A Guest Post: Sam Weller’s Walentine

To mark Valentine’s day I have passed my blog over to an author of some repute:  Mr Charles Dickens wrote the following account in his first novel The Pickwick Papers outlining  Sam Weller’s attempt to compose a valentine.

 

‘I’ve done now,’ said Sam, with slight embarrassment; ‘I’ve been a-writin’.’

‘So I see,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Not to any young ‘ooman, I hope, Sammy?’

‘Why, it’s no use a-sayin’ it ain’t,’ replied Sam; ‘it’s a walentine.’

‘A what!’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, apparently horror-stricken by the word.

‘A walentine,’ replied Sam. ‘Samivel, Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller, in reproachful accents, ‘I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it. Arter the warnin’ you’ve had o’ your father’s wicious propensities; arter all I’ve said to you upon this here wery subject; arter actiwally seein’ and bein’ in the company o’ your own mother-in-law, vich I should ha’ thought wos a moral lesson as no man could never ha’ forgotten to his dyin’ day! I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it, Sammy, I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it!’ These reflections were too much for the good old man. He raised Sam’s tumbler to his lips and drank off its contents.

‘Wot’s the matter now?’ said Sam.

‘Nev’r mind, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘it’ll be a wery agonisin’ trial to me at my time of life, but I’m pretty tough, that’s vun consolation, as the wery old turkey remarked wen the farmer said he wos afeerd he should be obliged to kill him for the London market.’

‘Wot’ll be a trial?’ inquired Sam. ‘To see you married, Sammy — to see you a dilluded wictim, and thinkin’ in your innocence that it’s all wery capital,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘It’s a dreadful trial to a father’s feelin’s, that ‘ere, Sammy —’

‘Nonsense,’ said Sam. ‘I ain’t a-goin’ to get married, don’t you fret yourself about that; I know you’re a judge of these things. Order in your pipe and I’ll read you the letter. There!’

We cannot distinctly say whether it was the prospect of the pipe, or the consolatory reflection that a fatal disposition to get married ran in the family, and couldn’t be helped, which calmed Mr. Weller’s feelings, and caused his grief to subside. We should be rather disposed to say that the result was attained by combining the two sources of consolation, for he repeated the second in a low tone, very frequently; ringing the bell meanwhile, to order in the first. He then divested himself of his upper coat; and lighting the pipe and placing himself in front of the fire with his back towards it, so that he could feel its full heat, and recline against the mantel-piece at the same time, turned towards Sam, and, with a countenance greatly mollified by the softening influence of tobacco, requested him to ‘fire away.’

Sam dipped his pen into the ink to be ready for any corrections, and began with a very theatrical air —

‘“Lovely —”’

‘Stop,’ said Mr. Weller, ringing the bell. ‘A double glass o’ the inwariable, my dear.’

‘Very well, Sir,’ replied the girl; who with great quickness appeared, vanished, returned, and disappeared.

‘They seem to know your ways here,’ observed Sam.

‘Yes,’ replied his father, ‘I’ve been here before, in my time. Go on, Sammy.’

‘“Lovely creetur,”’ repeated Sam.

‘‘Tain’t in poetry, is it?’ interposed his father.

‘No, no,’ replied Sam.

‘Wery glad to hear it,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’-day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. Begin agin, Sammy.’

Mr. Weller resumed his pipe with critical solemnity, and Sam once more commenced, and read as follows:

‘“Lovely creetur I feel myself a damned —”’ ‘That ain’t proper,’ said Mr. Weller, taking his pipe from his mouth.

‘No; it ain’t “damned,”’ observed Sam, holding the letter up to the light, ‘it’s “shamed,” there’s a blot there —“I feel myself ashamed.”’

‘Wery good,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Go on.’

‘“Feel myself ashamed, and completely cir —’ I forget what this here word is,’ said Sam, scratching his head with the pen, in vain attempts to remember.

‘Why don’t you look at it, then?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘So I am a-lookin’ at it,’ replied Sam, ‘but there’s another blot. Here’s a “c,” and a “i,” and a “d.”’

‘Circumwented, p’raps,’ suggested Mr. Weller.

‘No, it ain’t that,’ said Sam, ‘“circumscribed”; that’s it.’

‘That ain’t as good a word as “circumwented,” Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller gravely.

‘Think not?’ said Sam.

‘Nothin’ like it,’ replied his father.

‘But don’t you think it means more?’ inquired Sam.

