Nothing quite prepares you for the experience of being ‘in the skins’. You are not entirely in the dark because gauzes set into the cloth give you glimpses of the stage, but the sense of entrapment and enclosure is astonishingly intense. The feeling was enhanced for me because I was acutely conscious of occupying another’s space. The smell inside was not particularly offensive but it was somehow personal to the body which had once occupied it and the body of the former occupant’s partner which still did. I felt an acute and irrational terror of touching Peggy in the skins.
Before I made my first entrance in this new role Freddie Dring winked at me and said: ‘Sooner you than me mate. Talk about dancing cheek to cheek, eh? Eh?’
‘We’re not doing the dance,’ I said solemnly.
‘Don’t be green, son. Don’t be green,’ said Freddie.
I thought that, all things considered, the matinee performance did not go badly. I performed as instructed by Peggy and was hoping for some word of commendation at the end of it. Instead, when we had taken off the skins for the last time I was met with a set face and an angry stare.
‘When you’re in the skins, you keep your hands to yourself. That’s one of the golden rules. I thought every professional knew that. Don’t you ever do that again.’
I was astonished. I had avoided any physical contact with her whatsoever. The last thing I had wanted to do was touch her. My protests and denials were cut short.
‘Don’t insult me by lying, young man!’ she said as she stalked off to her dressing room carrying the empty horse.
**
Between the matinee and the evening show I visited Syd in hospital. I had learned that the night before, after the show, Syd had wandered off and got drunk. On his way back to the camper van late at night he had lurched out into the road and was run over by a car. His right leg was badly damaged; how badly I did not yet know. There had been conflicting opinions among the company, some saying that he would be out of hospital and dancing in a matter of days, others offering less hopeful prognostics.
Syd occupied a private room in the hospital. I found him sitting up in bed surrounded by flowers, fruit and get well cards. His right leg was under a frame which formed a long barrow in the blanketed surface of the bed. As I entered the room he gave his cheerful grin and wink, but I was immediately aware that a change had taken place in him. What first prompted this feeling were his teeth. I had never noticed them before but they seemed more prominent than usual: his grin was wolfish. His face, never in any way chubby, had sharpened; flesh had collapsed onto the bones.
‘Hello, son,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’ The bonhomie was now no more than a façade, and I could smell something confused and resentful beneath. I did my dutiful best to wish him well and express the hope that he would be out of hospital and performing within a few days. As I did so his face remained blank, and he nodded sharply at each clumsy expression of good will. He seemed impatient. His hands fumbled with a piece of dark cloth. I asked him about the leg.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just give us a few days. It’ll mend. They’re operating tonight. Don’t you worry. That’s a good leg. I’m not having it off in a hurry.’ I was puzzled: the possibility of amputation had not occurred to me. Syd’s hands continued to work at the piece of cloth: he seemed to have taken on some of his wife’s restlessness. When I told him that I now occupied his position in the skins he became animated.
‘You don’t want to do that, son,’ he said frowning.
I told him that I didn’t want to do it, but that I was doing it under Bunny Goldman’s orders. Syd did not take this in.
‘Listen to me, lad,’ he said, drawing me closer to him with a beckoning finger. ‘She’ll never work those skins without me. I tell you she’s nothing without me. Nothing’s going to change that. She can talk all she likes about Priscilla and Mother Goose. Oh, I know. It’s Priscilla this, sodding Priscilla that. Well, she won’t do no Priscilla. Understand? I’m seeing to that. Peggy and I do the skins together or we don’t do it at all. All right, son?’
He bared his teeth again. The lustreless eyes were no longer on me but had concentrated themselves on a distant object. The skin was pale, tautly folded and shining. Something convulsed under his sheet and I left quickly.
**
I felt still more nervous about the evening performance. The atmosphere in the theatre had not improved. I gathered that Victor was not speaking to anyone, least of all Peggy. Quite why he had pursued an affair with her in the first place was beyond me. Maid Marian and Robin Hood’s speculation was that it was wounded vanity: the star’s droit de seigneur had been denied him in other quarters, so he had settled for the only available opportunity. Peggy alone was hurt by his aloofness because the rest of the company, in one of those periodic fits of self-righteousness that sometimes grip theatrical people, had decided to shun him as coldly as he shunned them.
