Three Seasons of Sadie

Richard Masefield

Description

The decade is in full swing - days of hedonism, youth culture and free love. Not so for Sam Ashby, a hormonally charged country boy, busy navigating a turbulent adolescence. Frustrated by his lack of success, especially with girls, nineteen-year-old Sam accepts the job of Assistant Stage Manager and general dogsbody at the Meads Theatre in Eastbourne, where his world's about to change, in ways he could never have imagined.Enter stage left Abigail Compton, imperishable star of stage and screen - to dazzle, to embarrass and divest poor Sam of his every last defence (including his best shrink-to-fit Levi Strauss blue jeans) on his way across the shaky bridge to adulthood.The final playful episode in Richard Masefield's quintet of Sussex novels and a sequel to his bestselling Chalkhill Blue, Three Seasons of Sadie is a genuinely funny rite of passage story set in the provincial theatre of the nineteen-sixties.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Press
• Date de parution: 24 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839781094
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Richard Masefield
Three Seasons of Sadie

Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2020 Richard Masefield
The right of Richard Masefield to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Clare Shepherd
Typesetting: Fuzzy Flamingo
www.fuzzyflamingo.co.uk
For Lee as ever
… and for Margaret, to make up for my behaviour when we were seventeen
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
ACT I
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
FIRST INTERVAL
ACT II
Scene 1
S cene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
SECOND INTERVAL
ACT III
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
SHORT INTERVAL
ACT IV
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Producer’s notes
Credits
Richard Masefields’ SUSSEX NOVELS
About the Author
Dramatis Personae
Abigail Compton: imperishable star of stage and screen
Cordelia: her daughter and dresser
Barbara Bayliss: her toxic understudy
Nigel Hughes-Milton: a ‘Who’s for tennis?’ type
Crispin Blake: total tosser
Lumsdon Gould: Old Vic luvvie
Yvonne Hayes: character support
Primrose (‘call-me-Primmie’) Allan: gullible pekinese-owner
Nanki-Poo: said pekinese
Tom Allan: Primmie’s solid, real-life husband
Oh, and me, Sam Ashby: Assistant Stage Manager and dogsbody
Prologue
Do you ever wish that brains were like computers, with some sort of delete facility for things we’d rather not remember? I know that I do. And one youthful memory I’d be happy to consign to a black hole on the far side of the universe involved my very first pair of Levi jeans.
I don’t suppose there’s anyone these days who’s too important, fat or ancient to own a pair of jeans – except perhaps the Pope, or possibly the Queen. But back in the early 1960s they were strictly for the young and trendy. The fashion for them started with James Dean, the doomed young film star famous for his blonde quiff, moody scowl and well-worn Levi’s. One of the posters in my bedroom at the farm showed him in his final movie, Giant , just before he killed himself in a car crash at the age of twenty-four – James Dean leaning on the mudguard of a black Cadillac Tourer, with a rifle slung across his shoulders and Liz Taylor kneeling at waist-level gazing at his denim crotch. On him the jeans were skin-tight with strategic creases radiating from the vital bulge.
Which of course was what I wanted as soon as I was old enough to bulge convincingly myself. To look like the dead Adonis all the girls considered the last word absolutely. To look like Jimmy Dean.
‘I suppose you’ve half a look of him in a dim light from a distance, Sammo,’ my cousin Mag conceded while I was staying with her one half-term. She narrowed heavily mascaraed eyes to look me up and down. ‘You’d need a T-shirt, a leather jacket and a pair of jeans. I can do the hair.’
Mag worked as a hairdresser at Antoine’s Beauty Salon in Eastbourne, and followed her advice by pushing me through to her kitchen, to leave me with my head under the geyser spout while she fetched towels, tubes and bottles and a bright green Pifco hair dryer. The result an excruciating half-hour later was a quiff rearing from my eighteen-year-old forehead in a stiffened plume, before folding at the back into the then obligatory duck’s arse. Photos of me at the time look less like James Dean as a teenage rebel than someone who’s just met Anne Boleyn without her head.
I bought the T-shirt at Bobby’s Department Store a few doors up from the Eastbourne art gallery where my mother sold her paintings. A red plastic zip-up jacket was the closest thing to leather I could afford. But as the main ingredient of Jimmy Dean-ness, the ‘blue jeans’ as we called them then, had to be the best on offer – had to be by Levi Strauss, imported from the States complete with metal rivets and brass-button fly.
