A One-hit Wonder

This sparkling short story by Kathleen Conlon welcomes you to a brand-new Special.

A visit from a curious journalist stirred up old memories of being in the spotlight . . .

IDIDN’T get to work until ten on Monday morning. Geoff was unloading sacks of compost from the lorry. “You shouldn’t be doing that. Where’s John?” I asked.

“Hasn’t turned up. Again. I was beginning to wonder about you,” Geoff replied.

“I had to take Cosmo to the vet. Why not get one of the others on the case? The work-experience lad?”

“Not allowed. Health and safety. And all the others are busy.”

“Well, I need you in the office, so you’ll have to pull somebody off whatever they’re doing,” I told him.

We were checking through the order books when he suddenly clapped his hand to his forehead.

“I forgot! There was a phone call for you. A Clive Ferguson.

“Said he was a journalist and asked if you’d call him back.”

He began to sift through the papers on the desk.

“Don’t bother,” I replied. “I’m not interested.”

“But you don’t know what he wants.”

“I think I do.”

****

Monday was usually quiet on the customer front, but heavy on deliveries.

We had topsoil and turf, garden furniture, a load of wheelbarrows, watering cans, spades, forks and hoes arrive.

We had forest bark and planters, trellis panels and pergolas, as well as trays of bedding plants that we didn’t raise from seed ourselves.

The specialist growers had sent a fresh supply of clematis.

John arrived with some feeble excuse about his motorbike having broken down.

“Telephone?” I suggested. “I didn’t think it would take so long,” he said.

My guess was that he’d overslept.

“The floribundas need potting up,” I said. “After you’ve done that you can take the trays of pansies round to the front.”

Go to any garden centre and I can almost guarantee you’ll see trays of pansies as soon as you come through the gate.

With velvety petals and intense colour, they’re hard to resist and serve to lure the customers in.

Then they encounter the specialist, and therefore more expensive, stock.

I’d been on a learning curve since starting the nursery.

Eventually I had expanded it to include the other items people seem to require: pot plants, artificial flowers, birdfeeders, wrought-iron knick-knacks and reconstituted stone sundials.

My grandad had owned a nursery and I learned a lot of basic stuff at his knee.

What type of soil allowed certain plants to thrive, which were shade lovers and which sun worshippers, when to sow and when to prick out.

“But,” he’d said, “you can do all the right things and still the daft plants won’t do what they’re supposed to.

“They can be perverse, can plants. Just like life itself.”

****

Clive Ferguson rang again while I was snatching a sandwich at lunchtime.

“Did you get my message?” he asked.

I lied.

“No matter,” he said,

“I’ve got you now.”

He went on to recite his credentials.

He’d been commissioned by one of the Sunday supplements to produce an article about me and others of my sort.

“But I’m a different person now,” I insisted.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m doing a ‘Where are they now’ type thing. You, Billy Shaw, Kathy Lane, the

Band of Hope, and so on. People are interested.”

“In has-beens?” I asked. I knew what had happened to Billy Shaw, Kathy Lane and the Band of Hope: they were appearing on cruise ships

and doing tribute stuff at town theatres.

I got out while the going was good and my selfesteem still fairly intact.

“We do have a budget,” Clive was saying. “I’m happy to pay for your time. At least let’s meet and then you can make up your mind.”

“How did you get my number?” I asked. “I mean, how did you link me with the garden centre?”

“We have ways.”

****

When I was seventeen my friend Marcia told me there was a party in the offing.

Not a kids’ party – this was a proper party.

Jimmy Grove had heard about it from his cousin, who knew Dave and Rosamund from the fancy flats on Millionaires Row.

The Wrong Ones, her favourite band, were appearing in Liverpool and staying at the Imperial Hotel.

The word was that they’d turn up at the party, and I adored Peregrine Jones.

“My mum won’t let me go,” I told her.

“Tell her you’re staying with me.”

“And what about you?” “I’ll tell my mum I’m staying with you.”

So she lied and I lied and we smuggled out the appropriate apparel and changed in the ladies’ toilets at the railway station.

Emerging as two small town versions of Mary Quant, with our Cathy McGowan hairstyles and Dusty Springfield eyes, we boarded the number 16 bus and alighted at the bottom of the hill upon the summit of which lay our destination.

I’d never seen such opulence, nor so many exotic characters gathered together in one place.

I moved, mesmerised, through the throng.

It seemed as though the circus had come to town.

There were modes of dress more extreme than even I, an avid reader of every fashion magazine going, had encountered before.

Peacocks strutted, soubrettes dazzled and principal boys rubbed shoulders with sequinned sprites.

Drinks were placed into our hands and Marcia, hoping to quell the nerves she wouldn’t admit to, drank them all and, eventually, sought out a bathroom where she promptly fell asleep.