‘Vell p’raps it’s a more tenderer word,’ said Mr. Weller, after a few moments’ reflection. ‘Go on, Sammy.’

‘“Feel myself ashamed and completely circumscribed in a-dressin’ of you, for you are a nice gal and nothin’ but it.”’

‘That’s a wery pretty sentiment,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, removing his pipe to make way for the remark.

‘Yes, I think it is rayther good,’ observed Sam, highly flattered.

‘Wot I like in that ‘ere style of writin’,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, ‘is, that there ain’t no callin’ names in it — no Wenuses, nor nothin’ o’ that kind. Wot’s the good o’ callin’ a young ‘ooman a Wenus or a angel, Sammy?’

‘Ah! what, indeed?’ replied Sam.

‘You might jist as well call her a griffin, or a unicorn, or a king’s arms at once, which is wery well known to be a collection o’ fabulous animals,’ added Mr. Weller.

‘Just as well,’ replied Sam.

‘Drive on, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller.

Sam complied with the request, and proceeded as follows; his father continuing to smoke, with a mixed expression of wisdom and complacency, which was particularly edifying.

‘“Afore I see you, I thought all women was alike.”’

‘So they are,’ observed the elder Mr. Weller parenthetically.

‘“But now,”’ continued Sam, ‘“now I find what a reg’lar soft-headed, inkred’lous turnip I must ha’ been; for there ain’t nobody like you, though I like you better than nothin’ at all.” I thought it best to make that rayther strong,’ said Sam, looking up.

Mr. Weller nodded approvingly, and Sam resumed.

‘“So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear — as the gen’l’m’n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday — to tell you that the first and only time I see you, your likeness was took on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheen (wich p’raps you may have heerd on Mary my dear) altho it DOES finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete, with a hook at the end to hang it up by, and all in two minutes and a quarter.”’

‘I am afeerd that werges on the poetical, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller dubiously.

‘No, it don’t,’ replied Sam, reading on very quickly, to avoid contesting the point —

‘“Except of me Mary my dear as your walentine and think over what I’ve said. — My dear Mary I will now conclude.” That’s all,’ said Sam.

‘That’s rather a Sudden pull-up, ain’t it, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Not a bit on it,’ said Sam; ‘she’ll vish there wos more, and that’s the great art o’ letter-writin’.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘there’s somethin’ in that; and I wish your mother-in-law ’ud only conduct her conwersation on the same gen-teel principle. Ain’t you a-goin’ to sign it?’

‘That’s the difficulty,’ said Sam; ‘I don’t know what to sign it.’

‘Sign it —“Veller”,’ said the oldest surviving proprietor of that name.

‘Won’t do,’ said Sam. ‘Never sign a walentine with your own name.’

‘Sign it “Pickwick,” then,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘it’s a wery good name, and a easy one to spell.’ ‘The wery thing,’ said Sam. ‘I COULD end with a werse; what do you think?’

‘I don’t like it, Sam,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘I never know’d a respectable coachman as wrote poetry, ‘cept one, as made an affectin’ copy o’ werses the night afore he was hung for a highway robbery; and he wos only a Cambervell man, so even that’s no rule.’

But Sam was not to be dissuaded from the poetical idea that had occurred to him, so he signed the letter —

‘Your love-sick
Pickwick.’

Further Memories of Life in Tunbridge Wells

A year or so ago I wrote a blog post reflecting on my memories of childhood in Royal Tunbridge Wells and the reaction from the town itself was so enthusiastic that I decided to continue delving into the past and to resuscitate some scenes of my youth.

 

27 Boyne Park

The town of Tunbridge Wells is built in a valley between two ridges, one to the south (Forest Road) and one to the North (Mount Ephraim). We lived in Boyne Park, a rather well-to-do road off Mount Ephraim.  The houses were mostly been built around the turn of the 20th Century and were substantial red-bricked monuments to the wealth and success of professional gentlemen who had served their country – and their empire – abroad.  At the bottom of the hill was number 27: our house.

27 Boyne Park was (and remains so) one of the few old houses in the road that had not been converted into flats and was what an estate agent would refer to as ‘a substantial detached property. It was three storied house and had a strange conical tower growing from the roof.  There was a small driveway which wound around the house to a garage which had been built for one of the original owners who was a doctor and who actually owned a car: a peculiarity in Edwardian Tunbridge Wells.

