The Old Rex

This is not a story about a beloved but ageing GoldenLabrador nor about a raffish clubbable chap going to seed, this is a story about the Rex Cinema in a prosperous town halfway between London and the South Coast.

Charlie Hepple sheltered from the rain under the only section of the cinema’s canopy that remained intact and watched the neatly dressed woman with a red umbrella approach.
“Carol Timperley from Biggin-Newbold.” She proffered the hand not holding the umbrella. “You must be Mr Hepple. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“No. Just a couple of minutes” said Charlie.
“Shall we go in?” Ms Timperley burrowed in her handbag and produced a bunch of keys and after peering at the dog eared labels selected the largest and thrust it into the lock of the foyer doors. The Rex had been built in the 1930s and for a long time had been an outpost of the Gaumont chain, third in the cinematic pecking order behind the Odeons and ABCs. At some point in the 1970s the Rex had descended from showing exotically titled Horror double-bills to soft porn and finally closed as a cinema only to reopen briefly as a Punk Rock venue. At about this time the Rex was bought by a local businessman who tried more porn (insufficient dirty old men), Indian movies (the local restaurateurs and their families preferred to go up to London for their Bollywood dreams) and Bingo (the Rex’s Jackpots were no match for the Top Rank Suite’s at the bottom of the town). It was this businessman, now in his 80s, who was selling the Rex, freehold and all.
Charlie Hepple and Carol Timperley stood side by side in the gloom of the foyer.
“I haven’t been in here myself before” said Miss Timperley. “Mr Baildon at the office said there was a light switch on the right. Ah! There it is.” She flicked the switch and a fluorescent tube sputtered into life. The foyer was small, the ticket window boarded up and the sweet stall ceiled had collapsed, the walls were painted a nasty blue. There was a framed photo of a chubby bespectacled man in a dinner jacket that was captioned “Ron Pickles – Our Manager at Your Service”.
Ms Timperley gazed around at the dismal scene. “It’s been closed a very long time you know” she said rather failing in her estate agent’s duty to accentuate the positive.
“Yes” said Charlie “shall we go inside?” On the left of the foyer was a staircase that led to the circle and to the right three steps that led up to the stalls. He led the way to the right and Ms Timperley , who had brought a torch out of her handbag, followed. The double doors at the top of the steps opened into utter darkness and the light from the torch seemed to peter out after a few feet. Ms Timperley turned to her right and shone the torch along the back wall of the stalls until she located the switch that she was looking for. A single bulb dangling from the front of the circle gave out baleful yellow light. They heard rustling from around the room.and Ms Timperley stepped a little closer to Charlie. “I’m OK with mice” she said “but I’m not very good with rats. I can smell something. Do you think there are rats?” she asked.
“Probably” said Charlie cheerfully. But Charlie Hepple wasn’t smelling rats he was smelling profit and Charlie had come out of the womb smelling profit. At school he never paid much attention in class but on the playground he was the king of the free market and profitably wheeled and dealed his way through dozens of schoolboy crazes. He wangled a place on a business course at his local Poly (now the University of North Surrey) and found his niche as Student Union Entertainment Secretary. This meant that he got to book the bands, he got to meet the bands, he got to load the bands’ vans and he got to sleep with the girls who failed to sleep with the band. His wife Sandy had failed to get off with the bass player of a band called Sputum Test and their relationship had started in a moment of post-gig triste in the Union building car park. Twenty years on they were still together, Sandy is Finance Director of Charlie’s business. After college Charlie became the booker for a circuit of pub venues in the south-east and when a distant relative left him a lump of money he bought a bankrupt restaurant just outside Guildford which he converted (despite strenuous protests from local residents) into his first Rock venue. The Rex, should he go ahead and buy it, would be his fifth venue. The other four were all doing well with a mixture of cheap eats, expensive drinks and good music.

Charlie walked down to the front of the auditorium. By modern Multiplex standards it was big, 500 seats in the stalls with another couple of hundred in the circle. The walls had once been red but were now pockmarked with crumbling patches of crumbling plaster, there was some nasty 1950s fretwork around the proscenium framing some once gold drapes that in turn framed the screen which had a three foot gash near its bottom edge. The seats had been partially covered with dust sheets, Charlie peeled back the nearest to reveal moth eaten red plush.
Ms Timperley followed him down to the front. “Mr Baildon said that there was a mains switchboard or something backstage. I could go and try and switch some more lights on if you like”. She looked as enthusiastic about this expedition as she would if presented with a free holiday in Somalia.
“Great” said Charlie. Ms Timperley pluckily headed for a small door to the right of the screen and vanished through it.
Left to himself Charlie’s thoughts returned to profits. The Rex was certainly big enough, the auditorium could be levelled, he could put a bar at the back of the stalls and another up in the circle. As always where to put the kitchen was a problem. Perhaps Ms Timperley would reveal something, but at that moment the light went out leaving Charlie in complete darkness.
“Shit!” he said, she had the only torch, he could only wait in the dark for her return. He heard a faint clattering noise and beam of light from the projection room window flicked on. Ms Timperley had obviously found the switch room. Scratchy images of countdown numbers appeared on the screen accompanied by a hissing crackling soundtrack, a barely legible title came up I’m Here. Then the film seemed to break, the rattling projector momentarily sounded louder, the screen showed pure white for a couple of seconds before everything went dark and silent once more. The single bulb hanging from the circle came back on and Carol Timperley emerged through the little door at some speed looking somewhat less elegant than when they had first met under the canopy.
“You found the switchroom then” said Charlie
“No I didn’t. Sorry it’s all locked up back there. What a bugger! There must be more keys somewhere”.
“But this light went out and the projector came on”
“Really?” said Ms Timperley, “well not from anything I did. To tell the truth I didn’t look too hard for the switchroom, there are a lot of scuttling things back there. “She looked into the gloom above the circle, “I don’t think that there are any projectors up there. Are you sure?”
“Yes” said Charlie, but as he said it he felt less confident. “Perhaps we could look upstairs”
“Certainly” They both went back through the foyer and up the stairs. The circle was in worse condition than the stalls, most of the seats were broken and the wreckage piled up against the rear wall.
“How do we get up to the projection box?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know” said Ms Timperley. There appeared to be no access from the circle until Charlie pushed open the fire doors at the far end of the upper foyer and found a fire escape that led up onto the roof and to the projection box. The door was firmly locked.
“Sorry” said Biggin-Newbold’s finest. “I’ll have a rummage around for the other keys when I get back to the office.”
Charlie took pity on her. “I tell you what, leave me the Foyer key and the torch. I’ll have a look around for a while and I can drop them off at your office later.”

After Ms Timperley had left he spent a few more moments in the circle and then went slowly back down the stairs inspecting two foul smelling toilets on the way. Back in the stalls he took out his digital camera and took a dozen shots of the auditorium before going backstage where Ms Timperley had feared to tread. With only the fading beam of the torch to guide him he stumbled on to the tiny stage behind the screen, which housed the remains of a bingo-caller’s rostrum and a few chairs. On the side of the stage was a staircase leading below where he discovered the locked boiler and switch rooms. There was an exit door down there which Charlie presumed opened onto the small car park at the back.

A few minutes later he was standing on the other side of the street studying the Rex’s battered façade. One half of his brain was thinking that there were possibilities here. The location was perfect, the top end of the town had been going steadily upmarket over the past few years, the surrounding streets buzzed with life in the evenings. He could probably buy the Rex for a song and he didn’t expect any licensing problems from the local authority. The other half of his brain reran those few frames of scratchy film that he had seen or thought he had seen. The projection room had been securely locked, he and Ms Timperley would have met anyone coming down the stairs. It made no sense and Charlie Hepple didn’t go in for magic. He walked own the hill to Biggins-Newbold, returned the torch and keys, and told them he would come back the following week with his surveyor and builder.

After supper that evening he downloaded the photos that he had taken on to his laptop and showed them to Sandy. She clicked through them casually but then asked “Who’s that bloke?”
“What bloke?” said Charlie
“Him. In the doorway” she said pointing to the screen. Sure enough, standing in the doorway that led from the auditorium to the foyer was a man rather formally dressed in a dark suit with a raincoat over his arm. Charlie zoomed in as far as he could before the image became impossibly pixilated. The man appeared to be in his thirties with short hair, he looked unfashionably dapper, he had an almost black and white movie look about him.
“He must have turned the projector on” said Charlie.
“What do you mean?” asked Sandy. Charlie explained his ‘hallucination’.
“It’s still a bit weird isn’t it? Why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t know” said Charlie uneasily “he must be some sort of caretaker I suppose”.
Charlie shut the computer down and went to watch football on television.

