Years, even decades later, when Jack had long since ceased to be Jack Robinson—who could even remember that fleeting figure?—when he was just Jack Robbins again, though some spoke of his one day being Sir Jack Robbins, he was apt to say in interviews, with lordly modesty, ‘Actor? Oh, just an old song-and-dance man me.’ And he could still sing to himself, playing the part, his one-time song. Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head! And he could still give, if he wished, his end-of-the-pier wink and flashing grin, both fully visible and almost catchable from the back row.
• • •
Jack, Ronnie and Evie could often have been seen that summer in the Walpole Arms. They would form a lopsided trio, Jack and the couple, or, more often, a lopsided group of four—Ronnie and Evie, the engaged couple, and Jack with whatever compliant but temporary girl, name soon to be forgotten, might happen at that point to be hanging on his arm.
Now, as August moved towards September, neither the threesome nor foursome was in evidence. If Ronnie and Evie were finding conversation hard, then Jack and Ronnie were not speaking much either. Yet all this was while Ronnie and Evie had shot up the billing and Ronnie, thanks again to Jack, had even acquired a theatrical title that Jack himself (who would never be Sir Jack either) would never acquire.
And Lord Archibald and his teddy bear had no difficulty in talking to each other at all.
Jack and Ronnie went back some years. They’d met when doing their time in the army. Both had, quite separately, challenged the military authorities by putting down as their civilian occupations in Jack’s case not ‘song-and-dance man’ but ‘comedian’ and in Ronnie’s ‘magician’. In neither case were they dishonest or—even in Jack’s—joking.
The army might have found all kinds of ways to punish them for their facetiousness, or alternatively attached them to one of their troop-entertainment units. It did something in between. It didn’t send them on endless muddy exercises, but, taking them to be delicate artistic creatures, consigned them to quasi-civilian drudgery. It became their duty, as Jack would put it later, to guard and defend at all costs the Royal Corps of Signals’ filing system.
It was not so cruel of the army, which might, after all, have dispatched them to somewhere where they could have got shot. They actually had most weekends off. As Jack would describe it in the Walpole, embellishing for Evie some of the stages in Ronnie’s life that Ronnie seemed not to have fleshed out himself, it was every weekday in Blandford—‘in the green bosom of Dorset’—and every weekend up to town, to maintain, in one form or another, their show-business links.
‘Never mind the Signals, Evie. We were the BEF. Back every Friday.’
During this period Jack became known for his ability to entertain the whole hut, before lights out, with vivid impersonations (he might have become a Lord Archibald) of almost any officer who’d come their way, and Ronnie became known as a man you played cards with at your peril. He might not only win, but suddenly turn the game into something else altogether.
After the army they’d kept up their connection and even become for a while an ill-fated double act. A comedian-cum-song-and-dance man and a magician? It was never going to work. But it was Jack who, some time after the amicable split and when he’d advanced considerably as a solo performer, had come to the aid of his friend’s still-struggling career. When he’d signed up to compere the Brighton show for a second season (quite a coup) and thus to have some influence with the management, he’d said to Ronnie, ‘Get yourself an assistant and I could fix you up with a spot next summer.’
It was not necessary for Jack to say that by assistant he meant female assistant. It was not necessary for him to spell out that magic was a fine thing—what else was magic but magical?—but magic and glamour, now you were talking.
Ronnie hadn’t disagreed. This was 1958. He was a magician, but he’d learnt some of the unenchanting truths of the entertainment business. This was a chance to jump at. But his other response was also realistic. Hire an assistant, let alone a glamorous assistant? What with? He was close to penniless.
But all this was not long before Eric Lawrence, formerly known as ‘Lorenzo’ (and often in Ronnie’s mind as simply ‘The Wizard’), suddenly died.
• • •
Jack and Evie had not crossed paths before, but they were two of a kind and might quickly have spotted this in each other. The three soon became pals. It was natural. Ronnie and Evie owed to Jack that they were there at all—even, it could be said, that they had become engaged. Thus Jack himself had woven a kind of magic.
He put it differently to Ronnie: ‘I only said get an assistant.’
Jack was not the getting-engaged type, though if he didn’t join Ronnie and Evie in the Walpole it would usually be because he was otherwise engaged with some girl. Sometimes the girl would join them. The girl would be only too aware of being up against the regular core of three and thus of her own incidental status, but as Evie put it once to Ronnie, ‘At least she was having her turn.’ These passing girls, since they all blended into one, began to be known by Ronnie and Evie as ‘Flora’. Who is Flora this week? Their real names didn’t seem much to signify.
The saloon bar of the Walpole was a known theatricals’ haunt and Eddie Costello occasionally slipped in for a pint of Bass and a shufty.
As they sat in the Walpole, the eyes of the current Flora would now and then catch those of Evie, or vice versa. Or Evie might notice the girl looking at the engagement ring on her finger. The girl might be eighteen or nineteen. Evie was by