The house was on the corner of Boyne Park and the cul-de-sac of Mayfield Road and when we lived there was boarded to the front by a beech hedge and to the side by a grassy bank which in the spring hosted the most remarkable display of daffodils. There were seven of us living in 27: my parents, four children and our paternal grandmother who had assisted in the purchase of the property in exchange for a suite of rooms on the top floor.

27 was never happier than when it was entertaining and the house seemed to come alive at Christmas, when it would be filled with noise and laughter.  Often on Christmas Eve there would be a great party and friends, neighbours and relations would fill the ground floor, oozing from the rooms into the large hall which was dominated by a wonderful staircase.

There was quite a community feel to the Boyne Park neighbourhood as many of the families were of similar ages, and the children were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. The roads around us were largely residential and free from heavy traffic so we could play quite safely and happily on them.

Boyne Park linked Mount Ephraim at the top end to Oakdale Road and tucked away at the end of the latter was The Twitten: a very narrow path between two houses, and which connected us to Royal Chase, which in turn led to Earl’s Road, Byng Road and Connaught Way – another world!

If I were to walk through The Twitten and turn left into Royal Chase I would eventually find myself joining Bishops Down Road near to its junction with Lake Road. Here, in an overgrown wilderness, there was an abandoned neglected and ruined house deep in the woods which was said to be haunted.  Occasionally we would explore that house, but only on very bright sunny days when the chances of haunting were minimal (I knew that ruined houses such as this were places to be scared of thanks to watching Scooby Doo).

Hurrying away from the haunted house Bishops Down Road became, without ceremony, Culverden Down, which was lined with modern open plan homes. At the junction of Culverden Down and Coniston Avenue the road overlooked a narrow path alongside a small stream which ran through a tunnel under the road.  Children would clamber down the muddy bank and play in the stream, sometimes the braver ones would get on their knees and crawl through the concrete culvert, although our parents always warned us not to in case we should be swept away (in retrospect I think that the stream was little more than an open sewer and that our mothers and fathers were more worried about what we might ingest rather than a possible drowning).

I knew this area well because Coniston Avenue led to my school.

 

 

Bishops Down

My sisters and brother were slightly older than me and they had all attended St John’s Primary School, which was a wonderfully traditional establishment (I don’t know if it had separate doors for boys and girls, but I imagine so); however when I was old enough to commence my formal education I was sent to a brand new school: Bishops Down Primary School.

At the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s education was changing and Bishops Down was created to reflect the new attitudes and to stimulate creativity and individuality within its young charges. For example, rather than teaching us to read and spell by rote, the school used a system called ITA, which was a phonetics-based system to develop linguistic skills.  ITA (the Initial Teaching Alphabet) had been invented by Sir James Pitman who, as it happened, owned the Pitman Publishing Company and for whom my father worked in London.

In the name of research I have looked up ITA online: it seems to be terribly complicated and it’s a wonder that we learned anything.  Certainly to this day my spelling is hopeless, but it is equally true that I have grown up to have a fascination and love for the sounds and rhythms of the English language

 

The school itself was at the end of a quiet residential road called Rydal Drive and the single story building was set a little away from the houses up a short drive (which seemed to be terribly long to me). The main entrance led straight into the school hall in which we ate lunch and which would be the setting for my very first theatrical performance, playing a large cockerel in the annual nativity play.  I learned a great deal about performing in that hall, for I also played violin in the school orchestra.  I was not a good violinist and on one occasion during a school assembly I was scraping the instrument with such force that the tailpiece could not cope with the abuse any longer and snapped clean in two.  There was a loud bang, followed by a TWANGGGGGGG (which was possibly more musical than anything that had preceded it), and the strings dangled listlessly from the tuning pegs like rosin-covered dreadlocks. In my panic I looked at our music teacher Mr Sutton and with tears in my eyes mouthed ‘what do I do?’ to which he replied ‘SING!’

At the rear of the building there was an L-shaped tarmac playground onto which the children would pour at playtime, but the real excitement came in the shape of ‘The Mound’. When the school had been built a large pile of rubble and earth and been left on site, and this was subtly landscaped into an organic, natural play area.  Large concrete pipes were set into the base through which we could crawl, and the mound itself developed well-worn paths across it as we young Sir Edmund Hillarys made our proud way to the summit.  I am sure that the mound is long gone – a victim to health and safety regulations and natural erosion, but if there was ever a better way of encouraging children to exercise I have not heard of it.

The main playing field was at the front of the school and it was here that I first fell in love with the game of cricket.