A week later Charlie was in the Biggins-Newbold office, Carol Timperley cheerfully brandished a bunch of keys that she had produced from desk drawer. “Here you go Mr Hepple. I’ve found the right bunch this time with the boiler room, switch room and everything”. Charlie took the keys and paused at her desk. “You didn’t see a man in the Rex last week did you?” he asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Well when I got back and downloaded the photos that I took, in one of them there was a man standing in the auditorium doorway”
Ms Timperley frowned. “Really? Do you know what. I don’t think I locked the street door when we went in. He probably just walked in off the street. Just a curious passer-by.”
Charlie mentally kicked himself for not thinking of the obvious solution and set off for the Rex to meet his surveyor Keith Wallace and his builder Harry Dunphy.
“Welcome to the Rex gents” said Charlie as he ushered them into the foyer “soon to be Rock Dreams V “
“Good site Charlie” said Keith. He took out a laser measurer and started to map out the dimensions of the foyer. Charlie led Harry into the auditorium where he turned on the baleful yellow light.
“The boiler room and the switch room are through there Harry” said Charlie gesturing to the door to the side of the proscenium “do you want to check them out?” The builder nodded, took the keys and disappeared backstage. Immediately the single bulb clicked off and immediately a projector beam stabbed through the darkness.
“Oh shit!” said Charlie but this “Oh shit!” was not said just out of fear but also from expectation. Somehow Charlie had known that this would happen and indeed, by sending Harry off, leaving him on his own, had engineered it. This was the “Oh shit!” that you might say as you strap yourself into a white-knuckle ride. Just like the week before the scratchy image of the countdown numbers appeared on the screen and then the title ‘I’m Here’, but this time Charlie had a powerful torch with him. He swept the room with it focussing particularly on the auditorium door but there was no sign of the man with the raincoat. He looked back to the screen, he could hear a crackling hissing soundtrack. Had there been sound the week before? He couldn’t remember. The title faded into a snowstorm of scratches before the figure of a woman appeared. She was walking along a street towards the camera, she was smiling, a pretty woman with tight blonde curls, wearing a jacket over a full skirt. Charlie had no claims to be a student of the history of fashion but even he could tell that this was definitely pre-miniskirt. 1950s perhaps. He shouted out “Keith! Keith could you come in here please. Harry!” There was no reply, no sound except the relentless hiss and crackle as the woman neared the camera, her face nearly filling the screen. Charlie studied the smiling eyes, while the woman was pretty she was no film star and the quality of the film was that of a home movie. Why was he being shown this? He shone the torch up at the projection room windows but as he did so the film cut out and the single bulb hanging from the circle came back on. He strode out to the foyer where Keith was poking about in the box office.
“Didn’t you here me calling?” said Charlie.
“No” said the surveyor. “You OK Charlie?” He could see that his client was agitated.
“Yeah. Yeah I’m fine. Let’s check out the roof”. Keith sighed, stopped what he was doing and followed Charlie up the stairs, through the circle foyer and out onto the fire escape, Harry followed a few moments later.
“Let’s check in here” said Charlie as he unlocked the projection room. Keith and Harry exchanged glances, of all the aspects of the Rex the projection room was easily the least relevant to the job in hand.
“Shit!” said Charlie as he stepped inside. The room was empty apart from some rickety Dexion shelving in one corner.
“What were you expecting Charlie?” asked Keith
“Er nothing… I suppose” muttered Charlie. The curved steel runners embedded in the concrete floor on which the original projectors would have been rolled back for maintenance were the only trace of the room’s former use. There was a thick steel plate door at one end of the room. Charlie tried all the keys on the bunch but none fitted.
“That would have been the film store originally” said Keith “when this place was built film stock was still incredibly flammable and they had to keep it in fireproof rooms”.
Charlie shrugged, went out and leaned on the rail of the fire escape gazing distractedly across the rooftops of the town, gazing as it happens at the rooftop of Biggins-Newbold where Carol Timperley was keeping her fingers and her legs crossed in the hope that Charlie Hepple would make an offer for the Rex. It would be a feather in her cap to shift a property that had been on the books for so long.

At lunchtime the three men met in the pub across the road and compared notes. The builder and surveyor were relieved to see that their client had recovered his composure and was ready to do business. All the news was good news, the fabric of the Rex was sound and, for a building that had been unoccupied for most of the three previous decades, was in surprisingly good nick. Even the boilers which probably should be replaced eventually were good for another couple of years.
Charlie was decisive. “Ok guys I want to go for this. Let’s do some preliminary costings and let’s meet in Keith’s office next Monday morning. I want to make an offer next week. OK?”
As they left the pub Charlie said “Bollocks! I’ve left my torch in the Rex. I’ll have to go back for it. I’ll see you on Monday” As Keith and Harry wandered off to the NCP Charlie went back into the cinema and sat in the stalls. “Come on then. Show me the rest” he said out loud. There was silence. He sat there for nearly half an hour. At one point he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. A mouse trotted boldly along the floor by the skirting board and glanced casually at him as it vanished under a dust sheet. Charlie got up to leave and as he did so there was a familiar clattering noise and the single bulb went out. He sat down in the dark watched the screen intently. There were no clues in the in the initial numbers or title and the street background to the approaching woman sequence was so blurred that it could have been anywhere. The film cut to another close-up of the same woman. This time the camera was pulling away revealing more of the woman as it did so. She was smiling but not in the same open cheerful way as in the street, there was something sly in this smile. The scene was an interior, she cast a clear shadow on the white brick wall behind her, her bare arms were raised above her head. The camera drew back further, her wrists were manacled together and chained to a ring in the wall, she was wearing black bra and pants. “Bloody hell” thought Charlie “I’m watching a 1950s home-made S&M porn movie which is being projected by magic. What the fuck is going on here”. By now the screen was filled with a full length image of the woman chained to the end wall of a narrow room, from behind the camera a man emerged. He was stripped to the waist, showing a fair amount of paunch and he wore a black hood. He looked absurd, a Pythonesque member of the Surbiton Sadomasochists Society but then Charlie saw the whip in his hand and he said “No!” to the empty auditorium. The man started to lash the woman and through the incessant crackle of the soundtrack Charlie could hear her gasps of pain which soon turned into screams. In his career on the fringes of Rock & Roll Charlie had been to some wild parties and seen some weird stuff, but this was different, there was nothing mechanical about the scene on the screen, there was an emotional intensity about it which made it hard to watch. He wanted it to end. The whipping did eventually stop and the camera moved in to a close-up of the woman’s face, her eyes were full of tears but her expression was exultant. The film snapped off and the light came back on. Charlie sat stunned for a moment or two then something made him look back over his shoulder to the doors to the foyer. The man with the raincoat over his arm stood there watching him.
“What did that mean?” asked Charlie gesturing at the screen. “Who are they?” The man didn’t reply but stared steadily back at Charlie, who got up and started to move up the aisle towards him. The man stepped back into the foyer and the doors swung to behind him. By the time Charlie burst through those doors the man had vanished. Charlie had locked the street door and so knew that the man was no passer-by and that the only way he could have gone was up. He raced up the stairs to the circle and then through the circle foyer and onto the fire escape. There was no trace of the man but Charlie had not really expected any, he realised that something very strange was going on. He stood on the roof in the early summer sun for a few minutes before unlocking the projection room door. He went in and stared down at the auditorium through the projection windows for a long time, then he relocked the room and went downstairs and out onto the street. Across the road a traffic warden was enjoying writing tickets in the early summer sun, Charlie went over and asked for directions to the Public Library.

Mrs Pardew had been a librarian for many years, in fact she had officially retired some time ago but she still came in to man the Information desk. When she saw the flashily dressed young man stride into the library that afternoon she recognised a fish out of water. Charlie for his part was no scholar, no reader, he could just about manage a John Grisham on holiday. In his entire life up to that point he had probably not been inside a library of any description for more than a total of 7 ½ minutes.
“Can I help you young man?” asked Mrs Pardew who on closer inspection had decided that flashily dressed or not this was a rather good looking young man.
“Yes. Maybe. Do you keep copies of old newspapers here?” asked Charlie
“We do. On micro-fiche”
“Microfish?”
“Yes. I’ll show you. We only keep the local paper here, for the nationals you’ll have to go to London. What year?”
“Erm 1950s I think” said Charlie haltingly. Suddenly he had no idea what to look for.
“We probably need to be more specific” said Mrs Pardew kindly “what exactly are you trying to find out?”
“I’m interested in the Rex. The old cinema. Do you know it?”
“The old Rex. Yes I certainly do” she chuckled,” my second husband and I did some of our courting in the back row there. But it’s been closed for some time now hasn’t it?”
Charlie had his elderly helper down as an archetypal spinster and was surprised to discover that there had been at least two Mr Pardews.
“I’m looking for an event in the 1950s, something out of the ordinary. I’m not sure what.”
“Well apart from the Etherington murder there’s nothing that comes to mind”.
“The Etherington murder?”
“Yes. Mary Etherington was a usherette at the Rex. Her husband killed her but it didn’t have anything to do with the Rex as far as I can remember.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure but I think I can find out”. She went away and returned a few moments later thumbing through the appendices of Capital Punishment in the UK by J M Sturges. “This is a list of all the executions that took place in the UK. There were only a dozen or so per year in the 50s so we should be able to find it”
“The husband was executed?”
“Oh yes” said Mrs Pardew “They hung him. They did in those days. Ah here we are. Stanley Etherington executed at Wandsworth Prison on the 26th June 1954. it’s notable as one of the few cases where a murderer was executed when the victim’s body has not been found.”
“Is there a picture of him in there?” asked Charlie
“No” said Mrs Pardew “it’s not that sort of book, but I’ll get you the Evening Argus micro-fiche scrolls for 1953 and 54. there will be plenty of pictures, this was a big story locally.” She fetched the scrolls and showed Charlie how to use the viewing machine. Left alone he went immediately to the 25th June 1954 and below a banner headline reading Etherington to Hang Tomorrow – Final Appeal Fails was a picture of the man that Charlie had seen only an hour before. It is one thing to have the feeling that something strange is going on but it is altogether different when you are confronted with incontrovertible proof that you have been talking to a man that was hung for murder more than 50 years before. He felt a chill dread steal over him. What was he supposed to do now? Numbly he scrolled back through reports of the appeals and the original trial. Apparently the alarm was raised by Mary Etherington’s mother when her daughter had not turned up for a planned weekend visit. When she confronted Stanley Etherington he claimed that Mary had run off with another man and that he didn’t know where she was and didn’t care. For a while the affair was seen only as a ‘missing persons’ case by the local police but eventually at Mary’s mother’s insistence they started to dig deeper. A veritable army of family members, neighbours and local publicans presented themselves to the police to testify that Stanley Etherington, a local printer, was an evil tempered bastard and that they had heard him threaten his wife on many occasions. Eventually the police discovered traces of Mary’s blood in the boot of Etherington’s car (which he claimed were the result of an accident with a broken beer bottle on a picnic outing) and more traces of the same blood on a spade in his shed. The evidence was all circumstantial but overwhelming, the prosecution case being that he had done away with Mary in a fit of jealous rage by means unknown and then buried her body somewhere up on the Downs. Charlie scrolled further back past the reports of Etherington’s arrest back to the time of the alleged crime. There was no mention of the Rex but finally he noticed a tiny item in the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the June 2nd 1953 edition. ‘Local Projectionist Dies’. The report continued ‘Mr Percy Howland, projectionist at the Rex Cinema tragically died yesterday. Mr Howland was crossing the High St when he suffered a heart attack. First Aid was administered at the scene by a passing midwife but he was found to be dead on arrival at St James Hospital. Mr Howland was a respected and popular local character, he lived alone and leaves no family’.

