by Kaz Cooke
Lizzie read in the paper Annette got herself arrested in Boston for public indecency. And she was wearing a bathing costume, which is more than you can say for Pansy Montague most of the time. The article said Annette was examined by a hairy professor from a Boston university with a ‘specialty in the female’. Did you ever hear of such front? So old beardy claims he measured her and 2999 other ladies and found Annette’s proportions ‘perfect’ and exactly the same as the Venus de Milo. I don’t suppose he bothers to measure their arms, the dirty cove.
Speaking of which there’s an Annette copyist offering a spot of water dancing at the Wirth’s circus this week: a lady in a tank doing a mermaid dance and some Russian singers and no doubt a bit of trapeze. You should get along there.
Is there something you’re not telling me, Horrie? I must say, I’ve been very frank with you, except when I wasn’t. I can see by the look in your eye there’s something more to this caper of yours. Some days I’m sharper than others for a little while, you know, I can draw back the morphia veil and see it all clear.
I sometimes wonder whether you’re here at all. Perhaps you have your eye on Lizzie, who’s got her wheels on the tracks to spinsterhood herself, I would imagine, unless you can press your case. Or you might be a reporter, eh? Swear on your mother’s life you’re not a reporter, Horrie. If I find out you’re from The Truth or The Bulletin I shall choke the life out of you and stuff a pincushion with your hair. No offence.
Perhaps you are a plainclothesman sent by Superintendent Gleeson, after all. Your questions seem rather more direct today, Horace. You wouldn’t be the first who’s been prodded by Madam Marzella to ask impossible questions about an infant. A missing baby doesn’t mean a wicked deed you know, Horrie, however much she might huff and puff and harrumph. I never lie, of course, except when there’s a call for it. I’m not sure if there’s a call for it any more.
I’ve met the man billed as the Greatest Liar in the World, Louis de Rougemont, and he’s an amateur. He toured England years ago with his lecture tour about living in Australia. He said he was worshipped by savage Aborigines (make up your mind, was they savage or worshipping?). He claimed he’d ridden on a sea turtle through the waves, and – prepare yourself – witnessed flying wombats. Then he brought his tour to Australia and delivered his talks to the greatest barrage of vegetables ever hurled. In Sydney, the Bijou audience booed as he recounted being attacked on a steamship by an octopus with arms seventy-six feet long (which could only have happened if he’d ever asked the White Mahatma if he was going to be rich). In Melbourne they went berserkers and threw everything but their boots.
He could have told them the truth and they’d never believe him. Did you know that when wombats do their triddlings it comes out in cubes? It’s the truest thing I ever told you, dearie-oh.
On the matter of left-behind babies, I will tell you that it never felt right that we left behind the Under-the-Table Boys, even though we had them back, one or two at a time, over the years, when we could. In the end I think they were like the petals of a daisy – all connected to the family in the middle, but not to each other. And then the petals were plucked out and went their own way in the winds.
We thought we were doing the right thing, sent the boys enough money for a boarding-house rent, and they had an uncle close by. We kept them out of an orphanage or workhouse but in the end, how could they feel anything but abandoned? All they knew was we’d left them and taken their sisters. And Thomas was four when we left for Australia the first time. No wonder Alice had a thousand-mile stare for the rest of her life.
And when children grow up without their parents, they don’t have much time for kindness and brotherly bonds – they’re too busy surviving. We all are. That’s the problem women have everywhere – not enough choices. The boys who were under the table are scattered to all ends of the world now. We don’t even know where William is. Thomas hasn’t made much of himself. James Rickards junior is still in the theatre world, being an advance agent for other companies. And Charles, so inventive, and brave, and broken by his injuries from the infamous fire at the Oriental Hotel, did the sensible thing really – he’s got up and gone to America and is learning the advertising industry, so perhaps being economical with the truth runs in the family.
I’ll say this. We did our best with the Under-the-Table Boys, but it wasn’t the right thing. Anyway, none of those were my decisions. When I finally was tasked with my own choice, I made it sure. Children left behind have to be put inside the envelope of a proper family to post them to the future. You have to choose a family that’s well off, and takes notice of each other. A professional man for a father, or at least one with a trade, and a house that stays put, run by a mother who doesn’t pack to leave most mornings. A decent family that will look after that baby as long as it lives.