 

 

The Nevill Cricket Ground

In the 1970s Kent was a good county to grow up in if you liked cricket, for we boasted one of the best teams in the country. When England squared off against the Australians to battle for the Ashes the spine of the team came from Kent: Colin Cowdrey was the captain, Brian Luckhurst opened the batting, as would Bob Woolmer a few years later, Alan Knott was the greatest wicket keeper in the world, and Derek Underwood bamboozled opposition batsman with his medium paced spin bowling.

These men were heroes to me, as were others in the team: The West Indian John Shepherd, the little Pakistan master batsman Asif Iqbal,  Alan Ealham who looked like a blacksmith on a village team and who would bash the ball to all corners of the ground and our fast bowler Kevin Jarvis, who couldn’t bat to save his life.  For one week every year the Kent team would come to Tunbridge Wells and play two matches at The Nevill Ground.

The Nevill was, and still is, an elegant cricket ground which nestles among banks of rhododendron bushes. The County Cricket Week was held in May and if the weather had been favourable the red flowers would provide a vivid backdrop to the game.  The main pavilion was grand, and that is where the Kent County Cricket Club members would sit in their ties and panama hats sipping their gins and tonics or Pimms, dozing in the sun, waking only to clap politely  and mutter ‘well played’ through their bushy nicotine-stained moustaches.

The players themselves weren’t permitted into the pavilion, but had a small shed in the shadow of the main edifice from which they would watch the game. The changing rooms were behind and underneath the pavilion, so crowds of children would wait until the gladiators emerged and get them to sign autographs, which they were always happy to do.

Later in the summer I would sit in front of our black and white television and watch these men doing battle against Dennis Lilly and Jeff Thomson and the rest of the pantomime villains who made up the Australian team – I had met them, spoken to them and felt proud of them: I knew that they were fighting for ME!

 

 

The Carnival of 1969

Each summer Tunbridge Wells held a carnival, the highlight of which was the parade through the centre of the town.

In 1969 my father decided that we would enter a float to help raise awareness and funds for the local branch of the RSPCA and set about the project with customary gusto.

The construction of most carnival floats involved borrowing or hiring a flat-bed lorry from a local haulier and decorating it on the morning of the event. Some floats had a band playing, a choir singing or tinny recorded music blaring out; all of them were crowded with people trying not to fall off as the inevitably surly driver let out the clutch and his truck shuddered away, leaving behind a thick smog of diesel fumes.  The Rotary Club and The Lions and the Local Scouts and Girl Guides and Army Cadets and Sea Scouts would all be out in force waving flags and collecting loose change, but Tunbridge Wells had never seen anything like the Dickens entry of ’69.

Dad decided to build a full-sized Loch Ness Monster (what was actually full size was, of course, open to debate but ours was thirty feet long), which would seem to float along the roads. The construction started many weeks before the event itself and involved many visits to RN Carr, Ironmongers in Southborough.

Carr’s had a specific smell that was only to be found in old ironmonger’s shops, and which was a mix of galvanised steel nails, cleats and screws wrapped in oiled brown paper, and garden compost. I am sure that Ronnie Barker bought his fork handles in Carr’s.

Back home in Boyne Park Nessie began to take shape. She was built on a strong (for which read heavy) wooden frame, which was covered with chicken wire to create the dinosaur’s shape.  The chicken wire was then covered in papier mache, onto which was stuck the individual cups from a thousand cardboard egg boxes to give the impression of scaly skin.  The whole thing was painted in a lurid green paint, and had the most luscious eyelashes you can imagine.

As the creation grew my mother was repeatedly dispatched to Carr’s to buy new supplies of nails and screws, and she became more and more frustrated at being patronised by the old boys who worked there. She would try and describe what she needed and the men would try to confuse her be asking the sort of question that the little lady of the house wouldn’t possibly understand: ‘are those screws to be steel or brass, countersunk, domed head, or flat?  Timber: planed or rough? Paint: gloss or emulsion?  Look, dear, why not just tell us what job your husband’s trying to do and we’ll see if we can help you out.’  To which mum fixed them with a steely eye and replied: ‘That’s very kind of you, and since you ask he is building a thirty foot long, seven foot high Loch Ness monster which is to be painted green and pushed along the road.  It needs to billow smoke from its nostrils and be strong enough to last for a two mile journey: what would you suggest?’

