When Sydney came in late, which seemed always, he raided the larder before going to bed. This infuriated Louise, and one night when she had been drinking she came into the room and ripped the bedclothes off him and told him to get out. But Sydney was prepared for her. Quickly he reached under his pillow and whipped out a stiletto, a long button-hook which he had sharpened to a point.
‘Come near me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll stick this in you!’
She reared back, startled. ‘Why, the bloody young sod! – he’s going to murder me!’
‘Yes,’ said Sydney, dramatically, ‘I’ll murder you!’
‘You wait till Mr Chaplin comes home!’
But Mr Chaplin seldom came home. However, I remember one Saturday night when Louise and Father had been drinking, and for some reason we were all sitting with the landlady and her husband in their front-room parlour on the ground floor. Under the incandescent light Father looked ghastly pale, and in an ugly mood was mumbling to himself. Suddenly he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of money and threw it violently to the floor, scattering gold and silver coins in all directions. The effect was surrealistic. No one moved. The landlady sat glum, but I caught her roving eye following a golden sovereign rolling to a far corner under a chair; my eye also followed it. Still no one moved, so I thought I had better start picking it up; the landlady and the others followed suit, picking up the rest of the money, careful to make their actions overt before Father’s menacing eyes.
One Saturday, after school, I came home to find no one there. Sydney, as usual, was away all day playing football and the landlady said Louise and her son had been out since early morning. At first I was relieved, for it meant that I did not have to scrub floors and clean knives. I waited until long after lunch-time, then began to get anxious. Perhaps they had deserted me. As the afternoon wore on, I began to miss them. What had happened? The room looked grim and unyielding and its emptiness frightened me. I also began to get hungry, so I looked in the larder, but no food was there. I could stand the gaping emptiness no longer, so in desolation I went out, spending the afternoon visiting nearby market places. I wandered through Lambeth Walk and the Cat, looking hungrily into cook-shop windows at the tantalizing steaming roast joints of beef and pork, and the golden-brown potatoes soaked in gravy. For hours I watched the quacks selling their wares. The distraction soothed me and for a while I forgot my plight and hunger.
When I returned, it was night; I knocked at the door, but no one answered. Everyone was out. Wearily I walked to the corner of Kennington Cross and sat on the kerb near the house to keep an eye on it in case someone returned. I was tired and miserable, and wondered where Sydney was. It was approaching midnight and Kennington Cross was deserted but for one or two stragglers. All the lights of the shops began going out except those of the chemist and the public houses, then I felt wretched.
Suddenly there was music. Rapturous! It came from the vestibule of the White Hart corner pub, and resounded brilliantly in the empty square. The tune was The Honeysuckle and the Bee, played with radiant virtuosity on a harmonium and clarinet. I had never been conscious of melody before, but this one was beautiful and lyrical, so blithe and gay, so warm and reassuring. I forgot my despair and crossed the road to where the musicians were. The harmonium-player was blind, with scarred sockets where the eyes had been; and a besotted, embittered face played the clarinet.
It was all over too soon and their exit left the night even sadder. Weak and tired, I crossed the road towards the house, not caring whether anyone came home or not. All I wanted was to get to bed. Then dimly I saw someone going up the garden path towards the house. It was Louise – and her little son running ahead of her. I was shocked to see that she was limping exaggeratedly and leaning extremely to one side. At first I thought she had been in an accident and had hurt her leg, then I realized she was very drunk. I had never seen a lopsided drunk before. In her condition I thought it best to keep out of her way, so I waited until she had let herself in. A few moments later the landlady came home and I went in with her. As I crept up the darkened stairs, hoping to get to bed unnoticed, Louise staggered out on to the landing.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ she said. ‘This is not your home.’
I stood motionless.
‘You’re not sleeping here tonight. I’ve had enough of all of you; get out! You and your brother! Let your father take care of you.’
