Gigolo Pook

ONE

I had an extremely happy childhood surrounded by love, scandal, intrigue and rows, in the midst of a family still dominated by that strict moral code of the Victorian era which nobody observed. My father, a hugely confident man with a magnetic personality, was determined I should grow up like-wise, telling me what an engaging, intelligent child I was—a view not entirely shared by my relations.

I learned at an early age that I sprang from an ancient and noble lineage, and whenever we saw famous paintings my father was quick to show me my illustrious forbears in action. For years I was under the impression that Captain James Pook had discovered Australia in 1768, and that Napoleon had surrendered his sword to us on board the Bellerophon in 1815. My father often took me to see what had once been the Pook’s town residence in better times, now known as Cudford Museum with its impressive Grecian portico of seven pillars, where the family activities were recorded in oils, marble and parchment.

Every picture contained a Pook, usually on horseback and indicating the direction of the enemy with an out-thrust sabre, or pointing to the French fleet with his telescope as if his men could not locate where all the cannonballs were coming from.

We were also recorded in marble, often nude, throwing the discus, penning Shakespeare’s plays and discovering America. However, being essentially a naval family, I preferred the maritime pictures because my Uncle Sid had told me he was Admiral-of-the-Fleet with the rank of Chief Petty Officer.

Notice how every officer has to salute me back when I salute them, Peter, he explained. That’s because I’m Chief Petty Officer, see? Now here comes Admiral Mace, one of my best sailors. Watch, I’ll salute him and make him return my salute.

Sure enough, Admiral Mace obediently saluted my uncle and passed on. I was deeply impressed by Uncle Sid’s demonstration of his power and extremely proud that he was Admiral-of-the-Fleet so young.

It puzzled me how the family had once managed to live in such a huge building as Cudford Museum, where what had been our sitting-room was one hundred and ten feet long, and no bedrooms upstairs. Our present residence, which cost only eight shillings a week and boasted a front garden just big enough to accommodate our pram which could not get through the door, would easily fit into the Museum’s lobby. My Gran’s house was even smaller; so small in fact that the front door took you straight into the living-room, and passers-by often sat down on her window-sill for a rest, thereby causing a blackout in daytime. By night my Gran complained that customers from the adjoining pub often mistook her window for the Gents, to which end she kept a short cane by the curtain.

One of my early talents was to entertain my mother’s guests in the parlour while she made tea in the kitchen. Like a true Pook I conversed mainly about the family. I sat there preened and confident I was a fascinating child, while Mrs Buick patted my curls and observed to Mrs Foster what a loathsome creature I was, to be sure. Mrs Foster confirmed me to be a typical Pook—precocious and repulsive. I had asked my father what these terms meant and he assured me they were long words for intelligent and attractive, so I simpered engagingly and let them have the Christopher Robin smirk with my new teeth.

My Uncle Dick is a gigolo, Mrs Buick, I announced out of the blue.

Good grief!

He dances with the pretty ladies in London and they keep him.

If those pretty ladies were here, Peter, I expect they would keep your mouth shut about it.

My Uncle Dick’s got forty suits and an MG sports.

Let us pray he doesn’t get something else in the process.

I want to be a gigolo when I grow up, Mrs Buick. That’s why I’m taking dancing lessons at school.

I doubt if there is much call in the West End hotels for Indian war dances, Mrs Foster suggested coldly. I can hardly imagine a society band leader announcing, ‘Take your partners please for an Apache tribal waltz for rain.’

No, Mrs Foster, I mean a proper tango, like this.

Ever ready to show off I performed basic tango steps on the carpet, as befitted an infant gigolo of nine years. I had already learned to wiggle my bottom and snap my head to the left and right like a wary poacher stalking a pheasant. Even better, I suddenly went into the high-kicking routine of chorus girls, getting each foot above my head in turn, then an unexpected burst of ballet, and finally the soft shoe shuffle. I ran from the room, to return immediately for a curtain call despite the absence of applause except my own cries of encore, encore.

What an obnoxious little show-off! Mrs Buick remarked icily. I learned all that at Madam Robinson’s Dancing Academy, I informed them proudly.

I didn’t realize you were a pupil there, child.