The motivational force for this gargantuan creature was hidden beneath each of the famous humps and involved dad, my brother Ian and one other gullible – sorry, I mean willing – friend, pushing her along on little casters. If you think how wayward a modern shopping trolley is and incrementally increase that frustration from three feet to thirty you will get some idea as to what they faced on that summer’s day.

As the float was built to promote the RSPCA it was decided that Nessie would be a pet monster, so I was dressed up in a tweed jacket and kilt to walk ahead clinging on to her ‘lead’.

The day of the procession arrived and all of the floats were marshalled in a yard of the Old West Station (roughly where you would buy sandwiches in Sainsbury’s now) and slowly made its way through the town, involving a long push up the steep hill of Mount Pleasant. We passed the Town Hall and war memorial before reaching the Five Ways junction and turning sharp right at Chieseman’s into the then un-pedestrianised Calverley Road where the crowds were four or five deep, cheering, laughing and clapping.

Me leading Nessie in Calverley Road

I seem to remember that the whole thing ended up in Broadwater Down, but that seems so far away I can’t quite believe it.

We won a rosette for best float and I think that dad was probably more proud of that award than any other achievement in his life. For years afterwards Nessie’s head hung in our garage at Boyne Park – a reminder of an extraordinary and somewhat surreal day in the summer of 1969.

There is a lovely cine film on YouTube of the Tunbridge Wells Carnival, sadly not from 69, but the year before. However the flickering, faded pastel-coloured images give some sense of the event.

I don’t think that I can’t top Nessie, so I will bring this collection of nostalgia to a close, but I have no doubt that all too soon there will be more memories of Royal Tunbridge Wells to be shared.

 

January 2016

The start of a new year is always a time when, with the rigours of Christmas behind me, I can look forward and see what is on, and over, the horizon.

For a few reasons 2016 looks to be one of the quietest for many years and although that may seem to be a frightening prospect for one whose income is based solely on performances given, I actually go into the new year in a very positive state of mind, as there are lots of new ideas and plans in my head.

This enforced period of inactivity has given me time to stand back and look at where I am now and where I need to go. Hopefully over the year you will get a sense of how things are developing.

Firstly, why are things so quiet this year?

 

To Begin With

You may remember that this time last year I was starting to learn lines for an exciting new project that was supposed to become a regular part of my year. ‘To Begin With’ was a show commissioned by my good friend, and theatre producer, Dennis Babcock.   After many years of trying Dennis had found enough investment to launch the show in Minneapolis.

After a short rehearsal period in England, I flew to the USA and spent a month working in The Music Box Theatre to bring the new show to the stage. We were a small team and it was an amazing experience.

To Begin With was well received both by the audiences and the press and we got some great reviews but sadly almost as the word was beginning to spread, so our run came to an end. We had proved however that the show worked and Dennis assured me that we would revive it as soon as possible, and to clear my diary from January to Easter in 2016 as the only thing that would limit our USA tour of To Begin With would be my availability and willingness to be away from home.

I duly put a large line in my diary and waited for news. And waited and waited. Deadlines for English theatres came and went, and still I waited for news from Minneapolis, but none came. In America Dennis was struggling to find suitable investors and eventually he let me know that we couldn’t tour To Begin With in 2016.

January, February and March lay empty in my diary.

 

The Derek Grant Organisation

In England my work comes from a number of sources, but for the last seven years or so my theatre bookings have come from a small company called The Derek Grant Organisation. DGO is run by Derek himself and his partner Michael Jones who have been involved in variety performances for many years. They have produced their own shows and represented many artistes. Sadly, however, over the last decade or so it has become increasingly difficult to attract large audiences to theatres (unless you are a tribute band, which in a way I am: perhaps I need to gather a few performers together and find a more cheesy name for the act such as ‘The Twisting Olivers’, ‘Those Dickens Dudes’, ‘A Tale of Two Dickies’, or, if I want a whole new audience ’The Knickerless Nicklebies….’ Mmmmm, maybe I’ll stick with what I have).

Just before Christmas Derek informed me that he and Michael would be stepping back and no longer working as full-time producers and while there may be a few repeat bookings filtering through their books, the regular appearances in regional theatre would stop.

So 2016 lay before me: an arid desert, with a few oases of regular bookings shimmering here and there; that made me sit back and consider what the next move should be.

 

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

The first big idea came to me as Liz and I were getting ready to visit her sister and brother-in-law in Cambridge for a post-Christmas get-together. Martin, a very talented amateur actor, whose ability has often far outstripped the productions he has been in, is due to retire as a solicitor this year and it struck me that it would be fun to find a show that we could work on together.