Without hesitation, I turned and went downstairs and out of the house. I was no longer tired; I had got my second wind. I had heard that Father patronized the Queen’s Head pub in the Prince’s Road, about half a mile away, so I made my way in that direction, hoping to find him there. But soon I saw his shadowy figure coming towards me, outlined against the street-lamp.
‘She won’t let me in,’ I whimpered, ‘and I think she’s been drinking.’
As we walked towards the house he also staggered. ‘I’m not sober myself,’ he said.
I tried to reassure him that he was.
‘No, I’m drunk,’ he muttered, remorsefully.
He opened the door of the sitting-room and stood there silent and menacing, looking at Louise. She was standing by the fireplace, holding on to the mantelpiece, swaying.
‘Why didn’t you let him in?’ he said.
She looked at him bewildered, then mumbled: ‘You too can go to hell – all of you!’
Suddenly he picked up a heavy clothes-brush from the sideboard and like a flash threw it violently, the back of it hitting her flat on the side of her face. Her eyes closed, then she collapsed unconscious with a thud to the floor as though she welcomed oblivion.
I was shocked at Father’s action; such violence made me lose respect for him. As to what happened afterwards, my memory is vague. I believe Sydney came in later and Father saw us both to bed, then left the house.
I learned that Father and Louise had quarrelled that morning because he had left her to spend the day with his brother, Spencer Chaplin, who owned several public houses round and about Lambeth. Being sensitive of her position, Louise disliked visiting the Spencer Chaplins, so Father went alone, and as a revenge Louise spent the day elsewhere.
She loved Father. Even though very young I could see it in her glance the night she stood by the fireplace, bewildered and hurt by his neglect. And I am sure he loved her. I saw many occasions of it. There were times when he was charming and tender and would kiss her good-night before leaving for the theatre. And on a Sunday morning, when he had not been drinking, he would breakfast with us and tell Louise about the vaudeville acts that were working with him, and have us all enthralled. I would watch him like a hawk, absorbing every action. In a playful mood, he once wrapped a towel round his head and chased his little son around the table, saying: ‘I’m King Turkey Rhubarb.’
About eight o’clock in the evening, before departing for the theatre, he would swallow six raw eggs in port wine, rarely eating solid food. That was all that sustained him day after day. He seldom came home, and, if he did, it was to sleep off his drinking.
One day Louise received a visit from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and she was most indignant about it. They came because the police had reported finding Sydney and me asleep at three o’clock in the morning by a watchman’s fire. It was a night that Louise had shut us both out, and the police had made her open the door and let us in.
A few days later, however, while Father was playing in the provinces, Louise received a letter announcing that Mother had left the asylum. A day or two later the landlady came up and announced that there was a lady at the front door to call for Sydney and Charlie. ‘There’s your mother,’ said Louise. There was a momentary confusion. Then Sydney leaped downstairs into her arms, I following. It was the same sweet, smiling Mother who affectionately embraced us.
Louise and Mother were too embarrassed to meet, so Mother waited at the front door while Sydney and I collected our things. There was no umbrage or ill-feeling on either si
de – in fact, Louise’s manner was most agreeable, even to Sydney when she bade him good-bye.
*
Mother had taken a room in one of the back streets behind Kennington Cross near Hayward’s pickle factory, and the acid smell would start up every afternoon. But the room was cheap and we were all together again. Mother’s health was excellent, and the thought that she had been ill never entered our heads.
How we lived through this period I have not the remotest idea. Nonetheless, I remember no undue hardships or insoluble problems. Father’s payments of ten shillings a week were almost regular, and, of course, Mother took up her needlework again and renewed her contact with the church.
An incident stands out at that period. At the end of our street was a slaughter-house, and sheep would pass our house on their way to be butchered. I remember one escaped and ran down the street to the amusement of onlookers. Some tried to grab it and others tripped over themselves. I had giggled with delight at its lambent capering and panic, it seemed so comic. But when it was caught and carried back into the slaughter-house, the reality of the tragedy came over me and I ran indoors, screaming and weeping to Mother: ‘They’re going to kill it! They’re going to kill it!’ That stark, spring afternoon and that comedy chase stayed with me for days; and I wonder if that episode did not establish the premise of my future films – the combination of the tragic and the comic.