Peggy herself had absorbed some of this mood of indignation and the object of her censure was still me and my alleged offence inside the skins that afternoon. I had stopped protesting my innocence. In her dressing room, I allowed her to give me a talking to and to heal her guilt with the balm of moral superiority.
‘Whatever happens,’ she concluded. ‘I’m going solo in the skins after this. I’m going to ask Bunny to give me Priscilla next year, but I’ll settle for Puss in Boots.’
She was sitting at her dressing table as she said this and Dobbin’s skins were lying at her feet, looking like the desiccated corpse of a farm animal. As she spoke the last words she must have kicked the skin accidentally; at least, I saw one of the cloth legs give a strange twitch like the last convulsion of a dying beast. Peggy noticed this too and seemed shocked. She put one of her stockinged feet carefully on Dobbin’s head, then looked at me defiantly.
Long before the thing happened I was determined that this would be my last night in the skins. The stage lights beat down upon my mobile prison and made its darkness noisome and oppressive. I felt beads of sweat crawling off my bent back. The other occupant, so near yet so distant, was also in a state of agitation. How it was I don’t know—perhaps it was my eyes—but the gauzes in the skin out of which I could see onto the stage had become more opaque. The events outside seemed dim and remote, and among the unpleasant odours which surrounded my captivity was a faint scent which oppressed me most of all, that of another person, not Peggy, but another.
It was our last entrance before the ‘Walk Down’, the curtain call of the Pantomime. In this scene the Sheriff of Nottingham’s villainy was finally exposed and Dobbin had to come on to nudge him off to prison. We were waiting for our entrance in the wings when I felt something pass across my face, something yielding, cold and damp, like a cloth. It filled me with terror because it had no explanation and it left behind an intense version of that alien smell which so revolted me.
I heard Peggy’s muffled voice urging me to ‘Get a move on! We’re missing our entrance’. So we trundled on, I now in a state of incommunicable panic. Then it happened again, just as Peggy had given the Sheriff of Nottingham the first butt with her head, rather more violently than usual as I remember. It was at that moment that I felt as if someone or something was trying to suffocate me. The cloth—if that was what it was—was being forced over my mouth and nose. I tried to bring my hands up to pull it off, but I was paralysed and somehow I dreaded touching the thing. Its odour was intense: it was yielding, a little slimy and somehow soft. It felt like someone’s skin.
I was told later that having been violently sick inside the pantomime horse, I collapsed on stage. And the audience, seeing all this from the outside, roared with laughter.
That was my last night in the skins. I learned later that Syd had died in the early hours of the following morning. Gangrene had set in and he stubbornly refused amputation. I had the impression from the nurse I spoke to that a loss of the will to live had played its part.
**
In the summer of 1981 Bunny G had noth
ing for me in the way of theatrical work because he had closed down the Repertory side of his enterprise—it had never made much of a profit—and was concentrating on Variety. But I was desperately hard up and out of work, so he took me on as a kind of office boy at their London headquarters. I also became a roving trouble-shooter if there were stage management problems at any of his theatres. Bunny Goldman was one of those hard-faced businessmen who liked to think of themselves as having ‘a heart of gold’ underneath it all. Everyone at the office repeated this mantra about Bunny’s heart of gold, but I never saw enough of his heart to say what metal it was made of. Unless you count that blazingly hot August day when he came in and leaned over his secretary’s desk.
‘Millie, my love, I wonder if you can find a nice bouquet of flowers for me.’ There was something in his tone of voice which announced to the world that he was about to make a gesture. ‘I’ve just heard some very sad news about Peggy Brinton.’
He turned to me. ‘You remember Peggy, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Lovely lady. Real Pro. One of the old school. A trouper. Salt of the Earth.’ Moved by his own eloquence, he wiped something from his eye, then mopped his huge sweating head. He sighed. By this time he had commanded the attention of the whole office.
‘I fear she is not long for this world.’ A pause, then he announced solemnly: ‘The big C.’ After which he nodded several times in a thoughtful way, as if he had personally given the diagnosis. Everyone in the office began to make aggrieved and sympathetic noises.
