The North of England Home Service (11 page)

He used his humour to show his deep affection for the people and places he had been surrounded by all his life, and inspired a strong regional loyalty in return. ‘I suppose you could say that I represent something special to people, something that is more meaningful or more personal, because of their background, than history,’ he once said, in a rare recorded utterance. ‘“You don’t
know what you mean to my mother … My father was saying your jokes when he passed away …” It’s like they look at me and they see something in themselves they’re afraid they’re going to lose, or mebbe they’ve already lost. I feel almost a desperation in their love for me.’ When everything else got corporatized and homogenized, Bobby Thompson stayed the way he was,
preserved
in amber.

‘Eee, aa’ll tell yiz. Yi naa why I keep the tropical fish, diwen yiz? So aa’ve somethin’ entertainin’ to watch when Ray Cruddas is on the tellyvision. He should buy a barra an’ orn a decent livin’.’ Bobby had said this on one of the last occasions the two of them shared a bill together. The local press had tried to make something of it and build it up into a bitter feud. But Ray felt sure that nothing was meant; that it was just part of the professional give-and-take. He remembered the occasion well. It was in 1961 or ’62, the bridging period between the hard, sombre days of the war and rationing, and the more dashing, mobile times that were to come. There was a feeling of modernity and adventure. People were buying their first car and booking their first Continental holiday. DIY was starting to boom. Young couples were putting hardboard on doors to cover up panels whose edges were
dust-collectors
, and pulling out old Victorian mouldings and sconces. People were trying to bury the past, and all the reminders of deprivation and poverty. And Ray felt he reflected the new spirit in his clothes.

On the night in question he had been wearing one of the new Terylene drip-dry, non-iron shirts in a pale buttercup yellow, with a metallic, fat-knotted tie and a pale metallic suit with double vents and a faint windowpane undercheck. This had naturally raised suspicions that he was a bit light on his toes. (A wolf-whistle greeted him as he walked on.) But what drew most comment among the audience of miners and their families was his shoes. These were made from the softest kid leather of the
sort only ever usually used for making ladies’ gloves and, as with gloves, you could make out the faint outline of his toes. They had concealed tongues and parallel lacing and an
almond-shaped
toe. What was most startling about Ray’s shoes, though, was the colour. They were a delicate dove grey, and then somehow overlaid on the grey was the kind of pearlized sheen that was just starting to be seen on the new laminated bathroom and kitchen surfaces. In an area where most footwear was utility-wear, protected against corrosion and fierce
industrial
processes and, even when it was being bought for ‘best’, was bought for durability rather than appearance, Ray’s shoes were something.

He had been booked to appear with Bobby that night at the Miners’ Club and Institute, Percy Main. It was a benefit for spina bifida. He could remember clearly them being in the committee room, which had been set aside for the use of the artistes, as a pencilled sign said on the door. There was a lot of dark wood panelling and heavy, dark oak furniture and a round port-hole window with rich stained-glass and leaded lights. ‘Nice ti naa if I gan oot there the neet an’ die, like,’ Bobby said, ‘thi can bring iz back here ti the chapel a rest.’ He had black boot polish in his hair and kippered nicotine fingers and was eating the ‘bait’ of clammy beetroot sandwiches that his wife, the fearsome Phyllis, had put up for him and that he slurped like poor man’s oysters, the white bread dissolved into a purple paste on the slippery purple beets,
shhhlurrrrrrp
,
through his best teeth.

His whole attitude to life was distilled in a one-liner he
borrowed
from probably the most famous case of a comedian who was idolized in the North but who remained incomprehensible to a southern public, the Wigan-born Frank Randle: ‘She says to iz, she says [assuming his still Geordiefied version of a cut-glass accent], “Ew, you’re not polished enough, Berbby.” So aa gans, “What di yi tek iz for, like? A coffin?”’

For his first set of the night at Bobby’s, Ray put on a sharp suit and a wide tie and a pair of pale shoes made from ostrich or emu or crocodile or salamander, selected from the long row of shoes lined up along one wall of his dressing-room.

For his second set, he pulled on a flat cap with a lick of Brylcreemed hair fixed to it, a baggy Fair Isle jumper with a hole in the elbow, a pair of baggy trousers and some soft-soled carpet slippers shiny with grease. Just before he went on, Jackie passed him the Player’s Weight that he had started for him in order to authenticate his impersonation of Bobby Thompson.