Charlie sat quietly for a few minutes then pulled out his mobile phone and punched in Harry Dunphy’s number. Mrs Pardew scuttled across and said “Give me that. You can’t use it in here!”
Charlie ignored her.
“Harry I’m sorry and I know it’s late in the day but could you come back to the Rex and bring Sean or one of your other boys with a gas axe?”
“What?” said Harry
“You know. Oxy-acetylene cutter”.
“Yes I know what it is but what’s it for?” demanded Harry
“Humour me “. said Charlie and cut the connection. He turned to the outraged Mrs Pardew, “Sorry and thanks but I’ve got to go now”

45 minutes later Harry Dunphy pulled up outside the Rex in a Toyota pick-up with his son Sean.
“We need to get the gear up to the projection room” said Charlie.
Harry started to swear but Charlie raised a hand and Sean started to lug his equipment up the stairs. A few moments later Keith Wallace arrived having been alerted by Harry that something was up.

“Cut round the lock” said Charlie.
The three men and Sean were looking at the plate steel door of the store in the projection room.
“At the very least it’s criminal damage Charlie” said Keith.
“Someone’s going to notice eventually” said Harry
“Just do it “ said Charlie “it’s important”.
“Don’t I need a Hot Works Permit?” asked Sean nervously.
Harry caught Charlie’s grim expression. “Not today son. Just do it”.
As the room filled with smoke and the smell of scorched metal, the three men went out onto the roof while Sean worked. Nothing was said.

After a few minutes there was a clang as the lock fell out of the door, Charlie was about to shove Sean aside and open the door when Harry grabbed him.
“Wait Charlie! It’s red hot, let it cool”
Charlie looked round the room, picked up a piece of wood and levered the door open.
As the smoke cleared a different smell, a smell of dead things caught at the back of Charlie’s throat and he gagged. Mary Etherington sat on a mattress staring sightlessly past him. Mary’s neck was still ringed by a steel collar attached to a bolt in the wall, her underwear hung loosely over her mummified flesh, a few scraps of blonde hair clung to her withered skull. The room was the room that Charlie had been shown on the screen the only difference being that Mary had written, in her own blood, the words ‘I love you’ on the wall beside her.
Mary had run off with another man, run to Percy Howland’s S&M dungeon on the roof of the Rex. Percy must have left her chained there while he popped out for some cigarettes and dropped dead in the High Street with the only key to the store in his trouser pocket. Poor Mary must have died of thirst. Stanley Etherington had been hung for being an evil tempered bastard and nothing more.
“Christ! What a balls up” said Charlie. He pushed the door shut with his foot and took out his mobile to call the police.

How to Put on a Musical – Part 12 – The Design

No one can deny that set design is important. Would Les Mis have been the success it is without its barricades and its cast endlessly tramping around the revolve? Would Phantom still be running without its chandelier, drapes and subterranean candles? Would We Will Rock You prosper without the theatrical coup that is the Guitar Reveal? I firmly believe that the original Martin Guerre would have been a hit if only they had had a set more interesting than those dreary radio controlled trucks that trundled aimlessly around the stage (mind you at the preview I saw the finale consisted of the ensemble miming hoeing in semi darkness so perhaps the direction missed the mark as well). On the other hand a great set can’t buy you success as audiences who dozed through Lord of the Rings will testify.

Producers hate designers almost as much as they hate production managers. The reason is simple, as a basic principle producers hate anything or anyone that costs them money and designers are responsible for spending a substantial portion of the budget. Producers often get the designer foisted on them by the director and feel they have no control and definitely no understanding of these maverick creatures, who can be difficult, spendthrift, drunk, unavailable, irritatingly camp, abroad, vegetarian, Trotskyite, foreign, sleeping with the director, unfathomably intellectual, computer illiterate, patronising, impractical, late, and over budget (delete as applicable). Producers find themselves sitting with their head in their hands listening to a designer earnestly explaining why the floor texture has to be made from individually carved tiles as opposed to a simple paint job (a floor incidentally that no one in the stalls can see) or why the finale costumes have to be made from a handmade silk dyed in Milan rather than being bought in Southall. We production managers (and I must be careful not to grind too many axes here) are often caught in the middle, the producer will gush enthusiastically at the design presentation but the moment the designer is out of earshot will turn to me and say “Tell him the floor’s got to be a paint job and tell him he can shove the handmade silk up his arse”.


Project Model – Maintenance!

It’s late in the afternoon at the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance when director Kevin McHarrowing completes his introductory remarks and turns to designer Ulla Hoos to present her model of the set design to the assembled company. Ulla is an intelligent, determined woman who has never lacked ‘front’ but today’s presentation is bigger than anything she has done before and she is aware that there are some aspects of her model that may not find favour with other members of the creative team, who due to the lateness of the design have not had a chance of a preview.
So it is with some trepidation that unveils her model and starts to speak. “When Kevin and I first started to talk about this musical we both agreed that it was vital to set it in its correct 20th century context. You will notice I say 20th century not 21st and we feel that both the Skoda and Barry’s maintenance predicaments are very much products of their time and place in late 1990s Kettering.. We have drawn on cultural references from all over Europe and I’m sure that some of you will notice the influence of the Viennese Secessionist Movement in general and of the Absurdist poet-gardener Janos Handspring in particular. The original chief of design at Skoda was…” She drones on and has cleverly lost everyone in the room in no more than 30 seconds, she can ramble on without fear of interruption. As she pulls the white sheet off the model box there are polite ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ particularly from the acting company though production manager Stewart Cowless does hear someone mutter “Why is it all grey?” and as he dose so he sees the other members of the creative team making a beeline for him.

The model that Ulla has revealed consists of a cobbled stage with a criss-cross of tramlines surrounded by solid walls, which extend out into the auditorium, painted with a grim industrial wasteland and shadowy figures that might just suggest haggard children. There is a solid ‘faux’ concrete ceiling and the front edge of the stage appears to be decorated with broken glass. Ulla demonstrates how the various trucks and lifts work and how the ‘Pet Shop’ ingeniously transforms into Morag the Mechanic’s narrow boat..

Bobby Brasso is the first to arrive at Stewart’s side and whispers urgently in his ear “What’s with the fucking cobbles? Nobody said a damn thing about cobbles. We can’t fucking dance on cobbles.” Stewart makes reassuring noises as the choreographer rants on but then the normally mild mannered lighting designer Jeff Osram arrives at his other ear.

“Solid walls! Solid ceiling! Pros booms covered! How the fuck am I supposed to light this thing with no overheads or side light. This is supposed to be a bloody musical”.

Stewart manages to extricate himself only to be confronted by Ian Geek, Maintenance! s sound designer. “She’s covered the pros wall and the advance bar position! Where am I supposed to hang the PA?”, company manager Anthony Fawning is next “won’t the broken glass be a health and safety issue?” and finally costume designer Buzz Phelps sidles up to him “Stewie darling what about my shoes? Ooh those awful cobbles. Promise me you’ll get rid of the cobbles”.


Ulla is getting close to the end of her presentation “ …and finally the cobbles which are absolutely central to our design concept in that they make the link between Bohemia and Kettering abundantly clear.”
“I don’t think they ever had cobbles in Kettering” says Jeff Osram quietly at the back
“How do you know?” says Cowless “Have you ever been to Kettering?”
“Well no but…”
“They certainly never had trams in Kettering” says Geek.
“Why is the show set in Kettering? Does anyone know?” asks Osram
“Oh for Christ’s sake you two! Maybe it’s to do with ley lines or maybe Dermot O’Dainty lost his virginity there.”
“Really? “
“Gordon Bennett!” Cowless stalks off to listen to Buzz Phelps’s presentation of her costume drawings.
Buzz is the ultimate pro and has never delivered a design late in her life, there are those who might unkindly suggest that this is because all her designs are essentially the same and that she can knock them out in her sleep. She smoothly displays beautiful sketches complete with fabric samples neatly pinned to them. If she can’t sell these original designs to members of the cast she will sell them at ‘Showbizz Showbizz’ in the Fulham Rd after the show opens. The ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from the cast are unforced and heartfelt and the producers beam at this welcome antidote to Ulla’s dour and unsettling set presentation. In a rare moment of competence they have insisted that Ulla should not do both set and costumes on the grounds of workload and the only discontented faces in the room at this moment are Ulla’s and McHarrowing’s who both feel that the costumes will only trivialise the vital story that they have to tell, a story of ordinary working people facing the challenge of life in post-industrial Kettering. They are unwarrantedly colourful, they are sexy in a way that undermines the themes of sexual exploitation that they want to bring forward and both resent the complete lack of agonising that has gone into their design. On a personal level Ulla feels a twinge of envy as she studies the design for Morag the Mechanic’s overalls which are a triumph of subtle eroticism over utilitarianism. She has never had the flair for this kind of thing and her costumes often appear no more user friendly than her sets. Company Manager Anthony Fawning brings Maintenance!s first day of rehearsal to a close announcing as he does that there will be a production meeting after rehearsal the following day. As the company, the management, and the creative team drift away, the stage management hastily stack chairs and clear the hall in preparation for the evening’s Tai-Kwon-Do session. Dermot O’Dainty pauses on the steps of the Parish Hall for a moment and smiles to himself as he remembers the far off day when he lost his virginity in Kettering.

How to Put on a Musical – Part 11 – Rehearsals 2

Rehearsals. What do they do all day? Well the actors don’t normally learn their lines in the rehearsal room, they do that offsite while in the bath or walking the dog. In musical rehearsals there are normally 2 rooms one for the director and one for the choreographer. The latter lays out the big routines and the former does the motivation and the ‘don’t bump into the furniture bit’. It sounds simple doesn’t it, six weeks later a fully formed musical steps into the spotlight. However as always with Musical Theatre there is plenty to go wrong.

