Judith Armstrong

I first started with St Paul’s Players aged 11 when Eric Roberts asked me if I would like to help with the pantomime selling pop and crisps. In those days the Community Centre wasn’t as it is now, the access from the dressing room was an elderly ladder and the toilet for the cast and stage crew was a bucket in the corner of the stage and as the stage crew were fuelled by barrels of beer on stage it was well used.

 

The audience sat on chairs brought from St Albans School by Eric and my dad on the back of a small lorry. In those days the pantomime was so popular that additional seats were required, benches were put down the sides of the hall and small children were wedged on the window sills.

As the interval approached, we pop and crisp sellers took our positions behind long tables piled with crates of pop and armed with bottle openers on string which were nailed to the tables. The audience would then race to the tables pushing us further and further back until we were pinned to the wall madly opening bottles of Dandelion and Burdock and Vimto. It was terrifying but I stuck with it until six years later when I was allowed on stage as the Fairy in Cinderella. Poor Lillian Fairclough spent hours trying to stop me saying “go fetch us a pumpkin”, “no dear its go fetch me a pumpkin.” I got it in the end and have often wanted to use this phrase in normal life but strangely enough I have never needed to.

 

I then did a few more shows until I got married and left the area. Then I got unmarried and returned to the area twenty odd years ago and carried on from where I left off. Since then I have done many things which I won’t bore you with but a few things which might amuse you.

 

I went through a time of being a props lady, I made any number of  plates of jewels provided cups and saucers etc and at one time a blanket of leaves for Babes in the Wood to sleep under. I collected lots of leaves (not an easy job in winter) got a large piece of material and carefully glued the leaves to it, only to discover the next morning that I had glued it all to the living room carpet. I gave up with props after that.

 

I have done a bit of scenery painting, why is at one show i paint a white drop black and at the next paint the same drop white? I am not much of an artist but Howard Bates is so patient and shows me how to do every stroke, but I am convinced that he corrects my mistakes when I am not there. He also says some strange things i.e., “use one of the dark blacks” what other sorts of black are there? But, my favorite is whilst painting a woodland scene, “would you like to touch up my undergrowth?” not an offer a lady of my age gets every day!

 

Many parts in plays, pantos and musicals (always the chorus never the star) could be mentioned. I enjoyed being Mrs. Slocombe in Are You Being Served? and loved the singing as Madame Edith in ‘Allo ‘Allo. But a cautionary tale follows always read the stage directions before auditioning for a part. Years ago we did this play, Out Of Order, and I auditioned for the part of a Nurse. I was the only auditionee and got the part (not always the case). The director Adrian Beer asked if would be ok with the “special requirements” I said yes and wondered what he meant. I found out at the first read through when Adrian read out the small print where my character walks across the stage dressed only in a towel which slowly unravels revealing her bare behind. at the dress rehearsal whilst chatting to Marion Jessop about this part of the play she joked that she would bring her binoculars when up piped my youngest son, “you won’t need binoculars to see a bum like that.” whatever happened to family loyalty? mind you I fared better than Stephen Blundell who was also dressed in only a towel which fell off before he got behind the scenes… I am surprised we weren’t closed down!!!

 

Writing this has brought back so many memories. Like the time Wendy Salvage having a Godly moment got some of us involved in a biblical pageant at Preston North End football ground. Michaels Dootson was on a podium in the centre of the pitch dressed as Moses and the other half a dozen of us wandered round the ground trying to look like a crowed… there would have been more of us but Joyce Clarkson and her car full of Israelites forgot to leave the motorway and went to Kirkham.

 

I have learnt many things at St Paul’s Players, tap dancing in Stepping Out, making a pot of tea in the kitchen, painting my sons black with make-up then bathing them at home… Jif isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, modesty and vanity have gone out of the window and any ego squashed. One year I was given the part of a belly dancer in the pantomime, after a couple of rehearsals the director Alan Birtwistle said he had been thinking, and I was quickly replaced by a younger model and transferred to Old Hag. Thanks Alan, the truth always hurts!