by George Read online

  I was outside Romando’s Theatrical Properties for the first time.

  My journey had begun.

  Fisher Goes to School

  When he was eleven, George Fisher was sent away to school. It was September 1973.

  The Fishers had not previously been great believers in a general education. The unusual step was forced upon them by the death of George’s stepfather, Desmond Mitchell.

  George had attended classes before, often with other backstage children, when itinerant teachers visited the theatre; there had been a casual relationship with a local day school, and two happy summer terms spent at a village school outside Bournemouth, where one of the two schoolmistresses taxied him into town for the evening performance. But he had never actually felt like a schoolboy, just a guest.

  His mother, Frankie, was in constant work, and George could no longer tag along as he had when he was younger. He wasn’t old enough to join the chorus, let alone to work on the piers, or young enough to play soldiers in the dressing room. With no Des around to ferry him to and from the lodgings, and since he could no longer live with Queenie and his great-grandma (who had taken a turn for the worse), there was nothing else for it: Upside School for Boys.

  His mother, who had also to take the train to open three weeks as Peter Pan in Brighton, deposited him with his trunk at Charing Cross on a wet Tuesday morning. She was beside herself with happiness.

  “All boys together — how exciting!” She was only slightly taller than he, and their bodies had roughly the same proportions. She surveyed the platforms for any sign of his travelling companions, who were identified, on the forecourt outside the station pub, by the forest green blazers that matched George’s. “There they are! I know it’ll be strange at first, Georgie, but soon it’ll be midnight feasts with the first eleven and you won’t even remember to write home at all!”

  George was unconvinced by this rosy image.

  “All on your own?” she asked briskly of the five matching boys, introducing herself, insisting they call her Frankie. It was the same voice she used when she asked the audience volunteers what they’d got for Christmas, and the boys were able to rustle up more than the mumbles with which they greeted the tired conversational gambits of other people’s parents. Her blond hair was cropped short like theirs, as if to school regulation, and she shared the same toothy smile and freckles.

  “Mr. Potter will be back any moment,” said the tallest politely, indicating the pub over his shoulder where the Latin master was anaesthetizing himself against the coming term. George stood in the background, watching the train arrivals board click over, and wondered about the location of the announcer whose voice rattled through the station. He pictured a drab office and a grey employee who leaned forward at his desk to broadcast throughout his kingdom, cleared his throat before he turned on the microphone, and regretted to inform his subjects of the late running of the 11:42 to Orpington.

  A bedraggled Mr. Potter emerged, sucking froth from the corners of a ginger moustache. He counted his charges with a cocked little finger. “Ah, you must be George Fisher and . . . ,” as though she couldn’t possibly be mature enough for motherhood, “Mrs. Fisher?” She was thirty-seven.

  “Frankie Fisher, sir,” she said, saluting confidently, schoolboy with a dash of bonny lad at sea.

  “I say . . . ,” said Mr. Potter, wondering whether the name rang a bell. “Well, we certainly hope to see a lot of you at Upside.” Frankie secretly squeezed George’s hand, to let him know that she was doing her utmost on his behalf. It was as if George could hear her thinking out loud, broadcasting like the station announcer: I know it’s going to be a success, I just know it!

  “Be brave, Georgie,” she said, and then, turning to the assembled company: “You all be nice to him, mind, especially you, Mr. Potter. I’m holding you responsible.”

  “Keith,” he said with an intimate smile, and then, waking from his dream, “Oh, my lord, look at the time! Campbell, get a porter. Come along, George.” As he was shepherded to the train, George was determined not to look over his shoulder. Good-byes were best dealt with swiftly. “She’s waving, Fisher!” said Mr. Potter as they boarded. George didn’t turn around, thinking it better for both of them, particularly for her, so he didn’t know — though he might have guessed — that she was singing softly, “Wish me luck as you wave me good-bye.” They could have swapped places quite happily.

  “Wave, boy!” said Mr. Potter, amused at George’s reticence, assuming it was stiff upper lip that kept him from turning back, and expecting tears when he did. There were none. “That’s better.”

