A Box At The Empire

Once my father came back from the war, from time to time, providing he and my mother were on speaking terms, he would propose a special treat, either just for him and myself and occasionally my young brother, like going to the Museums to look at Dinosaurs and Mummies or one that involved the whole family like the Pantomime at Chatham Empire. I must emphasise that these treats were few and far between, not only because they involved unplanned expenditure but also because as time went on he and my mother had a hard time communicating. I did not quite understand the reasons for this then but later came to realise that he was an adulterer and had more than one Fancy Woman. This behaviour caused my mother great distress and decades later she was to say that in many ways she blamed herself and that she had never been good at forgiveness. The only thing I was aware of at the time was that she seemed to spend a great deal of time crying.

The visits to various museums and art galleries were not an unmitigated success as far as I was concerned and my younger brother was definitely more taken with dinosaurs than I was. Neither of us found paintings terribly thrilling and our Grandmother was heard to say that in her opinion it was the war that had ruined him. Aunt Rose who was married to a Welshman who did a fair bit of gallery visiting himself said it was because at times The War turned perfectly ordinary men from normal to highbrow. In her opinion they returned to Civvy Street with ideas above their station and this was evidenced by the development of an admiration for foreign ideas. I was wont to agree with her there because my father seemed to have a preoccupation with something called spaghetti which he insisted was delicious, and I privately thought looked like worms in blood. To be fair the only spaghetti I had actually seen was the tinned variety courtesy of Heinz displayed on the outside wall of Penney, Son & Parkers’ shop adjacent to the Roman Catholic Church on The Hill. When I pointed out the similarity with worms my father told me that I was extremely foolish if I thought that Heinz canned spaghetti was anything like the real thing. I made no further response but decided that I would be most unlikely to ever sample the real thing and in fact would actively avoid it at all costs.

It was to be a long time before I was given the opportunity to try it when a boyfriend took me to an Italian restaurant in Bloomsbury on the occasion of his own birthday. I was sharply reminded of the worms at the first few surprisingly tasty mouthfuls. Unexpectedly I came to the realization that all things Italian were not necessarily as unpalatable as they had previously appeared to be. Some time later in discussion with a cousin whose father was also said to have been ruined by the war, far from enthusiastically agreeing she said that she didn’t think she could ever get used to foreign muck and would prefer a Wimpy hamburger with chips any day of the week.

But when I was still a child these discussions were not frequent because we rarely went in for what is now termed Eating Out and on those exceptional occasions when we did, it was generally in cafes serving Egg & Chips and Fish & Chips . Not especially inspiring.

It was some weeks before Christmas when I was told that our entire family would be going to the Theatre – the Proper Theatre, the Theatre Royal, Chatham. We were going to see a Pantomime, Jack & The Beanstalk. I was nine years old and beginning to become very taken with The Theatre and greatly influenced by the children’s books of Pamela Brown and Noel Streatfield.

We set off for Chatham a few days later, traveling by train from Gravesend and arriving at The Empire Box Office just after lunch. It was then that we found all tickets for the stalls and circle had been sold. In fact the only seats left in the house were four in a Box at the huge sum of four pounds. My mother said that had he thought ahead my father would have booked and that nobody could afford four pounds. Despite this my father, who had been paid only the day before, paid up and that is how we came to be seated like very important people in a box overlooking the stage. It was my first experience of traditional Pantomime other than what I had read in books and I was immediately very much taken with the Principal Boy and the Pantomime Dame and the tradition of heckling from the audience. All in all I was both thrilled and delighted with the day, more so than my young brother, and very keen to return. However, it was to be a long time before I would find myself in the building for a second time, when I would go with a songwriter called Bill Crompton to see a performance of his great friend and ally, Morgan Thunderclap Jones, pianist, who had thoughtfully provided us with complimentary seats in the front stalls.

My mother, definitely keener on visits to the cinema, was not nearly as taken as I was with the theatre trip and maintained that you could waste a fair amount of hard earned money if you spent it inadvisedly in theatres. However, this particular treat still remains with me as one of the most magical events of my childhood – the day when we saw Jack & The Beanstalk from the luxury of a Box overlooking the stage, exactly like a family in a book! What could be better?