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April 29, 2007
I Got It In The Neck
For my It’s Not Fair blog.
E-mails sent at early morn:
"How could you praise other actors and not me?”
“I have the hide of a rhinoceros but please don’t use me as a platform for your weird hang-ups”
“You have taken the shine off all my brave efforts.”
I grovelled and took offline what had given offence.
I’ve put it back on again now. It’s my blog. And my hang-ups may be weird, but they’re mine.
Let's take the girl who read some of her writing aloud and unasked. Perhaps it’s an old-schoolism and out of date, but I believe that if an artist attends the performance of a colleague, nobody needs to know that they’re there. They shouldn’t pull focus in the foyer, at the stage door, in the Stalls Circle ladies loo - Heather Pearl, you know who you are! - or out front. My mother was terrible in this respect, singing along at my father’s gigs from a table near the stage.
"Singing along?" my father shouts, "moo-ing along, you mean!"
Both my parents were singers.
“And I’ve said it before” – my mother - “but I’ll say it again: it’s sad that you inherited your vocal cords from your father’s side of the family and not from mine. Vocal cords that could only ever have taken him singing his Country And Western round the pubs and the clubs and the folk festivals and what have yous.”
It’s a lottery, singing. It all comes down to the quality of two flaps of skin straddling your wind-pipe. My mother’s flaps were Fortnum and Mason, my father’s Quicksave, apparently.
My mother
“My father, your grandfather, was adopted. His real family surname was James. Never knew his blood mother’s first name. Except she was famous in Wales as the soloist for Madame Clara Novello-Davies (mother of the late, great Ivor) who had a choir. No-one knows what happened to her. There was talk of a fire or of a trip to make her lights in New York, and she never got there. As a girl, I was taken to see her brother, Caradog Gareth. Worked for the water board over at Maesteg, he did. Had a house right in the middle of a terrace. Opened the door to me and he knew straight away who I was, except that she, his sister, had the flaming red hair and I had the jet black. And we went in and he took me over to the piano and played the hymn and I sang and he said: “And there’s the voice” and shut the lid. No more needed”.
And what happened?
“First setback was when I was fourteen and my family refused to let me have the good shoes to compete with in the Eisteddfod. The talk was that I would have easily won the cup and gone international overnight. My mother said it wasn’t my turn, it was one of my brothers’s. I forget which of them exactly. But Vic was playing football and could have gone in his boots, which he only would have changed into anyway. John was only going to watch him, anything on his feet would have done. Dave was in London, out of foot-shot completely. Donald was getting married - who would have been looking at him? Would it have killed them the once? And in the third row but one in the marquee for the competition I saw the man who discovered Stuart Burrowes. There I was singing He Was Despised in boots with laces that didn’t match. There went my lights I should have had.”
The second major set back to her singing career was me being born. After a flourish of Rossini's Nacqui All’Affano - aka Knackering Your Fanny - she'll say,
“There. That's the voice could have taken me to the top of the operatic tree.”
“If”, says my nan on that side of the family, “she’d ever come down off the cross long enough to do anything about it.”
“Lost all the support under my diaphragm giving birth to you, though, Iestyn. Practically prolapsed me, you did."
When she's off on this one, the party line is that Gareth, my older brother, slipped out like an eel mid-cadenza during an avalanche of job offers that for some reason or other she didn’t accept. At all other times, the truth outs: he took seventy-three hours and was an arse-first breech presentation wearing his umbilical cord as a scarf.
"Back previous to your birth, Iestyn, I could have moved the ironing board with my support muscles. Lost all that. Eleven pounds six you were. My floaty e’s in Rest In The Lord didn’t stand a chance. No wonder you were nearly born in the corridor”.
Now, I’m not saying I was fat, but when her waters broke flood warnings were issued across three counties.
And my nan on that side said, "Talking of diaphragms, when your mother went to have one fitted after you were born, it was the same circumference as the wrong end of a bleach-boil bucket, so no wonder your father started chasing that woman from up Caerphilly way with the mobile home."
“Your father had it easy", mum's off again. "He had shoes, and his singing teacher played for the local concert party, which is how he came to have his first break when they were on the big show in Cardiff and he got spotted by the man who booked for the Nashville Rooms.”
The concert party was The Magnificent Seven. One: the name isn’t terribly imaginative. Two: after a ballooning accident over Merthyr, there were five of them. Dad was originally in the chorus, but his three cord Slim Whitman tribute set was the only thing ready to go on when soprano Florrie Evans got given the bird at a gig in Tiger Bay.
