From ilanet!JeanPaul_Nicholls@apple.com Fri Mar 31 17:20:53 GMT 1995
Article: 18654 of rec.juggling
Newsgroups: rec.juggling
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From: ilanet!JeanPaul_Nicholls@apple.com (JeanPaul Nicholls)
Subject: Magnus Nicholls - Lies
Message-ID: <818802686.2357346@ilanet>
Sender: juggling@pnfi.forestry.ca
Reply-To: ilanet!JeanPaul_Nicholls@apple.com
Organization: Petawawa National Forestry Institute, Canadian Forestry Service
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1995 07:51:32 GMT
Lines: 54

I am pleased to see all this interest in my grandfather at his hundredth
birthday, but I am sad to see the same old lies that plauged him for much of
his career cropping up again. 

Let me say once and for all that he never practiced Satanism or Witchcraft.
There was no pact with the devil. There was no sacrifice of live rabbits
before any show, apart from one practical joke he played on an unfriendly
magician. (I can hear his voice telling that story: "'Ere, pull zis out of
you 'at!") Even though as a teenager he performed at the court of the
Romanovs, I am certain that he did not have carnal relationships with
Rasputin. For most of his teenage years (with a couple of lapses due to
youthful exuberance) he was resolutely heterosexual. Yes there were those
faded sepia photographs in the family album of nude swimming at the Dachau on
the Volga, but we are certain that was his brother Ivor.

As to his relationship with Madame Rastelli, he was once asked if he had
slept with her, and replied, "But who didn't?" Rastelli was oblivious to such
things. The true source of bad feelings between them was quite different. My
grandfather used to juggle nine, ten and eleven balls in complicated patterns
that involved throwing two and three balls at a time. He said this was much
harder than Rastelli's ten ball pattern, since Rastelli only threw one ball
at a time, and besides, doing five balls in each hand wasn't really juggling
ten. For some reason this made Rastelli mad, and the two did not speak to
each other. But it was a friendly fued, and grandma used to say how 
delighted he was when he was invited to be a pallbearer at Rastelli's
funeral.

Someone mentioned the wooden leg stunt. In a way, that was a tribute to his
twin Ivor. Their mother Helga was of mixed German and Swedish parentage, and
their father Dai was part Welsh and part Gypsy. Helga and Dai communicated in
broken English, the only language they had in common, except when they were
having an argument, when Dai would revert to Romany and Helga to Swedish. The
boys grew up speaking five languages, but none of them as a native. They were
very close - grandpa used to boast that not only did his brother substitute
for him in the bedroom on his wedding night, but on several nights thereafter
when he had made other arrangements. At the outbreak of the First World War,
Magnus was in Paris and Ivor was in Munich. Each chose to adopt the
nationality of the country they were in rather than attract suspicion, so
they found themselves fighting on opposite sides. Ivor was killed by a mortar
in 1917.

Of course, it was not a real wooden leg. His real leg was bent double at the
knee and strapped in place. He performed that routine in the character of the
wounded soldier for about a year, to remind audiences of the horrors of war.
At the end of the routine he would hop to the edge of the stage and remind
the audience that he was one of the lucky ones, before doing a handstand, and
walking off on his hands.

I would write more, but I only have twenty minutes a day on this BBS.

Jean Paul Nicholls
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