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Chapter One
Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster? If you have, you
will remember it. Some quirk of the Kentish coastline
makes Whitstable natives — as they are properly called — the
largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the subtlest, oysters
in the whole of England. Whitstable oysters are, quite rightly,
famous. The French, who are known for their sensitive palates,
regularly cross the Channel for them; they are shipped, in barrels
of ice, to the dining-tables of Hamburg and Berlin. Why,
the King himself, I heard, makes special trips to Whitstable
with Mrs Keppel, to eat oyster suppers in a private hotel; and
as for the old Queen — she dined on a native a day (or so they
say) till the day she died.
Did you ever go to Whitstable, and see the oyster-parlours
there? My father kept one; I was born in it — do you recall a
narrow, weather-boarded house, painted a flaking blue,
half-way between the High Street and the harbour? Do you
remember the bulging sign that hung above the door, that said
that Astley's Oysters, the Best in Kent were to be had within?
Did you, perhaps, push at that door, and step into the dim,
low-ceilinged, fragrant room beyond it? Can you recall the
tables with their chequered cloths — the bill of fare chalked on
a board — the spirit-lamps, the sweating slabs of butter?
Were you served by a girl with a rosy cheek, and a saucy
manner, and curls? That was my sister, Alice. Or was it a man,
rather tall and stooping, with a snowy apron falling from the
knot in his neck-tie to the bow in his boots? That was my
father. Did you see, as the kitchen door swung to and fro, a
lady stand frowning into the clouds of steam that rose from a
pan of bubbling oyster soup, or a sizzling gridiron? That was
my mother.
And was there at her side a slender, white-faced, unremarkable-looking
girl, with the sleeves of her dress rolled up to
her elbows, and a lock of lank and colourless hair forever
falling into her eye, and her lips continually moving to the
words of some street-singer's or music-hall song?
That was me.
Like Molly Malone in the old ballad, I was a fishmonger,
because my parents were. They kept the restaurant, and the
rooms above it: I was raised an oyster-girl, and steeped in all
the flavours of the trade. My first few childish steps I took
around vats of sleeping natives and barrels of ice; before I was
ever given a piece of chalk and a slate, I was handed an oyster-knife
and instructed in its use; while I was still lisping out my
alphabet at the schoolmaster's knee, I could name you the
contents of an oyster-cook's kitchen — could sample fish with
a blindfold on, and tell you their variety. Whitstable was all
the world to me, Astley's Parlour my own particular country,
oyster-juice my medium. Although I didn't long believe the
story told to me by Mother — that they had found me as a baby
in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me
for lunch — for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish
sympathies, never looked far beyond my father's kitchen
for occupation, or for love.
It was a curious kind of life, mine, even by Whitstable standards;
but it was not a disagreeable or even a terribly hard
one. Our working day began at seven, and ended twelve hours
later; and through all those hours my duties were the same.
While Mother cooked, and Alice and my father served, I sat
upon a high stool at the side of a vat of natives, and scrubbed,
and rinsed, and plied the oyster-knife. Some people like their
oysters raw; and for them your job is easiest, for you have
merely to pick out a dozen natives from the barrel, swill the
brine from them, and place them, with a piece of parsley or
cress, upon a plate. But for those who took their oysters
stewed, or fried — or baked, or scalloped, or put in a pie — my
labours were more delicate. Then I must open each oyster, and
beard it, and transfer it to Mother's cooking-pot with all of its
savoury flesh intact, and none of its liquor spilled or tainted.
Since a supper-plate will hold a dozen fish; since oyster-teas
are cheap; and since our Parlour was a busy one, with room for
fifty customers at once — well, you may calculate for yourself
the vast numbers of oysters which passed, each day, beneath
my prising knife; and you might imagine, too, the redness and
the soreness and the sheer salty soddenness of my fingers at
the close of every afternoon. Even now, two decades and more
since I put aside my oyster-knife and quit my father's kitchen
for ever, I feel a ghostly, sympathetic twinge in my wrist and
finger-joints at the sight of a fishmonger's barrel, or the sound
of an oyster-man's cry; and still, sometimes, I believe I can
catch the scent of liquor and brine beneath my thumb-nail, and
in the creases of my palm.
I have said that there was nothing in my life, when I was
young, but oysters; but that is not quite true. I had friends and
cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town
in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice — my dearest
friend of all — with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and
who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had
a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging
smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on
Whitstable Bay.
And last of all I had a fondness — you might say, a kind of
passion — for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall
songs and the singing of them. If you have visited
Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient
passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre — only
a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel,
where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the
Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only
fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there
was a music hall — the Canterbury Palace of Varieties — where
the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence,
and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent.
The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre;
but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my
oyster-girl's eyes — I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls,
the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted
gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house,
it had its own particular scent — the scent, I know now, of
music halls everywhere — the scent of wood and grease-paint
and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined.