An irony not lost on Ray was that, in the last years, the Bobby Thompson who put on the cap and the jumper and the flattened gutter snout was by then a wealthy man with a fine house at the seaside, a car with a driver and whose greatest pleasures, indulged at every opportunity, were days at the races with a full wallet in the jacket of his bespoke silk suit with the satin Paisley lining, and nights at the gaming tables playing roulette and blackjack.

For forty years, up to his death in 1988, the Little Waster was locked in a love embrace with the North-East working class.

‘Your voice’, somebody, an important man in the industry, reaching for a compliment, had once told Ray, ‘has a little quality of being reassuring in it.’ This, he knew, is what he amounted to.

Counting the house was an old tradition, and one that Ray, a traditionalist in most things, nightly observed.

Every night around eight o’clock he walked the few yards from his dressing-room and inserted himself into the space between the blackout cloth at the back of the stage and the high rear wall of the club. The back flat was studded with lights which
objectively
everybody knew were plain household bulbs coated in a thin layer of dust but were nevertheless prepared to accept as a representation of a twinkling, starry sky. The back of the flat was a confusion of spaghetti leads and electricity ducts, and Ray
climbed on to a platform of wooden crates to press his eye against the peep-hole that had been inserted in the cloth slightly above the part of the stage where the band sat.

From this vantage point he was able to encompass the entire panorama of the club: the communal tables arranged in rows radiating out from the circular dance area in the well of the room, with smaller tables, each one with an amber lamp glowing on it, rising in tiers; the long brass-rail bar stepped down the
right-hand
side of the club in all its promise and bottley glitter; the
five-hundredweight
chandelier hanging on tension wires anchored high up in the roof; the faded Coronation-era bunting and colours; the waiting staff assembled at their stations all along the middle tier, clean and scrubbed and ready to go. From day one they had stuck to a hiring policy that discriminated in favour of workers who had been made redundant from the old heavy industries, which meant a preponderance of men and women in their forties, fifties and even sixties, most of them without any previous waiting experience. But it seemed to work. They were less inclined than the waitresses and bartenders that Ray had come across in other establishments to treat the customers as turkeys to be housed, fed and stripped clean with a minimum of violence. He had watched many former rivet-slingers and conveyor-belt overseers develop performance skills and learn to project a character in keeping with the nostalgic tone of Bobby’s and earn big tips.

Occasionally, standing on his platform of splintered pallets and crates, listening to the band play an old standard from his youth, Ray would allow himself to be engulfed in a fondness and a nostalgia for his own life. Nostalgia, or homesickness, is never about the past but about felt absences or a sense of something lacking in the present: even primitive peoples are said to dream of an even more primitive past – the original, unspoiled season (described in so many myths). And, watching from the secrecy of
his blackout screen while men in corduroy britches and bicycle-clips and canvas braces like his father’s and women in hairnets and curlers and sensible sandals like his mother’s were brought to their tables, Ray could sometimes imagine he was seeing a parade of dead relatives descending the tiers like players at the final walk-down in a pantomime – uncles who worked as
lightermen
and emptying the bins; grandmothers who pushed wicker baskets and zinc bathtubs of washing up to the wash-house on old bogeys and prams on Mondays and laboured for hours in the life-sapping heat and steam.

He was also constantly surprised by the number of young people who came dressed in ways they could never have seen, except in period TV dramas and faded family pictures. A related phenomenon was the local talent competitions Ray was asked to judge which were invariably won by teenagers impersonating people – Bobby Darin, Matt Monroe, Norman Evans, Sammy Davis Junior – who had been dead before they were born.

By eight o’clock, he normally expected to see the bar brimming with people and the main room beginning to fill up with buzz and noise. Tonight, though, he could hear the brushes and the kick-drum of the drummer, who was immediately below him, with the eerie clarity of a record and, in the quieter moments, hear the band cracking wise among themselves. Even with one eye he could see that the bar was about a third as full as it was supposed to be.

Blanche usually supplied him with a crib sheet which set out the who and where of the party bookings so he could work some local or topical reference in during his first spot of the night. Most nights this didn’t tax him. The hen parties and ruby-wedding groups, the sewing circles and pigeon-fanciers and stags; the domed eccentrics of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association and the nervous nellies from the vast Ministry of Pensions gulag to the east of the city – these were all easy, requiring one or two
one-size-fits-all gags from his mental Rolodex. But the Ephphatha League of the Deaf posed trickier problems.

