Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online

metal taps cracking out into the room like gunfire.
    ‘Don’t stop ’til I tell you,’ my father would cry. ‘I want my shilling’s worth.’ My mother, meanwhile, perched on the edge of the sofa scrubbing on a ukelele, Formby-style. (She can still, at a pinch, and even out where she’s orbiting, play accordion, trumpet, clarinet, trombone and harmonium, God help us.)
    By the time I was ten I could walk into a cinema and tell you which studio – Warners or Metro or Fox or Gaumont-British – had made what was showing just by looking at the print. MGM’slion; Paramount’s snow-topped mountain; RKO’s radio beacon, and Columbia’s diaphanous Miss Liberty were the dominant images in my childhood, the last two especially so because I wasn’t altogether sure what they were meant to represent.
    Monday nights and Thursday nights – the night programmes changed at the Troxy – were when we went to the cinema together as a family. We usually made up the head of the queue at what my father still quaintly called the Electric Palace (it was only years later, many years after his death, that I noticed these words done in plaster, amid baroque twirls, high above the contemporary façade).
    The balcony at the Troxy was thrillingly raked and cantilevered and we would dash to claim seats in one of the two curved corner sections which swung out over the stalls like Waltzer cars.
    This was part of what, in the late thirties, was the owners’ much-vaunted Odeon-modern look. My mother was super-taken with a colour scheme she insisted was ‘carnation and mango’, and with the way the gilded sconces and scrolls that went with a past that pre-dated even their past had been blocked and negated and streamlined out.
    A game I liked to play – only with myself, who of course was too young to know the Troxy as Mark and Fay had known it – was to seek out evidence of what the Troxy had been like in the days of the silents, when the decorative theme was apparently south-coast Samarkand; in the days, that is to say, immediately before my arrival on the scene.
    I would gaze about me and quietly note a palm cornice here, the tip of a barley-sugar column there, a swan-neck gas bracket concealed behind a sweeping parabolic plaster screen. Stupid, I know, but it was almost as though Mark and Fay – Poppa and Momma, Tateh and Mameh – had been trying to keep something from me and I’d found them out.
    I was a strange little girl. But not as strange as the little girl who, singing, dancing, acting and dimpling, would tower over us, spit curls bouncing, hammy knees hamming, toxic in her winsomeness.
    Baby Take a Bow, Our Little Girl, Bright Eyes, Little Miss Broad way, Curly Top … There was no end to them. Shirley Temple films came thick and fast. And we sat through everything One-Take-Temple, America’s Sweetheart, ever made.
    There was always a special tension between the three of us when we went to see a Shirley Temple picture. I could sense meaningful glances being exchanged over my head each time the precocious one launched into another number. Many encouraging smiles were flashed at me in the flickering half-light and there was a marked amount of cosying down in seats and metaphorical clucking.
    I felt them willing me to like her and want to follow her down the thorny path she had beaten. I was given a Shirley doll for my third or fourth Christmas with moving and sleeping eyes and jointed arms and legs and her name branded into her head under the human hair wig.
    But I pointedly ignored what I have no doubt is now a much-coveted collectible, and instead lavished all my affection on the plastic likeness of the ice-skater-turned-movie-queen, Sonja Henie.
    Too late in my own career – the Teds were on the rampage; Elvis was being denounced as morally insane – somebody put an Alma doll on the market. The manufacturer took the bath on it that I predicted. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you can still sometimes spot me sitting on the