It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later
I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the
smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came
to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief.
That, however, is to get ahead of my story.
I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and
scents of the Canterbury Palace — in the period, at least, of
which I am thinking, that final summer in my father's house,
when I became eighteen — because Alice had a beau who
worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at
knock-down prices or for free. Tony was the nephew of the
Palace's manager, the celebrated Tricky Reeves, and therefore
something of a catch for our Alice. My parents mistrusted him
at first, thinking him `rapid' because he worked in a theatre,
and wore cigars behind his ears, and talked glibly of contracts,
London, and champagne. But no one could dislike Tony for
long, he was so large-hearted and easy and good; and like
every other boy who courted her, he adored my sister, and
was ready to be kind to us all on her account.
Thus it was that Alice and I were so frequently to be found
on a Saturday night, tucking our skirts beneath our seats and
calling out the choruses to the gayest songs, in the best and
most popular shows, at the Canterbury Palace. Like the rest of
the audience, we were discriminating. We had our favourite
turns — artistes we watched and shouted for; songs we begged
to have sung and re-sung again and again until the singer's
throat was dry, and she — for more often than not it was the
lady singers whom Alice and I loved best — could sing no
more, but only smile and curtsey.
And when the show was over, and we had paid our respects
to Tony in his stuffy little office behind the ticket-seller's
booth, we would carry the tunes away with us. We would sing
them on the train to Whitstable — and sometimes others,
returning home from the same show as merry as we, would
sing them with us. We would whisper them into the darkness
as we lay in bed, we would dream our dreams to the beat of
their verses; and we would wake next morning humming them
still. We'd serve a bit of music-hall glamour, then, with our fish
suppers — Alice whistling as she carried platters, and making
the customers smile to hear her; me, perched on my high stool
beside my bowl of brine, singing to the oysters that I scrubbed
and prised and bearded. Mother said I should be on the stage
myself.
When she said it, however, she laughed; and so did I. The
girls I saw in the glow of the footlights, the girls whose songs
I loved to learn and sing, they weren't like me. They were
more like my sister: they had cherry lips, and curls that danced
about their shoulders; they had bosoms that jutted, and elbows
that dimpled, and ankles — when they showed them — as slim
and as shapely as beer-bottles. I was tall, and rather lean. My
chest was flat, my hair dull, my eyes a drab and an uncertain
blue. My complexion, to be sure, was perfectly smooth and
clear, and my teeth were very white; but these — in our family,
at least — were counted unremarkable, for since we all passed
our days in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as
bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish.
No, girls like Alice were meant to dance upon a gilded
stage, skirted in satin, hailed by cupids; and girls like me were
made to sit in the gallery, dark and anonymous, and watch
them.
Or so, anyway, I thought then.
The routine I have described — the routine of prising and
bearding and cooking and serving, and Saturday-night visits to
the music hall — is the one that I remember most from my girlhood;
but it was, of course, only a winter one. From May to
August, when British natives must be left to spawn, the dredging
smacks pull down their sails or put to sea in search of
other quarry; and oyster-parlours all over England are obliged,
in consequence, to change their menus or close their doors.
The business that my father did between autumn and spring,
though excellent enough, was not so good that he could afford
to shut his shop throughout the summer and take a holiday;
but, like many Whitstable families whose fortunes depended
upon the sea and its bounty, there was a noticeable easing of
our labours in the warmer months, a kind of shifting into a
slower, looser, gayer key. The restaurant grew less busy. We
served crab and plaice and turbot and herrings, rather than
oysters, and the filleting was kinder work than the endless
scrubbing and shelling of the winter months. We kept our windows
raised, and the kitchen door thrown open; we were
neither boiled alive by the steam of the cooking-pots, nor
numbed and frozen by barrels of oyster-ice, as we were in
winter, but gently cooled by the breezes, and soothed by the
sound of fluttering canvas and ringing pulleys that drifted into
our kitchen from Whitstable Bay.
The summer in which I turned eighteen was a warm one,
and grew warmer as the weeks advanced. For days at a time
Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk
stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the
Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one
that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy
Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves
and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves's
airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle.
There are more similarities between a fishmonger's trade
and a music-hall manager's than you might think. When Father
changed his stock to suit his patrons' dulled and over-heated
palates, so did Tricky. He paid half of his performers off, and
brought in a host of new artistes from the music halls of
Chatham, Margate and Dover; most cleverly of all, he secured
a one-week contract with a real celebrity, from London: Gully
Sutherland — one of the best comic singers in the business, and
a guaranteed hall-filler even in the hottest of hot Kentish
summers.