  As the train sped from the station, George stared through the rain-streaked window. The dirty backs of the houses reminded him of the back of his teeth, never quite as well cleaned as the front, and he traced his tongue along his gums. With the flicker of film, these houses washed into drab towns and then rolling countryside. He knew the name of every station, every one en route to somewhere Frankie had played.

  George had liked the idea of school ever since it had first been mooted. By the time of its initial tentative dangling, however, and unbeknownst to him, it was a fait accompli, so his enthusiasm had merely made things easier for his family. He had imagined that, an unknown new boy at school, he could become whoever he wanted, in the same way that Dick Whittington became mayor of London. Just like Frankie, he would take a trip to wardrobe, emerge with something fantastic in green, and charm his way to the top. His chosen costume box had been John Lewis; his chosen outfit, schoolboy. Unlike Dick Whittington, however, he was leaving London behind.

  The other boys paraded new acquisitions. They more or less ignored the stranger, and George was quite content to look at the patterns of the rain on the window, twiddle his thumbs, and explore the inside of his mouth. The atmosphere changed only when Mr. Potter disappeared to the restaurant car with a telling “Well, I think I might . . . ,” as though he had to excuse himself. Campbell, who had been left in charge, sniggered and made a mime of drinking, while his friend supplied the sound effect, before they burst out laughing. George looked up, and they stopped.

  “George Fisher?” asked Campbell, the tallest, before checking pointedly: “George?” It was rather an old-fashioned name, attached only to the occasional grandfather or the author of an unread volume on a family bookshelf. A few footballers still flew the flag — Best, Armstrong — but these meant nothing to George. At Upside, he would find democratic Jonathans (Jontys), Nicks, Richards, and Edwards, but no other Hanoverian Georges.

  “How old are you?” asked the smallest through his upturned nose.

  “Eleven.” He had to break his silence at some time.

  “Where were you before?” asked Campbell.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You weren’t? You have to go to school,” said a third.

  “Yes, it’s against the law not to!” said the piggy one officiously.

  “I had teachers,” said George defensively.

  “Homeschooled!” scorned Campbell.

  “What does your father do?” demanded George’s other interrogator.

  “Probably does the teaching,” sniggered Campbell.

  “I don’t have a father.”

  This bizarre answer brought the cross-examination to a shuddering standstill, as though George had pulled the emergency chain. Finally, without alternative and in apology, Campbell was decent enough to enquire, “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.” George declined to say more. Sometimes he’d lie, claiming his father was alive, an astronaut, a politician, an explorer, whatever suited. But on this occasion, he just wanted to shut them up. They wanted to know how his father had died but couldn’t ask.

  “Well, your mum’s all right,” said Campbell, by way of conciliation, but the death had been an icy slap in the face of their fun, and they left the fatherless child alone for the rest of the journey.

  This suited George. A tunnel squeezed the air against the train like the roar of applause.
r />   “Say your prayers,” the matron said unaffectionately as she switched off the light. The Fishers had never been keen Jesusists. They distrusted men generally, finding them unreliable and accident-prone: by and large, a weak lot. Jesus and His Father were no exceptions.

  The dormitory felt like a hospital ward — the only place George had come across a matron before — and the association made him queasy. As he lay between rough sheets in that dark, thin dungeon of whining bedsprings, grumbling mattresses, foreign creaks, coughs, and groans, there was no hope of sleep. Gradually, Pope dormitory became contentedly quiet, a peace punctuated only by the rasp of floorboards in the corridor.

  He tested himself with thoughts of home.

  Des’s death had left George the only male. There were plenty of women, however: his mother, Frankie, of course, as busy as she ever had been, and grandma, Queenie, always in charge. Even George’s great-grandmother lingered on, though, at ninety-four, for how much longer nobody knew.

