LITMIR.BIZ

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with a lifelong ‘horror of debt and a steely determination to pay my own way’.⁸ In spite of such sobering moral lessons, Harry still somehow managed to contrive on countless occasions to stun Connie with his capriciousness. On one such occasion he decided – without informing Connie – that he urgently needed a ‘home cinematograph’ he had seen advertised in the local newspaper. It arrived with one film, which, in the absence of a screen, he proceeded to project, over and over again, on to the pantry wall. He never quite got round to buying a proper screen, nor did he ever quite get round to purchasing any more films, either.

      One reason why Connie was prepared to tolerate such behaviour was the fact that, deep down, she had always valued his unforced charm and his ebullient sense of showmanship. Although she was never happier than when she had the time to sit at the piano and sing her favourite songs, she was, Ernie recalled, ‘temperamentally reluctant to perform in public’.⁹ The quixotic Harry, in contrast, was an instinctive performer, and talented enough (like his father before him) to take his amateur song and dance routines on to the local club circuit. Full of amusing stories, tried-and-tested jokes and familiar crowd-pleasing songs, Harry ‘would have made the perfect Butlin’s Redcoat’,¹⁰ and Connie, for all of her well-founded fears about their future, loved and admired – and perhaps even gently envied – that untamed and indomitable sense of fun.

      She was not the only one who did. Ernie, from a very early age, was entranced by ‘this warm, immensely attractive man with a sunny personality and an optimistic disposition’.¹¹ If there is one word that appears more often than any other in the autobiography of Ernie Wise, then that word is ‘devoted’.¹² Beneath the bustling ambitiousness there was always a rare generosity of spirit about Ernie Wise, a genuine admiration of other performers. This uncommon yet thoroughly decent quality first became evident in the obvious enthusiasm that he showed for his father’s burgeoning stage career. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps – not to compete with him but rather to join him – help him – and share in his joyful escapism.

      When he reached the age of six or seven Ernie began to ask his mother to teach him some popular songs, such as ‘The Sheikh of Araby’, which he would then dutifully memorise and proceed to rehearse interminably. One evening, after Harry had finished his tea, Connie instructed him to get up from the table and go into the other room. ‘Ernest’, she said conspiratorially, ‘has something to show you.’¹³ When he opened the door to the living-room he was confronted by the unexpected sight of his diminutive son, complete with an old towel tied around the top of his head, rocking purposefully from side to side in a well-rehearsed way while singing of strange and exotic foreign climes. ‘I will never forget the reaction I got,’ Ernie would recall. ‘He was so bowled over, so excited and thrilled that his eldest son had taken after him and had a spark of talent that there were tears in his eyes.’¹⁴

      Harry, from that point on, determined to teach his son everything he knew about performing. Tap-dancing lessons came first: Connie would play something on the piano while Harry watched their son practise three basic steps on the cold and hard kitchen floor. Songs and short comic routines followed on in the same methodical fashion. It is not entirely clear whether Harry, to begin with, saw in Ernie another potential child star in the making or merely a brief but charming effusion of juvenescent exuberance, but we do know that he wasted little time in drafting his son into his own act. Ernie, at the tender age of seven, joined Harry as part of a novelty double-act called, initially, Carson and Kid.

      There is something quite remarkable, perhaps even Proustian, about Ernie’s typically detailed recollection of those first days on the stage, something almost reverential about the slow and precise route he charted through the rich minutiae hidden within the prosaic experience of playing the working men’s clubs:

      [There would be] a big room with usually a long bar running along one side and a stage, the room filled with marble-topped, cast-iron tables, chairs and against the wall, benches. There’d be a snooker room and a place where you played darts. There’d be fruit machines. There’d be beer and sandwiches, pies, potato crisps, pickles and bottles of tomato sauce, the whole place crowded for the concert with working-class people dressed in their Sunday best. The men wore blue serge suits, white shirts with detachable, boned collars and patterned ties fastened to the shirt front by a clip, pocket handkerchiefs to match, black shoes and short hair slicked down. The women and girls wore homemade dresses, their hair in tight curls still smelling faintly of heated tongs, and the bolder, unmarried ones wore make-up. There’d be a scattering of children running about, getting in the way of waiters in white coats and long white aprons carrying trays laden with drinks, mainly beer; if they were paid with a note, you’d see them holding it in their teeth till they had produced the correct change. In the middle of it all there’d be the concert secretary at a table near the stage ringing his official bell and saying, ‘Now give order for the next act on the bill which is going to be, ladies and gentlemen – CARSON AND KID!’¹⁵

      Ernie’s principal stage outfit in those days consisted of a black bowler hat with the brim cut off, a cut-down dinner jacket with a white carnation pinned to the left lapel, a white wing-collar shirt, a black bow tie, thin black-and-grey-striped trousers and little red clogs. His other occasional, more flamboyant, costumes included what might best be described as a kind of plaid Charlie Chaplin – complete with false moustache – and, made out of what looked suspiciously like the very same material, a most eye-catching little number that flared out wildly at the shoulders and thighs to form an elaborate butterfly shape. The songs that father and son sang together included ‘It Happened on the Beach at Bah Bali’ and ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’, while Ernie’s solo repertoire included ‘I’m Knee Deep in Daisies’ and ‘Let’s Have a Tiddly at the Milk Bar’:

       Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

       Let’s make a night of it tonight.

       Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

       Let’s paint the town a lovely white.

       You buy a half pint, I’ll buy a half pint.

       We’ll try to drink a pint somehow.

       Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

       And drink to the dear old cow.¹⁶

      The act was usually broken up into two single spots and a double: Harry would come on first and perform an abbreviated version of his old routine, then Ernie would appear and perform his own solo routine (lasting five or six minutes) and then, for the second half of the show, father would join son for a double-act.

      One reason for the distinctive appeal of Carson and Kid (or, as they were sometimes billed, ‘Bert Carson and his Little Wonder’ or, in honour of the local distillery, ‘The Two Tetleys’) was the incongruity of a boy of seven or eight taking part in cross-talk of an ‘adult’ nature. One joke, for example, had Ernie announce, ‘There were two fellahs passing by a pub, and one said to the other as he saw a trickle of water coming from under the door, “What’s that? White Horse?” “No,” said the man bending down to taste it. “Fox terrier.’”¹⁷ A second reason for their popularity may have been their readiness to mix light comedy with the occasional detour into maudlin music-hall territory. One successful routine, ‘Little Pal’, had Harry blacked-up to resemble Al Jolson and Ernie sitting on his knee; Harry would sing:

       Little pal, if daddy goes away.

       If some day you should be

       On a new daddy’s knee

       Don’t forget about me, little pal.

      Ernie, looking up plaintively at his father, replied:

       If some day I should be

       On a new daddy’s knee

       Don’t forget about me, little pal.¹⁸

      To audiences with relatively fresh memories of the loss and disruption that accompanied, and followed, the 1914—18 war, such an unashamedly manipulative exercise in sentimentality went down very well indeed.

      Carson

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