‘AUNTIE ROSINA’ STANHOPE BUYS ME CHOCOLATE 1956

It’s 1956, I am 8. I was looking in Barrat’s sweetshop window, in the local shopping parade opposite Wollaston’s Mill. I was startled to hear from behind “Hello Roger”, I turned to discover it was the conjuror's wife.

‘The conjuror’ lived in Burman Road in a house next door but one to the east of the tennis courts. He and his wife were children’s entertainers ‘Percy Stanhope and Rosina’, they must have been about 60, and they hated children. All the children in the neighbourhood knew they hated children and avoided them, lest they were shouted at for a trivial reason - like a request to retrieve a ball. We vaguely pondered the irony of them being children’s entertainers, but only with hindsight can I see their life was a nightmare – they were childless. They scraped a living giving performances for local schools and birthday and Christmas parties. It was pretty simple stuff - ladders and Christmas trees from rolled up newspapers, disappearing dice in a box (he turned the box round) etc.

So I was astonished to be addressed by her, and in a friendly tone. Even more astonishing she said “Would you like some chocolate?”. I thought very quickly of the simplest thing I could and said “Yes please, a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk”. She went in a bought me one – but I was very puzzled. Perhaps it was only Percy and not her, perhaps she had seen me as a shabbily dressed child from a shabby bungalow looking wistfully at chocolate I couldn't buy? I never had any further interaction with her.

Recently I researched them – he had been a very successful interwar Music Hall and Concert Party entertainer – droll stories; ventriloquism; conjuring, he had evidently married his be-sequinned glamorous assistant. They toured the country's Halls, theatres and piers - I even found a photo of him in a Pierrot costume. So they were at the fag end of their long careers, reduced to pretending to love other people's children when they had none of their own. They probably hated each other.

 

I am an aficionado of private hells.

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