In the back of my mind there was the glimmer of an idea which had been planted three years ago in Santa Cruz, when I was listening to a lecture about the relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, which quite fascinated me. The two authors were close friends for many years and in 1857 Dickens proposed that they should go and have a walking adventure in Cumberland which they could use to create a short story for Dickens’s magazine Household Words.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices is a fun account of the adventures befalling Francis Goodchild (Dickens) and Thomas Idle (Collins) and starts with a day’s walking on Carrock Fell, during which they get hopelessly lost in the rain and cloud.

As the idea took hold I began to realise that there was an opportunity to interweave the biographies of these literary giants by using letters and diary extracts, alongside the Lazy Tour text, which could create a show of great interest.

I immediately ordered two copies of the book and let my mind wander. The weekend in Cambridge was fun (somehow Liz and I ended up in Capt Jack Sparrow wigs and costume), and Martin embraced the idea of The Lazy Tour with great enthusiasm. The first new project was underway.

For the next few weeks I started to search for the letters that Charles Dickens had written to Collins before the trip, as well as those written to other friends during their time away. Unfortunately the letters from Collins TO Dickens will be more difficult to find – in a fit of pique brought on by constant public scrutiny Charles burnt all of his personal correspondence in the gardens at Gad’s Hill Place.

To further my research I emailed Melisa Klimaszewski, the academic who had originally given the lecture in Santa Cruz, and to my delight she replied almost straight away with great enthusiasm for the project. In her reply Melisa happened to mention that Professor Michael Slater was currently editing a new edition of The Lazy Tour and perhaps I should chat to him as well. Professor Slater is one of the leading Dickens academics in the world, who has published a great many fabulous biographies: As far as Dickens is concerned If Michael doesn’t know about it, it didn’t happen! Michael also happens to be a great friend and supporter of my shows, so an email to him also elicited a positive response.

I now had all that I needed to begin work on the script, so how should this work…..?

 

Highgate Cemetrery

The second week of January saw my only performance of the month, at Highgate Cemetery in London, where I had been asked to perform The Signalman in the chapel.

Highgate Cemetery is one of the largest in the capital and is the final resting place of many famous people, including Karl Marx.  On a more personal level many of the Dickens family are buried there, including Charles’s parents John and Elizabeth, his wife (my great great grandmother) Catherine, his sister Fanny (who won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music while Charles was working in a shoe blacking factory and who became the model for ‘Little Fan’ in A Christmas Carol,) and his brother Alfred.

On a dark and wet night Liz and I drove towards London in the height of the rush hour. One would have thought that all of the traffic would be heading away from the city, but the fact is that it was just moving around, so we sat on the North Circular road watching the time tick by.

Fortunately The Signalman isn’t a complicated piece to stage and we arrived at the great iron gates of the cemetery with thirty minutes to spare. A few keen members of the audience were huddled together in the cold, trying to shelter from the rain as we unloaded a chair, a table and a railwayman’s lamp from our car.

The chapel itself was a lovely room, with a low stage set up at the far end. The wind outside and the knowledge that we were surrounded by thousands of dead bodies made it a perfect setting for the spine-chilling tale of The Signalman.

Having set the stage we were shown to a small office across the courtyard, where we tucked into a plate of sandwiches and waited for 7.30 start time.

The chapel was full and I started by recounting the circumstances of the terrible rail accident in which Charles had been involved in 1865. With the horror of Staplehurst vividly on the audience’s minds I launched in with that great opening line: ‘Halloa! Below there!’ The low lighting combined with the arches soaring up to the vaulted ceiling above threw eerie shadows across the room, which seemed to darken as the plot unfolded.

The performance went well and I’m sure that as the audience made their way out of the chapel and through the gothic gatehouse into the dark night more than one may have nervously glanced over their shoulder or started as a ghostly bough of the overhanging trees creaked.

As we packed up my props Melanie, the event organiser, pointed out that we were in the Anglican Chapel, where in the past a short service would have been held before burial , and that many of my ancestors would have gathered in this same room to pay their respects to John, Elizabeth, Catherine, Fanny or Alfred.

Tax Return

The tax year in the UK runs from April 5, and the deadline for submitting a return is January 31, therefore the sensible thing to do is to collate all of the figures and get them off to the accountant in April, leaving the rest of the year worry-free. Do I think that every year? Yes. Do I do it….?