Then I met Andy Harding. In those days, in the pop world, it wasn’t all about looks.

I used to be given the solos in the school choir, though recently I’d failed to turn up for rehearsals on the grounds that choirs, like youth clubs, were for kids.

Andy Harding was a puckish little man in a suit, and the manager of the Wrong Ones.

When the Wrong Ones went on to trash their suite at the Imperial Hotel. Andy Harding fixed it just by taking out his wallet.

That was how things went in those days.

That night at the party he had a question for me.

“Can you sing? Because you’ve got all the other attributes.”

I had long blonde hair, long legs and a face that approximated to the shape of a heart.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Rosemary Gold,” I replied.

“Rosemary Gold,” he repeated. “Wait!”

I was making for the door.

“I have to get home,” I said. “My mum will be going spare.”

I had no reasonable explanation that could be offered for why I wasn’t staying at Marcia’s.

As for Marcia’s whereabouts – she’d slaughter me.

“I think I’d like to speak to your mum,” Andy Harding said, taking a notebook and pen from the pocket of his plain suit that looked so out of place in those surroundings.

“Here,” he said, handing them to me. “Write down your number.”

Any other day, I might have hesitated, or written down some entirely fictitious number, but it seemed that, at long last, my life might be unfolding before me, like a fairy story.

And that was how it was. For a time.

Andy was very persuasive and my mother was talked into allowing me to go to London (heavily chaperoned) in order to cut a demonstration record.

Marcia was hopping mad. She was adamant that if she hadn’t drunk so much, she could have been the one wearing the headphones and talking to the men with the shiny suits and dead eyes in Wardour Street.

I did gently remind her that, even fully awake, she was still tone deaf.

Two of the Wrong Ones had written a song for me.

It was called “Farewell”, a sad little ditty about a couple separated on different sides during a civil war.

The two sat in on the recording session, fooling about and making sarcastic remarks.

Girls swooned over them, apparently, but I thought them deeply unattractive and so full of themselves that they were liable to explode.

They were aware that I was unimpressed, and referred to me as “Little Miss Clogs and Shawl”, because I came from the north.

When I took their song to number one in the charts, their attitude changed completely.

As did the attitudes of a number of others: people who wouldn’t have given me the time of day when I was Rosie Gold, sixthformer swotting for A-Levels.

Suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend, or pretended to despise me for my “spurious” fame.

I had to learn who was halfway genuine and who was not.

Meanwhile, my life became exciting, glamorous.

I was a pop star and this entitled me to meet the people I’d previously only read about in the press, to stay in palatial hotels and eat in fancy restaurants.

I was flown to Monte Carlo, to Paris and Amsterdam and Madrid.

I was photographed endlessly, interviewed by those very fashion magazines I used to drool over, pictured wearing the originals of the clothes I’d

It seemed that, at long last, my life might be unfolding before me

saved up my pocket money to buy as recreations.

A biography was created for me which made my background sound more interesting than it was.

I began to believe my own publicity.

I would have got so far above myself I’d have had difficulty in climbing back down.

However, my grandad informed me that if I put on any more airs and graces he’d prove to me that I wasn’t too old for a smacked bottom.

I went on tour, supporting the Rebellion, together with Billy Shaw and Boys Will Be Boys.

We played most of the English seaside resorts, and when that was over I did another one almost straight away.

A Motown group was headlining: four girls who fought continually.

I saw things then that caused my eyes to open wide.

Temptation abounded and I might have gone seriously astray if my mum hadn’t always been there to make sure I didn’t let myself down.

Peregrine Jones went to Australia and the Wrong Ones broke up amidst much acrimony.

My second single was penned by an up-andcoming duo. Great things were expected of it.

It got to number

24, and the follow-up didn’t even nudge its way into the top 100. By the time my eighteenth birthday came round, I had been dropped by the record company.

“It’s been a whirl,” Andy remarked. He wasn’t paying me much attention.

He had a new client. Loads of potential, he claimed.

I thought she looked rather like me and realised then that, though talent will undoubtedly out, girls like us were interchangeable.

We didn’t have enough talent; we were simply puppets manipulated to fit an ever-changing requirement and were expendable when no good fit could be achieved.

After that last meeting with Andy in London, I came back by coach from Victoria.

I’d become used to first-class travel; I’d danced on the stages of television studios; I’d performed before screaming audiences.

My face had adorned newspapers and magazine covers and posters and billboards.

They called me “The Golden Rose”.

And this is how it had ended: jolting back home through the night with a stranger asleep on my shoulder.

We were very naïve, myself, Billy Shaw and Kathy Lane, and all those other youngsters plucked from obscurity for their brief moment of glory.