School was now the beginning of new horizons: history, poetry and science. But some of the subjects were prosaic and dull, especially arithmetic: its addition and subtraction gave an image of a clerk and a cash register, its use, at best, a protection against being short-changed.
History was a record of wickedness and violence, a continual succession of regicides and kings murdering their wives, brothers and nephews; geography merely maps; poetry nothing more than exercising memory. Education bewildered me with knowledge and facts in which I was only mildly interested.
If only someone had used salesmanship, had read a stimulating preface to each study that could have titillated my mind, infused me with fancy instead of facts, amused and intrigued me with the legerdemain of numbers, romanticized maps, given me a point of view about history and taught me the music of poetry, I might have become a scholar.
Since Mother had returned to us she had begun to stimulate my interest in the theatre again. She imbued me with the feeling that I had some sort of talent. But it was not until those weeks before Christmas when the school put on its cantata Cinderella that I felt an urge to express all that Mother had taught me. For some reason I was not selected to play in it, and inwardly I was envious and felt that I was better able to play in the cantata than those who had been chosen. I was critical of the dull, unimaginative way the boys played their parts. The Ugly Sisters had no zest or comic spirit. They spoke their lines eruditely with a schoolboy inflection and an embarrassing falsetto emphasis. How I would have loved to play one of the Ugly Sisters, with the tutoring Mother could have given me! I was, however, captivated by the girl who played Cinderella. She was beautiful, refined, aged about fourteen, and I was secretly in love with her. But she was beyond my reach both socially and in years.
When I saw the cantata, I thought it dismal but for the beauty of the girl, which left me a little sad. Little did I realize, however, the glorious triumph I was to enjoy two months later when I was brought before each class and made to recite Miss Priscilla’s Cat. It was a comedy recitation Mother had seen outside a newspaper shop and thought so funny that she copied it from the window and brought it home. During a recess in class, I recited it to one of the boys. Mr Reid, our school-teacher, looked up from his work and was so amused that when the class assembled he made me recite it to them and they were thrown into gales of laughter. As a result of this my fame spread, and the following day I was brought before every classroom in the school, both boys and girls, and made to recite it.
Although I had performed and deputized for Mother in front of an audience at the age of five, this was actually my first conscious taste of glamour. School became exciting. From having been an obscure and shy little boy I became the centre of interest of both the teachers and the children. It even improved my studies. But my education was to be interrupted when I left to join a troupe of clog dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads.
three
FATHER knew Mr Jackson, who ran the troupe, and convinced Mother that it would be a good start for me to make a career on the stage and at the same time help her economically: I would get board and lodging and mother would get half a crown a week. She was dubious at first until she met Mr Jackson and his family, then she accepted.
Mr Jackson was in his middle fifties. He had been a schoolteacher in Lancashire and had raised a family of three boys and a girl, who were all a part of the Eight Lancashire Lads. He was a devout Roman Catholic and after his first wife died had consulted his children about marrying again. His second wife was a little older than himself, and he would piously tell us how he came to marry her. He had advertised for a wife in one of the newspapers and had received over three hundred letters. After praying for guidance he had opened only one, and that was from Mrs Jackson. She too had been a school-teacher and, as if in answer to his prayer, was also a Catholic.
Mrs Jackson was not blessed with abundant good looks, nor was she a voluptuary in any sense of the word. As I remember her she had a gaunt, skull-like, pale face with manifold wrinkles – due, perhaps, to having presented Mr Jackson with a baby boy rather late in life. Nevertheless, she was a loyal and dutiful wife and, although still nursing her son at the breast, worked hard at helping with the management of the troupe.
When she told her side of the romance, it varied slightly from that of Mr Jackson. They had exchanged letters, but neither one had seen the other until the day of the wedding. And in their first interview alone in the sitting-room while the family waited in another room, Mr Jackson said: ‘You’re all that I desire,’ and she avowed the same. In concluding the story to us boys, she would primly say: ‘But I didn’t expect to be the immediate mother of eight children.’