Every January is filled with a mental struggle as I find any number of ways to put off ‘doing the books’ (this year the initial research for The Lazy Tour project was a superb excuse). Finally, with a week to go before the deadline, I dragged myself into the office, pulled out the various receipts and invoices from the year 2014-15 and began to work.

For a task that is purely number driven the job of preparing accounts is wonderfully evocative, for with each invoice, or hotel receipt comes a raft of happy memories: memories of a beautiful theatre with gilded boxes overlooking the stage; reflections on a show well performed and enthusiastically received by a responsive audience. I could almost taste the fish and chip lunch in a wind-swept Little Chef near Barnsley. Whitby Abbey reared before my eyes once more in all of its ruined majesty.

But the figures didn’t only bring happy memories, for there were also receipts from our trip to Ireland and Wales which was the prelude to losing our dear cat Kip. The pain and emptiness of that time returned as I ignored my financial responsibilities and tearfully opened pictures of him.

 

Marketing

With such an empty diary it became obvious that I needed to find some more work to fill the gaps, and rather than hope for a few bookings dripping in here and there, I needed to be proactive in developing new opportunities.

As regular readers will know my brother Ian is a marketing man. For many years he worked with Olympus Cameras and rose to become their Director or Marketing and now has his own consultancy business.

It seemed sensible to get together and work out a way forward that would bring us both a new income stream, so on January the 27^th we had a meeting.

I drove to Ian’s beautiful house in Bedfordshire and immediately it became apparent that we were doing things right, as he had erected a flip chart with the words ‘Gerald Dickens. The Brand’ written up.

After coffee was poured we got down to a long and varied discussion based on an agenda that I had drawn up during the week.

Ian’s great talent is his common sense approach to marketing. There are no gimmicks or buzz-words just plain sensible strategies. One of his mantras is to identify a goal and then work back from there; for example, imagine I want to play for a two month run in a thousand-seat theatre filled to capacity every night. That is not going to happen next week, so let’s first find a small theatre, and identify an audience and work until we have filled that for one night; then let’s see if we can fill it for three days, and then a week. The success and profile generated by our successful run means that we can talk to a larger theatre in a larger city with a theatre-going demographic, but there we will be starting again, so we work on the next step finding a new audience to fill every seat – and so it goes on until eventually the original goal has been reached.

The result of an hour or two around the kitchen table was that we are going to investigate self publishing a book based on my interpretation and performance of A Christmas Carol, and finally try to film the show either for DVD release or online streaming. We are going to investigate all of the festivals in the UK, and maybe try to create a tour of venues where Dickens himself performed.

Next year is the 160^th anniversary of the Lazy Tour’s publication and will also see the publication of Michael Slater’s new edition, so there are plenty opportunities to launch the new show with a fanfare.

Our meeting broke up to make way for a delicious lasagne and salad. I have no doubts that from here on things are going to get very exciting.

 

Tunbridge Wells

As the month came to a close a strange thing happened with my blog. I was minding my own business when an alert came from WordPress reading: ‘Your stats are booming! On The Road With Gerald Dickens is getting lots of traffic’, which surprised me somewhat as I hadn’t posted anything for ages. Further investigation revealed that a post written almost a year ago about my childhood memories of Tunbridge Wells had been placed on a Facebook page dedicated to the town.

I watched in amazement as the skyscraper on the stats page grew and grew, far surpassing my previous best, and then doubling and almost tripling it!  Messages came in from others who had spent their childhoods in the town and discussions went back and forth on Facebook about the town in the 1970s and where various shops had been.  In an instant digital age the power of nostalgia is a remarkable thing.

I re read the post ‘Memories of Tunbridge Wells’ and once more my childhood came to life as a whole host of new recollections came to mind: there may well be a sequel written soon, and I certainly know who to share it with.

 

A New Blog

At the beginning of January as we pondered the year ahead Liz mentioned that she wanted some creative outlet and thought that she may like to write a blog about our garden. Liz is an amazing and creative gardener and the thought and artistry which goes into making our long stretch of mud into a thing of beauty is extraordinary.

Liz wanted to share not only her practical work in the garden, but also her influences and emotions as a new year began.

As we looked out across the dull dank vista we saw dots of colour as a few buds responded to the warm winter: It was the perfect time to begin the story.  I know that you will enjoy it:

https://foxcottagegarden.wordpress.com/