Free The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin Page B

was let in after the first turn.
    I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough air to go round.
    The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself. And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?
    After the dog circus came six men who were a German or Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orches­tra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat; there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things. The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain; the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top, which was blinding white.
    The bill-topper was the ventriloquist, the one I'd come to see, but he turned out to be the sort I don't like: the kind with a walking figure.
    As the floods went up he was leaning on the figure, or the figure was leaning on him. It was an English Johnny, or Champagne Charlie. You could tell by the tailcoat and high collar. The head was weird: round, white and lumpy, like the moon or some great fungus, and the grey eyes seemed to be sliding to the side, as if the figure was sad and ashamed at having a perfectly round head. The ventriloquist was also got up like a toff: frock coat and top hat. He was breathing deeply, trying to get a breath in the heat like all of us, and preparing for the walk. The doll, of course, was not breathing at all. Any sort of weather was nothing in his way.
    The walk started, and as usual a great cheer went up at the same time as the walking music started up. It was as if a famous cripple had got to his feet and taken his first steps in years. The ventriloquist's left hand was at the figure's back, and he was working the levers that swung the legs. The figure moved by a forward jerk of the left leg, which woke up the right one, and brought it swinging along behind, and the left arm rode up towards the chest every time this happened. The doll's right arm was in the hands of the ventriloquist.
    They were heading for two chairs half involved in darkness in the middle of the stage, and you could see that disaster beckoned because the ventriloquist's legs (which were shak­ing) and the legs of the figure were moving further and further apart, so the two of them were starting to make the shape of an A.
    In walking ventriloquism, the figures were always the Johnny or Champagne Charlie sorts, so that their funny walks could be put down to them being cut. It was all so samey, but there was an extra sort of desperation with this pair, and I really wanted them to get to the chairs without a collapse.
    Part of the trouble was that the ventriloquist wasn't such a great hand at walking himself. He was a big fellow, but trembly from nerves. At one moment he lost control of the figure's head, which swung from left to right, as if saying:
    No, I will not go on with this. But they did reach the chair, and sat down to great applause. The ventriloquist beamed out at the audience. He had a red face, shining with sweat, a wide grey moustache held out by wax, and a sharp, pointed beard, the two of them together making a cross on the lower part of his face. He looked so completely jiggered that really you did not want