But it also opens a new door when, leaning against a lamppost one night in her guardsman’s uniform, a darkened carriage draws up beside her and invites her to step inside. On stage, Nancy’s cross-dressing has always been mitigated by a bit of feminine tailoring here, a bit of rouge there but when her heart is broken and she walks out on Kitty with nothing but a bit of money and her costumes, she discovers that being able to pass for a boy offers her a way to make some money. On the surface it’s just a spot of cheeky cross-dressing – the music hall audiences love to see pretty girls swanking around, dressed up as Bond Street swells – but beneath the superficial innocence, the currents run deep. The world that Nancy and Kitty enter is a complex one.
Invited backstage, Nancy experiences the thrill of building a friendship with her idol, and when Kitty moves on to greater things, and invites Nancy to join her as her dresser (later joining her on stage as part of a hugely popular double act), Nancy doesn’t hesitate. Nancy begins to haunt the Palace, to the extent that her family tease her mercilessly, but it all becomes worth it one day when Kitty Butler looks her way. Him, and hell still distant and unguessed. Then, like a fallen angel – or yet again like a falling one: she sang like aįalling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind She sang that night like – I cannot say like an angel, for her songs wereĪll of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade perhaps, Nancy is transfixed by her (in many ways the book is a paean to the triumph of the trouser role), but her schoolgirl crush develops into something else: an alluring sense of affinity.
A new act arrives on stage: the sleek, chic male impersonator Kitty Butler. Her escapist passion is the music hall, and she and her sister Alice spend many happy hours in the Palace at Canterbury but one night everything changes. Nancy Astley’s childhood in Whistable is flavoured by the scent and salt of the sea, and focused on her family’s busy oyster-parlour, which forms the heart of a sprawling web of relations and friends. I could claim I timed this post specifically to coincide with Pride, but that’s just a happy coincidence. Beautifully written, evocative, sexy and playfully transgressive, it deserves its status as a modern classic. However, I found it in Oxfam yesterday, decided to give it a go at last, and have devoured it at high speed. I’ve read two of Sarah Waters’s books since then, but I’d never quite had the courage to go back to this: her first and most celebrated novel. I remember being utterly shocked (I had a very sheltered upbringing), although since it’s rated 15 it really can’t have been that scandalous. One of the most mortifying moments of my teenage years – and there’s plenty of competition, believe me – was watching the BBC’s adaptation of Tipping the Velvet with my parents at the age of seventeen.
0 kommentar(er)
