home to scores of vignetted portraits of bewhiskered fellows in stiff wing-collars and curl-brimmed hats, and ample women sharing the same stem, unwavering gaze – great-great-aunts employed as rabbit-skinners by a company that made hats for the quality of the city; the great-grandmother of a second cousin in a sandwich board advertising the suffragette journal, The Common Cause.
Every night at Bobby’s brought people who had clearly come slumming; groups of businessmen, in particular, in the North for a bulling session or a sales conference, came prepared to smirk. But after half-a-dozen rousing choruses of ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny’ or ‘The Gallowgate Lad’ and (especially) a dozen pitchers of Radgie Gadgie strong bitter, they tended like everybody else to be content to be cast back to a time when nobody spoke of ‘community’ and everybody belonged to one, and nearly always went away with a souvenir T-shirt or a video or a picture of themselves taken with the star of the show ( £ 8.50 incl. de-embossed self-stand cardboard frame) at the end. Jackie was in charge of the merchandise, which he sold from a kiosk in the main foyer, where he was also occasionally asked, usually by a fellow former denizen of the boxing racket, to sign an autograph himself. Like most places of public entertainment, the club was cold and rather bleak-looking when it was empty. ‘Sharp warms up when people come in, like,’ Blanche, the general manager, would reassure new members of staff as they stood in the hangar-like , vaulted space with their collars up and their hands plunged deep in their pockets, watching Blanche’s breath pluming in the twilighted darkness. Voices echoed in the building in those pre-opening hours and something like a clattering ladder detonated with the shock of an explosion, and even the old-stagers sometimes allowed themselves to be teased by the thought: What if no one ever came? What if all the customers of Bobby’s had decided against it and found somewhere else to go in the future?
Normally it was a thought that could be immediately dismissed rather than morbidly chewed over. There was a thick bookings register made thicker by Post-its and business cards and elastic bands that Blanche fussed and clucked over, endlessly entering new names into it and rubbing old names out, briskly dusting the crumbs of rubber away with the heel of her hand. There was a bookings book and usually the book was full a month or so ahead.But when she had got in just after ten that morning there had been messages on the machine from Bulls Hill Farm at Dunstan, and Emrick Farm at Yarm, cancelling their tables for that night. And all through the morning all the other farmers who had been coming in with their families for what was turning into a much-looked -forward-to, once-a-year occasion – Cleughfoot Farm, Cambo; High Highlaws Farm, Marlish; Startup Farm, Halt-whistle – had had to cancel their bookings on account of foot-and -mouth disease. (Blanche soon started to recognize the jumpiness in the voices and to appreciate that people were calling from already quarantined places where unknown, and possibly unendurable , circumstances lay ahead.) By the time Ray arrived, the page for that day was striped with rulered black lines. There were still some private bookings for couples and small groups of four or five. But the only block booking remaining was for a party of sixty associated with the Ephphatha League of the Deaf, a social club exclusively for deaf-mutes. It had already been agreed that a signer would stand at the side of the stage during Ray’s set, to sign the jokes.
‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker,’ Blanche said, poking her pencil into the airy pillow of hair at the side of her head.
‘This should be interesting,’ Ray said and headed for his dressing-room, where they both knew his first drink of the day – a generous Jack-and-ginger – would be waiting on the table by the sun-bed.
The
Every night at Bobby’s brought people who had clearly come slumming; groups of businessmen, in particular, in the North for a bulling session or a sales conference, came prepared to smirk. But after half-a-dozen rousing choruses of ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny’ or ‘The Gallowgate Lad’ and (especially) a dozen pitchers of Radgie Gadgie strong bitter, they tended like everybody else to be content to be cast back to a time when nobody spoke of ‘community’ and everybody belonged to one, and nearly always went away with a souvenir T-shirt or a video or a picture of themselves taken with the star of the show ( £ 8.50 incl. de-embossed self-stand cardboard frame) at the end. Jackie was in charge of the merchandise, which he sold from a kiosk in the main foyer, where he was also occasionally asked, usually by a fellow former denizen of the boxing racket, to sign an autograph himself. Like most places of public entertainment, the club was cold and rather bleak-looking when it was empty. ‘Sharp warms up when people come in, like,’ Blanche, the general manager, would reassure new members of staff as they stood in the hangar-like , vaulted space with their collars up and their hands plunged deep in their pockets, watching Blanche’s breath pluming in the twilighted darkness. Voices echoed in the building in those pre-opening hours and something like a clattering ladder detonated with the shock of an explosion, and even the old-stagers sometimes allowed themselves to be teased by the thought: What if no one ever came? What if all the customers of Bobby’s had decided against it and found somewhere else to go in the future?
Normally it was a thought that could be immediately dismissed rather than morbidly chewed over. There was a thick bookings register made thicker by Post-its and business cards and elastic bands that Blanche fussed and clucked over, endlessly entering new names into it and rubbing old names out, briskly dusting the crumbs of rubber away with the heel of her hand. There was a bookings book and usually the book was full a month or so ahead.But when she had got in just after ten that morning there had been messages on the machine from Bulls Hill Farm at Dunstan, and Emrick Farm at Yarm, cancelling their tables for that night. And all through the morning all the other farmers who had been coming in with their families for what was turning into a much-looked -forward-to, once-a-year occasion – Cleughfoot Farm, Cambo; High Highlaws Farm, Marlish; Startup Farm, Halt-whistle – had had to cancel their bookings on account of foot-and -mouth disease. (Blanche soon started to recognize the jumpiness in the voices and to appreciate that people were calling from already quarantined places where unknown, and possibly unendurable , circumstances lay ahead.) By the time Ray arrived, the page for that day was striped with rulered black lines. There were still some private bookings for couples and small groups of four or five. But the only block booking remaining was for a party of sixty associated with the Ephphatha League of the Deaf, a social club exclusively for deaf-mutes. It had already been agreed that a signer would stand at the side of the stage during Ray’s set, to sign the jokes.
‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker,’ Blanche said, poking her pencil into the airy pillow of hair at the side of her head.
‘This should be interesting,’ Ray said and headed for his dressing-room, where they both knew his first drink of the day – a generous Jack-and-ginger – would be waiting on the table by the sun-bed.
The
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