‘I want a nice bouquet of flowers,’ he said, handing me a £10 note. ‘Nothing fancy. Just a nice bouquet of flowers. And I would like you, my friend—’ putting his hand on my shoulder—‘to take it round to Peggy, personally, from me and all of us here. I have a card here which we can all sign.’ He produced a large specimen decorated with yellow roses. He had already signed the card with an enormous flourish and our little messages were to adorn the empty spaces around this central signature. After we had put our names to the gesture, he told me where to go. Peggy had recently come out of hospital and rather than returning to her house in Southend she was being looked after by her son Mick at his flat near the Elephant and Castle.
That day London rippled in white, airless heat. Having bought the flowers—and even in 1981 a decent bouquet cost more than £10—I made my way to Mick’s flat. It was on the fifth floor of a huge block on the Old Kent Road. The lift had failed and the walk up a baking concrete stairwell was an exhausting, despairing journey. I think the heat blacked out some of my conscious memory because I remember suddenly and unexpectedly finding myself in front of a red door, one of many which opened onto a narrow balconied walkway. Down below traffic roared, houses hazed and shivered in the heat. I had a chance to recover my senses because a long time elapsed between my ringing the bell and the door being opened.
Standing in the doorway was a very large man in his thirties with a great senseless slab of a face. His huge bulk was clad in shorts and a black sweatshirt with LONDON PALLADIUM emblazoned on it in white.
‘Hello,’ I said proffering a hand. ‘You must be Mick.’
Mick looked at the hand, but did not move. He said: ‘Have you come to see Mum?’ He pronounced the last word ‘Moom’ which, in his cavernous, colourless voice had a suggestion of threat to it.
I nodded, showed him the flowers and explained their origin. Mick stared blankly at them and retreated an inch or two inside the doorway. I could see a narrow passage beyond and an open door to the right through which I could just discern a small, sweltering sitting room. There was a smell of unemptied kitchen bins and fried food.
‘Moom don’t like company no more.’ he said eventually.
‘Will you give her these, then?’ I said handing him the flowers. He hesitated warily before accepting them and withdrew a little further into the hot darkness of the passage.
Mick’s great bulk made it impossible for me to pass him, but I could now see a little more of the sitting room. It was lit by the sun made pallid and bland by the yellow muslin curtains through which it filtered. The room was crammed with photographs and ornaments. Someone had decided to collect gaudy little china figurines of animals. In the midst of this in an armchair sat Peggy, her face white and shrivelled, the air and blood sucked out of her. She was smoking hard. From time to time she gave a convulsive twitch as if she were trying to shake off the loose robe of flesh which still clung to her bones. It was hot, horribly hot and stuffy, but she seemed to be wearing a sort of white woolly jump suit. I noticed that where she ought to have had shoes there were great orange webbed feet.
She saw me and opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
‘Moom won’t move out of the skins now,’ said Mick.
THE SERMONS OF DR HODNET
I first became acquainted with my friend Professor Price in connection with a short article which I was preparing for the Cambridge Review on the windows of some of our college chapels. He at once showed himself sympathetic by sharing with me a distaste for the gaudier products of the last century, and proved to be a fount of information on the windows in the chapel of his own college, St James’s. They had been designed in the 1630s by the brothers Abraham and Bernard Van Linge who are perhaps better known to the general reader for their work at Oxford during the same period. In 1650, not long after they had been installed, the Provost, a Dr Young, had shown great foresight and no little courage by having the windows taken out of the chapel and hidden in his own lodgings to save them from Puritan depredation. When King Charles was restored, so were the windows. Though mainly armorial, the glass is in the Van Linges’ best manner and is worthy of more attention than it has yet received.
While showing me the documents connected with these matters in his College Library, Professor Price also drew my attention to a number of papers concerning a slightly later period in the history of the College. The Professor said that, knowing my ‘interest in such matters’, he would value my opinions on certain MSS and printed materials relating to the Provostship, of Dr Young’s successor, the Reverend Dr Elias Hodnet, in the years 1678 and 1679.