  Evie, they all called her: she couldn’t bear to be called Great, except in praise, and wasn’t fond of Grand. She could no longer leave her bed, but despite her dilapidation, there was no doubt who was in control of the household. The strictness of her schedule was legendary. George knew exactly what she’d be doing at any given moment: when napping, when playing patience, when organizing her scrapbooks, when doing crosswords (always general knowledge), when playing a cantankerous game of Scrabble with Queenie, and when watching television. She didn’t like Coronation Street, complained about it constantly, and never missed an episode.

  Evie was inordinately proud of her first great-grandchild, allowing George, from the moment he had first twanged up and down in the baby bouncer set in her door frame, an inordinate amount of time in her bedroom. When he was old enough, she paid him the tribute of teaching him games as she had been taught: without mercy. If he put cards down and then changed his mind, it was too late — they stayed. If he had only one card, forgot to knock, and then won, the game was declared invalid: “There you are, then; that’ll teach you, Georgie, losing to an old woman!”

  Her hands had never been big enough to shuffle the two decks required for canasta, although she claimed to have been master of all the magical shuffles for one pack, numbering (according to her) seventeen. “It helps to be slight of hand,” she had said many times. Such dexterity was now a memory — crippled by arthritis, she could barely hold the cards at all, although she was too vain to admit it. For her so-called silent shuffle, she used a specific table with a raised edge, called “the card table” (though this was the one thing it was specifically designed not to be), on which she spread the entire deck facedown. Then she simply muddled the cards with a flamboyant stirring before gathering them once more and strenuously battering them back into a pack. “The most honest shuffle of all,” she proclaimed. “You can tell I’m not cheating.” Who had mentioned cheating? And who would, unless they were considering it? He followed one card suspiciously as she spread the deck across the tabletop, and he saw the many opportunities. “Look, it’s raining!” she remarked, but he didn’t.

  He lost to her at everything, not only canasta: pelmanism, Scrabble (she used outlandish words like xu and qat), and even, on one memorable occasion, darts. How had that happened? It had been his idea to set the board up at the bottom of the bed, and hers to play competitively. His only chance was Monopoly, a game she declared to be based entirely on luck and of no interest at all.

  “I can’t beat you at anything,” he moaned.

  “You’ll beat me at life,” she said, once more spreading the cards thinly over the oval mahogany table.

  And as he lay in bed, he realized that his moment of victory might be upon him before too long. Perhaps that was why he was away at school. At half-term — a concept he already cherished — he would listen closer when she complained about Coronation Street.

  In truth, George had inherited his love of Evie from his mother, for, although it was never mentioned in the family, between Queenie and her mother-in-law there was a simmering discontent. The matriarch ruled from her bed — there was still a Victorian bellpull, which rang imperiously to the kitchen — and Queenie fetched and carried with good grace, taking in trays, filling in crosswords, and changing the channel. Appreciation, however, was not given as freely as it might have been (dependence caused resentment), and though no unkind words were ever spoken, the strain sometimes showed. Frankie laughed it off with typical lack of concern — “Those two!” — but George worried that Evie would one day scratch too deep. He had seen Queenie in tears of frustration, tears she blamed on her blessed hay fever.

  But this was a rare moment of vulnerability. Queenie (or “Mum,” as almost everyone called her — as though they were addressing the Queen Mum herself) was solid. She had married into the Fisher family, survived her husband (who had died in his thirties in the last year of the war), and brought up their two daughters, Frankie and Sylvia, on her own. She was a large jolly woman, as unlike the female Fishers as a human could be engineered, with a plentiful bust (always entirely covered) and a stack of unmanageable chins. “They broke the mould when they made that one,” said Evie, never short of a joke at anyone’s expense. “Or she broke it trying to get out.”

  Whereas her mother-in-law and her daughters had dedicated their entire professional lives to show business, Queenie was no more than a talented amateur who found herself most comfortable entertaining at children’s parties. She carried on the modest family business she had started with her husband in their corner of London. Children loved their Auntie Queenie. There was something daunting and matronly about her appearance and manner, but this made their joy even greater when the silliness began. She didn’t need a script: she’d simply ask a child what he had for breakfast and she was off and running.