Alice and I visited the Palace on the very first night of Gully
Sutherland's week. By this time we had an arrangement with
the lady in the ticket-booth: we gave her a nod and a smile as
we arrived, then sauntered past her window and chose any
seat in the hall beyond that we fancied. Usually, this was
somewhere in the gallery. I could never understand the attraction
of the stalls ticket; it seemed unnatural to me to seat
oneself below the stage, and have to peer up at the artistes
from a level somewhere near their ankles, through the faint,
shimmering haze of heat that rose above the footlights. The
circle gave a better view, but the gallery, though further away,
to my mind gave the best of all; and there were two seats in the
front row, at the very centre of the gallery, that Alice and I particular
favoured. Here you knew yourself to be not just at a
show but in a theatre: you caught the shape of the stage and
the sweep of the seats; and you marvelled to see your neighbours'
faces, and to know your own to be like theirs — all
queerly lit by the glow of the footlights, and a damp at the lip,
and with a grin upon it, like that of a demon at some hellish
revue.
It was certainly as hot as hell in the Canterbury Palace on
Gully Sutherland's opening night — so hot that, when Alice
and I leaned over the gallery rail to gaze at the audience below,
we were met by a blast of tobacco- and sweat-scented air, that
made us reel and cough. The theatre, as Tony's uncle had calculated,
was almost full; yet it was strangely hushed. People
spoke in murmurs, or not at all. When one looked from the
gallery to the circle and the stalls, one saw only the flap of hats
and programmes. The flapping didn't stop when the orchestra
struck up its few bars of overture and the house lights dimmed;
but it slowed a little, and people sat up rather straighter in
their seats. The hush of fatigue became a silence of expectation.
The Palace was an old-fashioned music hall and, like many
such places in the 1880s, still employed a chairman. This, of
course, was Tricky himself: he sat at a table between the stalls
and the orchestra and introduced the acts, and called for order
if the crowd became too rowdy, and led us in toasts to the
Queen. He had a top-hat and a gavel — I have never seen a
chairman without a gavel — and a mug of porter. On his table
stood a candle: this was kept lit for as long as there were
artistes upon the stage, but it was extinguished for the interval,
and at the show's close.
Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice — a
voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating,
and lovely to listen to. On the night of Sutherland's
first performance he welcomed us to his show and promised
us an evening's entertainment we would never forget. Had we
lungs? he asked. We must be prepared to use them! Had we
feet, and hands? We must make ready to stamp, and clap! Had
we sides? They would be split! Tears? We would shed buckets
of them! Eyes?
`Stretch 'em, now, in wonder! Orchestra, please. Limes-men,
if you will.' He struck the table with his gavel — clack! — so that
the candle-flame dipped. `I give you, the marvellous, the musical,
the very, very merry, Merry' — he struck the table again
— `Randalls!'
The curtain quivered, then rose. There was a seaside backdrop
to the stage and, upon the boards themselves, real sand;
and over this strolled four gay figures in holiday gear: two
ladies — one dark, one fair — with parasols; and two tall gents,
one with a ukulele on a strap. They sang `All the Girls are
Lovely by the Seaside', very nicely; then the ukulele player did
a solo, and the ladies lifted their skirts for a spot of soft-shoe
dancing on the sand. For a first turn, they were good. We
cheered them; and Tricky thanked us very graciously for our
appreciation.
The next act was a comedian, the next a mentalist — a lady
in evening dress and gloves, who stood blindfolded upon the
stage while her husband moved among the audience with a
slate, inviting people to write numbers and names upon it
with a piece of chalk, for her to guess.
`Imagine the number floating through the air in flames of
scarlet,' said the man impressively, `and searing its way into
my wife's brain, through her brow.' We frowned and squinted
at the stage, and the lady staggered a little, and raised her
hands to her temples.
`The Power,' she said, `it is very strong tonight. Ah, I feel it
burning!'
After this there was an acrobatic troupe — three men in spangles
who turned somersaults through hoops, and stood on one
another's shoulders. At the climax of their act they formed a
kind of human loop, and rolled about the stage to a tune from
the orchestra. We clapped at that; but it was too hot for acrobatics,
and there was a general shuffling and whispering
throughout this act, as boys were sent with orders to the bar,
and returned with bottles and glasses and mugs that had to be
handed, noisily, down the rows, past heads and laps and
grasping fingers. I glanced at Alice: she had removed her hat
and was fanning herself with it, and her cheeks were very red.
I pushed my own little bonnet to the back of my head, leaned
upon the rail before me with my chin upon my knuckles, and
closed my eyes. I heard Tricky rise and call for silence with his
gavel.
`Ladies and gentlemen,' he cried, `a little treat for you now.
A little bit of helegance and top-drawer style. If you've champagne
in your glasses' — there was an ironical cheering at this — `raise
them now. If you've beer — why, beer's got bubbles, don't
it? Raise that too! Above all, raise your voices, as I give to you,
direct from the Phoenix Theatre, Dover, our very own Kentish
swell, our diminutive Faversham masher ... Miss Kitty' — clack!