Are you all right, Horrie? You look a bit peaky. Don’t worry, the doctors say consumption isn’t catching. It’s caused by not enough alpine air, now, they say.
I have a bone to pick with you, Horrie. You’re good company and a fine boy with lovely manners and you make a decent cup of tea properly strained but I have it on the highest authority – theatrical gossip – that the Homes for Defenestrated Actors don’t accept ladies on their own as young as me, no matter how desiccated they are. There’s something in the rules about having to be elderly and destitute and not just on your last legs. The legs have to be elderly. Mine are hardly a day over forty-five.
So I’ve got you there, to put it plainly. Not that I was holding out much hope for one of them cottages anyway. I’ve grown rather attached to this room despite the mouldy bit on the ceiling in the shape of Ceylon, and I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing much in the way of outside again.
Nattled as I am, I won’t throw you off the verandah, Horrie, after all we’ve been through. I probably don’t have the strength to kick a dust mote off the bottom step these days, to be honest. But you can’t blame me for wondering. No cottage and free coal for me in the offing, and you’re not one of the superintendent’s lads asking about erstwhile possible crimes, and yet full of questions about moral character and what happened that didn’t make it into the papers.
And I wish you wouldn’t look at me like Ed Ford did when a woman in the audience dropped dead in the middle of Jim’s banjo solo in Strahan. She might have waited. I’ve got a photo of Ed doing that face, somewhere, wearing his best tie.
Well, I’m glad of you in any case. I don’t quite feel the lure of your dear mother’s pumpkin scones, today, as I’m a wee bit poorly. But you should tuck in. If you shove that ticking-covered cushion under my noggin I can see you proper. I feel a little ashamed for you to see me like this, Horace, though you have rather a wraith-like countenance yourself. My skin has lately turned to parchment and I suspect even a jaunty wave is beyond me, which is just as well as I believe I’ve started to rustle when I move, for Heaven’s sake.
What I like is a bit of noise. I like a party, Horace, a bit of a gather-round, lots of people in and telling tall stories and laughing and putting the kettle on again or generous tipping of the brandy bottle, or breaking into song or waltzing around with each other. Chiacking and chatting, that’s what I like.
Peace and quiet isn’t always lovely. Two days after my mother passed on to glory I was in the house with her, before a neighbour thought to stick a head in and take stock. Two very quiet days before anyone thought to see how we were getting on, and send for the clergy. That’s the sort of quiet Lizzie probably had when she was holding Amy that last time. Make me a promise Horrie, because take it from me, you don’t want that sort of hush settling over you. If I look like I’ve taken to my heels, give me a poke with one of those bamboo sticks from the costume. If I don’t snap at you I’m probably the late Ada Delroy and you can send a boy to tell Jim at the Tivoli. He won’t be surprised.
All right, then. The low times. Not just us, but Melbourne and the whole bottom corner of Australia. When we first arrived in Australia, la
dies complained that they couldn’t get an Irish slavey maid to behave, and when we came back from our world tour in the middle of the 1890s the same ladies were queuing up to register for housekeeper positions at the servant agencies in Russell Street.
The bust made me take against rich people. Now of course I don’t number myself amongst the rich people, I was only rich for about half an hour in the scheme of things, and now I can’t even remember what a sovereign looks like. The way I see it, at first rich people flaunted their cash even if they’d nicked it or inherited it, and then they was simply appalled by the eight-hour day for anybody else, and smashed the shearers’ strike. Then they had the impudence to ruin the economy for the rest of us as well as themselves. What manner of gawby-brains does it take to be in charge of every rule and all the money and still bring the lot crashing down round their ears?
I knew in 1888 that down the hill in Collins Street from the Vic Pal crouched all the best banks and building societies and insurance companies with fancy frontages. Had I known what I do now, I would have cheerfully skipped down and thrown a lovely bomb in each of their windows. It turned out every second grinning ninny-hommer with a looping length of watch-chain who ran a lending society was on the diddle. Anybody suggesting an imminent crisis was told to kindly shut their stupid face, but that didn’t stop it happening.