The three sons’ ages ranged from twelve to sixteen, and the daughter was nine, with hair cut like a boy in order to pass as one in the troupe.
Each Sunday, everyone attended Catholic church but me. Being the only Protestant, I was lonely, so occasionally I went with them. Had it not been for deference to Mother’s religious scruples, I could easily have been won over to Catholicism, for I liked the mysticism of it and the little home-made altars with plaster Virgin Marys adorned with flowers and lighted candles which the boys put up in a corner of the bedroom, and to which they would genuflect every time they passed.
After practising six weeks I was eligible to dance with the troupe. But now that I was past eight years old I had lost my assurance and confronting the audience for the first time gave me stage fright. I could hardly move my legs. It was weeks before I could solo dance as the rest of them did.
I was not particularly enamoured with being just a clog dancer in a troupe of eight lads. Like the rest of them I was ambitious to do a single act, not only because it meant more money but because I instinctively felt it to be more gratifying than just dancing. I would have liked to be a boy comedian – but that would have required nerve, to stand on the stage alone. Nevertheless, my first impulse to do something other than dance was to be funny. My ideal was a double act, two boys dressed as comedy tramps. I told it to one of the other boys and we decided to become partners. It became our cherished dream. We would call ourselves ‘Bristol and Chaplin, the Millionaire Tramps’, and would wear tramp whiskers and big diamond rings. It embraced every aspect of what we thought would be funny and profitable, but, alas, it never materialized.
Audiences liked the Eight Lancashire Lads because, as Mr Jackson said, we were so unlike theatrical children. It was his boast that we never wore grease-paint and that our rosy cheeks were natural. If some of us looked a little pale before going on, he would tell us to pinch our cheeks. But i
n London, after working two or three music halls a night, we would occasionally forget and look a little weary and bored as we stood on the stage, until we caught sight of Mr Jackson in the wings, grinning emphatically and pointing to his face, which had an electrifying effect of making us suddenly break into sparkling grins.
When touring the provinces we went to a school for the week in each town, which did little to further my education.
At Christmas time we were engaged to play cats and dogs in a Cinderella pantomime at the London Hippodrome. In those days, it was a new theatre, a combination of vaudeville and circus, elaborately decorated and quite sensational. The floor of the ring sank and flooded with water and elaborate ballets were contrived. Row after row of pretty girls in shining armour would march in and disappear completely under water. As the last line submerged, Marceline, the great French clown, dressed in sloppy evening dress and opera hat, would enter with a fishing rod, sit on a camp stool, open a large jewel-case, bait his hook with a diamond necklace, then cast it into the water. After a while he would ‘chum’ with smaller jewellery, throwing in a few bracelets, eventually emptying in the whole jewel-case. Suddenly he would get a bite and throw himself into paroxysms of comic gyrations struggling with the rod, and eventually pulling out of the water a small trained poodle dog, who copied everything Marceline did: if he sat down, the dog sat down; if he stood on his head, the dog did likewise.
Marceline’s comedy was droll and charming and London went wild over him. In the kitchen scene I was given a little comedy bit to do with Marceline. I was a cat, and Marceline would back away from a dog and fall over my back while I drank milk. He always complained that I did not arch my back enough to break his fall. I wore a cat-mask which had a look of surprise, and during the first matinée for children I went up to the rear end of a dog and began to sniff. When the audience laughed, I turned and looked surprised at them, pulling a string which winked a staring eye. After several sniffs and winks the house-manager came bounding back stage, waving frantically in the wings. But I carried on. After smelling the dog, I smelt the proscenium, then I lifted my leg. The audience roared – possibly because the gesture was uncatlike. Eventually the manager caught my eye and I capered off to great applause. ‘Never do that again!’ he said, breathlessly. ‘You’ll have the Lord Chamberlain close down the theatre!’
My Autobiography Page 5