Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

Chapter 1

Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster? If you have, you will remember it. Some quirk of the Kentish coastline makes Whitstable natives - as they are properly called - the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the subtlest, oysters in the whole of England. Whitstable oysters are, quite rightly, famous. The French, who are known for their sensitive palates, regularly cross the Channel for them; they are shipped, in barrels of ice, to the dining-tables of Hamburg and Berlin. Why, the King himself, I heard, makes special trips to Whitstable with Mrs Keppel, to eat oyster suppers in a private hotel; and as for the old Queen -

she dined on a native a day (or so they say) till the day she died.

Did you ever go to Whitstable, and see the oyster-parlours there? My father kept one; I was born in it - do you recall a narrow, weather-boarded house, painted a flaking blue, 1

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half-way between the High Street and the harbour? Do you could name you the contents of an oyster-cook's kitchen -

remember the bulging sign that hung above the door, that could sample fish with a blindfold on, and tell you their said that Astley's Oysters, the Best in Kent were to be had variety. Whitstable was all the world to me, Astley's Parlour within? Did you, perhaps, push at that door, and step into my own particular country, oyster-juice my medium.

the dim, low-ceilinged, fragrant room beyond it? Can you Although I didn't long believe the story told to me by recall the tables with their chequered cloths - the bill of fare Mother - that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-chalked on a board - the spirit-lamps, the sweating slabs of shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch butter?

- for eighteen years I never doubted my own oyster-ish Were you served by a girl with a rosy cheek, and a saucy sympathies, never looked far beyond my father's kitchen for manner, and curls? That was my sister, Alice. Or was it a occupation, or for love.

man, rather tall and stooping, with a snowy apron falling It was a curious kind of life, mine, even by Whitstable from the knot in his neck-tie to the bow in his boots? That standards; but it was not a disagreeable or even a terribly was my father. Did you see, as the kitchen door swung to hard one. Our working day began at seven, and ended and fro, a lady stand frowning into the clouds of steam that twelve hours later; and through all those hours my duties rose from a pan of bubbling oyster soup, or a sizzling were the same. While Mother cooked, and Alice and my gridiron? That was my mother.

father served, I sat upon a high stool at the side of a vat of And was there at her side a slender, white-faced, natives, and scrubbed, and rinsed, and plied the oyster-unremarkable-looking girl, with the sleeves of her dress knife. Some people like their oysters raw; and for them rolled up to her elbows, and a lock of lank and colourless your job is easiest, for you have merely to pick out a dozen hair forever falling into her eye, and her lips continually natives from the barrel, swill the brine from them, and place moving to the words of some street-singer's or music-hall them, with a piece of parsley or cress, upon a plate. But for song?

those who took their oysters stewed, or fried - or baked, or That was me.

scalloped, or put in a pie - my labours were more delicate.

Like Molly Malone in the old ballad, I was a fishmonger, Then I must open each oyster, and beard it, and transfer it because my parents were. They kept the restaurant, and the to Mother's cooking-pot with all of its savoury flesh intact, rooms above it: I was raised an oyster-girl, and steeped in and none of its liquor spilled or tainted. Since a supper-all the flavours of the trade. My first few childish steps I plate will hold a dozen fish; since oyster-teas are cheap; and took around vats of sleeping natives and barrels of ice; since our Parlour was a busy one, with room for fifty before I was ever given a piece of chalk and a slate, I was customers at once - well, you may calculate for yourself the handed an oyster-knife and instructed in its use; while I was vast numbers of oysters which passed, each day, beneath still lisping out my alphabet at the schoolmaster's knee, I my prising knife; and you might imagine, too, the redness 3

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and the soreness and the sheer salty soddenness of my The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby fingers at the close of every afternoon. Even now, two theatre; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with decades and more since I put aside my oyster-knife and quit my oyster-girl's eyes -I see the mirror-glass which lined the my father's kitchen for ever, I feel a ghostly, sympathetic walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, twinge in my wrist and finger-joints at the sight of a painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our fishmonger's barrel, or the sound of an oyster-man's cry; oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I and still, sometimes, I believe I can catch the scent of liquor know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and brine beneath my thumb-nail, and in the creases of my and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco palm.

and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I I have said that there was nothing in my life, when I was loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre young, but oysters; but that is not quite true. I had friends managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my essence not of pleasure, but of grief.

dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a That, however, is to get ahead of my story.

bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked scents of the Canterbury Palace — in the period, at least, of a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle which I am thinking, that final summer in my father's Joe on Whitstable Bay.

house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for seats at knock-down prices or for free. Tony was the music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have nephew of the Palace's manager, the celebrated Tricky visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather Reeves, and therefore something of a catch for our Alice.

inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall My parents mistrusted him at first, thinking him 'rapid'

nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of because he worked in a theatre, and wore cigars behind his Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally ears, and talked glibly of contracts, London, and sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his champagne. But no one could dislike Tony for long, he was booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train so large-hearted and easy and good; and like every other from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the boy who courted her, he adored my sister, and was ready to Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were be kind to us all on her account.

three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts Thus it was that Alice and I were so frequently to be found were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent.

on a Saturday night, tucking our skirts beneath our seats 5

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and calling out the choruses to the gayest songs, in the best sure, was perfectly smooth and clear, and my teeth were and most popular shows, at the Canterbury Palace. Like the very white; but these - in our family, at least - were counted rest of the audience, we were discriminating. We had our unremarkable, for since we all passed our days in a miasma favourite turns - artistes we watched and shouted for; songs of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and we begged to have sung and re-sung again and again until blemishless as cuttlefish.

the singer's throat was dry, and she - for more often than not it was the lady singers whom Alice and I loved best - could No, girls like Alice were meant to dance upon a gilded sing no more, but only smile and curtsey.

stage, skirted in satin, hailed by cupids; and girls like me And when the show was over, and we had paid our respects were made to sit in the gallery, dark and anonymous, and to Tony in his stuffy little office behind the ticket-seller's watch them.

booth, we would carry the tunes away with us. We would Or so, anyway, I thought then.

sing them on the train to Whitstable - and sometimes others, The routine I have described - the routine of prising and returning home from the same show as merry as we, would bearding and cooking and serving, and Saturday-night visits sing them with us. We would whisper them into the to the music hall - is the one that I remember most from my darkness as we lay in bed, we would dream our dreams to girlhood; but it was, of course, only a winter one. From the beat of their verses; and we would wake next morning May to August, when British natives must be left to spawn, humming them still. We'd serve a bit of music-hall the dredging smacks pull down their sails or put to sea in glamour, then, with our fish suppers - Alice whistling as search of other quarry; and oyster-parlours all over England she carried platters, and making the customers smile to hear are obliged, in consequence, to change their menus or close her; me, perched on my high stool beside my bowl of brine, their doors. The business that my father did between singing to the oysters that I scrubbed and prised and autumn and spring, though excellent enough, was not so bearded. Mother said I should be on the stage myself.

good that he could afford to shut his shop throughout the When she said it, however, she laughed; and so did I. The summer and take a holiday; but, like many Whitstable girls I saw in the glow of the footlights, the girls whose families whose fortunes depended upon the sea and its songs I loved to learn and sing, they weren't like me. They bounty, there was a noticeable easing of our labours in the were more like my sister: they had cherry lips, and curls warmer months, a kind of shifting into a slower, looser, that danced about their shoulders; they had bosoms that gayer key. The restaurant grew less busy. We served crab jutted, and elbows that dimpled, and ankles - when they and plaice and turbot and herrings, rather than oysters, and showed them - as slim and as shapely as beer-bottles. I was the filleting was kinder work than the endless scrubbing and tall, and rather lean. My chest was flat, my hair dull, my shelling of the winter months. We kept our windows raised, eyes a drab and an uncertain blue. My complexion, to be and the kitchen door thrown open; we were neither boiled 7

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alive by the steam of the cooking-pots, nor numbed and never understand the attraction of the stalls ticket; it seemed frozen by barrels of oyster-ice, as we were in winter, but unnatural to me to seat oneself below the stage, and have to gently cooled by the breezes, and soothed by the sound of peer up at the artistes from a level somewhere near their fluttering canvas and ringing pulleys that drifted into our ankles, through the faint, shimmering haze of heat that rose kitchen from Whitstable Bay.

above the footlights. The circle gave a better view, but the The summer in which I turned eighteen was a warm one, gallery, though further away, to my mind gave the best of and grew warmer as the weeks advanced. For days at a time all; and there were two seats in the front row, at the very Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-centre of the gallery, that Alice and I particular favoured.

and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit Here you knew yourself to be not just at a show but in a the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as theatre: you caught the shape of the stage and the sweep of no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in the seats; and you marvelled to see your neighbours' faces, our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or and to know your own to be like theirs - all queerly lit by two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of the glow of the footlights, and a damp at the lip, and with a Tricky Reeves's airless music hall, made us gasp and droop grin upon it, like that of a demon at some hellish revue.

and prickle.

It was certainly as hot as hell in the Canterbury Palace on There are more similarities between a fishmonger's trade Gully Sutherland's opening night - so hot that, when Alice and a music-hall manager's than you might think. When and I leaned over the gallery rail to gaze at the audience Father changed his stock to suit his patrons' dulled and below, we were met by a blast of tobacco- and sweat-over-heated palates, so did Tricky. He paid half of his scented air, that made us reel and cough. The theatre, as performers off, and brought in a host of new artistes from Tony's uncle had calculated, was almost full; yet it was the music halls of Chatham, Margate and Dover; most strangely hushed. People spoke in murmurs, or not at all.