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THE DARK CITY 79
good manager they might have made a decent living, but mostly they were reduced to singing ballads on the stage and they were never at the top of the bill. The father was proud of his comic singing, the mother of her Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire and her knowledge of French ballads. The boy was barely two when he learned to be a clog dancer and to sing from their repertoire. He was taken with them on their travels. Bright and well-formed, with his mother's sensitivity and his father's features, he was appealing when he was led out onto the stage; like Grimaldi he was an actor almost before he could walk. There were constant visits to France to escape creditors, then long dismal days in London while the two music-hall veterans searched for jobs, and the jobs came rarely, and gradually they drifted apart. At the age of four or five young Charles took his mother's place on the stage at Croydon and sang the rowdy old coster song, "Jack Jones." His mother was ill. Out of desperation the boy gave a performance which brought the house down. Like many children he had the power of total recall, and therefore, imitating his mother, he sang with all the requisite nuances, all her fire. Pennies were rained down on the stage, and he would have gone on singing all night if his father had not dragged him away.
He was seeing the world as it is. Fascinated, he watched the drunks and derelicts shambling along the Embankment; the small world which stretched between Kennington Road and the Thames was to haunt him all his life. The doss-houses he knew, for he wandered into them. He remembered the costers with their round carts heaped with tomatoes, their greasy clothes shining in the light of kerosene lamps, and he remembered particularly one coster with a glass eye which stared at nothing in particular, but gave you the feeling that he was seeing everything. He had a large bottled nose with a net of red veins on it. There is something of that majestic all-seeing coster in the portrait of Charlie, but it was the old blind man with the ear-muffs and clothes green with age