All those women pushing to get up front and touch it, Nechells not being a place where you saw a lot of gold lamé.
The next Saturday he went back down to Oxford Street for more supplies. Mrs Grimley said she couldn’t be doing with any more of it because of the fraying and the mess on her carpet, so he took it all to a tailor called Funkleman and had two more jackets made, one in silver lamé, one in rainbow glistenette. Funkleman thought our Sel was loopy but he took his money anyway.
After that he spent all his time thinking about suits and relied on me to do the musical groundwork, picking out new songs, trying out new arrangements. If we were doing both halves he’d change his whole outfit before the second set. He’d come running on and twirl around, so they could get a good look at his outfit. And the ladies appeared to like it. They didn’t seem to care if he was out of puff and his singing was affected. Sometimes we’d only do half of the second set because they kept calling to him, egging him on to dance around some more and come down to the front, and make goo-goo eyes at them and ask them their names. Married women with their husbands looking on. He was lucky one of them didn’t come over and thump him, but it never happened. Sel always got away with murder.
So the routine was, if we had a booking I’d go straight to bed when I got home from Greely’s, to try and get some sleep, although I hardly ever did, what with the daylight streaming in and Sel upstairs practising his twirling, like an elephant with clogs on. Then, about five o’clock Mam would start filling the tin tub, so he could have a soak before tea. She’d put towels on the clothes horse and arrange it round him like a screen so he could be private. I don’t know why she bothered because she was in and out every minute, topping up the water and scrubbing his back. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she’d say. ‘You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen.’
And he didn’t mind. He’d just sit there smiling like a great pink bab, steaming and smelling of white heather bath salts.
‘Why don’t you get in after him, Cled?’ she’d say. ‘It’s a pity to waste the hot water.’
But I wouldn’t. A stand-up wash in the kitchen suited me and I wouldn’t have put it past him to do a jimmy riddle in the tub, just to spite me.
As it was, I’d had to move out of our bedroom. ‘He needs a room to himself,’ Mam said, ‘so he can work on his presentation and conserve himself for his public.’
She got him a full-length mirror and made a star out of a silver cake board and stuck it to the door, and I had to move downstairs and have a zed bed in the front room.
I said, ‘Why can’t he have the front room? He could hang his stuff from the picture rail.’
We never used that front room. Nobody did in those days. It was kept for funeral teas, but luckily we never seemed to have any.
‘And have everybody peering in,’ she said, ‘spying on his costumes? No, no. That wouldn’t do. You have to understand, Cledwyn. A star has to keep his air of mystiquerie.’
So everybody peered in at me instead, especially Mrs E from next door, because the front-room curtains were the kind that only looked like curtains. You couldn’t actually close them. I always waited till I was under the covers before I took my trousers off.
We were getting three or four bookings a week, travelling as far as Wolverhampton or Castle Bromwich sometimes, struggling on the bus with his shiny jacket on a special hanger and him with his collar up and sunglasses on at seven o’clock on a January night so as not to be recognised.
‘I’ll have to get a car,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ll buy it and you can drive me.’
I wouldn’t have minded.
‘We’ll have tartan rugs in the back,’ he said. ‘And a personalised number plate. SEL 1.’
We were doing all right for money by then but Sel could spend it faster than they could mint it. Day trips to London. Cuff links and fancy shirts and high-heeled boots from Drury Lane. He kept a log of what he’d worn where, so he wouldn’t repeat himself. He bought silly things as well. Knick-knacks for his bedroom. A suitcase with his initials on it.
Mam encouraged him, of course. ‘Beautiful,’ she’d say. ‘You’ve got very good taste, Selwyn, like me.’
But it would have been nice if he’d put a few quid aside every week, like I did. There were things needed doing around the house. The roof needed re-tiling and the gas stove was from the year dot. And then there were the sanitary arrangements. The council were bringing in home improvement grants and not before time.
I said, ‘I think this is something we should look into. Get this place brought up to standard. We should do it for Mam.’
The way it worked was you paid half and the council paid half, and you could get a proper bathroom put in, next to the kitchen. Mrs Grimley had signed up for it and the Edkinses at number 15, but Sel wasn’t interested.
He said, ‘Mam, do you want the upheaval of getting a bathroom?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Where would we keep the coal? And how would we go on without our convenience?’
That was what they did. Took your coal house and the outside lav and converted them into all mod cons.
I said, ‘That’s easy. We can get a bunker for the coal and we won’t need an outside lav any more because we’ll have an inside one. And lovely hot baths whenever you want them. We can put a shelf up, for your Amami and your talc. You’ll be like Cleopatra.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She was wavering, I could tell.
I said to Sel, ‘Tell her how nice it’d be. No more lugging in bathwater for you every club night.’
‘Cled,’ he said, ‘frankly I’m thinking bigger than Ninevah Street. Bigger and better, onward and ever upward. I’ll be moving on soon so what’s the point of spending money on this dump?’
I said, ‘Oh, well, then, you’ll be moving on so you’re all right. What about the rest of us? How about a few comforts for Mam in her old age?’
‘You plum duff,’ he said. ‘When I move on, she’ll move on. And so will you, unless you intend trimming car seats the rest of your life. I’m on my way to the big time, our kid, and you and Mam are invited along.’
But his first move out of Ninevah Street was nearly his last. He came close to moving on somewhere nobody else can follow.
It was September of 1949 when it happened. It had been so hot the tar was melting on the roads and there wasn’t a breath of air. You didn’t feel like doing anything, only sitting still in your vest and pants and having a glass of lemonade, but we had club appearances three nights in a row so we had to stir ourselves, and of course we got a very poor turnout. People were staying at home, sitting out on their front steps, hoping for a cooling breeze. Things were so half-hearted the night we played the Alma Street Liberal I said we should cancel the rest of our bookings till the weather broke, but His Numps wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Sel Boff never cancels,’ he said. ‘The show goes on.’
So the show did go on. We were appearing at the Birmingham Welsh, with a novelty gargler who did the William Tell overture, Chucky Crawford doing his old card tricks and a vocalist called Avril who was just starting out, dark honey blonde with a nice frontage and a big voice for such a pint pot. She was making a play for Sel, straightening her stocking seams in front of him, getting him to fasten her necklace. I could have saved her the trouble. When it was showtime he had a one-track mind.
He seemed all right in the first half. We did ‘Start the Day With a Smile’, ‘Where or When’ and ‘You Rascal You’, and he’d acted the giddy goat as usual, running around, showing the ladies his new cummerbund, getting into a