The Prestige

2

Because the yard was prospering my parents could afford to send me to the Pelham Scholastic Academy, a dame school run by the Misses Pelham in East Bourne Street, next to the remains of the mediaeval Town Wall and close to the harbour. There, amid the persistent stench from the rotten fish which littered the beach and all the environs of the harbour, and against the constant but eloquent braying of the herring gulls, I learnt the three Rs, as well as a modicum of History, Geography and the fearsome French language. All of these were to stand me in good stead in later life, but my fruitless struggles to learn French have an ironic outcome, because in adult life my stage persona is that of a French professor.

My way to and from school was across the ridge of West Hill, which was built up only in the immediate neighbourhood of our house. Most of the way led along steep narrow paths through the scented tamarisk bushes that had colonized so many of Hastings’ open spaces. Hastings at the time was experiencing a period of development, as numerous new houses and hotels were being built to accommodate the summer visitors. I saw little of this, because the school was in the Old Town, while the resort area was being built beyond the White Rock, a former rocky spur that one day in my childhood was enthrallingly dynamited out of existence to make way for an extended seafront promenade. Despite all this, life in the ancient centre of Hastings continued much as it had done for hundreds of years.

I could say much about my father, good and bad, but for the sake of concentrating on my own story I shall confine myself to the best. I loved him, and learnt from him many of the cabinet-making techniques which, inadvertently by him, have made my name and fortune. I can attest that my father was hard-working, honest, sober, intelligent and, in his own way, generous. He was fair to his employees. Because he was not a God-fearing man, and no churchgoer, he brought up his family to act within a benign secularism, in which neither action nor inaction would occur to cause hurt or harm to others. He was a brilliant cabinet-maker and a good wheelwright. I realized, eventually, that whatever emotional outbursts our family had to endure (because there were several) his anger must have been caused by inner frustrations, although at what and of what sort I was never entirely sure. Although I was never myself a target for his worst moments, I grew up a little scared of my father but loved him profoundly.

My mother's name was Betsy May Borden (née Robertson), my father's name was Joseph Andrew Borden. I had a total of seven brothers and sisters, although because of infant deaths I knew only five of them. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest child, and was not particularly favoured by either parent. I grew up in reasonable harmony with most, if not all, of my siblings.

When I was twelve I was taken away from the school and placed to work as a wheelwright's apprentice in my father's yard. Here my adult life began, both in the sense that from this time I spent more time with adults than with other children, and that my own real future started to become clear to me. Two factors were pivotal.

The first was, simply enough, the handling of wood. I had grown up with the sight and smell of it, so that both were familiar to me. I had little idea how wood felt when you picked it up, or cleaved it, or sawed it. From the first moment I handled wood with purposeful intent I began to respect it, and realize what could be done with it. Wood, when properly seasoned, and hewed to take advantage of the natural grain, is beautiful, strong, light and supple. It can be cut to almost any shape; it can be worked or adhered to almost any other material. You can paint it, stain it, bleach it, flex it. It is at once outstanding and commonplace, so that when something manufactured of wood is present it lends a quiet feeling of solid normality, and so is hardly ever noticed.

In short it is the ideal medium for the illusionist.

At the yard I was given no preferential treatment as the proprietor's son. On my first day, I was sent to begin learning the business by taking on the roughest, hardest job in the yard — I and another apprentice were put to work in a saw-pit. The twelve-hour days of that (we started at 6.00 a.m. and finished at 8.00 p.m. every day, with only three short breaks for meals) hardened my body like no other work I can conceive of, and taught me to fear as well as respect the heavy cords of timber. After that initiation, which continued for several months, I was moved to the less physically demanding but more exacting work of learning to cut, turn and smooth the wood for the spokes and felloes of the wheels. Here I came into regular contact with the wheelwrights and other men who worked for my father, and saw less of my fellow apprentices.

One morning, about a year after I had left school, a contract worker named Robert Noonan came to the yard to carry out some long-needed repair and redecoration work to the rear wall of the yard, which had been damaged in a storm some years before. With Noonan's arrival came the second great influence on the direction of my future life.

I, busy about my labours, barely even noticed him, but at 1.00 p.m. when we broke for lunch, Noonan came and sat with me and the other men at the trestle table where we ate our food. He produced a pack of playing cards, and asked if any of us would care to “find the lady”. Some of the older men chaffed him and tried to warn off the others, but a few of us stayed to watch. Tiny sums of money began to change hands; not mine, for I had none to spare, but one or two of the workmen were willing to gamble a few pence.

What fascinated me was the smooth, natural way that Noonan manipulated the cards. He was so fast! So dexterous! He spoke softly and persuasively, showing us the faces of the three playing cards, placing them down on the small box in front of him with a quick but flowing motion, then moving them about with his long fingers before pausing to challenge us to indicate which of the cards was the Queen. The workmen had slower eyes than mine; they spotted the card rather less often than I did (although I was wrong more often than I was right).

Afterwards, I said to Noonan, “How do you do that? Will you show me?”

At first he tried to fob me off with talk of idle hands, but I persisted. “I want to know how you do it!” I cried. “The Queen is placed in the middle of the three, but you move the cards only twice and she is not where I think she is! What's the secret?”

So one lunchtime, instead of trying to fleece the other men, he took me to a quiet corner of the shed and showed me how to manipulate the three cards so that the hand deceived the eye. The Queen and another card were gripped lightly between the thumb and middle finger of the left hand, one above the other; the third card was held in the right hand. When the cards were placed he moved his hands crosswise, brushing his fingertips on the surface and pausing briefly, so suggesting the Queen was being put down first. In fact, it was almost invariably one of the other cards that slipped quietly down before her. This is the classic trick whose correct name is Three Card Monte.

When I had grasped the idea of that, Noonan showed me several other techniques. He taught me how to palm a card in the hand, how to shuffle the deck deceptively so that the order remained undisturbed, how to cut the pack to bring a certain chosen card to the top or bottom of the hand, how to offer a fan of cards to someone and force him to choose one particular card. He went through all this in a casual way, showing off rather than showing, probably not realizing the rapt attention with which I was taking it in. When he had finished his demonstration I tried the false dealing technique with the Queen, but the cards scattered all about. I tried again. Then again. And on and on, long after Noonan himself had lost interest and wandered away. By the evening of the first day, alone in my bedroom, I had mastered Three Card Monte, and was setting to work on the other techniques I had briefly seen.

One day, his painting work completed, Noonan left the yard and went out of my life. I never saw him again. He left behind him an impressionable adolescent boy with a compulsion. I intended to rest at nothing until I had mastered the art that I now knew (from a book I urgently borrowed from the lending library) was called Legerdemain.

Legerdemain, sleight of hand, prestidigitation, became the dominant interest of my life.