Free The Fun Factory by Chris England Page B

a booming “Alfred! Hail fellow well met! Well met indeed!”
    “Ah, George, there you are,” Alf grinned, shaking the hand of a formidably confident chap of around forty. The man had luxuriant eyebrows and was rather affluently turned out in a well-cut suit with a gold watch chain draped across the front of his checked waistcoat. “Can I ask a favour of you, do you think?”
    “My dear chap! Anything, anything at all!” George beamed.
    “This…” Alf pulled me closer by my sleeve, “…is Arthur Dandoe, he’s new with us. Just stick him somewhere where he can watch, and keep him safe until I get back, could you? I need to go to the Paragon, couple of hours probably.”
    “Eh? I haven’t heard it called that before,” said George. “But if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Arthur, my boy – shall we?” He shook my hand briskly and led me to the prompt corner, where he explained to the stage manager that I was his personal friend, and that I was to be given the best possible view of the show.
    I hadn’t the first idea who he was at that point, but from the way the stage manager jumped to attention and offered to go and fetch me a beer and a beef sandwich, I gathered that George was a figure of some importance. For the first time since I’d come to London, I was actually beginning to enjoy myself.
    The show began. From my vantage point in the wings I could see a swath of audience down below, family groups, gangs of office boys, clerks, a few rougher-looking sorts, ruddy-faced, getting a little the worse for wear, and a healthy sprinkling of the dark-clad and swarthily bearded gentlemen I had seen in the street earlier.
    What I noticed at once was a much more ribald interaction between stage and crowd than I had seen before. The audiences back in Cambridge were genteel and restrained by comparison, and the acts onstage were having their work cut out just gaining the attention of the room. Some of them were just not up to it, and their voices strained reedily upwards like a teacher trying to bring a classroom of rowdy boys to order.
    A little spectacle held the crowd better. Two chaps dressed like circus gymnasts rode bicycles around the stage in crazy circles, interweaving at breakneck pace. It seemed that they must collide at any moment, cracking their limbs or spilling their brains onto the apron, but they were masters of their routine and exited to the first decent round of applause of the night.
    Later a gentleman in evening dress addressed the audience on the subject of a large glass tank full of water, in which a lithe young girl swam like a mermaid, not coming up for air nearly often enough. The man would describe various feats, which the mermaid would then perform.
    “And now,” the gentleman cried, “Marina will eat a pie!”
    And she did, rising to the surface to collect her treat, then sinking down to her knees on the floor of the tank and munching away until the whole thing was gone before allowing herself another breath. The audience were fairly captivated, principally I suspect by the fact that she was a lithe young lass not wearing very much and that sooner or later she’d climb out of the tank absolutely soaking wet to take her bow.
    A curtain came down so that the tank could be carted away by stagehands, and a cockney coster singer of supreme cheeriness cavorted about on the forestage, tweaking his braces with his thumbs and singing about eels. In the meanwhile I became aware of a slight figure pacing nervously in the wings beside me. His beard and get-up mimicked those of the Jewish contingent in the audience, and I could hear the fellow muttering as he ran through his jokes.
    I suppose I was peering at him rather, principally because I had the suspicion that he was much younger than he was trying to appear, when he suddenly turned and glared at me, as much as to say: “What the devil are you looking at?”
    I stared back at him, and after a moment of two of frosty hostility he