“Miles off form she was”, my father remembers, “and on it she was no Maria Callas, mind. Doing the Miserere from Il Trovatore, straight after Neddy the comedian with his routine about having to share a bed with his eight brothers and sisters, and three of them wet the bed, so when his mother asked which end he wanted to top and tail he asked for the shallow end. Tenor, Bernard, from Tredegar, walked in at the back and through them all sitting at the tables with the candles stuck in the bottles, that everyone’s keeping a close eye on. Not the fire risk, mind, like you’d think, but because there was a couple of bob to be had back off them at the corner shop. And Bernard was singing:
Dawn over rosy mountain
Love through me like a fountain
‘And Florrie, flatter than the testicle that caught in the mangle, sang,
I am assailed
By a horrible voice
And the crowd were all shouting back:
”You’re not the bloody only one, love. Bugger off back to Bargoed”.
‘Gwen, her sister at the piano, made a dash mid-diminished seventh cord, caught her, helped her off just in time, and they pushed me on for a solo spot. Went down tidy. Over the moon I was when they asked me to do another one at the next gig. RAF St. Athens, it was. Sadly, it got cancelled cos the camp mascot, a billy goat called Bryn, refused to get out of the bath again”.
This was from an interview he gave in 1965 to Country News, the trade rag for sequin and tassle jacketed yodelleurs everywhere. A plug for his residency at The Nashville Rooms in West Kensington.
Dad and I going back to the B and B after a gig in Portsmouth
Two couples, imagine, arrive at the Nashville Rooms at seven for the show at eight. Carrying plastic carrier bags, they make for the loos. Manager Charlie Stephenson (think Sid James with a wire-wool’d face) sees them and stops talking to a regular known as the Duchess in the snug.
“Piles of poop, ain’t done the signs”.
The two couples are onto this and won’t go into the loos.
Charlie, singing The Time Waltz, mediates with the blue tac. He hides Men under Braves, Women under Squaws.
“Have I got the weeks right?”
He has. Next week the stand-in signs will say Cowpokes and Cowgirls.
The couples change out of Dolcis and BHS and glumph thwock back through the toilet door. The caged mynah bird that joined Charlie singing The Time Waltz stops on two-and to advise them to mind their arses. Tonight, Matthew, they are going to be Mountain Stream, Moonshadow, Passing Peace Pipe and Long Battle Fought Brave - AKA, during the pissed row with Passing Peace Pipe just shy of last orders: Short Pulling Of Hair Run Away From.
Don’t call them Alan, Derek, Pam and Liz. They can tomahawk.
“Real suede?” calls Jane, Charlie’s daughter, from behind the bar.
“No”, answers Mountain Stream, checking for knicker coverage, “cheesecloth dyed in tea”.
Jane mule-flaps upstairs with a half bottle of Moët starting the mynah bird singing again as she goes. Time Waltz, la da da di da.
It’s Passing Peace Pipe’s first round.
“How! Saloon Keeper”, he tells Charlie with stop sign hand.
“How…do”.
“We come in peace for licquor”.
“Welcome you that come in peace”, while he’s thinking, “Do we have to?”
“We would like two of that licquor” – pointing to the Carlsberg tap, “one of that licquor” – the gin optic – “and one of that” – the vodka optic.
“With juice of sun-going-down-colour fruit”.
Charlie tries and fails with a poem on do they want ice and a slice? Passing Peace Pipe smiles and offers,
”Ah, you wish to know if we require tomahawk’d fragments of Mountain God’s cot blanket three days climb up Blue Ridge Mountains and of fruit that is colour of corn ripe in blessing of laughing Sun God not in shadow of passing buffalo in afternoon prairie light”.
Good to get that clear. They do.
As Passing Peace Pipe crosses plain back to gathering outside wigwam Charlie whispers his thanks to godblimey that Moonshadow is on diet again.
“Otherwise we’d have been here all f-ing night with the bar snacks, asking Big Chief Crone Mother to bless us from her cooking pot, and fertility dancing and wah wah wah wah wahing up and down in front of the crisps and the nuts”.
He employs four extra bar staff for these Count-ry nights as it is.
More of them are arriving now. Changing clothes and names.
“We come in covered wagon”. Ford Cortina.
“We come on stage coach”. The number 27.
