The Devil Rides Out by Paul O'Grady Page A

lot of forms in triplicate and stamping the dead creatures’ flanks with a large rubber stamp that proclaimed ‘Condemned Meat’. The sight and smell of the slaughterhouse made me feel physically sick. I was forever talking through my nose so I didn’t have to inhale the smell of raw meat and blood, and the slaughtermen must’ve thought I had either adenoids or a permanent cold.
Occasionally a sheep or cow would escape, briefly enlivening the boredom, and make a bid for freedom up the old Chester Road with everyone in hot pursuit. Once a pig ran out of the gates and jumped on to a Crossville bus that had conveniently just pulled up at the bus stop outside. Somehow it managed to climb the stairs and get up on to the top deck, knocking an old woman over. Poor things must’ve been terrified, the pig and the pensioner.
    A story that sickens me to this day was told to me by one of the slaughtermen. He was a big beefy bullet-headed hunk of a man, stripped to the waist, his magnificent chest and thighs covered by a blood-splattered black leather apron, a massive turn-on, I suppose, for some gay men and heterosexual women but one that did nothing for me. He had huge hands and swollen fingers with blood ingrained dark red and deep around each fingernail. Standing outside one afternoon having a fag and absently watching a small bonfire at the end of the yard, I wondered what it was they were burning. It certainly stank. ‘Spontaneous abortion,’ a slaughterman told me. ‘If a cow comes in pregnant then we abort it and burn it along with the condemned meat. If the abortion comes out a decent size then we sell it on as veal.’ I’m not sure if that story was true but it was enough to put me off meat for over a year, and even today I’m still slightly nauseous at the sight of a well-stocked butcher’s window.
    The Unity Youth Theatre got me through the boredom of the daily grind at the abattoir. I’d been cast in a strange play called Punch and Judy! and we rehearsed in a building in an alley off Church Street. We were a mixed bag. There was Florence, small and plump with apple-dumpling cheeks who appeared to be very intense until you got to know her and made her laugh, then her eyes twinkled and her solemn little face lit up in a smile. Flom, as we came to call her, could play the piano and had been cast as the Proprieter of the Punch and Judy Show. Christina, a delightful redhead who came (according to gossip) from a very good family, played a jolly-hockey-sticks-type doctor. A lad named Dave made an excellent Mr Punch. I’m not implying that his nose met his chin or that he had a hump on his back; no, he was an energetic and inventive performer who threw himself into this peculiar role as if he were playing Lear’s Fool at the National. Angela was his Judy.
‘Not much of a part really,’ she said airily, in the manner of a seasoned actress who had done the rounds, over a half of cider in the pub after rehearsals. ‘Couple of lines and then I get hit over the head with a stick. I think I’m going to play her Irish, she sounds Irish with a name like Judy, don’t you think?’ I could only bring to mind the Judys Garland, Holliday and Carne (this last Judy from Rowan & Martin’s Laughin) and none of those seemed remotely Irish to me but I caught Angela’s drift and nodded in agreement like an old pro. In addition to Judy she was also playing Lola, Joey the Clown’s assistant. I was never off the stage, playing the roles of both Joey and the Hangman as well as appearing as chorus in a couple of numbers. I was in seventh heaven and if Ron, who’d introduced me to Unity in the first place, was a little put out that he had only been given the part of the Illustrious Gentleman, which he wasn’t very keen on, then he was big enough not to show it.
    The part of the policeman went to a lugubrious chap with a face like Deputy Dawg whose name I can’t remember, and then there was Christine. Christine was understudying