Tuesday Club
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As a child I had a burning ambition to be an actor. I begged my parents to send me to stage school to no avail. I languished, invisible, at my primary school, waiting for someone to recognise my star quality. When I auditioned for the school play they were so impressed by my talent that they put me in the choir.
My opportunity to shine appeared in an unexpected place. I’d started attending something called Tuesday Club, with my friends, after school. This was a youth club run by a well-meaning bearded man and his two teenage daughters, Cheryl and Hazel. My friends favoured Cheryl, who was chatty and ebullient but I preferred her younger sister, Hazel, who was softly spoken and shy. The club took place in an inauspicious, low red brick building at the end of our road.
Tuesday Club involved a lot of energetic games, the most memorable one being ‘Ladders’, where you had to run in and out of the other kids’ outstretched legs, hopefully without stamping on them. I didn’t enjoy the games - I was a reader, not a runner. I was only there to hang out with my pals and partake of the weak orange squash and custard creams that they passed round at the end of the evening. They read us a story at the end of the evening too, but I didn’t pay too much attention to what it was.
Around Christmas time Cheryl approached me to ask whether I’d mind taking the lead role in that year’s festive play. No, I didn’t mind - I’d be absolutely delighted, I told her gleefully.
My character’s name was Lee, she and her family had to escape from an unspecified, dangerous country and seek sanctuary in England. I think I was aware, even then, of why they had asked the only brown skinned child at the club to portray this character but it didn't bother me. Whatever gets you the gig, eh?
‘Lee’ didn’t actually have that many lines but the most memorable one was, ‘Please, what is Christmas?’ The English kids (within the play) then educated her on Jesus and the Nativity.
A girl called Vicky*, who I found deeply annoying, had problems with some of her lines and fudged up the word ‘refugee’. Despite this the performance was a glowing success and I was congratulated on my part in it.
*not her real name.
A man in a suit asked me if I went to Sunday school. I answered, bemusedly in the negative. Sunday school was a church thing, we didn’t go to church. In fact, my Sri Lankan, Hindu father was so paranoid about my brother and I being converted to Christianity that there was a period in infant school, when I wasn’t allowed to attend assembly. Me and this blonde kid called Benjamin(his family were Jehovah's Witnesses, I later discovered), had to sit outside the hall while the assembly took place. My Welsh mother had been gradually shedding her Catholic upbringing, when she moved to London, and totally jettisoned it when she married my Dad.
My Dad lived in a state of constant vigilance, lest my Irish Granny or any other ‘religious nut’ got their hands on our soft, vulnerable brains and forced us to take Holy Communion. I’m not sure why he allowed me to attend Tuesday Club but my presence there was tenuous. One day, one of the club leaders gave us a huge piece of white card, on which we were instructed to draw a shepherd. I looked forward to this task as I was much better at drawing than I was at ‘Ladders’. I would have preferred to be drawing an Elizabethan woman, with puffed sleeves, but you can’t have everything.
I laid my card on the kitchen table that evening.
‘What do you have to draw?’ My dad asked.
Before I had a chance to reply, my mum, who has always had an irascible sense of humour, said:
‘Jesus, they have to draw Jesus.’
And that was the end of Tuesday Club.