“We come on mule train”. By rail. And some Brave is now buffeting his head with a drinks tray.
Dad is in the wings playing with the confederate pistol and holster he got mail order from Kansas. Mum is there. She plays bad company member to his good. He has always said nobody but you is bothered by your status, so don’t bother anyone else with it. Mum bothered on his behalf.
“Need anything, Terry?” says Charlie, putting his head round the door.
“No”, says my father.
“New carpet curtain throughout back here would be nice”, says my mother.
“Everything all right, then?”
“Aye”, says my father.
“How can it be?” says my mother, “God only knows what Iestyn is up to with the baby sitter. Been one thing after another he have since he was born. Croop at eighteen months, rushed into intensive care, could only be handled with gloves through holes in the glass, ward sister who nursed him ended up winning Nurse Of The Year…”
I upset mum with my first show. I told this story, but said she sent Sister Claudette a letter telling her not to interfere next time.
“Fell down the stairs at two and a half, lying there looking like an over played with action man”.
She would update and add to her true me-stories over the years.
“At five we took him to see Bambi in Streatham, had to carry him out when they shot Bambi’s mother”.
“Aged eight he pleaded with us to let him look after Pipkin, the school rabbit. Had asthma all over it. And it was the beginning of the summer holidays and we couldn’t take it back as no-one was manning the school. Six weeks of him sounding like Terry’s grandmother’s pug wheezing into an empty yoghurt pot”.
“Sensitive skin aged nine, he developed. Couldn’t go out of the house from hotter than May onwards without I had to cover every inch of him in Calamine”.
“Let him go on his own with Robert Martin to the circus on Hammersmith Green and he got run over”.
“Aged twelve to fourteen we were sending him to educational psychologists on the bus – which he never sat at the front of – every six months or so. Miss Potter, his deputy head, said he had forgotten how to learn, he spent so much of his time being lippy to his teachers. Philip my friend with the Marks and Spencers cardigan fetish thought it was because he was gay. And as for his school reports. Sewing lessons don’t need quite the amount of screaming he does in mine, Mrs. Clossick. Irrelevant in maths no matter what he says to sit at the back singing the song about the Inch Worm, Mr. Smith. Never fails to cause a commotion in art when the class are at the paint desk mixing their pallets, Miss Amzah”.
Just before eight o’clock, back in 1965 at the Nashville Rooms, mum goes out front to get noticed at her table.
“My wife is here, I hear”, Dad will say between songs, when she has oo’d along with the melody like a menopausal heifer quite long enough, thank you.
But her piece de resistance came with Mr. and Mrs Zephyr. Telepathy act. Mrs sat onstage blindfold. Mr went into the audience.
“I am coming among you, and ask that you give me objects that you have about your person. Then, I shall transmit an image of whatever object you give me telepathically from my mind to the mind of my wife.”
“It was a code, of course”, dad remembers. “Not obvious, like “Get this right, dear”, being be a pen. Or “Take your time, dear”, a watch. But still it was a code. And of course, there’s a limit to the kind of stuff people are going to take out with them to the theatre.”
At a variety night in Luton, my mother beckoned Mr. Zephyr over and handed him a tin of Kitekat.
“But I thought they could really do it! How was I to know it was a code?”
Legend says Mr. Zephyr called out:
”You’ll be the cat’s whiskas, I hear, if you get this one, dear”.
The stage is a small world and dad got fewer bookings. He and mum had a fight that ended when he held her head underwater in the kitchen sink with the post Sunday lunch soak. In the don’t you believe it calm after they talked, she came upstairs full Sue Ellen going on, blinking and clutching at me, gravy like a wonky corsage on her left shoulder.
So, is it any wonder that I have a hang up about decorous front of house behaviour? Or that that when I was taken aged eighteen months to the informal crèche run by Aunty Daisy I thought: thank Bambi’s mother for that. There has been a mistake. Those Welsh nutters aren’t my real parents. This lovely Lily Of The Valley smelling lady, who plays me The Lonely Goatherd whenever I want, who pretends that Cod Liver Oil grows in that tub on her window sill, and who lets me eat mince straight out of the frying pan – she’s my mother.
At picking up time, I refused to leave.
“Why do I have to come home with you? What did I do? I haven’t bitten the lady, I haven’t said “f**k” or “c**t”, and I haven’t done do-do's in my hand and hidden it anywhere.”
Oh, but I did later…
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