I’m not, Mrs Buick. Fred Robinson and me are pals at school, so when I call for him I watch the girls so much that I can do what they do. Look.

Without warning I kicked my right leg high over my head, then held it there so I could hop about on the other leg.

Stop it at once, Peter, Mrs Buick cried. A most revolting exhibition if ever I saw one.

What’s more, you’ve split your trousers in an unmentionable place, child, Mrs Foster confirmed. I thought you wanted to be a gigolo, not a chorus girl.

I want to marry a chorus girl, Mrs Foster.

The way you’re going on you won’t be able to marry anyone.

I can do the splits too.

My immediate demonstration of the splits was accompanied by a protracted noise of tearing cloth, completely severing the gusset of my trousers to the extent that I appeared to be clad in leggings rather than a single garment. The trousers were literally split in half from the waist-band at the rear to the buttons in front, as I examined myself in astonishment at so much damage.

Let us pray it is only your trousers which have split, Mrs Buick observed, just as my mother entered with the tea tray. My mother often wondered why guests sometimes failed to visit us after the first time, but now she regarded me in wonderment as I sat on the carpet practically in my underpants.

I was extremely proud of Uncle Dick. Sometimes he would call unexpectedly, dressed in white tie and tails, top hat and gold cane, just like Fred Astaire. But what thrilled me most was the black cloak with the crimson silk lining, which he always swirled off like a visiting conjurer before patting his sleek black hair in front of the mirror. I used to think to myself if he dresses like this just to have tea with us down here in the sticks, what does he wear in London when he’s working? I asked him once and he replied pyjamas.

What added to his glamour was his being a ballroom champion, with cups and medals to prove it. Further evidence was stamped on his half-hunter watch, his gold cigarette case, and on the medallions sewn to the lining of his jacket—even the gold cuff-links told us he was Blackpool’s Carioca King last year. Whenever anybody inquired where he was, they were invariably told the magic phrase, he’s dancing in London, so that my young mind pictured him perpetually dancing in tails, day and night, along the Strand and round Piccadilly Circus. Even off the dance floor, Uncle Dick behaved like a true professional, never moving above the hip-line, upright with left shoulder inclined to the line of advance, head high, face a mask of immobility, observing you only by eyeball swivel. Below the hips he was graceful and silent, gliding along the street with that tardy but long stride of the slow foxtrot, pivoting on the ball of the foot for a perfectly balanced turn into our road, performing a neat chassé to allow an old lady to pass on the narrow pavement, and so timing his arrival at our door for a finale toe-spin to expose the crimson silk lining of the black cape for the neighbours’ benefit, halting at the exact position for his cane to press the bell.

Being an observant child I spotted an odd thing about Uncle Dick. On the rare occasions when he spent a weekend with us to rest, as he termed it, he stayed in bed all day, rising only for supper. Mother had invited some friends round to meet him during the short period he was up, so about eight o’clock Uncle Dick burst into the room fully kitted in tails and cloak, and wearing the top hat indoors. Following his matador routine with the cloak, I involuntarily clapped his entrance, whereupon he pirouetted lightly on his toes as he pulled off his white gloves. Our visitors were visibly impressed, thinking he had just arrived from London, but I knew he had just got up. Even stranger, I knew he wasn’t going out, but would return to bed directly after supper. This gave me a new mental picture of Uncle Dick, who, when not dancing in London, was lying in bed fully booted and spurred.

The last time I saw Uncle Dick he was no longer in tails, but in full flying kit, with the goggles pushed up on the leather helmet. He had obviously joined the RAF because he had grown an outsize moustache like pilots do, and was waiting by a huge poster of a fighter plane advertising Hell’s Angels outside the Troxy Cinema, as though he had lately landed there by parachute. He kept looking up at the night sky and shouting, Standing only; seven singles in the balcony.

When I accosted him he explained, They’re sending a staff car to rush me to the airdrome, Peter, because I’m on night ops. Standing only; seven singles in the balcony.

But why do you keep calling out to the queues, Uncle Dick?