From my personal point of view, a production manager’s point of view, the first day of rehearsal can be both dreary beyond belief and fraught with peril. On the one hand one has to sit through endless introductory speeches and meet dozens of people whose names melt away quicker than snow in the desert and on the other one is likely to be confronted by aggrieved staff members who have discovered that their contracts are not exactly what they expected and one can also be ambushed by the creative team who may have added something to the design concept not previously discussed or costed. So we production managers have to either be on our mettle or find some reasonable excuse for not being there at all.

Project Model – Maintenance!

Kevin McHarrowing slowly rises to his feet, he gazes round at the assembled company, he almost seems to be counting them to check that all were present, that no one would miss his First Day of Rehearsal Director’s Speech.
“Welcome. All of us in this room have something in common, we have all shared at least one experience and that is the feeling of pure bewilderment when we heard that these two guys” here he indicated the show’s producers sitting either side of him, “were going to put on a musical based on the Haynes Owners Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit.. It’s crazy, it’s off the wall, it’s almost surreal” Glaswegian McHarrowing lovingly rolls the ‘r’s in surreal, “which incidentally is a word we will be coming back to later. But now let’s think about the 1989 Skoda Favorit. It was the last crap car that Skoda made, after this Favorit model Volkswagen bought the company and starting making ‘good’ German cars. All well and good but did we not lose something at that moment. Leave your bourgeois ‘What Car Magazine’ prejudices at the door. The Skoda was the people’s car, the Czech people’s car built at a plant deep in the Bohemian forests. Ah Bohemian there’s another word that we will be coming back to in these rehearsals. These are the forests where the Brothers Grimm roamed in search of their fairy tales, where Hitler went on camping trips from school, they are soaked in romance, blood and history and in order to put the Skoda in its true 20th century context we will be doing the opening ‘Production Line’ routine entirely in Czech. At this point I would like to introduce Katarina Masaryk who is our Czech language coach.” All turn to look at the pretty blonde girl at the back of the room.
“And then we have the ‘’Book’”, McHarrowing raises a copy of the Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual for the 1989 Skoda Favorit above his head. It is a mauve A4 size hardback with an artist’s impression of a Skoda Favorit and a photo of something that might be a gear box on the cover. It has been out of print for sometime and is hard to come by. “All down the ages from the Gospels themselves, through A Pilgrim’s Progress , Das Kapital, down to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets there have been books that show us the way, that show us our place in the universe. This book in its humble way does the same. It guides our hero Barry on his perilous journey from adolescence to manhood on what Sigmund Freud described as ‘Das autobahn von der leben’. We can take this book as a paradigm for……”

At the mention of the word paradigm, the meaning of which is known to only four people in the room, the company’s attention starts to wander. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust starts to feel distinctly uneasy, partly because he doesn’t know what paradigm means and partly because he thought that he was putting on a simple ‘Boy Buys Car to Get Girl – Boy gets Girl – Car Breaks Down – Boy Loses Girl – Boy Fixes Car – Boy gets girl Back’ sort of a musical and from what McHarrowing is saying, (he is now deep into the relationship between contemporary socio-political mores and motor maintenance), he is not going to get it.

Stage manager Rowena Pettifer takes a moment to open the box next to her chair which should contain scripts of Maintenance! but to her dismay, due to a cock-up at the printers, contains copies of a 50 page pamphlet produced by the London Borough of Newham entitled Performing Arts for the Elderly – A Users Guide. An ASM is despatched to the printers in a cab.

Choreographer Bobby Brasso sighs inwardly as he listens to McHarrowing. He has sat through many such speeches but this one has the makings of an all time low. Why was it that Brits took the direction thing so seriously, on Broadway there was a lot more pzazz than paradigm. Brasso, who despite his age (58) has been voted ‘Boy with the Pertest Bottom on Broadway’ for the last three years running, comforts himself with the thought that only he can turn things round, only he, using a lifetime’s experience on ‘the Great White Way’ can turn this dreary tuneless English suburban piece of hackwork into a dazzling choreographic extravaganza with routines remembered long after the Skoda Favorit has been forgotten.

Designer Ulla Hoos, clad in her normal khaki dungarees and beret, listens to McHarrowing attentively. She is probably the only person in the room who shares his world view and as his loyal and long term collaborator she desperately hopes that Maintenance! could be their passport out of a cultural ghetto of their own making onto a sunlit upland plain of mainstream work that might pay the rent and buy some new dungarees.

Composer Gunther Eisenkopf sits entranced. All this is new to him, in all his years with the East German heavy metal band Kursk Salient his music (and most critics didn’t describe it as such) was universally reviled by all but a devoted and drug crazed band of fans. His English isn’t good enough to quite follow what McHarrowing is saying but phrases like ‘musically a definitive statement of intent’ and ‘beats the shit out of Rodgers & Hammerstein’ sit well with him.

Book and lyric writer Dermot O’Dainty does know what paradigm means but also realises that McHarrowing is talking absolute bollocks. However he is savvy enough to know that to have any credibility a director has to talk absolute bollocks some or all of the time. He lets his imagination roam to a world where he and Katarina Masaryk make sweet sweet music together.

Production Manager Stewart Cowless sits in his chair trying not to writhe with anxiety. His mobile phone vibrates silently but relentlessly in his pocket as desperate scenery contractors try to contact him to nail down orders for a set that Cowless knows is already over budget and highly impractical. Eventually he can stand it no longer and making apologetic gestures to McHarrowing in particular and to the room in general he heads for the corridor to get on with business.

‘……and that’s enough quotes from dead Germans for one day’ says McHarrowing mercifully concluding his opening remarks. ‘Now I’d like to introduce our design team Ulla Hoos who has come up with a sensational set and Buzz Phelps our costume designer……’

To be continued


Here is a brief reminder of who's who on Maintenance!

Producers: Alvin Toxteth & Samuel J Bloodlust
General Manager: Kevin Whimper
Producers PA: Charlotte Gore Wincanton

Music: Gunther Eisenkopf
Book: Dermot O’Dainty
Choreographer: Bobby Brasso
Director Kevin: McHarrowing
Designer: Ulla Hoos
Costume Designer: Buzz Phelps
Lighting Designer: Geoff Osram
Sound Designer: Ian Geek

Production Manager: Stewart Cowless
Company Manager: Anthony Fawning
Stage Manager: Rowena Pettifer
Deputy stage Manager: Sazz Muldoon
ASM Book Cover: Maggie Truelove
ASM: Justin Philpotts
Wardrobe Mistress: Angie Overlocker
Wig Mistress: Natalie Tongs

And here is a reminder of the location of past episodes in the archive

No 1 Feb 1 2008
No 2 Mar 3 2008
No 3 Mar 31 2008
No 4 Apr 21 2008
No 5 Apr 31 2008
No 6 May 25 2008
No 7 June 1 2008
No 8 June 29 2008
No 9 Oct 9 2008
No 10 Nov 17 2008

How to Put on a Musical – Part 10 - Rehearsals

The first thing you need for rehearsals is a rehearsal room and for a musical the ideal rehearsal space should fill the following criteria:
Be within 400 yards of Leicester Square tube station
Comprise: 1 large space for the main production calls
1 smaller space for dance calls etc
1 room with mirror & piano for costume fittings and music calls
1 room with phone/internet as a company office
3. Be available 9.00am – 10.00pm
4. Have a sprung timber floor
5. Be well heated so that dancers don’t injure themselves
6. Be in a nice middle-class area with access to cappuccinos, ciabatta sandwiches, noodle bar, and a pub for the stage management to brood in at the end of the day.
How many rehearsal rooms fit these criteria? None. Most rehearsal rooms are in socially challenged areas where the local kids can strip the wheels off a BMW and leave it on bricks in less than 3 minutes. Most are inconveniently placed in quadrants of London not served by the underground and most are draughty and dank, too small to mark up the set plan on the floor, have limited access and provide a wide variety of cultural and sporting activities for the local community in the evenings requiring a complete clear up of the space at the end of rehearsals every day. The latter drawback is often viewed as a plus by some wily producers who realise that a full programme of table tennis, Brownies and Tae-Kwon-Do in the evenings will prevent the director from rehearsing after 6.00pm and thus save thousands of pounds of stage management overtime.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Due to the short notice of the deal with the Piccadilly Theatre the Maintenance! management have had to book rehearsal space at the last minute and have ended up with the Parish Hall of the Church of Our Lady of Cheerful Countenance in East Ham. This is a sub-standard space by any reckoning. It is not big enough, it is badly lit and heated, it is a nightmare to access from central London and worst of all, the local priest is a musical theatre enthusiast who likes to pop in and discuss how things are going with the director.

The first day of rehearsals gets off to an inauspicious start when stage manager Rowena Pettifer and her team turn up at 9.30 to set up for the morning’s ‘Meet ‘n Greet’ session only to find the hall securely locked. After half an hours detective work they find caretaker Sid Stickler a few doors away. Sid, who, unlike his parish priest, believes that all musicals, with the possible exception of Bernadette, are the work of the devil and that the unhappy group of stage management on his doorstep are only one step removed from being Satanists, is not helpful. He declares that there was only a pencil booking, that nothing has been confirmed and that no advance payment has been made, furthermore he has no intention of opening the hall until he has a call from Doris Quill the parish secretary telling him that a cheque has been received. With that he departs for his allotment. Rowena hastily calls Kevin Whimper, who is already half way to East Ham and now has to turn round and return to the office to pick up a cheque for Mrs Quill. It is a miserable, drizzling February morning in East London and slowly the group of disgruntled actors, management and creative team huddled together by the locked doors of the hall grows larger. The Church of our Lady of Cheerful Countenance is marooned in an ocean of derelict industrial sites interspersed with the occasional decaying tower block or vandalised playground, there is not a Starbucks for miles and the only catering nearby is a petrol station where the pork pies have sell-by dates from the previous year. Director Kevin McHarrowing eventually cancels the morning call and tells everyone to return at 2.00pm. Producer Samuel J Bloodlust curses everyone within earshot including the Lady of Cheerful Countenance and sets off in his chauffeur driven BMW with his leading man and leading lady to buy doughnuts for everybody.