By the time we came back in 1895 or so, Jim and Cissie had written a song called ‘The Man Who Saw a Lovely Bust Come Round the Corner’. It went like this: ‘Oh, it used to be the land of plenty, now we can’t even pay the renty, and whooo knew all the banks was benty?’ We thought we were clever. Not clever enough, as it turned out.
It was when we got back, in the middle of the nineties depression, that we became the Ada Delroy Company. Jim tried to call it the Jim Bell Company for a few weeks but there were plenty of Jim Bells doing various business in the world already, and only one me, whose ankles more people wanted to see.
I was the first of the not-Loïes to bring the act under the equator, at least the first who didn’t look like she was tangled in a spinnaker sail. With me Serpentining, and Alice doing the Mahatma-ing, we had a fresh-looking troupe. We went round Australia and New Zealand twice, and South Africa and India again. We sold the land parcel we’d bought – with ocean views – near the Cottlesloe railway station in Perth; it was called the Ada Delroy Estate and had a road in the middle called Jim Bell Street. It was all sold so we could bring the Under-the-Table Boys out: Charley came to do stage setting and electrics, and James junior was to be our new advance man. Alice wanted Thomas with us, and William and Walter were making do all right in the old country.
We were eating, but we had to keep moving. Does it make sense to feel trapped when you’re a nomad? In a thousand towns (at least, if you ask me), day after day we counted on and off the trains thirtynine pieces of baggage with my name stamped on them. And every Tuesday Jim would come out of a hall manager’s office, or count up the takings himself from a country hall, and fold some pound notes into his drawstring bag he’d tuck back under his shirt. I would then hold out one gloved hand, and feel the thud of the first shilling, and then the clink of the second. ‘Get yourself something nice,’ he’d say. ‘Some ribbon, or take Lizzie and Cissie for cake.’
We weren’t inventors like Loïe, but we tried to stay abreast of the new machineries as the years passed. As I’ve told you, we already travelled with lights and a sheet of glass to put over the trapdoor in the stage to shine a light up underneath for my Serpentine dance, and a magic lantern with the coloured slides, and then we added a bioscope projector with moving pictures. The first ones were shown in Melbourne by Carl Hertz the magician, at the Tivoli in 1896, and Harry pronounced them a ‘novelty that would flash in the pan and disappear’. Kate told him moving pictures would be part of the future, but he just chewed his cigar and said nobody would want to see a flat picture when they could see the real thing.
But the House would be in raptures watching film of a wee babby eating even though they shovelled pap into their own tiddler at home twice a day. You could run the film backwards and have a chap splashing out of the river in a giant leap and ending dry on the river bank. We secured the first film of the Jubilee procession and then Queen Victoria’s funeral, and people sobbed in their chairs. I suggested we run the funeral backwards and bring the Queen back to life, but we didn’t.
I finally saw the danger when an old walrus with his hat still on bowled up to me on the pier in Mackay at an oyster stall. He’d already seen somebody else do my dance on a bioscope film, he said, quite crossly. He resented that the previous evening he had paid to see me do the old rope in the flesh. As if I wasn’t preferable, a living, breathing, dainty chutneyite braving the humidity. I leaned in, took him by the elbow and apologised prettily, and watched him huff off. I’d dropped an open oyster in his jacket pocket.
By the end of the nineties the depression was biting everyone hard. So many lives ruined. Professor Baldwin was back in San Fran but all his careful savings had been lost from Melbourne banks that closed their doors, and he lost his two houses in Balmain (‘my retirement insurance’, he called them) and was never the same again. He went from being a spiritualism debunker to a spiritualist, overnight – it paid better but I know it stuck in his throat like a pigeon bone that he was reduced to trickery, just like poor old Clara ending up giving clairvoyant racing tips as Madam Hope.
