The Valley by Richard Benson Page B

Winnie says he’s barmy and she won’t be able to show her face again in Highgate, but privately she thinks his ideas are good, and a part of her likes the idea of a husband who is popular and acclaimed.
    Harry will never tell anyone how he carries the half-pint under his skirt, but the trick and the Mother Riley take-off appeal to promoters. With Millie often performing with him, he is booked for bigger clubs around Doncaster and Barnsley and moves up the bill, adding the Sand Dance and the Dudley drumming as he goes. Winnie welcomes the extra money because pit wages are low and the chances of being made unemployed high; that autumn the Jarrow Marchers pass through Barnsley, and King Edward VIII goes to mining villages in South Wales and says that something must be done to get the people work. For Millie the fees make up for the loss of earnings after Danny retires from professional boxing and shifts to training lads in the Bolton-upon-Dearne gymnasium. It is she who will be doing the travelling now, says Harry, and she had better get ready because this act is going places.
    *
    ‘Skegness?’ says Winnie one Sunday morning in June 1938, as a hungover, late-rising Harry eats a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the radio humming fuzzily in the background. 
    ‘There’s nowt wrong with Skegness,’ says Harry. ‘You like it.’
    Skegness is busy and booming, with a Butlin’s holiday camp just opened and new gardens, baths and a boating lake on its foreshore pulling in East Midlands families with money to spend.
    ‘I do like it,’ she says, ‘but I don’t disappear off to it on a Saturday night, though.’
    ‘More’s t’ pity.’
    ‘Shut up, Harry. Who’s booked you?’
    He tells her the name of the pub. ‘Twenty-five bob.’
    Winnie catches herself. Twenty-five shillings is a lot, even after it’s been shared out with Millie.
    ‘How are you going to get there?’
    Feeling optimistic that the Skegness booking will be a success, Harry has already purchased a secondhand tandem from a couple in Goldthorpe. Millie, though doubtful at first, has decided she is game.
    ‘Our Millie’s as daft as you are,’ Winnie says when Harry confesses.
    ‘It’s ambition,’ he replies. ‘Tha’s got to start somewhere.’
    After lunch on the Saturday, Harry and Millie pack their costumes and props into bags, tie them to the tandem’s frame, and set off at a wobbling pace along the road that leads to Doncaster and then to the open flat country and the sea. It is a fine, warm day and they reach the town in five hours, stopping off at a pub on the way for a pint of bitter and a half of stout. The act goes down well and they are offered a repeat booking. As they cycle home through the warm, dark countryside, they sing their songs and make plans, and the next morning Harry tells Winnie that he was right: Skegness will be only the beginning of the venture.
    Harry talks to some acts he knows and pitches them to promoters as a music-hall troupe called the Mother Riley Roadshow, with him as compère and Millie as vocalist. After a few weeks of rehearsing and plugging they get a foot-of-the-bill booking at a theatre in Rotherham, and Harry paints posters, drills the acts, and grows anxious and irritable with Winnie until the afternoon comes when he can get on the tandem and set off towards the bright lights of the city to the south.
    Later that night, when Roy, Tommy and Juggler Jane have all been long asleep, and Winnie is reading a romance in the sitting room, she hears muffled sounds outside: laughter, singing and a fumbled scratching of keys on the door. In a burst of air and banter, Harry, Millie and Danny tumble in with a gang of comics and musicians, all of a-snigger and a-roar with booze. ‘T’ performance has gone down wonderful, my love,’ says Harry, ‘and t’ manager wants us back. Bring my champagne and cigars!’
    He turns on the radio and sends one of the gang up to the beer-off near the crossroads at the top of the