The North of England Home Service (19 page)

Booba asked Jackie if he had heard of the Jewish legend of the
golem;
if he was familiar with this word. ‘Was an artificial man. Mechanical man in a human image which stood and lived.
Golem
had the gift of memory and would obey orders mechanic-like, without reflection, provided they came at regular intervals. Chop wood, sweep the street and the synagogue, all diversity of menial tasks.
Golem
was servant, and servant that does not answer back. But when rabbi wished to destroy his
golem,
rabbi had power to revert his
golem
–
his!
always me me me! – back to straw and wet clay.

‘I don’t like to be
kibbitzer
here‚’ Booba said, slowly easing
herself
out of her chair, ‘but boxing is over with you now. What is you do? You come with the bucket, you mop up the blood. You
shmooze
the mother. You prowl the night. You carry tales. Jack is Jack. Jack is his own story. But you are Jackie. Different story. What is Jackie’s story? Where does Jackie go? Are your dreams
really
your own dreams?’

Booba started for the scullery, supporting herself by the knuckles on large pieces of furniture as she went. Jackie stood at the door and looked at what had been Jack’s and Maxie’s and Barney’s and Asher’s room (the shiny rub of their bodies was still imprinted on the walls), and then his room. The openwork window curtain weighted with a single lapis bead which
frequently
made a light tapping in the night; the wallpaper faded to an almost sepia brown; the swan-neck gas bracket for the hissing light. He saw a pair of shoes he had forgotten he ever owned peeping out from under the bed.

Booba brought pink veal, gherkin pickles,
challah
bread – a little
shmeck.
The candles guttered at a slant, gouging crater holes in the wax. Booba cupped her hands around the candles closest to her to shut out the draught. He ate. The knife rang against the plate. So it was agreed. He would move back here.

Life in London was such a rich density of living – so densely
textured
and closely packed with the tight unpickable weave of detail and incident: the hanging yellow smogs of the traffic and the frying-onion smells drifting from the new hamburger bars that were now starting to spring up all over; the visual crash and
commotion
, the roar and racket non-stop from neon-rise to neon-set.

It made that other life that Ray had been used to until then feel like a thin thing, thin as the sheets he liked to have his mother tuck in tightly around him at night while pretending to be asleep and unaware she was there. These sheets he remembered from childhood were frictionless and shabby and rubbed away to a slippy pilled near-transparency which was beyond patching. (‘Even the patches had patches’ – an old joke of Bobby Thompson’s – for a while had been literally true in Ray’s case. In Ray and Betty Cruddas’s case: many times his mother would sleep with only a hessian-like rough blanket next to her body, or a dyed Service coat, coarse against the satin slip she slept in, and no sheet at all.) Every so often an elbow or a knee or a ragged
toenail
would catch in a sheet and Ray would become aware of a rasping tearing sensation which would briefly wake him up. The next morning his mother would rip conclusively through the sheet using her fists and (he particularly remembered) her teeth, demonstrating unsuspected pent-up strength, and he would recognize the colour or the pattern with a start or a pang some time later when she started using the sheet pieces for dusting and polishing and other tasks about the house.

The place Ray was always most likely to entertain thoughts about the interesting thickening of his life and the encouraging course it was taking was a small drinking club on the ground floor in Denman Street in Soho; the Mazurka it was called. It was also known as ‘Ginnie’s Club’ after the woman who ran it and who had been a Windmill girl once: Denman Street was a narrow rat-run almost directly opposite the Windmill Theatre, and a lot
of the girls from the show would get down there. Solomons Gym was around the corner, and the boxing fraternity came in to ‘Ginnie’s’. Occasionally it was the champions themselves, but more usually the managers and the sharpies and other
supernumeries
of the fight game. Mac’s Rehearsal Room was in the basement of the Jack Solomons building, and the cool hip-hep jazz types from Mac’s would also crowd in with their hair cut short in Perry Como ‘college-boy’ styles, duffel coats, pointed, elegant shoes, and skinny, horizontally banded ties. What you also had in Ginnie’s at this point in the mid-to-late fifties was a group of ex-Guards officers who camply called each other names such as ‘Miss Ann’ and ‘Belinda’ and shouted ‘Abyssinia!’ at each other when they parted, and leggy gorgeous chorus girls who waved around Princess Margaret-style cigarette holders and addressed each other as, for instance, ‘Brian’.