— `Butler!'
There was a burst of handclapping and a few damp
whoops. The orchestra struck up with some jolly number, and
I heard the creak and whisper of the rising curtain. All unwillingly
I opened my eyes — then I opened them wider, and lifted
my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite forgotten.
Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of
rosy limelight, and in the centre of this there was a girl: the
most marvellous girl — I knew it at once! — that I had ever
seen.
Of course, we had had male impersonator turns at the
Palace before; but in 1888, in the provincial halls, the masher
acts were not the things they are today. When Nelly Power
had sung `The Last of the Dandies' to us six months before she
had worn tights and bullion fringe, just like a ballet-girl — only
carried a cane and a billycock hat to make her boyish. Kitty
Butler did not wear tights or spangles. She was, as Tricky had
billed her, a kind of perfect West-End swell. She wore a suit
— a handsome gentleman's suit, cut to her size, and lined at the
cuffs and the flaps with flashing silk. There was a rose in her
lapel, and lavender gloves at her pocket. From beneath her
waistcoat shone a stiff-fronted shirt of snowy white, with a
stand-up collar two inches high. Around the collar was a white
bow-tie; and on her head there was a topper. When she took
the topper off — as she did now to salute the audience with a
gay `Hallo!' — one saw that her hair was perfectly cropped.
It was the hair, I think, which drew me most. If I had ever
seen women with hair as short as hers, it was because they had
spent time in hospital or prison; or because they were mad.
They could never have looked like Kitty Butler. Her hair fitted
her head like a little cap that had been sewn, just for her, by
some nimble-fingered milliner. I would say it was brown;
brown, however, is too dull a word for it. It was, rather, the
kind of brown you might hear sung about — a nut-brown, or a
russet. It was almost, perhaps, the colour of chocolate — but
then chocolate has no lustre, and this hair shone in the blaze of
the limes like taffeta. It curled at her temple, slightly, and over
her ears; and when she turned her head a little to put her hat
back on, I saw a strip of pale flesh at the nape of her neck
where the collar ended and the hairline began that - for all the
fire of the hot, hot hall — made me shiver.
She looked, I suppose, like a very pretty boy, for her face
was a perfect oval, and her eyes were large and dark at the
lashes, and her lips were rosy and full. Her figure, too, was
boy-like and slender — yet rounded, vaguely but unmistakably,
at the bosom, the stomach, and the hips, in a way no real boy's
ever was; and her shoes, I noticed after a moment, had two-inch
heels to them. But she strode like a boy, and stood like
one, with her feet far apart and her hands thrust carelessly
into her trouser pockets, and her head at an arrogant angle, at
the very front of the stage; and when she sang, her voice was a
boy's voice — sweet and terribly true.
Her effect upon that over-heated hall was wonderful. Like
me, my neighbours all sat up, and gazed at her with shining
eyes. Her songs were all well-chosen ones — things like `Drink
Up, Boys!', and `Sweethearts and Wives', which the likes of G.
H. Macdermott had already made famous, and with which we
could all, in consequence, join in — though it was peculiarly
thrilling to have them sung to us, not by a gent, but by a girl, in
neck-tie and trousers. In between each song she addressed herself,
in a swaggering, confidential tone, to the audience, and
exchanged little bits of nonsense with Tricky Reeves at his
chairman's table. Her speaking voice was like her singing one
— strong and healthy, and wonderfully warm upon the ear. Her
accent was sometimes music-hall cockney, sometimes theatrical-genteel,
sometimes pure broad Kent.
Her set lasted no longer than the customary fifteen minutes
or so, but she was cheered and shouted back on to the stage at
the end of that time twice over. Her final song was a gentle
one — a ballad about roses and a lost sweetheart. As she sang
she removed her hat and held it to her bosom; then she pulled
the flower from her lapel and placed it against her cheek, and
seemed to weep a little. The audience, in sympathy, let out one
huge collective sigh, and bit their lips to hear her boyish tones
grow suddenly so tender.
All at once, however, she raised her eyes and gazed at us
over her knuckles: we saw that she wasn't weeping at all, but
smiling — and then, suddenly, winking, hugely and roguishly.
Very swiftly she stepped once again to the front of the stage,
and gazed into the stalls for the prettiest girl. When she found
her, she raised her hand and the rose went flying over the
shimmer of the footlights, over the orchestra-pit, to land in
the pretty girl's lap.
We went wild for her then. We roared and stamped and she,
all gallant, raised her hat to us and, waving, took her leave. We
called for her, but there were no more encores. The curtain fell,
the orchestra played; Tricky struck his gavel upon his table,
blew out his candle, and it was the interval.
I peered, blinking, into the seats below, trying to catch sight of the girl who had been thrown the flower. I could not think of anything more wonderful, at that moment, than to receive a rose from Kitty Butler's hand.