By lunchtime the cheque has finally reached Mrs Quill and the stage management retrieve Mr Stickler from his allotment (he is discovered in his shed reading a periodical entitled ‘Zips ‘n Buckles’). He grudgingly opens the hall and even more grudgingly turns on the heating. At 2.00 the company are finally assembled, seated in a semicircle in front of a table where the producers, Samuel J Bloodlust and Alvin Toxteth sit with director McHarrowing. Bloodlust gets up to speak.
“Welcome everyone. I am Samuel J Bloodlust and I and my partner Alvin, are the producers of Maintenance! Today is a proud day both for us and for the creative team on this project, today is not the beginning but is a vital staging post on a journey that began one night two years ago in the departure lounge of Berlin’s Tegel Airport. On that night these two guys”, he pauses to indicate composer Gunther Eisenkopf and book writer Dermot O’Dainty, “met at the bar and in an evening of creative inspiration wrote the basis of the show that we are about to put on”.
Eisenkopf and O’Dainty nod sagely knowing full well that they were both so drunk on that fateful evening that they had no idea that they had written a musical until the following morning when the airport police released them and with the personal possessions returned to them was a bundle of paper napkins on which they had laid down the basis of Maintenance!
“Dermot brought the project to us soon afterwards and I’m happy to say that we are now fully funded”, at this point his partner Alvin Toxteth looks distinctly shifty, “and as you all know we are scheduled to start previewing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 7 weeks time. We are very excited to have secured the Piccadilly with its superb location and long history of successful runs”. This last laughable assertion sets some of the company sniggering. “However I’m not going to take up any more time, I’m going to pass you over to Anthony your company manager who has some business stuff to get out of the way and then to Kevin who will lead us on the journey that is Maintenance!"
Anthony Fawning gets up. “OK everyone. Welcome and many apologies for this morning’s problems. Now if you haven’t been seen by our wardrobe department and been measured then you need to have done so before you leave the building. You also need to have handed me your starter forms before you leave. And finally I know some of you had trouble finding your way here today and I know that two of you ended up at Stanstead Airport, so can I recommend that you go to Stratford East by overland then get the 429 bus heading towards Barking and get off at Asda and get a 365 heading towards Woolwich which will drop you off at the top of the road. Any questions? No? OK it’s over to you Kevin”.
Director Kevin McHarrowing gets slowly to his feet and surveys the clay from which he hopes to mould a hit musical. He has never staged a West End musical before but he has absolute not to say psychotic confidence in his own abilities and has no doubt that given sufficient intellectual rigour he can transform the sentimental pap that is the current book into a socialist parable for our times, a parable that will bring hope and meaning to ordinary working people and not just the contemptible pleasure seekers who come to the theatre solely to have ‘a good night out’.
“Good afternoon everyone. Before I tell you something about Maintenance! I think we should all introduce ourselves and tell the room what we do. So Gavin would you like to start”.
“Gavin Shoestrap playing Barry”.
“Erica Fortinbras playing Sharon”
One by one the cast and staff announce their names and the part that they are playing or the job that they will be doing.
“Miranda Williams ensemble”
“Harry Hopkins playing Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”
“Diane Wilkins ensemble & dance captain”
“Peter De Vriess ensemble.”
“David Casper, Foreman, Pet Shop Owner and Registrar”.
“Ah” says McHarrowing staring at David Casper who he fails to recognise. Alvin Toxteth quickly intercedes, realising that somewhere in his office something has gone horribly wrong and that somehow they have contracted two actors to play the same parts.
“David you and I need to get together on this”
“Do you mean I’m not playing the Foreman, Pet Shop owner and Registrar?” says the aggrieved actor.
“No, no, no. We just need to have a chat”. says a flustered Toxteth and gestures for the next actor to introduce themself. Finally all are done and the company look around with mixed feelings. The Company manager and stage management study the sea of faces trying to work out who will be the company nutter, the rest look around and compile a mental list of whom they would most like to sleep with and David Casper leaves the room to ring his agent.
McHarrowing starts his introductory address.

To be continued

How to Put on a Musical part 9 – The Staff

Stage Management

“Ted please tell why I need stage manager?” was the question asked on an almost daily basis by the Moscow promoter of We Will Rock You, Sergei Baranov. I would look across the table, take a deep breath and have another go at persuading him that the show needed someone to organise scene changes, to structure the rehearsals, to set props, to produce a prompt copy and above all write it all down so that we could do approximately the same show on the second night that we did on the first. After my explanation he would shake his head dismissively and leave the room. Eventually he was persuaded to employ a show caller so that at least we would have some coordination between departments. The lucky candidate was Julia, a recent graduate from an Arts/Business course, whose backstage experience was nil but she was very keen, had a few words of English and was very beautiful. In desperation we flew Tracy, stage manager from WWRY London to give emergency guidance, which she did with great charm and skill. Julia did come up trumps a couple of days into the tech rehearsals in responding to some criticism from our rather upmarket director (his day job was directing Chekhov) with a volley of abuse that translated roughly as “Don’t, you fucking well tell me what to do you fat bastard. I’m the bloody stage manager here I’ll have you know!”
As we started the Tech Rehearsal I realised that there was no one backstage who had a clue what was supposed to be happening and so, with a heavy heart, I put on a headset and got up on stage to get things going. After 10 minutes of shouting (Russians love shouting) I got someone to turn off the working lights and the stage went totally dark, completely and utterly dark, and at that point I realised that I hadn’t checked that ‘Act 1 Beginners’ were standing by onstage. I thought about getting the working lights back on but couldn’t face any more shouting so I decided to check by feel alone. Luckily the actors playing ‘Pop’ (long wig) and the 2 policemen (helmets) were easy to identify by touch but as I tugged at Pop’s wig I had one of those moments of clarity that we all have now and then and I thought “What the fuck am I doing here”. At the same time I decided that not having any stage management can put you in a very dark place both literally and metaphorically.

So you definitely need stage management even if they can be a bit anal and a bit irritating at times. For a musical you need at least four and probably more, you need a stage manager in charge, a Deputy who calls the show from the prompt corner and will probably have developed a large bottom from sitting on a prompt stool night after night. You also need assistants to run either side of the stage, props etc.

It is sometimes said that whether you were born in the stairwell of a Peckham tower block or in a four-poster in a stately home when you work in the theatre you immediately become an honorary member of the middle class. This is never truer than with stage management, they are the stuff of which the Empire was built. In days gone by your average stage manager would not have been unlocking a rehearsal room at 9.00am but would have been administering an area of Africa bigger than Surrey. Stage Management are willing to give their lives to ensure the show goes on and the nation needs more people like them.


Wardrobe
The wardrobe mistress is a key figure in backstage life, apart from organising her department and washing lots of smelly clothes she is a clearing house for all company gossip, using the dressers to garner information with all the skill of a KGB spymaster. Should the Company Manager need to know anything about a member of the company, drug habits, drinking habits, sexual tastes, he goes straight to the wardrobe mistress. Traditionally they are large, motherly, drink gin and sleep with the master carpenter. If you happen to employ a wardrobe master they tend to be slim, excessively tidy, drink gin and sleep with the master carpenter.

Wigs
If you have children who show no obvious talent for anything in particular then you might consider pushing them in the direction of wigs. As a production manager I find that putting together a wig department is extremely tiresome. There aren’t enough wig staff about, competent or otherwise, so Mrs Worthington put your daughter into wigs and she will never be out of work again.

Project Model – Maintenance!
Production Manager Stewart Cowless, Company Manager Anthony Fawning and Producer’s Assistant Kevin Whimper interviewed more than twenty would-be stage management for Maintenance and finally settled on Rowena Pettifer as stage manager, a well organised determined girl who is probably not tough enough for the job in hand but is the best of a bad bunch. As DSM they have hired the ballsy Sazz (Sarah) Muldoon an Irish girl with a backside the size of Gloucestershire, as ASM book cover Maggie Truelove a West End veteran and finally as ASM Justin Philpotts a charming young man from Brighton who was hired by Fawning and Whimper while Cowless was out of the room making a phone call. He enchanted them by declaring that his mother, herself an actress of sorts, had had a dream in which she saw him emerging from the stage door of the Palladium to be greeted by his adoring fans. He declared that he had come to fulfil his destiny. Thus begins the career of Justin Philpotts who by the year 2050 will be known by all and sundry as a ‘National Treasure’ and his Sunday night chat show Philpot’s Pals will attract vast audiences. Cowless was enraged to find that someone so utterly inexperienced had been employed without his say-so and accused Fawning and Whimper of going for the prettiest bum.

Angie Overlocker has been employed as wardrobe mistress and she lives up to the stereotype handsomely. She is large, jolly, motherly, but can be tigerish when negotiating quick change space in the wings or defending her position in the queue at the bar.

The Wig Mistress will be Natalie Tongs, who is delightful in every way other than that she has only ever been an assistant and has never run a department before. The main thing going for her is that she has spent nine months on The Rolf Harris Story at the Queens, dressing wigs for Maintenance!’s future leading lady Erica Fortinbras who is known to be difficult.

Casting Update

After the debacle in Andover (see blog of 25th May 2008) plans for the TV audition show Baby You Can Drive My Car are revised down to a more controlled, not to say ‘fixed’, enterprise in order to give the producers the cast they want. Unfortunately it turns out that Hampshire Gold TV, who were to produce the series, were sponsored by the city of Reykyavik (strap line “Where the fish come to party”) and their funds were cut overnight resulting in a total collapse. For a brief moment the producers toyed with the idea of a radio version but then went back to more traditional methods of casting. To play the leading role of Barry, Kevin McHarrowing has picked Gavin Shoestrap, a 3rd placed X Factor contestant, who has made a decent living over the past couple of years with soap opera parts and the occasional chart entry. He has promised to lose weight in rehearsal. The part of Barry’s girl friend Tracy has been given to Erica Fortinbras whose lack of anger management has landed her in court twice, once after an incident on the Jonathan Ross Show and once when she assaulted a dresser with a stiletto heeled shoe after chasing her out of the fire exit and across the roof of the Shaftesbury Theatre during rehearsals for Petra & I the Blue Peter musical. The voice of the Haynes Manual will be delivered from an offstage vocal booth by veteran soul singer Charlie ‘Duke’ Magee. The vital role of Morag the Mechanic is as yet uncast.