Standing on the good side of a stiff Scotch, Ray would loiter in the Mazurka and try to get to grips with this new world he was entering, in which nothing was ever totally what it seemed, or even close to what he would have imagined it to be just a few weeks earlier. There was a code to be broken, and he was intent on breaking it. The sense of things seemed upside-down. A
curtain
made of strips of garish coloured plastic hung in front of the door at the Mazurka. Where he came from, these curtains were put up in the summer to protect the outer paintwork from the sun and were generally considered common. Here, though, the plastic strips were out in all weathers and seemed to denote something witty or clever (‘infra dig’ was the vogue expression then), like the rum-and-peps and the brandy-and-Babychams Ginnie’s regulars ordered, the Tia Marias and Rémy-on-the-rocks which Ray had believed were vulgar, unfashionable things to drink. It was like a joke everybody was in on but nobody ever mentioned.

The Mazurka Club was a single room with a utility bar and a star walnut upright piano; rose lights glowed dimly on the
worn ‘tapestry’-pattern upholstery of an oak wood and a drover bringing the cows home and fish swam in a tank above the old bronze-metal cash register which rang up every sale with a
grating
ding.
The Mazurka would enjoy a brief notoriety four or five years later when it became identified as a regular haunt of the vicious property racketeer, Rachman, and Ward, the society osteopath at the heart of the sensational Profumo scandal. Ray apparently met both of these characters in his days going to Ginnie’s, but he met so many people in those days he could claim no memory of them. Even when he saw their pictures in the paper, brooding and notorious, they meant nothing.

Ginnie’s prided itself on being untrammelled and inclusive and madcaply come-as-you-are. ‘The great thing about here is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your income, or whether you’re nobody or famous, or a boy or a girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are so long as you can hold a drink and behave yourself and have left all that crap behind you when you come in the door.’ Ray heard this, or something like this, on any number of visits to Ginnie’s. In practice, of course, it actually wasn’t the kind of place you could just walk into off the street unless you were with somebody who was already known there or you came with an introduction from a member.

Ray’s open-Sesame to the Mazurka and the underlife of Soho had been a beautiful but rather strange girl called Pauline. Pauline – ‘Reeves’ was her second name, although almost nobody who knew her would have been able to tell you that; even her first name varied according to which special clique or demi-monde she was in: ‘Christice’ and ‘Ruby’ were among her aliases – ‘Pauline’, as Ray knew her and would always think of her, came from an ordinary, respectable, professional
background
in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire or somewhere else that he could never remember in the Home Counties. She had
scandalized
her parents by telling them when she was sixteen that she
wanted to be an art student (a ‘famous artist’ she actually said) rather than apply for teachers’ training or go to an approved secretarial college as her mother had, to learn shorthand and typing and begin the long task of scouting for a husband.

The stake would have been driven into their hearts even deeper if they had ever discovered that she was supporting herself and earning the college fees they refused to give her by working as a showgirl in a Beak Street club. The rules at the Cabaret Club, as it happens, were unusually strict. Discipline was in the hands of two ‘matrons’. They were assisted by two ‘head girls’ who were helped by ‘prefects’. The main offences were being late, missing a cue, or taking time off without permission. Lesser offences included forgetting to wear nail varnish, missing the free weekly visit to the hairdresser, and failing to cover light patches left by swimsuit straps after sunbathing. All this struck Pauline – as most of life did then – as being hilarious. She was sparky and fearless. (‘Plenty of fun and gaiety but no sex silliness‚’ she would quote old man Murray who owned the club, collapsing in
laughter
.) But none of this could disguise the fact that she was living a hazardous life.