Oh that! I’m on loan from the RAF to do a guest spot here to publicize the film. Standing only; seven singles in the balcony. And see how it’s packed them in, Peter. Standing only; seven singles in the balcony. Go on, pop upstairs and see the film free—I’ll fix it with the management. Standing only; six singles in the balcony. . . .

Mrs Buick possessed great influence in our circle because her husband was a retired army major—retired from a successful career marred by a single defeat at the Battle of the Nile, 1917, where he had been outflanked, surrounded and finally captured by Mrs Buick, then a young spinster harassing the British Army on all sides. In conversation she referred to him as Major Buick or the Major instead of Norman, and brought herself into the conversation with the preface, As a major’s wife, I declare that. . . .

We were fortunate to receive Mrs Buick to tea every Tuesday because she was high up the scale of the hierarchy of local society, just two points below doctors and solicitors and similar gentry. So high in fact that my mother did not let Vera—our maid at 7s.6d. a week— bring in the tea but performed this chore herself.

Mrs Foster, on the other hand, was only halfway up the mountain, being the wife of Nick Foster, Distribution Superintendent with Cudford Dairies at £3 12s. 6d. per week, who was best known for retiring early. This early retirement was an essential part of his profession because he commenced work at 4 a.m. in order to ensure all milk floats were on the road before dawn. In emergencies he was not above taking out a float himself, so that whatever else they might be short of the Foster household was never short of milk. To become a milkman with Cudford Dairies—as with the Co-op also—it was necessary to pass an examination. This was one of the highest paid jobs in the area—£3 4s. 9d. a week for two delivery rounds per day—and skilled craftsmen in Cudford Dockyard on the top rate of £2 18s. 3d. had been known to abandon shipbuilding for the milk business in order to gain the extra money.

Mrs Foster took in a lady lodger for company, as she expressed it, 4/6d. a week, and the lady lodger in turn took in washing and mending. Mrs Buick, however, owned the house she occupied, and kept a cook-general who lived in at £1 per week. My mother rated Mrs Buick’s visits so highly that she used a tea-strainer and sugar-tongs, and placed a tiny muff on the tea-pot spout to catch drips. Also there were my favourite tuppenny chocolate éclairs, and seven-for-sixpence jam doughnuts.

What mystified me at these gatherings was the way the ladies talked so much scandal of which they disapproved most strongly. Why, I asked myself, did they harp on about things they disliked? And why did they adopt the maddening habit of losing the power of speech at the best parts and continue with lip movements only?

And why did they lower their voices at critical moments, when nobody outside could possibly hear them? And why did they persist in spelling out certain words and widening their eyes in the process?

So now, by all accounts, my cook-general informs me that the silly woman is p-r-e-g-n-e-n-t, Mrs Buick informed the company.

P-r-e-g-n-A-n-t, Mrs Buick, I corrected her politely.

Mrs Buick regarded me with the face of one who has opened a bad egg at breakfast. What a precocious, prying boy you have, to be sure, Mrs Pook. Why doesn’t he go and play in the garden like normal children of his age? Hasn’t he any little friends to take his mind off eavesdropping on every single word I utter? Only last week he informed me his Uncle Dick is a gigolo or something he shouldn’t know about.

I’ll go and play for a shilling, eff, eff, eff, eff! I replied, lapsing into my financial lisp and giving her my most endearing chuckle by placing the top teeth on the lip and blowing till some small bubbles appeared.

Ugh! What a hideous child, to be sure, Mrs Foster confirmed as one of the bubbles alighted on her hand.

I’ll just pop into the kitchen and refill the pot, ladies, my mother decided tactfully.

I sat there in the absence of a shilling, staring at the visitors with my choirboy smile to let them see I was not hurt. My Uncle Ted’s been inside, I announced with the abruptness of youth.

Inside what, pray? Mrs Buick inquired without looking at me.

And for decency’s sake wipe the chocolate off your face and ears, Peter, Mrs Foster added. Such a little glutton you are.

You had as many cakes as me, Mrs Foster. You had five, Mrs Buick had six and I only had seven. Mum only had one so you could eat them all. You’ve all had two cups of tea, but I only had one. The cream puff what’s left we call the good manners one, but now you’ve finished I can have it.

The two ladies exchanged the glance favoured by people who find they are both standing over a