I was living in those far-off but never to be forgotten days in a cottage made of clay and wattles just outside the north gate of the city of Cambridge. That cottage stood by a fen. Fatherless, motherless, I was being looked after by a pair of sisters, whiskered virgins, Meg and Merry Muchmore, two spinsters with long noses for the smelling out of knavery.
It was the pleasure of each of these ladies in turn to spank me naked while the other watched. I think they liked to see my little pintle harden. Meg's lap smelt of liquorice but there was no pleasing Merry. I had a well-whipped childhood, I can tell you.
All their long lives these two weird sisters had dedicated themselves to piety and good works, and I, the bastard son of a priest's bastard, conceived in a confessional, born in a graveyard, was one of the best of them. I mean, what better work than Pickleherring?
I was a posthumous child. Of my father, I heard from my mother only that his mouth was so big and cavernous that he could thrust his clenched fist into it. How often he performed this trick for her amusement I know not. I know only that he could do it, and that also he had some interest in the occult. That is an interest which I do not share.
Reader, don't get me wrong. I believe in ghosts and visions. I pray only to be spared from seeing them.
My mother died when I was seven years old. She smelt of milk and comfrey fritters. She used to tell me tales by the chimneyside. It was from her sweet lips that I first heard of Tattercoats and of Tom-Tit-Tot and of Jack and his beanstalk. She sang to me, too, my mother - all the old English songs.
I remember her singing me to sleep with a ballad called O Polly Dear. But she died of a fever and then there was no more music. My bed was under thatching and the way to it was up a rope ladder.
I had never before been spoken to by a man in a copataine hat. Mr Shakespeare was tall and thin, and he wore that hat with an air of great authority. He had also a quilted silken doublet, goose-turd green; grey velvet hose; and a scarlet cloak. Never believe those who tell you he was not a dandy.
This first meeting of ours took place in the yard of a tavern called the Cock. A small rain fell like brightness from the air. Ah, what a dream it seems now, seventy years away.
One thing I can tell you that you'll perhaps not learn elsewhere. Mr William Shakespeare never minded a bit of rain. He sat under the springing mulberry tree that grew in the middle of the Cock's back yard. He had a damask napkin over his knee and a little knife of silver in his hand. He was opening oysters.
As for me, I had climbed up on the red-brick wall to keep him in my sight. My friends mocked me. One of them said the man was from Wales, and an alchemist. They said he could make gold, and fly in the air. They said he was in Cambridge for blood for his lamp. I pretended not to care. I did not want his art, but I had no father.
'Pickleherring's mad again!' piped my playmates.
Then they all ran away and left me on my own to face the necromancer.
Mr Shakespeare must have seen me watching him. But I don't believe that his eyes ever left the oysters.
His voice was soft and gentle when he spoke. But it was the sort of softness that you stop and listen to, like the sound of the theorbo.
'Boy,' he said, suddenly.
I nearly fell down off the wall. Instead I said, 'Yes, sir?'
I was shaking in my boots.
'Say this, boy,' he said. 'I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it.'
What kind of spell was this?
I looked at Mr Shakespeare.
He looked up from his oysters and looked at me.
Something in his look made me take him straight. So I forgot all about spells and I said the words he said. I said them simply. I do not think I can say that I said them well. But I said them more or less as he said them, which is to say that I spoke the speech trippingly on the tongue, not mouthing it, not sawing the air with my hand.
It was, as I learnt later, the way he liked it. He never could abide the ranting sort. Truth to tell, I had never then acted in my life, so I knew no worse. Also, I was afraid, which helped me to say that I was as though I meant it.
My performance seemed to please Mr Shakespeare.
He took off his hat to me.
'Good,' he said. And then, 'Good, boy,' he said. And then again, after a little while, 'Good boy,' Mr Shakespeare said finally.
He swallowed an oyster.
'Say this,' he said. 'Say that.'
I mean, I can't remember now all Mr Shakespeare bade me say then. He sat there downing oysters while I recited. Sometimes he said 'Good' and sometimes he said 'Good, boy' and once he said 'Good boy' again and more than once he said nothing but just wiped his mouth with his napkin.
I do recall that he asked me at last to sing.
So I sat down on the wall and I sang for Mr Shakespeare.
I had a good voice in those days.
I sang for him the ballad of O Polly Dear.
The sweet rain fell and the drops ran down my face and I sat there in the rain, legs dangling, singing O Polly Dear that my mother used to sing to me.
Mr Shakespeare listened with his eyes as well as his ears.
When I finished he nodded and he clapped his hands three times together.
It was the first applause I ever had.
Then at Mr Shakespeare's instruction I jumped down off the wall.
Chapter Two In which Pickleherring makes strides in a pair of lugged boots
The first part I ever played for Mr Shakespeare on the London stage was that of young Prince Arthur in his play of The Life and Death of King John. That's why he asked me to say I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it. It is what that poor boy says before he kills himself by jumping from the battlements of the castle where he is confined.
When I jumped down off the red-brick wall and into the back yard of the Cock Tavern, Cambridge, Mr Shakespeare stopped eating his oysters and he asked me my name and where I lived and who my father was. So I told him of the cot beneath the thatch and my fatherless fate.
As I spoke to him of fathers, I saw tears run down his cheeks. I thought it was rain.
'O my poor Hamlet,' Mr Shakespeare said.
Like a fool, I repeated the four words.
Mr Shakespeare flushed. His face was all at once a crimson rose. He blinked at me in anger through his tears. I think he thought that I was mocking him. Then he must have realised that I'd mistaken what he said for another speech to try. He pinched his nose between the thumb and the first finger of his left hand, shaking his head a moment as he did so. When he looked at me again his eyes were clear.
'Do you have perfect pitch?' Mr Shakespeare asked me.
I told him that I had. (It was a lie.)
Then Mr Shakespeare took my hand, unsmiling, and he promised me that if I chose to come with him to London and join his company he could make me a player like himself.
My heart thumped in my breast. I felt as if I had suddenly grown taller by an inch.
Well now, my dears, it happens that this part of Prince Arthur might contain the key as to why Mr Shakespeare first noticed me and thought to give me employment as a player.
I think perhaps that I put him in mind of his son.
I was wearing, do you see, a pair of lugged boots. Those boots were all the rage that year of our first meeting. They were boots of soft leather, hanging loose about the leg, turned down and fringed. I think they called them lugged because the fringes looked like ears.
Be that as it may. I learnt later that young Hamlet Shakespeare begged for a pair of these boots to wear as he lay dying. He was eleven years old. It was Mrs Shakespeare herself who told me that she got them for Hamlet to wear as he tossed on his death-bed. He never so much as walked in them anywhere.
So it might be that my lugged boots were what caught Mr Shakespeare's eye.