Short Story

PULLING STRINGS

Jan Pain, Sherborne Scribblers

In the late forties, my parents and I would take tea with Uncle Gerald, my rotund and jolly relation with the deepest cleft chin I ever saw, intriguingly sprouting tufts of dark hair. His ebullient personality was a foil to that of his somewhat superior wife, Aunt Dot, whose languid manner and stylish mode of dress were equally captivating to a small girl.

They had been bombed out of their London home and, like thousands of others, were living in a prefab – the compactness and rectilinear design of which appealed to me after our sprawling house in the Surrey hills. It seemed like a cosy doll’s house, filled with utility furniture and donated household bits and pieces from sympathetic family and friends to fill that yawning gap of losing nearly everything.

Gerald was what in those days was referred to as ‘a card’ – full of fun and practical jokes and a competent pianist in the music hall tradition, thumping out on our arrival The Twelfth Street Rag from his rescued bomb-scarred piano, heralding our anticipation of scones for tea. As a precursor, Gerald would fill a Kilner jar with creamy milk, shaking it calypso style, and produce enough butter for our tea time treat. Entranced, I waited for the magic moment when a golden yellow nugget appeared and watched as he poured off the buttermilk. A pinch of salt was added and, together with Dot’s homemade plum jam, the indulgence was complete.

But it was late on those autumn afternoons when the highlight of our visit would materialise, thanks to Gerald’s thespian leanings and generosity. In Church Street, Chiswick, stood a little theatre – a two-storey house with a lofty studio above where John and Doris Bickerdike performed with their Ebor Marionettes. Ascending to the first floor into the cavernous, dark space seating around fifty people, I had no idea I was in the company of highbrows, lowbrows, artists, musicians and poets comprising the audience, only being aware of a frisson of excitement running through my veins. Gold crushed velvet curtains adorned the proscenium opening with an embroidered drop drape behind. It was a breath-taking setting, full of promise. A workshop occupied the rear where puppets hung in the course of creation and the walls of the auditorium were covered in photos from the Bickerdike’s West End glory days in the thirties, depicting costume and scenic designs of historical interiors.

The repertoire of this remarkable company included plays, operas, fantasies and performances by characters from variety theatre. John was a professional woodcarver by trade, whose ‘day job’ was fashioning angels to embellish

ecclesiastical buildings. He achieved great realism in his marionette creations, then handed them over to Doris who made the costumes and was renowned for her skill as a manipulator.

I can only surmise that a gramophone provided the source of music accompanying each act. I was introduced to The Peer Gynt Suite as trolls danced before my eyes in The Hall of the Mountain King where Peer finds himself captive, and the exoticism of Anitra in her Bedouin tent from Ibsen’s same story – each brought to life by the clever animation of the characters as the Bickerdikes controlled the marionettes.

The little cameos are too numerous to recollect fully but my undoubted favourite was Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – that enduring, grizzly, Victorian melodrama sending shivers down my spine. It’s said that children enjoy experiencing this sort of terror and I don’t believe it left me traumatised! On reflection, the technical expertise of the operators was astonishing, as the barber’s chair tipped its bloody victim via the wings into the hands of Mrs Lovett below, shortly to become the filling for her meat pies! Deftly, the chair was restored to its upright position to await its next client.

Thrilled and exhausted in equal measure, I clambered into the back seat of my father’s Ford 8, where I slept on the journey home. This magical entertainment left its mark on my love of puppet theatre, which in later life has been enjoyed in most European capitals, where it still flourishes. Inextricably linked, for me, are tea time scones and the theatricality of Uncle Gerald whose introduction to this enchanting world was such an unsurpassed gift.

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