For George Asquith Bartlett actoring was as much a trade as bricklaying
and carpentry (and he'd done a bit of both of those in his time too) and
something that had to be learned and perfected, and George had learned
and perfected his acting to a degree seldom seen in England's green and
pleasant land, especially by the native English, who, George reckoned,
couldn't act to save the life of a flea, although he wouldn't tell
Augustus Littleton that, at least not yet, especially as they'd shared
so many dangerous times together.
You see, George wasn't English, not wholly and not by origin, but
Italian. The Barletonni family had come to England in the 16th century,
at the request of Mr William Shakespeare himself, to give colour and
flavour to a production of /Romeo & Juliet/ the Bard was staging for the
old Queen.
The Barletonni family didn't bother to go back to Milan afterwards, but
instead toured England putting on adaptations of Italian and Spanish
classics that always involved a great deal of fire-eating, juggling,
singing - lots of singing - acrobatics and sword fighting - it's what
the English seemed to enjoy, especially the women, and especially the
married women.
George was born in his grandfather's caravan in 1815, but his mother (a
sweet English country girl who soon found herself in the family way
courtesy of the handsome Adolfo Barletonni) died in childbirth screaming
her lungs out in the owly darkness of the English countryside. After the
girl's death, George's father, consumed with grief, slit his throat and
bled to death in a quiet forest glad where the foxes and the birds ate
him and what was left of his body disappeared into the boggy black earth.
Little George never knew what had become of his father, although
dreadful stories of his murder by the father of the girl circulated for
decades. After that the troupe split up and George, with his Welsh
grandmother (it was she who had given George his love of the great
poetry within her huge family Bible) and his half Italian, half English,
grandfather, Titus Ezekiel, who now called themselves Bartlett,
travelled around with whatever fair, circus, or theatre
company, would have them. But old Titus had acting in his blood and
taught the young George everything he knew and made sure the boy read,
and learned by heart, all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. The old man
also taught the young George how to fight with a sword and dagger, and
shoot straight with a flintlock.
After George's grandparents died of typhoid fever in 1835 the
twenty-year old George headed, in his caravan, for London and slowly
made a name for himself at Drury Lane playing anything from Hamlet, via
an Italian Count, to a Cockney pie seller, and if Hamlet, or the Italian
Count, or the Cockney pie seller, had to dance, fight, eat fire, sing
and juggle, or do all five things at the same time, George Bartlett was
your man.
If he was also required to do a bit of highway robbery, or add colour to
a con job, then George was also your man.
And George was soon the talk of London town and a frequent visitor to
the beds of the wives of the nobility, or the less noble wives of his
less then noble fellow actors. And George always bedded married women
with children. He never stopped to work out why of course, but just
knew, somewhere deep inside, that he could only copulate with a woman
who had given birth. It felt like a search of some kind, but George
never questioned it.
And he never questioned the amount he was drinking either, what would
have been the point? He needed it to get through a performance, or a
caper, and bed the married mothers.
But then, one morning, on waking, he found his once beautiful lover of
the night before stone cold dead beside him, with the rope that had
throttled the breath from her naked body still tightly knotted about her
neck, with her bulging blood-shot eyes and bloated tongue still pleading
for George's help from the blackness of her hideous face.
“Dear God,” cried George in anguish.
And as he hurriedly dressed George tried to remember what had happened,
but his mind was a blank. Had he killed her?
“Dear God,” he cried again.
He had to get out of her house, out of London.
And he did, heading slowly west in the caravan pretending to be an
illiterate knife-sharpening gypsy. After spending some time in Wales and
Lancashire he eventually hooked-up with Littleton's company in Liverpool.
Only years later, having returned from America and his adventures with
Littleton, did George read an old newspaper report to the effect that
the dead woman's husband had confessed to her murder as revenge for her
numerous affairs and that he had thought of killing the man asleep
beside her but had thought better of it. He too had been hanged.
When George had read the report something snapped in his head and a
dreadful pressure was released that soon turned into a prolonged and
terrible illness that would surely have killed him had constable Hughes
not found the caravan and horse and carried the hallucinating and
shivering George Bartlett back to his little cottage, where the
policeman's wife calmly and gently restored George to some kind of health.
And with the return of his health came the return of a certain
recklessness of old and the need of drink and of married women who were
mothers, especially Constable Hughes' plump little wife who'd given the
policeman four healthy children and was kindness itself and refused
George's drunken advances one hot afternoon as she tended the vegetable
garden. It might have ended rather differently too had Mrs Hughes not
taken a spade to George's naked backside and genitals and chased him
into the river at the bottom of the garden where his ardour was cooled
considerably.
Constable and Mrs Hughes bore no grudge, in fact Mrs Hughes was rather
taken by the idea that old lecherous George, as he had become known, had
taken such a fancy to her, which was something she taunted Constable
Hughes with quite often, which, on another hot summers afternoon, when
the policeman was not on duty, resulted in him taking his wife right
there in the middle of a row of broad beans, in broad daylight. The
resultant daughter grew up to be one of the most beautiful girls the
village had ever seen, although many said she looked nothing like
Constable Hughes.
And as George parked his caravan by the river in Stratford, and
un-harnessed the horse, he recalled how lucky he was to be alive and
still have his grandfather's old caravan (which had been safely locked
away in the barn of a friendly farmer when George had sailed for America
with Littleton) and get yet another chance to act upon the legitimate
stage, instead of touring with second rate fairground acts. He'd show
the world, he'd show Donaldson, a man he hadn't seen in years, what he
could do. He'd show him, the old bastard. George then fed and brushed
the horse, boiled a kettle for some tea, lit a pipe, and, sitting on the
back step of his green and red caravan, looked in awe at the huge red
brick theatre on the other side of the river and wondered if the last
line in Littleton's telegram meant what he thought it meant and what
sort of caper Augustus had in mind this time.
To Be Continued...