Mr Poulter’s Last Match – Part 2

By the time Mr Poulter and Hugh Fennimore had set up the stumps the rest of the team had arrived at the wicket and Jack was placing his field. Doug Billings was going to open the bowling from the By-Pass end and Sam Fletcher would bowl the second over from the Railway end. Neither team had non-playing umpires so the job was done by members of the batting side already out or yet to bat. Scoring was done by whoever was competent and had a pencil. The scoreboard was a warped sheet of plywood, which leaned against one of the beeches, with hooks which carried metal plates on which were numbers too small to be read from the middle. The Allied Breweries (Western Division) 3rd XI openers strode purposefully to the wicket, were greeted with polite applause from the Paragons, one of them prepared to face Doug, and the umpire, a tall dark haired man with grey sideboards who none of the Paragons had seen before, said ”Play”.

Dorothy looked up from the Tom Stoppard piece she had been reading (“Me and my Window Boxes”) and adjusted her position on the rug to be able to watch more comfortably. She genuinely loved cricket, she came from a cricket mad family and had the LBW laws by heart before she read her first Enid Blyton. She had a grandmother who kept a signed photo of Don Bradman on her mantelpiece, her father was a long time member at Surrey, and she had three cricket mad older brothers, two of whom still played club cricket. She had spent a substantial part of her girlhood retrieving ‘lost balls’ from under the rhododendrons. So these Sundays watching John and the Paragons were no chore though the Paragons’ fragile batting often made the afternoons shorter than planned.
She watched her man take his place in the slips, she loved this man. She had noticed him in the office lift on the same morning that he had noticed her and she had asked around as to who and what he was. She was told he was a departmental deputy who had been in the bank longer than anyone could remember and that he was dull, punctual, stuck in a rut, older than the rest of his department by a good 10 years. Did he have wandering hands? No he didn’t. Did he chase account clerks at the Christmas party? No he didn’t. Was he gay? No he wasn’t. Was he married? Yes he was. Dorothy had been married once, in her early twenties, to a man she had originally met at a business college in Kingston. It had not gone well and her husband took to ‘working late’ so often that she knew he was having an affair. What depressed her most was not that he was having an affair but the fact that she didn’t care. She moved out of their tiny rented flat into a tinier
bedsit. Two years later a decree arrived in the post telling her that she was single once more, something that she had known all along. She had been 32 by the time she joined USBB and that fateful eye contact in the lift occurred only a few weeks after she had started there. John Poulter was definitely good looking in a grey sort of way, Dorothy often thought that he could make a good living in TV commercials as an ‘honest’ man selling insurance or pension schemes. There was something reassuring about him and when he stuck his head round her door and proposed the trip to Arundel she hadn’t hesitated for a second. Their affair was now 12 years old, for 12 years she had been ‘the other woman’ and she really didn’t mind. She had watched TV documentaries about being a ‘mistress’ with interviews with bitter women who resented every moment that their lovers spent with their wives and families but she valued her independence and when their affair had started all three of John’s children had still been at school and leaving Nancy wasn’t an option. Dorothy had been made redundant by USBB two years after she first met Mr Poulter and after a string of short term jobs in the city she had finally set herself up selling vintage knitwear on ebay. This meant that she didn’t see Mr Poulter at work but her ‘sole trader’ existence meant that she could easily be free to accompany him to dreary European banking conferences to which he was despatched by the USBB as ‘a safe pair of hands’, He developed a technique of giving his business card to, and shaking hands with, every warm blooded creature in the conference centre before discreetly leaving by a fire exit and spending the rest of the time with Dorothy who found his hands very safe indeed. One weekend in Berlin, where there was no cricket to be had, they hadn’t left their swanky hotel room once and lived off room service with Dorothy never wearing more than a slinky1920’s black silk knit cardigan that she had bought in an antique market the week before. Once when Nancy went to stay with her brother in Canada for a couple of weeks they had managed to do ‘Cricket Week’ at Scarborough and occasionally they made it to Old Trafford or Headingley.

Doug Billings was a class act, he was quick, accurate and consistent, he took wickets year in year out and this afternoon was no exception and with his fifth ball he clipped the off stump of one of the AB openers. Their No 3 was their captain who in the past had played some dogged innings against the Paragons and he straight batted Doug while the other opener accumulated runs off Sam Fletcher. All went well for the AB’s until the tenth over when Jack took Sam Fletcher off and replaced him with Maltese Joe who tempted the opener into a wild drive which he mishit tamely to mid-off. The following over Doug had the AB skipper caught at slip and in the over after that Maltese Joe took a second wicket when the AB No 4 unluckily kicked the ball onto his stumps. At 40-4 things were looking up for the Paragons when the tall stranger with grey sideburns headed for the wicket.
“Oh look! Oh I hate that” said Jack.
“What?” said Mr Poulter
“He’s wearing some poncey school tie as a belt. Don’t you hate that?”
“Oh! Yes I do” said Mr Poulter grimacing “tell Doug to hurt him”.
“I will” said Jack and walked off to give his fast bowler the necessary instruction.
The stranger arrived at the crease and took guard with casual ease. Mr Poulter at mid-on noted the expensive cream flannels, the immaculate shirt, the man only needed a silk scarf round his neck to be a 1930s House-Party toff. He played the last ball of Maltese Joe’s over past Mr Poulter’s left hand for a single and prepared to face the first ball of Doug’s next over. Doug, following his captain’s instructions to the letter, bowled a lively bouncer, which the Toff planted effortlessly over the mid-wicket boundary. He then proceeded to score off every ball of the rest of the over. It was apparent to the Paragons that this man was in a different class to normal run of Sunday afternoon cricketers, Jack mouthed the word ‘ringer’ to Mr Poulter who nodded grimly. The Paragons only strategy was to get the rest of the ABs out before the Toff scored too many, but this was easier said than done as the Toff farmed the strike mercilessly and scored 80 odd in what seemed like no time at all. Jack rotated his bowlers desperately, even offering Mr Poulter, who had never claimed to be even an occasional bowler, a chance, but the flow of runs from the Toff continued while only two wickets fell at the other end. With the score at 170-6 Mr Poulter saw Jack in discussion with Jacek and after a few moments Jack tossed Jacek the ball. The young Pole then started walking towards the boundary at the bowler’s end and for a moment Mr Poulter thought that Jack had not asked him to bowl but had sent him on some errand to the pavilion but eventually the Pole stopped, scratched a mark in the turf and started to run in off what was the longest run-up that Mr Poulter had seen since the golden age of West Indian fast bowling. His first ball, which was as quick as any that Mr Poulter had seen that season, pitched on a good length but lifted enough to hit the Toff in the chest. He staggered back, surprised, and eyed the new bowler with suspicion. Jacek’s second ball was even faster and yorked the Toff, who played far too late, his batting partner at the other end mouthed the word ‘ringer’ and the Toff nodded grimly as he marched off.
The Krakow Dynamo, as Jacek was immediately christened, mopped up the last wickets in his next two overs and the ABs were all out for 176.

At tea the Paragons put a brave face on things despite the fact that the tea itself had been provided by Hugh Fennimore, who was an evangelical vegetarian, so not only did both teams have to suffer dull sandwiches but also endure a string of homilies on the perils of animal fats and bad Kharma. Several of the team smuggled in pork pies and Scotch eggs along with other decadences like ‘char-grilled steak’ flavoured crisps and Coca-Cola, some of the ABs vanished to return with Kentucky Fried Chicken from the retail park along the by-pass.
Catering aside the Paragons knew that on their crumbling end of season wicket and with a lunar surface of an outfield 176 was an enormous total particularly when they had no one with the talent of the Toff in their team. Jack interrogated Jacek, hoping that he might have batting skills equal to his bowling prowess but the Tatra Tornado shook his head and earnestly told his captain “No. I yem crep betsman, I go eleven pliss”.

Dorothy tended to avoid the rituals of the tea interval and brought along her own picnic which Mr Poulter came to share after tasting one of Hugh’s bean curd tartlets. Jack joined them to ask “Where do you want to bat today? Last time and all that, you can open if you like”. Mr Poulter refused this offer and Jack put him down at No 6 as normal and wandered off, filling in the batting line-up in the score book as he went. He found his two openers Harry Shah and Fat Barry padding up and gave them a pep talk not found in Mike Brearley’s ‘The Art of Captaincy’.
“Look realistically we’ve got no bloody chance of winning this but remember it’s not limited overs, it’s 20 overs from 6.30 and we could just hang on for the draw so dig in and waste as much time as you can. OK”. His openers nodded obligingly but neither had any intention of ‘digging in’, they were going out to play their natural game come what may. Fat Barry had a good eye and could hit the ball extremely hard and had every intention of doing so. Harry Shah, who ran a sporting goods shop in South Norwood and had once played for the Rawalpindi Colts, was the Paragons’ best batsman and he felt that his natural game was not unlike that of Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s, and he had every intention of living his dream.
The Paragons’ innings got off to a good if hectic start with both openers blazing away as if they were in a 20/20 game that had been cut by rain to 10/10. They took 22 off the first three overs before disaster struck, Harry Shah skied a short ball off a top edge to give an easy catch to the wicket keeper, almost immediately Fat Barry holed out in the deep and the Paragons were 24-2 with Jack Lascelles and Ron Haslam newly arrived at the crease.
“Come on Ron let’s give them a run for their money. Dig in” said Jack
“OK skip” said Ron who promptly hit his first ball for a straight six but was clean bowled by the next. 30-3
Jack was joined by Mark Philpotts, who had been to a decent public school, and could be relied on to follow instructions and bat sensibly but Jack at the non-strikers end called for a suicidal single to a ball that the wicket keeper fumbled and both batsmen ended up at the striker’s end with the ball back in the bowler’s hand. Mark did the decent thing and stepped out of the crease leaving Jack, who hadn’t been to a decent public school, cursing but still in. So at 30-4 Mr Poulter came in to play his final innings. Jack stopped swearing for long enough to give him more or less the same spiel that he had given to the openers but then relented and said “Oh just enjoy it John”.
Mr Poulter did just that, he felt both relaxed and confident, he started slowly but soon began to score freely and Jack was content to play second fiddle and once the first two AB quickies were rested the bowling held no terrors. Eventually the Toff was given a bowl and Mr Poulter’s heart sank, if he was only half as good a bowler as he was a batsman they were doomed but he turned out to be a ‘nothing special’ medium pacer and the Paragons revival continued until the score reached 83-4 at around the time that 20 overs were called at 6.30. Twenty overs to get 94 thought Mr Poulter, twenty overs to survive thought Jack. They met in the middle. “We could do this” said Mr Poulter.
“Bollocks!” said Jack “How often have we got more than 150?”
“True” said Mr Poulter.
Jack saw that his friend was looking across at Dorothy and said “You don’t think that Nancy will turn up do you? It being your last game”
“No” said Mr Poulter “I didn’t mention it to her”.
“Ah. Well I might have mentioned it in passing if you know what I mean” said Jack
“What! What do you mean ‘mentioned it in passing’”? said Mr Poulter incredulous.
“Oh. I think I may have said something when she answered the phone last week”
The umpire cleared his throat extravagantly and the two returned to their respective ends, Mr Poulter to face the ABs spinner. He was so distracted by Jack’s revelation that he failed to play a shot at the first ball and was lucky to escape an LBW decision.