  “Always in work, that one,” Evie admitted with grudging admiration. The old woman paid for the big expenses, but it was these parties (including some rather poor magic tricks, no better than they needed to be) and the war pension that kept Queenie in pin money.

  It was she who had taken George to John Lewis to buy the Upside uniform. This kind of errand always fell to her, for of all the Fisher women, she alone could be considered capable. On this expedition, George had the honour of brandishing the official checklist: one black overcoat compulsory, two optional.

  “You already have a dark blue overcoat, Georgie. That will be good enough, I’m sure.”

  “I thought compulsory meant . . .”

  “How many hankies?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Eh? Fifteen?” she asked in the tone of someone who is being overcharged for a pint of beer. “What does fifteen mean?”

  “Fifteen means fifteen,” interrupted a shop attendant, who peered down his nose through half glasses and brandished his tape measure. “Upside, is it? They’re notorious. When they say fifteen, he’d better have fifteen. Nor am I sure that dark blue will be quite good enough at all.”

  Like all the Fisher women, Queenie had little sympathy for males over the age of eleven, and from time to time even George had started to wonder whether his grace period was drawing to a close. She could show terrific forbearance to the birthday boy who spilt ice cream on her lap, but not to a supercilious busybody masquerading as a haberdasher (her words).

  “Madam!” said the John Lewis employee as he retreated behind the safety of his counter.

  The new black trunk, on which George’s name was emblazoned in black on sloping gold parallelograms, gradually filled to bursting. He closed it with some satisfaction and sat on it.

  Completing the collection of Fisher females were George’s mother and aunt. Evie’s great favourite was Frankie: she treated her more as daughter than granddaughter, assuming rights that might have been presumed Queenie’s, and because she could no longer support Frankie in person, she demanded firsthand news of every show — the size of the house, its reaction, Frankie’s appraisal of her own performance — and these details
she filed away with the reviews in her scrapbooks. Frankie was the family’s great hope, and George had always been taught that nothing was to get in the way of his mother’s career, including himself.

  George was born to Frankie Fisher on November 6, 1961. Despite their surname, she had given him the middle name Jeremy, which reminded her of her father’s voice, reading her to sleep. She idolized him, this man who, though a civilian, had died a war hero. He was gone when she was eight, and even then she hadn’t seen him since she was five. She remembered his face only from photographs, but she could summon his voice whenever she wanted: “Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher; he lived in a little damp house amongst the buttercups at the edge of a pond. . . .”

  Frankie never revealed the identity of George’s real father. Queenie honoured her daughter’s silence, partly because his identity was no great secret (and speaking his name aloud wasn’t going to change anything) and partly because she felt the pregnancy her own fault. It was she who had introduced Frankie to the charming theatrical entrepreneur when he had taken such a special interest in her career. And then he was long gone, the damage done, and Frankie too proud to say anything. Frankie received the subsequent news of his death (a car-racing accident at Silverstone that made the front page of The Express) with indifference and never mentioned his name from that moment on. There was no criticism of her in the Fisher family, for such behaviour was hardly considered scandalous: Queenie had herself enjoyed a hastily arranged wedding on Frankie’s account.

  The Fisher women made sure that George had never felt himself lacking a father, so it was easy for him to proclaim the man dead, or alive and in any profession he fancied: there was something dashing in the Father of a Thousand Faces. He had pestered Queenie, of course — What was he like? What did he look like? How did Frankie and he meet? — questions she bore with good grace, since she knew Frankie would not want to be asked. It was the one thing George could never talk to his mother about. Only she could bring it up, and she never did. Queenie, the sole source of information, was as forthcoming as she could be: he had been a handsome man, a charming man, a married man. Finally, George managed to winkle his name out. He did some research in the library, where, thinking he was requesting another obituary, he found himself confronted with the front page of The Express, the grainy picture of a twisted wreck knotted in barrier rope, surrounded by oil drums and straw bales at the Abbey Curve. There was no sign of a human, as though the driver had vanished on impact. His father was long gone. George left the library immediately and told no one.