me with one skeletal hand balled into a fist. Slowly the fingers unclenched to reveal a small mass of dirty-yellowish putty.

  “Cheese?” the vision offered.

  “N-no, thank you very much.”

  “Go on, it’s Wensleydale,” the old geezer wheezed.

  “Really, I’m fine, thank you.”

  “I think I’ve got some Red Leicester if you’d rather…”

  All of a sudden he clambered up onto my lap, shoving one bony kneecap into my groin, and began rubbing some cheese against my face, trying to force it between my lips.

  “Cheee-eee-eeese!” my assailant keened happily.

  “Ahem!”

  A little cough from the doorway. Abruptly the assault was over, and the ancient figure scampered off up the passage and away up the stairs. I wiped my face quickly with both hands and looked up.

  There was the Guv’nor, slightly flushed, clutching a leather-bound album in one hand, while with the other he guided a buxom and cheerful-looking woman towards me.

  “Arthur, may I present Mrs Karno?”

  “Arthur Dandoe,” I spluttered, scrambling to my feet and offering my hand. “Charmed, I’m sure, Mrs Karno.”

  “Please, call me Maria,” Mrs Karno smiled. “So, Fred, this is the lad you’ve been telling me about, the one you’ve such high hopes for?”

  “One of ’em,” Karno grumbled, and it was clear that he was irked to have this opinion aired in front of me. I, of course, was thrilled to know I had been the subject of discussion between them, and Mrs K banged on regardless.

  “Yes, the lad who’s been doing so well,” she said, still smiling, and I preened a little at this, I’m afraid. “I remember you saying. Syd’s brother.”

  Thump. Down to earth I fell.

  “No, no, dear, this is t’other one,” the Guv’nor mumbled, waving a hand dismissively in my general direction, and I shrank another couple of inches.

  “Well,” Mrs Karno clapped her hands together. “I’m sure you two boys have things to discuss. Why don’t I…?” She and the Guv’nor shared a glance, and she nodded and set off upstairs after the cheesy old codger. Probably to tie him down to something.

  Karno sat down at the table and began flicking through the album, looking for whatever it was he had meant to show me. Neither of us said anything at first, until he noticed a stray lump of grubby-looking Gloucestershire on the table between us, and noticed me noticing him noticing it. He picked it up daintily, between forefinger and thumb, and walked it over to a waste scuttle, then washed his hands at the sink. Back at the table, he sniffed, embarrassment in the air, and said: “You met my father, then, I see?”

  “I did…?”

  Karno nodded slowly.

  “You won’t mention to anyone … the…?”

  “The cheese?”

  I promised him faithfully that I wouldn’t ever tell anyone anything about it. “You mustn’t mind what Maria said, you know. She’s only taking an interest in young Chaplin because I told her t’ story of how I came to take him on.”

  I waited expectantly, hoping he would enlighten me.

  “Syd, you see, has been on and on at me to bring Charlie on board ever since I first got him off Wal Pink. He’s always playing t’ big brother, see, h
as always looked after the boy because their father died years ago and their mother, poor soul, is not all there. But Karno’s is not a charity, and I didn’t think the lad was ready. After that Jail Birds tour of yourn I called Syd in, as I’d a mind to send him back to America, and he tells me straight he won’t go.

  “‘What’s this, Syd?’ I says. ‘A mutiny?’

  “‘If you like,’ says he.

  “Well, I telled him there’s no more money for him, and he says it’s nowt to do wi’ money, he must put his family first, and if I won’t take Charlie on then he’ll be off, and the two on ’em’ll work up an act together, or maybe run back to Pink’s. I could see he’d got himself proper worked up, and so I reckoned it like this: either Charlie will be up to it, in which case everyone wins, or he won’t, in which case Syd will see it as well as anyone else, and I’ll be able to say I gave him a fair go and get rid. And as it ’appens he’s doing fine, so far.”

  Karno began to leaf through his clippings.

  “Some of you young lads don’t know you’re born,” he said. “I hear you complaining about doing three a night and it makes me laugh. I was in a travelling circus when I was your age, and on Sheffield Fair Ground one New Year’s Day, how many shows do you think we did?

  Naturally I had no idea.

  “Twenty-two!” Karno cried. “Twenty-two shows in a day! Not just a ten-minute turn, either, a full on affair. I did the double trapeze, the horizontal bars, I was ringmaster for the Fortune-Telling Pony, I had to introduce the so-called clown and pick the audience back up afterwards, I was in a sketch called Dead and Alive, and played three parts in The Drama of Dick Turpin.”

  “Twenty-two times?” I said, astonished.

  “Twenty-two times, and was paid one and ninepence for my trouble.”

  I listened to him telling me stories of his youth, and knew this was an indication of a growing bond between us, knew that all this was a good sign, good for me, good for my future career. All the while, though, somewhere in my central nervous system, I had registered the knowledge that I was the “other one”.