The Friday Poem on 26/11/21
You can almost touch the stiff permanent waves of the ladies in their silk and taffeta gowns and the Brylcreemed hair of the men in dinner suits as they lounge and smoke. Matthew Paul’s poem ‘Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades’ beautifully evokes the atmosphere of the roadhouse, a country club style establishment built along arterial roads in and out of London in the inter-war years, where people liberated by motorcar ownership could meet for entertainment and dancing. In the black and white newsreels of the time these clubs were portrayed as sophisticated and glamorous but Matthew Paul’s poem focuses on the seedier side, offering us a peek at the louche lowlifes, glitzy girls and slick entertainers of the 1920s and 30s. His poem is lavish, detailed and lots of fun, and we revel in it.
Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades
Hook, Surrey, 1933
The crew don’t capture Noël and Ivor snorting cocaine
off the black-marble bar; the gargoyles they actually film
are me and my pals: Marcel waves and louche rum coves
high-balled to the eyeballs, soft-shoe-shuffling to the silver
syncopation of Percy Chandler and his rinky-dink band,
trowelling a long, smooth intro to Al Bowlly, who croons
like a trout. The camera pans across the diners and lingers
on that cad Mosley’s double, hiding his face with a plate,
a trice too late. Clad in top-hat and tails, and spying
for Japan, the Colonel Master of Sempill swallow-dives
from the highest board, to frolic among ‘Spadettes’
in the ace-shaped outdoor pool. Norman Long, a comic
off the wireless, corpses at his own punchlines, before
he delivers them. The Southern Sisters — Vera, Sybille
and Betty — harmonise ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t
Got That Swing’. All of us blootered punters, grinning
like ventriloquist dummies, cheer as if Larwood’s snared
Bradman for a golden duck. Bill-toppers Gerlys and Lysia,
‘Continental artistic dancers’, provide a sensational
climax to proceedings: Lysia raised aloft, like an angel,
fully fanning-out her knife-pleated, black-leather skirt.
Still swooning afterwards, we whip my new Alvis Firefly
up the by-pass to party till noon in Lancaster Mansions,
at Putney Bridge; more champers and — oh, hot digetty! —
more Duke Ellington stompers: ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’,
‘Doin’ the New Lowdown’, ‘Jig Walk’, ‘Diga Diga Doo’ …