Dorothy, enjoying the sun in halter top and shorts, was unaware of Mr Poulter’s emotional turmoil though she did notice the LBW incident and wondered what on earth he was thinking of, but otherwise there wasn’t a cloud on the horizon. But, and in life there are always ‘buts’, even in the clear blue sky of Dorothy’s existence, there were times when she wished that he was there in the morning when she woke up, that he was there on her birthday, that they were together at Christmas. When she wished these things, she remembered the bitter ‘mistresses’ in the TV documentaries and retracted her wishes hastily. In the meantime John was looking good for a fifty and she kept her fingers crossed on his behalf.

“She won’t come. She never comes. She doesn’t know where the ground is.” But the latter sentence wasn’t true, Nancy occasionally dropped him off here. Mr Poulter mentally calculated the odds for and against his wife turning up at the game. After a minute or two’s thought he came to the reassuring conclusion that not only would Nancy almost certainly not come but even if she did she wouldn’t recognise Dorothy, it was several years since they had last met. He had these thoughts while watching Jack ‘digging in’ at the other end and as he came to his final reassuring conclusion Jack dollied up a simple catch to short leg and the Paragons were 97-5 and Mr Poulter had scored 42. Hugh Fennimore came in and Mr Poulter went to meet him.
“Mark’s a bit upset about that run-out” said Hugh “he’s sulking in his car”.
“He’ll get over it” said Mr Poulter” it’s not the first time that Jack’s run him out. Now listen we need to dig in”.
“Absolutely” agreed Hugh and the words ‘dig in’ were music to his ears because while his batting was as dull as his bean curd tartlets, ‘digging in’ was what Hugh did best. Mr Poulter thought “I’m going to get 50” and that was a very pleasant thought. He had scored fifties for the Paragons in the past but not often and not recently and he got to 50 with two ‘4’s in the next over. He and Hugh attempted a high-five but failed to make contact.

At this point the ABs realised that the Paragons were not going to roll over and die so brought their opening bowlers back on, but Mr Poulter was both seeing and striking the ball well. Hugh Fennimore was not as alert to a quick single as he might have been and Mr Poulter found it hard to farm the strike but with 6 overs to play they had progressed to 147-5. “We should win this” thought Mr Poulter. Hugh Fennimore came over and said “Look we could win this. I’m going to stop ‘digging in’.”
“Oh right. If you think so” said Mr Poulter dubiously. And then the wheels came off. Hugh attempted an uncharacteristic sweep and was caught at square leg. Sam Fletcher came in and was given out LBW off his first ball by Fat Barry, who was umpiring, though as Sam said later “I was so far down the pitch I could smell the umpire’s halitosis”. Maltese Joe managed a few defensive prods before being caught behind and Doug Billings took a wild swing at a ball that both pitched on and removed his middle stump. From a match winning 147-5 the Paragons were at a terminal 151-9 with Mr Poulter on 79. Four overs left to get 26 runs with just the ‘Polish Pietersen’ to come. Mr Poulter intercepted Jacek on his way to the wicket and was about to give him some pointers but was momentarily distracted by the virulence of the young man’s acne. In that hiatus Jacek said determinedly “I stay, you hit. We win game. OK”
“OK” said Mr Poulter and went back to face the first ball of the next over. As he prepared to take guard the AB wicket keeper said “Is that blonde woman over there waving at you?”
Mr Poulter looked round and there was Nancy in beige slacks and turquoise top waving gaily. He waved back half-heartedly and was relieved to see Jack moving swiftly to intercept her. Fortunately Dorothy was further along the boundary than the rest of the team so there was a good chance that Jack could keep them apart. Dorothy didn’t seem to have noticed the presence of Nancy.
He managed 6 off that over but failed to get a single to get Jacek to the non-strikers end for the next. Nancy appeared to be in relaxed conversation with Jack and Mr Poulter stood back to see what the young Pole could do with the bat. An elaborate forward defensive was what he could do, and he did it again with his second ball. The AB bowler pitched the next one shorter to discourage him but the ball clipped the very top corner of the bat and flew over the keeper’s head for 4. Jacek kept out the next three balls and with the score at 161-9 Mr Poulter took guard with 16 required to win off two overs and it was at this moment that he realised that mathematically it was possible that he could get a century. He had never hit a century. Like anyone who has ever picked up a cricket bat he had fantasies, not just fantasies that involve women in interesting underwear, but fantasies that involve the crowd rising as you hold your bat aloft at Lords having scored a chanceless hundred against the Australians. Nancy in the meantime was progressing slowly along the boundary talking to other members of the team despite Jack’s efforts to distract her with the score book.
The first ball of the penultimate over was wide of his off stump and he failed to make contact, the second he played to deep mid-on and they were able to run 2 to a misfield, the third was dead straight and he could only defend, the fourth he smashed through midwicket for 4, the fifth came off an edge and they scrambled a single to third man. Jacek’s forward defensive proved equal to the last ball of the over. 9 required off six balls to win the match, 8 required for his century and his marriage quite possibly in ruins because Nancy, arms folded, was now talking to Dorothy. Jack was hopping anxiously from foot to foot trying to get Nancy to watch the game.
Mr Poulter couldn’t score off the first ball but managed 2 off a mishit slog to square leg. At this point raised voices could be heard from the boundary. As the bowler went back to his mark the AB wicket keeper came round from behind the stumps.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight” he said “The blonde lady over there is your wife?”
“Yes” said Mr Poulter
“..and the dark haired lady is not your wife?”
“Yes that’s right”
“Hmm. I reckon you might have a problem there” said the wicket keeper.
The next ball was a yorker which Mr Poulter managed to dig out but failed to score off. 7 required off 3 balls. Mr Poulter tried to ignore the increasingly animated scene on the boundary, he must concentrate, he needed a boundary but the next ball was short, wide and should have been hammered for 4 but he missed it completely. 7 required off 2 balls.
The AB skipper despatched his fielders, including the wicket keeper to the boundary. Mr Poulter looked around and decided that his best chance of a 4 was back past the bowler. His plan would have worked perfectly if he had not hit the ball straight into the bowler’s hands who luckily was so surprised that he dropped the catch. 7 required off one ball, it was impossible.
“Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!” he said
“Hard luck mate” said the wicket keeper
“Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!” said Mr Poulter. All he could do was block the last ball to get the draw. The AB skipper brought the field up into a tight ring around the bat and went over to talk to his bowler. On the boundary Nancy was pointing an accusing finger at Dorothy, Jack tried step between the two women but Nancy slapped him hard across the face.
“Come on chaps let’s focus” shouted the AB captain. The bowler ran in and bowled a wide down the leg side, there was nothing marginal about this wide, it was very wide and in the circumstances it was unforgivable but in the bowler’s defence it must be said that he may have been distracted by the word ‘Slut!’ which carried clearly from the fracas on the boundary just as he reached his delivery stride. Another ball in which to hit a 6 to win the match and get his century. Mr Poulter took a deep breath and paused to survey the state of his marriage. Nancy was storming off towards the car park, Dorothy made to follow but was prevented by Jack. She slapped him hard across the face.
The AB captain caught the wild look in Mr Poulter’s eye and thought “This man is not going to play for a draw” and the fielders retreated to the boundary once more. Mr Poulter took guard and watched the bowler run in. If he was bowling he would be going for a Yorker and in that case he, Mr Poulter, should be going down the pitch, and yes, he guessed right, he middled the ball which flew high in the direction of long leg. The Toff loped elegantly round the boundary to take the catch above his head but as he did so he overbalanced carrying the ball with him over the line for 6.
“Lucky bugger!” said the wicket keeper.
The Paragons had won, he had scored his first century and he was seriously considering making a run for it over the Portsmouth-Waterloo mainline but Jacek in a fit of Slavonic emotion gave him a hug and led him in triumph towards his celebrating team mates.
“She said I could bloody well have you” shouted Dorothy at him as he and Jacek came in to the faltering applause of the other Paragons. She looked flushed and very angry.
“Well?” she demanded
“Well what?”
“Can I bloody well have you?”
“Yes you can”
“Will you marry me?” she demanded
“Yes I will”
“Well that’s alright then.” She paused. “Come on we should go to the pub. You have to buy lots of drinks for everybody.”
“Why did you hit Jack?” he asked
“He was being a pratt”
“Fair enough” he said and they went to the pub.