Many were ripped off by their management, and this included some of those contracted to Andy Harding.

Eventually he went conveniently bankrupt and took off for foreign parts.

But my grandad had looked out for me and made sure I got at least some of my dues.

We sold the posh house and the posh car that none of us could drive.

I did my A-Levels at night school, and applied for and was awarded a place at a horticultural college.

My mum put all the scrapbooks up in the loft where, sadly, they got nibbled by mice.

****

I suspected that there were people who were born looking arrogant, and Clive Ferguson was one of them.

I always try to avoid being influenced by first impressions of someone, but there are times when that’s difficult, especially when arrogance is combined with a damp handshake.

I led him into the office – Geoff gave me a wink as we passed him – and the work experience lad brought us some coffee and biscuits.

“Well,” Clive Ferguson began, looking around him as he stirred his drink. “You don’t mind?”

He was recording our conversation so that my words might be preserved for posterity, or at least quoted accurately.

I shook my head.

“Though I’m not sure that I’ve anything remotely interesting to impart,” I added.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m sure you have. We’re heavy on nostalgia at the moment – loads of anniversaries of wars and stuff.”

“Well, I don’t quite qualify for that,” I said with a touch of asperity.

“No, of course not, but I wonder if you’d like to tell me what you recall of your time as ‘The Golden Rose’. I mean, it was pretty fabulous, wasn’t it?”

I tried to remember: hotel rooms, coaches, greasy sandwiches, people throwing tantrums, the adrenalin rush followed by the dull headache that accompanies disturbed sleep patterns – and the stupid questions asked by eager journalists.

But this was not what Clive Ferguson was hoping to hear. He wanted the juicy stuff.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I never dabbled in anything illegal, nor did I have any sort of relationship with anyone you’d have heard of,” I told him, smiling.

“I suppose I may have been over-protected, but now I’m glad that I was.”

There was a knock at the door and one of the girls opened it.

“Do you know if we can still get a Souvenir de la Malmaison rose this late in the season?

“There’s a customer on the phone . . .

“Oh! Sorry,” she apologised. “I didn’t realise . . .”

“That’s OK, Sally,” I said, glad of the interruption. “Take their number and I’ll ring them back.”

Clive Ferguson paused to look around him at the paraphernalia involved in trying to run a business of this nature: the clutter of sacks, catalogues, seed packets and spilled compost.

“It must have been a life-changing experience, from that to this.

“Don’t you regret it? Didn’t you miss the limelight?” Clive asked. I pondered this.

“I did,” I replied. “But I suppose I always knew that it would be a temporary thing.

“I didn’t have the drive or the determination that I recognised in other people.”

“But this . . .?” he said in such a dismissive way that I was stung into a sharp response.

“Second best?” I stated, “Is that what you’re thinking?

“Well, you’re wrong. It’s given me more satisfaction than any claim to fame.”

I gave him a few anecdotes from my performing days, but I could tell I was a great disappointment to him and he soon packed his stuff and left.

I supposed he was off to seek out Kathy Lane, Billy Shaw and the others who were commuting between Southend and Stoke-onTrent, Newport and Nottingham, unloading instruments, playing to empty houses and waiting for their big comeback.

I spent the afternoon doing the time sheets and VAT returns. I chased up some alpines that should have arrived and started on the order for spring bulbs.

A few customers drifted in and out and eventually I heard sounds indicating that the staff were preparing to cash up.

I felt oddly unsettled. Clive Ferguson brought back memories I’d long ago cast into oblivion.

The Golden Rose: young and pretty with the world at my feet. And now . . .

Geoff put his head round the door and beckoned me.

I followed him down the main path, past the herbaceous perennials and the camellias, past the conifers and the heathers and acers, down to the furthest glasshouse.

The special glasshouse. He opened the door, putting his finger to his lips, and I realised what he was trying to tell me.

“It’s happened?” I asked. “It’s happened!” he exclaimed.

It had taken us a long time, grafting and regrafting, working patiently towards achieving our goal.

We’d had several disappointments and had come close but not close enough.

Nothing less than perfection would do.

Last year, and the year before that, we thought we’d got it right, and then, nature being as perverse as life itself, as my grandad used to say, the result always left something to be desired.

“Look!” Geoff urged me. There it was: one perfect rose, the bud unfurling almost before our eyes, its petals the colour of pure, untarnished gold and its fragrance drenching the atmosphere.

“We did it,” Geoff murmured.

He put his arm around my shoulders.

“We did it!”

We’d applied to register its title. It had been Geoff’s suggestion: Rosie Gold.

It might be a forgotten name in Clive Ferguson’s pantheon of stars, but in my world, it would live for ever.

The End.