“I have been taking the measure of our audiences,” Philip Astley continued, and Thomas Kellaway pulled himself out of his thoughts to listen. “Public entertainers must be ever vigilant to public moods. Vigilant, my friends. I am aware that, though audi-ences like to be kept abreast of the state of the world, they also come to the amphitheatre to forget-to laugh and rejoice at the superlative wonders before their eyes, and to put out of their minds for one evening the worries and threats of the world. This world”-he gestured around him, taking in the ring, the stage, the seats, and the galleries-“becomes their world.
“Even before today’s terrible news, I had reached the inevitable conclusion that the current program places perhaps too much emphasis on military spectacle. The splendid and realistic enactment of soldiers striking camp at Bagshot Heath, and the celebration of peace during the East India Military Divertissement-these are scenes of which we can be justly proud. But perhaps, friends, given the present state of affairs in France, they are de trop-particularly for the ladies in the audience. We must think of their sensitive natures. I have seen many members of the gentler sex shudder and turn away from these spectacles; indeed, three have fainted in the last week!”
“That were from the heat,” the carpenter next to Thomas Kellaway muttered, though not loud enough for Philip Astley to hear.
“And so, boys and girls, we are going to replace the Bagshot Heath spectacle with a new pantomime I have penned. It will be a continuation of the adventures of the Harlequin my son played earlier this season, and will be called Harlequin in Ireland.”
A groan arose from the assembled company. Astley’s Circus had been playing to good crowds and, after several changes in program, had settled down into a happy routine that many had expected would take them right through early October to the end of the season. They were tired of change, and content to repeat themselves each night without learning a new show, which would require a great deal of unexpected extra work. Saturday afternoon off would certainly be canceled, for a start.
Even as Philip Astley reiterated that Harlequin in Ireland would be a tonic for revolution-weary audiences, the carpenters were already heading backstage to ready themselves for immediate set building. Thomas Kellaway followed more slowly. Even three months into his job with the circus, he found working with so many others overwhelming at times, and sometimes longed for the quiet of his workshop in Dorsetshire or at Hercules Buildings, where there had only been him and his family to make noise. Here there was a constant parade of performers, musicians, horses, suppliers of timber and cloth and oats and hay, boys running in and out on the endless errands supplied by Philip Astley, and general hangers-on creating chaos along with the rest of them. Above all there was Philip Astley himself, bellowing orders, arguing with his son about the program or Mrs. Connell about ticket sales or John Fox about everything else.
Noise was not the only thing Thomas Kellaway had had to adjust to in his new position. Indeed, the work couldn’t be more different from his chairs, and he sometimes thought he ought to tell Philip Astley that he was not suitable for the demands made on him, and admit that he had really taken the job only to satisfy his circus-obsessed wife.
Thomas Kellaway was a chairmaker-a profession which required patience, a steady hand, and an eye for the shape wood would best take. Building the sorts of things needed for Astley’s Circus was a completely different use of wood. To expect Thomas Kellaway to be able do such work was like asking a brewer to trade jobs with a laundress, simply because both used water. In making chairs, the choice of wood used for each part was critical in creating a strong, comfortable, long-lasting chair. Thomas Kellaway knew his elm and ash, his yew and chestnut and walnut. He knew what would look and work best for the seat (always elm), the legs and spindles (he preferred yew if he could get it), the hoop for the back and arms (ash). He understood just how much he could bend ash before it splintered; he could sense how hard he had to chop at an elm plank with his adze to shape the seat. He loved wood, for he had been using it all his life. For scenery, however, Thomas Kellaway had to use some of the cheapest, poorest wood he had ever had the misfortune to handle. Knotty oak, seconds and ends of beech, even scorched wood salvaged from house fires-he could barely stand to touch the stuff.
Harder even than that, though, was the idea behind what he was meant to make. When he made a chair, he knew it was a chair-it looked like one, and it would be used as one. Otherwise there was no reason for him to make it. The scenery, however, was not what it was meant to be. He constructed sheets of board cut into the shapes of clouds, painted white, and hung up in the “sky” so that they looked like clouds-yet they were not clouds. He was building castles that were not castles, mountains that were not mountains, Indian pavilions that were not Indian pavilions. The only function of what he now made was to resemble something else rather than to be it, and to create an effect. Certainly it looked good, from a distance. Audiences often gasped and clapped when the curtain went up and the carpenters’ creations set the scene-even if up close they were clearly just bits of wood nailed together and painted for effect. Thomas Kellaway was not used to something looking good from far away but not up close. That was not how chairs worked.
His first weeks at Astley’s were not the disaster they so easily could have been, however. Thomas Kellaway was rather surprised by this, for he had never in his life worked as part of a group. The first time he appeared at the amphitheatre, the day after Philip Astley hired him, carrying his tools in a satchel, no one even noticed him for an hour. The other carpenters were busy building a shed at the back in which to store the few bits and pieces that had been salvaged from the laboratory fire. Thomas Kellaway watched them for a time; then, noting one of the carpenters going around the gallery of the theatre, tightening handrails, he found some nails and bits of wood, took up his tools, and set about making repairs in the boxes. When he’d finished, having gained in confidence, he went back to the half-built shed and quietly inserted himself into the scrum of men, handing over the right-sized plank just when it was needed, scrounging up nails when no one else could find any, catching a loose board before it hit a man. By the time the last plank for the slanted roof had been hammered into place, Thomas Kellaway had become a natural part of the team. To celebrate his arrival, the carpenters took him at noon to their favored pub, the Pedlar’s Arms, just across the road from the timber yards north of Westminster Bridge. They all got drunk except for Thomas Kellaway, drinking toasts to their late head carpenter, the unfortunate John Honor. He left them to it, finally, and returned to work alone on a wood volcano that was to spew fireworks as part of the drama Jupiter’s Vengeance.
Since then Thomas Kellaway had spent the summer keeping quiet and working hard. It was easier, keeping quiet, for when he did open his mouth the men laughed at his Dorset accent.
Now he began to sort through his tools. “Jem, where be our compass saw?” he called. “One o’ the men needs it.”
“At home.”
“Run and get it, then, there’s a good lad.”
2
When needed, as today, Jem helped his father in the amphitheatre; other times he joined the other circus boys hanging about to run errands for Philip Astley or John Fox. Usually they were to places in Lambeth or nearby Southwark. The few times he was asked to go farther afield-to a printer’s by St. Paul’s, or a law office at Temple, or a haberdasher’s off St. James’s-Jem passed on the honor to other boys, who were always looking for the extra penny that came with trips across the river.