Mr Poulter’s Last Match – Part 1

Mr Poulter’s cricket bag was made of blue canvas and had leather handles. Written on it in flaking white paint were the words “St Ursula’s Convent”, he had bought it at a car boot sale some years before. In it were his bat, his batting gloves, his box, his boots (which were the traditional leather type with proper studs, not the glorified trainers that the younger members of the team wore), one stump, two bails, his sweater, an old pair of socks, one of those key thingummies used for screwing in studs, and last week’s Sunday Times Review and Sports sections (unread). He removed the Sunday supplements and replaced them with the ones that had come with the paper that he had bought from the newsagents that morning, he put in a clean shirt, flannels and pair of socks. As he did so his wife, on her way from the kitchen to the living room asked “Will you be late?”
He sighed as he zipped up the bag, Nancy asked this question every Sunday before he went out to play cricket.
“No I don’t think so” he replied, “I’ll only have one drink”.
“Oh OK but don’t worry about me, I went to the library yesterday and I have plenty of books to keep me company”.
Nancy didn’t like cricket. Early in their marriage he had taken her to the Saturday of a Lords Test against the Australians and she had been restless all day. She complained about her seat, the sun in her eyes, the rowdy drunks around her, the smelly toilets and the fact that she couldn’t sit in the pavilion.
Mr Poulter picked up his cricket bag, went out of the front door and put it in the boot of the Peugeot, he came back in and said “I’m off now”.
Nancy gave him a quick peck on the cheek “Have a good time. Love you!”
“Love you too” he replied automatically.
For a few moments he sat in the car and didn’t put the key in the ignition. He suddenly realised that he hadn’t mentioned to Nancy that not only was this was the last match of the season but it was also his last match for the New Malden Paragons. He was 52 and after running a couple of sharp singles needed a lie down, in the field he realised that the skipper expended a great deal of ingenuity in not exposing him to long chases to the boundary but most of all his knees hurt, his knees hurt most of the time. As a founder member of the team he knew that he could probably play until he needed a wheelchair and that no one would say a word, but he felt the time had come to hang up his boots. Why hadn’t he told Nancy? Was he worried that she would be irritatingly solicitous, that she would miss her quiet summer Sunday, that she would encourage him to take up bowls, or most likely, that she wouldn’t care.

He started the engine and drove off, the prospect of the day’s game against Allied Breweries (Western Division) 3rd XI banishing any such anxieties. This was a regular fixture for the Paragons and was usually a closely fought encounter. The link between the AB(WD) 3rds and the brewing giant had become increasingly tenuous over the years and now the team mostly consisted of blokes who drank in a pub called the Roebuck in Putney. The Paragons had been founded by Mr Poulter and his best friend Jack Lascelles nearly twenty years before at a time when they both worked for USBB (the United Singapore & Bankok Bank which Mr Poulter thought of as Usurers Shits & Bastards Bank in his darker moments). Jack had moved on and had done pretty well, Mr Poulter was still with the USBB which had changed hands several times and was currently called Winnipeg & North Klondike Securities. He was No 2 in the Foreign Offsets & Denials Department and he was a good No 2, serving at least a dozen bosses over the years with neutral efficiency. He had adroitly seen off attempts by several uppity 26 year olds to oust him, he was living proof that age and guile will always defeat youthful talent.

The West Nutley Recreation Ground was only 15 minutes drive from Mr Poulter’s home and as the car bumped along the pot-holed lane to the car park he gazed across the four pitches that surrounded the pavilion. It was a perfect day for cricket and despite being flanked on two sides by semi derelict industrial sites, and by the main Waterloo-Portsmouth mainline and the Kingston By-pass on the others Nutley Rec was a beautiful place. Mr Poulter was well aware that to any cricketer a cricket ground was a beautiful place but even so the arrangement of the pitches separated by rows of tall beeches and the rampart of brambles on the railway embankment gave the Rec a charming rural feel. By contrast the pavilion was now so vandalised and so graffitied that it could have been lifted bodily and dumped into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern without an eyebrow being raised. In the car park he saw the familiar Fiat Uno of his mistress Dorothy who had the back open and was lifting out rugs & a picnic. He parked and walked over and she kissed him warmly on the lips.
“It’s a great day for the match John” she said
“Absolutely” he said and they kissed again and as they did so a bright yellow Audi Quattro parked alongside them.
“Steady you two, you’ll frighten the horses”. This was Jack Lascelles, who got out, gave Dorothy a hug, punched Mr Poulter on the shoulder, picked up his bag and set off for the Pavilion. Mr Poulter and Dorothy dumped the picnic under one of the beeches and started to stroll arm in arm around the boundary.

Dorothy had been working at USBB when they had first met twelve years before, not in his department but in the neighbouring Domestic Breakovers & Futilities. He first noticed her one morning in the lift and, having discovered where her office was, contrived most days to walk down her corridor and gaze through the glass partition into her office. He discovered that she had an interest in cricket when he came across her studying the Daily Mail cricket page in the canteen, they started to chat occasionally at the coffee machine or on the homeward walk to the Tube station. Mr Poulter had never been unfaithful to Nancy, he had never been tempted by any of the endless stream of underclad banking vamps who passed through his department but now he was disturbed by Dorothy. She loomed large in his thoughts, whatever he did he found himself wondering what Dorothy would think about it, what Dorothy would do if she was there. He was in his professional life a decisive man, he was never afraid to make a decision and stand by its consequences whether right or wrong, but in his personal life he had always taken the line of least resistance. Nancy had been a pretty and vivacious 24 year old when they got married and there had rarely been a cross word between them, except of course for that unsatisfactory trip to Lords when Mr Poulter had got rather testy on the train journey home. Their married life together had gone as smoothly as a Mediterranean cruise, temperate in climate and mood with the occasional dramatic landfall. But now he realised he was on the brink of danger, possibly disaster, but he would not pull back and so one day he tapped on the glass door of Dorothy’s office, poked his head in and said without any preamble “Er look I’m going to Arundel this weekend. For the cricket. Would you like to come?”
There was a moment of silence. Neither of them had any illusions about what this invitation meant or its consequences. Dorothy knew he was married indeed she had met Nancy at the bank’s Christmas do.
She smiled “Yes I’d like that very much”
“Oh right! Good! We should start fairly early. Can I pick you up at 9.00?”
“Make it 8.30, the traffic might be bad”. She was still smiling.
“Right. Excellent, 8.30 it is”. He turned to go back to his office but she followed him out into the corridor.
“Wait!” He turned and she put a scrap of paper into his hand with her address written on it.

Mr Poulter was very nervous the following Saturday morning, he had put Nancy on to a train to Manchester the previous evening, she was going to her mother’s for the weekend, and he had been pacing around the house ever since. He had set off far too early to pick up Dorothy and had been driving in circles round the Tooting area for three quarters of an hour before he pulled up outside the address she had given him. He was in an agony of doubt and guilt, it was only good manners that stopped him driving away, but when she appeared at the front door in a summer dress with her dark hair falling over her bare shoulders he was sure it was going to be alright. He took the small red suitcase and hamper that she was carrying and put them in the boot. They set off for Arundel on a glorious morning and it’s hard to say whether they fell in love before they crossed the M25, but they had certainly fallen in love by the time that the Duke of Norfolk’s XI declared at tea at 280-6 and put the Indians in. Mr Poulter had booked a room at an ivy clad hotel a few miles from the town, in fact he had booked two rooms just in case things hadn’t gone well, something that Dorothy guessed and as she sat up in bed the next morning, her breasts silhouetted against the early morning sunshine, she said “I bet you bloody well booked two rooms. You did, didn’t you?” Mr Poulter confessed and Dorothy hooted with laughter.

Hugh Fennimore the Paragons wicket keeper appeared in his whites wearing a blue rubber glove on one hand and carrying a plastic bag in the other. He started his habitual and obsessive search for dog turds on the square and outfield. When teased by his team mates, who incidentally were delighted that someone cleared up any hazards to diving stops in the deep, he would launch into an earnest lecture on the wide variety of parasites, bacteria and other toxins contained in dog shit. Mr Poulter realised that he was late and that he should go and change, he and Dorothy curtailed their walk and she went to read the papers under a tree. In the pavilion he changed in his customary place under the words ‘Blue Moon Girls’ written in broad silver marker above the changing room coat hooks. He had once asked the girls in his office whether the ‘The Blue Moon Girls’ were a pop group but they had denied all knowledge. He looked around to see who was playing that week, Jack, next to him was captain, he could see the two openers Fat Barry and Harry Shah. Maltese Joe, their lone spinner, Doug Billings, who normally opened the bowling with Sam Fletcher, were down by the washbasins. Ron Haslam and Mark Philpotts arrived together arguing about whether Samuel Beckett was dead or not. At the far end of the room sat a tall skinny young man with a mop of blonde hair and terrible acne.
“Who’s the kid at the end?” Mr Poulter asked his skipper.
“ Ah”, said Jack “he’s a new signing. His name is Yacek and he’s from Krakow”.
“Has he played before?”
“Oh yes I think so” said Jack airily.
“Where did you find him?” asked Mr Poulter.
“He came with the bloke who services my pool. He noticed my bat in the hall and said he liked cricket”.
“Does he bat or bowl?”
“Er not sure.” said Jack “Oh come on John you know how hard it is to get eleven to turn out at this time of the season, anyway he looks pretty fit”.
“What’s his surname?”
“Unpronounceable” said Jack. “Come on we should get out there”.
Mr Poulter sat while the rest of the team filed out. He had never thought about it before but he was fond of this room that smelled of socks and drains, he liked the clatter and scrape of studs, he liked the racket from the Surbiton Tamils in the room next door (whose games against the Surbiton Lankans were evidence that cricket can be genocide by other means) and the Paragons’ other neighbours the Weejans, who were all Jamaican, and normally played with a ghetto blaster at square leg.
He picked up his bag and joined the rest of the team on the boundary . Jack returned from the middle to announce that he had lost the toss and that the AB(WD) 3rds were going to bat.
“OK let’s get out there and throw some catches around” said Jack keenly. As always he was ignored by his team who mooched about under the beeches gossiping and discussing all the other and better ways that there are of spending a Sunday afternoon. Yacek stood by himself staring out across the field. Mr Poulter and Hugh Fennimore picked up stumps and bails and set off toward the wicket.

To be Continued