Shirley Read Online Free PDF Page A

hardship. As a boy, he would cycle to the docks to see the big ships, and remembered his mother’s warnings to be careful of the dangers that lurked in Tiger Bay. Recalling now the Halal butchery with its stringy meat in the window, the men playing dice on the pavement, the shabby pubs on every corner, and the children darting between the slag heaps in the dock area, Wyn Calvin knew that this girl deserved far better.
    After her audition, Shirley’s life appeared destined to settle into the same old routine, factory work by day, singing in the working men’s clubs on weekend nights, securing her limited reputation. That reputation, among the older girls of Tiger Bay was sometimes less than enthusiastic. One of Marina Bassey’s friends was fed up with ‘That girl Shirley Bassey’. As she told it, ‘Here we are in this nice, well-run dance hall in Cardiff then Shirley and this gang from Splott comes in and spoils it all. You know Shirley, it’s “look at me, look at me”, and then someone started a fight over her, and then they all got thrown out. I felt ashamed coming from Tiger Bay because of her antics. We all got tarred with the same brush.’
    But Shirley’s mother was confident that her daughter was destined for better things, and had always expressed the belief that one day she would be famous. There was never a less typical stage mother than Eliza Mendi, a quiet woman except when roused beyond endurance – as when any of herchildren were insulted. Modest and unassuming, she nevertheless knew instinctively that Shirley was different, one in a million, and she wasn’t going to sit by and watch her packing chamber pots and saucepans for much longer. Not that she had any clear idea of how to change things for her daughter. She certainly had no desire to see Shirley go away or travel abroad. As she told everybody, she wasn’t one for travelling herself, and once she had landed up in Tiger Bay, that was as far as she intended to go. The move to Splott had marked the end of her travels.
    It was in a working men’s club in Paradise Place, Cardiff that something at last began to happen for Shirley. She had a booking to sing there one Saturday night, and when she arrived the club steward came over to her. ‘There’s someone here called Georgie Wood,’ he told her. ‘He’s a Cardiff man, but he acts as an agent for films and shows and things. After your song I’ll take you over to him and introduce you. It might be a good idea to pretend to be American. You know, a pretty dark girl from Harlem.’
    Meeting Georgie Wood after her number, Shirley disregarded the steward’s advice. After all, as she realised, Wood was probably from Tiger Bay himself and there would be little point in embarking on such a far-fetched charade. This totally unexpected meeting in a noisy, smoky workers’ club went very well. Georgie Wood was impressed with Shirley’s voice and told her so. She was one of the Bay Girls, wasn’t she, he asked? That was good he said, because he was about to audition some of the Bay Girls for a show from London called
Memories of Jolson
and they wanted a nice chorus line from Tiger Bay. Naturally, there’d be a bit of singing involved and would Shirley be interested incoming to the audition next week at Frenchie’s? Frenchie’s studio in Bute Street? And after that would she be interested in coming to London?
    Would she ever! Shirley left the club in a state of mixed excitement and disbelief wondering whether she was at last on the edge of the ‘big break’ that the Tiger Bay girls had talked and dreamed of for years. She needed to talk to somebody and despite the fact that it was midnight, she made her way over to her best friend Iris Freeman’s house in Sophia Street, Tiger Bay. She didn’t think, in the circumstances, that Iris would mind being woken. Nothing was stirring in Sophia Street, and for a moment it seemed that even the doorbell wasn’t going to rouse anyone in the Freeman