We didn’t know then that things would never feel easy again, because as it happened, we didn’t gaze into the far-forevers – only the right-what’s-nexts. I was still hammering tacks into a piece of Brussels lace over the window to make a mosquito screen at every lodgings. Harry was bringing out big stars like Lottie Collins and Little Tich and smaller local acts were struggling for space on the bill with the Human Spider, and trained dogs, harmonising families, roller-skate dancers, barrellistes, simpering soubrettes and quick-draw caricaturists. Harry did his best to keep smaller acts employed, but he needed the big ones to prod the new penny-pinchers into the audience.
I own I’m a bit on the bewildered side, Horace, I’ll confess. I try not to feel resentful, but I don’t understand how Harry and Kate got rich and we’re poor when we came from the same nothings, and worked just as hard, and lived through the same times. Fortune plays favourites, and it’s very hard to bear. I do try not to mind and I don’t feel bitterness. But we’re just the same sort of people, aren’t we? Self-made, and bound together by experience, and by losing our children. We have worked just as hard. And yet it’s Harry whose office has a safe the size of a wardrobe, with a reinforced floor because of the weight of the buckets full of thousands of coins that come up every night from the ticket office. And Jim who’s taking home four pounds a week.
But when Harry and Kate lost their little Syd to scarlet fever I’m certain they would give away every Tivoli theatre in the land now to have him back. Harry was on stage the next week flat out just getting through his Covent Garden cockney character songs, ‘Our Little Nipper’ and ‘You Fancied Winkles and a Pot of Tea’ and ‘D’yer Hear I Love Yer Dear’. And all the blasted Bulletin blaggards could print was, ‘We are deadly sick of costermongers’.
Through the tough years I’d wire Bob Bell a bounce-along, a pound or five shillings when I could. No matter where we performed, there’d often be mail waiting for me in a stage-door pigeonhole from him, or a letter from Harry and Kate. Bob’s would be a postcard addressed to me, a picture of Fannie Dango or Pansy Montague often, and a line or two such as ‘I am quite tall in highwaisted trousers. Sincerely, Robert Bell.’
Or he’d gamble on the racehorse or the greyhound or the racing pigeon named after me and send me the losing slips in an envelope with no note.
Bob preferred the climate in Perth and Fremantle, in the open air where it hardly rains to speak of. He loves the Cremorne Gardens there – which is really the backyard of a pub, but he describes it in raptures: ‘At dusk, with its beautiful velvety grass, the dainty kiosks dotting the l
awns, the fernery and creepers, the wooden walls and most elegant Japanned wicker chairs . . . served drinks by dear little waiters in evening dress, and as the stars begin to twinkle above in the indigo far-ups, waiters in evening suits, the electric fairy lights give their answering twinkles, and all the while the shrubbery teeming with sailors.’ That’s what Bob Bell’s Heaven will be – Cremorne Gardens fernery on a summer night. His Hell would be court.
It was ridiculously easy to find yourself in court in those days. False pretenses, insolvency, breach of promise, breach of contract, breach of breeches – theatre contracts are tighter than a masher’s gas-pipe trousers. Poor Bob had to do three weeks in a dread farce in West Australia after trying to break a contract. The papers reported he said to the judge: ‘I describe myself as a professional, but there are only so many times a night a man can club himself in the face.’ He had to pay ten pounds in damages and departed the court in high dudge, I can tell you. I wired him ten shillings and a line. ‘Club yourself together’.
But it was Harry who collected the most Press cuttings over the years: if memory serves, he was variously fined for spitting at an editor, for snotting a reporter, two carriage accidents (not even trying, I’ve been in five and I’m twenty years younger), run over by a London tram, sued for suggesting a lady had an unmentionable illness, sued for calling an agent a snivelling varmint: that was the one who had an affair with his first wife Carrie. Sued for stealing a song about Doing the Block. Even sanguine old Jim made the papers last year for being slightly bankrupt, and he was sued for damages after he punched The Calculating Boy’s father on the snoot after much provocation. The father had been an advance man for Professor Baldwin years ago and had some inside knowledge. He tried to nick the White Mahatma act in the middle of one of our Maoriland tours. You could see the magistrate would quite like to have taken his own turn to poke the man fair on his snout. Case dismissed.