Dr Hodnet, according to that invaluable volume Parnassus Cantabrigiensis (1685), was ‘a most learned and ingeniose divine’ and ‘an ornament to the Church’. He was a fellow of St James’s and a celebrated preacher whose sermons regularly attracted much appreciative attention. The taste for pulpit oratory, and perhaps its practice, has been in decline since the beginning of the last century, so it would be hard for me to pass judgement on the quality of his effusions, even if sufficient examples remained for me to do so. Unfortunately, apart from some fragments which I shall come to later, no sample of his style has survived. Suffice it to say that contemporaries compared him with the great Jeremy Taylor who had died just over a decade before the events which concern us. Indeed the Parnassus informs us that ‘by some he was dubbed Taylor Redivivus’.
The first documents which should help us to piece together our narrative are a series of letters written by Dr Hodnet to a friend of his, the Reverend Mr Beard, the Rector of Grantchester. The first is dated the 5th of October 1678. I have, for the convenience of the reader, corrected some of the vagaries of seventeenth-century spelling in the foregoing MSS.
News may already have reach’d you of the demise of our worthy Provost, Dr Young. It was an ague, they say, that carried him off, but, truth to tell, he had been like to die these many months, being infirm both in body and mind. He hath seen his three-score-and-ten years, so we may not weep over an untimely death. He was buried with much pomp and at the service in the chapel I pronounced the oration which many declared to be a very fine thing. Knowing me well, you must understand that I speak not out of vanity, but from a desire to acquaint you with all particulars. Non nobis Gloria!
Now there is much ado about the election of a new Provost. Two names are mentioned, my own being one of them. The other, being that of the Revd Mr Sammons, I find hard to account for. He is reckoned
a fair scholar and a loyal fellow of the college, yet beyond that I have heard little that would lend weight to his cause. Some of the younger fellows find him convivial for he gives them good Canary Wine in his rooms. I have no doubt he is a very pleasant fellow, for all say he is, but what of that? Mr Catton, an undergraduate, tells me that he hath Popish Leanings. I would ask of you whether you have heard the same.
The next letter to Mr Beard must have been sent over a month later, though Dr Hodnet has not dated it. The University Annals record that Dr Hodnet was elected Provost ‘by his fellows and by the Grace of Our Sovereign Lord the King, on the 7th day of November, 1678’. Hodnet writes:
I am preferred, and have already taken my place in the Provost’s Lodgings which I find in a sorry state and much in need of repair. The circumstances which have attended my elevation were surrounded by such idle and malicious talk that I beseech you, in the name of our friendship, and of Christ’s Mercy, to quell any disposition that you find among your acquaintance to talk of such things. It is all mere whim-wham.
I did tell you in my last letter that Mr Sammons was thought Popish in his leanings. This I had of Mr Catton, and from others of whom I made enquiries. You well know that there is much agitation among the common people against papists since the late Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found murder’d. [I would remind the reader that we are in the time of the Popish Plot, and the brief heyday of Titus Oates.] It was said even—with what truth I know not—that Mr Sammons was in league with the Jesuits. These rumours reached the ears of the townsfolk, certain of whom, inflamed by wine and zeal, waylaid Mr Sammons and threw him from Queens’ Bridge into the Cam, whereupon, being in himself distempered by over much eating and drinking, the putrid humours of his body and the weight of his belly did cause him to sink and perish in the waters by drowning. Now this unfortunate accident was about the time of the election and there are certain giddy-heads who say in consequence that it was I who incited the town against Mr Sammons so as to secure my preferment. That this is a most pernicious calumny, I would have you at all times and in all places declare. Certain of my acquaintance such as Mr Catton who now bids fair for a fellowship at this college also stand accused of aiding my cause by spreading news abroad against Mr Sammons and provoking the rabble to violence. It is most injurious to the dignity of my office which I hold dearer than myself. Besides who knows but that these tales of Mr Sammons were not true? This Sunday I did preach a sermon to condemn those murmurings against me, taking as my text the words of Zecheriah: ‘This is the curse that shall go forth upon the face of the earth for falsehood, false swearing and perjury; and this curse shall enter into the house of the false man and into the house of the perjur’d man, and it shall remain in the midst of his house and consume him.’
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