Clipped to the sheet that Blanche had given him had been a note, written with a broad-nibbed pen in blue ink, from the
organizer
of the deaf-mute club’s trip to Bobby’s:

Ray knew instantly now that the first thing he had to do was stand down Alexis, the dumb waiter. ‘I spill beer on people, bump into them, step on their feet, and hit them in the face with my elbows,’ Alexis, a former circus performer, had told Ray when he came to be interviewed for the job. ‘All the time I look dumb. It is a very funny act to people with a keen sense of humour. Of course, some people just don’t have a sense of humour.’

‘What do they think of your act?’ Ray had asked.

‘Well, I tell you,’ Alexis said, ‘look at this scar on my forehead. And I suppose you noticed that I walk with a limp.’

Ray had hired him on the spot, and on many nights Alexis was the star of the show. People liked having Radgie Gadgie slopped down their necks and pease pudden dropped in their laps by an apparently well-intentioned but accident-prone waiter, it
transpired
. (‘Aah naa, ’e’s canny, man.’) It helped them to lose their inhibitions and have a good time. But tonight, Ray decided, Alexis’s brand of slapstick couldn’t be risked.

When Jackie went looking for Alexis in the bar he found it largely populated with people dressed the way Ray dressed every night, in dead people’s – their own mother’s or brother’s or somebody else’s – clothes. They were having pre-drink drinks before the serious drinking, and there was an air of expecting the place to fill up, everybody both spectator and part of the
spectacle
, not knowing yet that tonight, for reasons beyond anybody’s control or contrivance, the spectacle was going to be curtailed and limited to just about all those who were there now – about ninety in total and two-thirds of that total being the
deaf-and-dumb
people using signs to small-talk and joke and gossip with one another. They closed and unclosed their hands in the air, wriggled their fingers and made complicated gestures.

Some had come as ladies’ maids and land-girls; others as farm labourers and Jarrow Marchers. Jackie himself was wearing a dark lounge suit and a plain crew-neck sweater. As he looked around for Alexis he was approached by a tall, slightly stooped man dressed as a miner who was carrying a spiral notebook at the level of his chest. ‘Do you work here?’ he had written on the first blank page. Jackie nodded yes, that he did, and the man flipped the page and started writing. He was wearing breeches that hung just below his knees and had a red sweatcloth hitched to his waist. When he reached the bottom of the page, he tore it out and gave it to Jackie. ‘Hello. Glad to meet you. My name is Mark Douglas. I’m the organizer of the deaf group’s outing. Perhaps it would be helpful if I write down a couple of things about the group that you may care to pass on to whoever’s in charge of things this evening.’ Jackie saw that there were two upraised hands printed on the piece of paper. The hands represented letters in the manual alphabet, but obviously Jackie didn’t know what the letters were. ‘For one, the deaf are top dancers. A1 dancers. None better. We don’t hear, but when we dance on a wooden floor most of us feel the vibrations of the music. To watch
us dancing, you’d never guess we didn’t hear anything at all. Even have a few jivers!’

Jackie side-stepped to his left and reached around and under the bar counter where the new order pads were. ‘Dance floor hear glass.’ Jackie wrote everything in awkward block capitals whose interstices didn’t meet up and which lay on the page like broken branches on the forest floor. ‘Also hi–’ He scored that out. ‘Hay–’ The word Jackie was trying to spell was ‘hydraulic’. They had a hydraulic dance floor made from strengthened glass, salvaged from one of the first clubs to open in the city in the fifties. Mark Douglas wasn’t paying any attention to him anyway, but
continuing
to write in his notebook. He had a sharp, very pronounced Adam’s apple which bobbed in and out of the neck of his
collarless
pitman’s shirt as he wrote. Presently he tore out another leaf and gave it to Jackie. ‘We also “sing”. We love singing. We have choirs who sing in sign language and we are all looking forward to singing tonight! We take part in many activities as a group. We prefer our own company because most hearing people have a tendency to look on us as peculiar, or mysterious, or unnatural. We are always stared at. Because of this we like to go about together. Do you find these facts interesting?’ Jackie was smiling politely; nodding and smiling. But what he was thinking was: The inside of your head. The darkest place on earth.