‘You’ll want the shrink-to-fit 501s, Sir,’ an unctuous menswear assistant told me while he nudged my scrotum with his tape. ‘You’re a Medium 34-inch, Sir.’ (The ‘Sir’ pitched short of genuine politeness and quite a long way from respect.) ‘Medium for everything but length, Sir. With your legs you will have to have them taken up.’
I didn’t care, rushed back to Mag’s to put them on and view them in her bathroom mirror. On Jett Rink in the Giant poster they’d been tight as eel-skin. On me they hung completely straight – baggy, sexless, creased only where they concertina’d at my feet – being as the menswear assistant had asserted, far too long. ‘You’ll also have to shrink them, Sir,’ he’d told me, pointing to the label on the Levi’s.
He couldn’t have been more than five years older than me, but made a point of staring at my quiff while smoothing his own sleekly Brylcreemed Cary-Grant-style hair. ‘Shrink-to-fit, Sir,’ he repeated. ‘You’ll need to wear them in the bath to give them something to fit on to , if you take my meaning – and make sure the water’s hot, Sir.’ He’d smirked unpleasantly.
***
First thing the next morning, as soon as Mag and her live-in lodger, Len, had left for work, I nipped down to the bathroom we all shared, took off my clothes, and while the bath was filling pulled on my brand new Levi’s and buttoned up the fly.
I think it must have been the first time I’d worn any kind of trousering without pants on underneath, and have to say I liked the way it felt. There was another thing, it occurred to me, that I might do in Mag’s pink bathroom while I was on my own. Besides taking a bath, I mean. I glanced at the pink toilet roll beside Mag’s pink porcelain lavatory and locked the door.
When I’d run the water as hot as I could bear, I climbed in gingerly one foot at a time to watch the fabric covering my shins begin to darken. When my backside hit the water, it felt as if a pair of hot and eager hands were reaching up to grasp it; another if I’m honest not unpleasant feeling. Then, as I extended them, I felt the denim mould itself around my legs like greedy anacondas swallowing their prey. I ran in more hot water and lay back to let the shrink-to-fit 501s do what they’d done for Jimmy Dean, albeit with a little more to work on in the leg-department.
Mag’s bath was pink inevitably, to match the walls, the toilet, basin, bath mat, towels and scented soaps – although below the water line, reflecting as it did the colour of the saturated denim, it appeared less pink than mauve. That was what I thought. Until I saw it wasn’t a reflection.
I should have let the water out of course the moment I realised that the jeans weren’t colour-fast, and can only think that I was mesmerised by the sheer speed with which it changed from lavender to purple and then navy blue – or else immobilised by the prospect of my nether regions vanishing beneath the dye? Either way I left it too late to react, and by the time I pulled the plug, my cousin’s bath was stained, half pink, half blue.
Well I panicked – tried to stand, but finding that my legs, shrink-wrapped in boiling denim, refused to bend, sank back on to my knees inside the bath. Then made a wordless sound a bit like oooucccch! as something very tight and cruelly studded gave my testicles a violent squeeze. It wasn’t so much that the jeans had shrunk-to-fit, as shrunk-to-strangle-me-alive from the feet up.
Working slowly, painfully unbending, whimpering a little as I scissored one leg then the other over the bath’s pink flank, I landed on the lino in a roughly upright posture, in the middle of a spreading pool of dye. There was no question of attempting to wipe round the bath’s now two-tone interior before I could move freely – or actually at all. So, concentrating all my efforts on the top button of the Levi’s, I struggled manfully to force it through its shrunken button hole.
Then the second button.
Then the third and fourth, and finally the fifth… which was when my genitals burst through the open fly, parboiled, flat-packed, stained bluish-grey and frankly looking at their least appealing.
But if I thought the worst was over, I was wrong. Despite the welcome outbreak in the front, the shrunken fabric of the Levi’s still clung tenaciously to my clenched buttocks and cramped thighs. My first attempt at moving it felt less like peeling a banana than skinning a live rabbit. The blood trapped round my shrink-wrapped knee joints had puffed them up to twice their normal size, and however hard I pulled, the jeans refused to budge. Until it dawned on me that I would have to tug them from the bottom. Not too adroitly as it turned out. Because it was when I stooped to get a grip on one wet cuff, to give it a sharp yank, that I crashed over backwards – hit the bath, slid heavily on to the floor and lay there moaning.
‘Sam, is that you up there?’ I heard Mag yelling from below me in the kitchen – having come home I suppose for something she’d forgotten. I never did discover what. ‘Sammo, do you hear me? What the devil do you think you’re up to?’
Somehow