Many of the Cabaret Club’s forty-five ‘young ladies’ were housed on the opposite side of Beak Street to the club. One of the familiar sights of Soho in those days was the girls tripping across the street in their exotic costumes to go to work, like the famous ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis waddling in file across the lobby at a set time every morning to frolic in the hotel
fountain
. And, coming across it one night without warning, Ray was as riveted by this little Soho side-show as any of the northern businessmen and American tourists and Arabs and other gawpers who could always be found lurking in the vicinity of the club.

It was something imprinted on his memory. He was disoriented. It was dark. He was slightly drunk. He was just starting to find his way around. He turned the corner of Kingly Street and almost
walked straight into the two Amazons who emerged arm in arm and chatting from a deeply recessed door. They wore tall silver head-dresses and silver sandals with high spiked heels and long, full-skirted street coats over their showgirl costumes. Pauline had a pale face and heavily mascara’d eyes and pouting lips and a big tumble of savage blond hair in the style of Brigitte Bardot. (There was a poster of Bardot in
Mam’zelle
Striptease,
Ray would discover, pinned to a wall in Pauline’s flat.) Her friend was a bottle blonde, taller, fuller figured and more conventionally pretty in the bathing-beauty mould. As they arrived at the edge of the red glow cast by the Cabaret Club sign, Dervla, as the friend was called, turned and unexpectedly flashed her tits at Ray by quickly opening and closing her coat. She was wearing a glittering
stiff-ribbed
costume which stopped just short of her breasts. Pauline bent down to pick up something she’d dropped and glanced quickly back at Ray and then a frock-coated doorman he hadn’t noticed until then stepped from the shadows and ushered the girls inside.

On 20 July 1957, at an open-air rally at Bedford, Mr Macmillan, in his first year as Prime Minister, was reviewing the country’s economy. He said: ‘Let’s be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good.’ It was a phrase that caught the national imagination and even, perhaps, people said, its lust.

Ray had finally made the big move south that year. Over the previous few years he had established a solid reputation in the North through his long residency on
Variety
Parade
which he recorded every two weeks for the BBC in Manchester. He did the clubs, a pantomime every year, a summer season in Blackpool or Scarborough. In 1953 he had been given a small part in one of the lousy pictures Frank Randle made for Mancunian Films in what was laughingly known as ‘Jollywood’. He had had a crash course in power-politicking and brass-neck showbiz bravura by
watching
the off-screen performance of Diana Dors, who was the sex
interest in
It’s
a
Grand
Life.
He had to learn to be more ‘pushful’ if he ever expected to get anywhere, she told him in their single, brief conversation. ‘And for chrissakes get rid of the
child-pesterer’s
haircut and that dopey goddam shirt and tie. Unless you like looking like the man who’s come to read the meter. Didn’t anybody tell you? The war’s over. Get with it. Is it Ray, Roy? Self-respecting modesty never buttered any potatoes. You’re in the business of show.’

It’s
a
Grand
Life
led to nothing, but Ray thought he looked OK in front of the camera. He appeared on television for the first time in 1955, presenting
Top
Town,
a talent competition between teams from Sunderland and Blaydon. He was ‘discovered’ when he did
The
Good
Old
Days
in a matinée scarf and muttonchop whiskers live from Leeds City Varieties. The impresarios George and Alfred Black had been looking for a young comedian to present a new television variety show that was to go out on Saturday nights from the Prince of Wales Theatre. And after his first appearance on
The
Big
Show
in October 1956, Ray’s career had caught fire. The Blacks (in association with the Delfonts) had booked him to appear with Tommy Steele, Dickie Henderson and the singer Jill Day in
Startime
at the Hippodrome in the West End, which opened in April 1957 and ran into the first weeks of the
following
year. He acquired an Austin Hereford, a flat in a portered thirties-modern block in Marylebone, and started to indulge his taste for hand-crafted, expensive bespoke shoes. He had to
experiment
with ways of using hats, scarves, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and other props in order to avoid being recognized and even chased in the street. He had a top West End agent who was quadrupling and quintupling his fees. Things looked swell; things looked great. Everything was coming up roses.