Owning Up: The Trilogy (66 page)

He had been an insurance agent in Dunfermline: ‘I was very, very respected in Dunfermline,’ he would often tell us, but had left over a muddle with money. He was scrupulously honest, so it had been a genuine muddle mostly due, we gathered, to allowing people who couldn’t pay to leave it over to next week, and marking their books as though they had paid, and then forgetting if they had or not. A muddle due to kindness in fact, for he was a very kindhearted little man.

Pat had discovered in the cheerful blasphemy of the Mulligan band, perhaps, the most worrying milieu for him. He took, as they say, ‘refuge in drink’, in his case Guinness. Sober he was a polite person. When drunk he began to swear, not as most people swear, in order to emphasise what they have to say, or from verbal poverty, but as though possessed. At the same time his face would alter. His eyes rolled, his nostrils distended, and his mouth grinned fixedly revealing his formidable teeth.

Pat was a virgin. He once told me that when he had been working in a sack factory a girl had pushed him back on to a pile of the finished product and ‘tried to rape me, but I managed to push her off’!

He owned an enormous collection of the sort of suits you can see on men waiting for the pubs to open on Sunday mornings in Camden Town, bright blue with floppy trouser bottoms. He was also a great runner of mysterious errands involving small brown paper parcels.

Drinking and gambling so complicated his financial life that for quite a long time he was forced to live in the band coach which was parked on a piece of waste ground behind King’s Cross. He washed in the nearby public baths and ate in a café. His wardrobe hung across the back of the coach, his belongings along the shelves.

But despite these economies, he was always having to approach Mick for subs and loans. Mick, although prepared to help him out, rather dreaded these moments, not only for the money involved, but because Pat insisted on giving him an hour-long explanation of just why and how his finances were in such a mess. He prefaced these sessions with a sentence that Mick learned to dread. ‘I wonder,’ he would say, ‘if we could have a little chat?’

Pat’s real obsession was his instrument. His double bass was an old one and, alone among the instruments in a jazz band, the age of a double bass would appear to add to its standing in the eyes of its owner.

During journeys it lay across the back seat of the coach, and, whenever we passed over a level-crossing or humpbacked bridge, and in consequence bounced into the air, Pat would give a loud anguished cry of ‘the bass’, and scurry down the coach aisle to make sure it had suffered no damage.

Musicians’ reactions to their instruments vary a great deal. Clarinet players, due to the flimsy nature of the clarinet, become hardened to minor disasters, although at the same time given to irritable exasperation. Between overhauls a complicated forest of elastic bands replaces weak springs, little green pads are constantly falling off, and reeds have to be singed with matches in an attempt to harden the blowing edge.

Trombonists are very neurotic about their horns. They’re usually fairly neurotic anyway, but it’s impossible to say whether they become trombonists
because
they’re neurotic or become neurotic
because
they’re trombonists. It’s easy to see why they worry about their instruments. The long slide, incredibly vulnerable and, if bent only a fraction, completely useless, which must nevertheless be temptingly pushed out over the heads of an audience, is the main cause, but also the fact that many people tend to think of the trombone as a musical joke is a contributing factor. Most trombonists alternate between pushing their technique beyond its limits and angry self-parody.

Trumpet players are musically pretty extrovert on the whole. Because it is quite hard to damage a trumpet short of jumping on it, they treat their instruments with a certain indifference.

Mick’s various trumpets – he had almost as many as he had suits – were always in terrible condition, but even so they had to seize up before he cleaned them. This, in itself a distressing process for a spectator, usually took place in tiny dressing rooms when we were changing into our uniform, and it was difficult to avoid being forced to bear witness. It involved flushing out all the tubing by running hot water through under pressure, and Mick would draw our attention to anything particularly interesting as it slithered down the plug-hole.

Mick always maintained that he found it hard to blow in tune after he’d cleaned out his trumpet because he’d got used to compensating for the distortion produced by the blockages.

Once, when Mick was a member of a band which had formed to welcome Louis Armstrong at London Airport, Louis borrowed his trumpet to blow a few notes with the group for the benefit of the press photographers, and handed it back with the words: ‘You want to get the saveloys out of your horn, man!’

During tours a continuous problem was finding somewhere to stay. We had an ideal in our heads; a pub where the bar was still swinging however late the job finished, where the landlady actually preferred us to have breakfast at about 11 a.m., and where a girl with a strong local accent was accepted as your wife when you got back, even though you had booked in as a single before the gig.

Here and there such places actually existed, but usually some compromise was necessary.

Some bands had their accommodation booked through their offices which meant in fact staying at AA hotels, but these were the prosperous organisations like the Lyttelton Band. Others kept a methodical record of everywhere they stayed and wrote off in advance. We did neither. We had a rota and tried to fix ourselves up when we arrived, taking it in turn to actually find the digs.

As we were often late, and might have as little as half an hour to spare before we were due on stage, this was a nightmare.

Of course, as time went on in most of the big towns we knew where to go. In Sheffield it was Mrs Flanagan.

She was a large, kind woman who always wore slippers and an apron. Her house, big and unbelievably shabby, was situated in the seedy area which usually surrounds provincial universities dating from the last century. An area of unlikely dogs copulating in the rain, sad Negroes and Indians, women in curlers going to shop wearing dusty maroon coats over their nightdresses, large Catholic Churches, junk shops full of rags and broken electric fires, pubs standing alone on the corners of bomb sites, bright poster hoardings, graffiti and children’s street games chalked all over the pavements.

Mrs Flanagan seldom moved out of her kitchen except to answer the bell or bring in the breakfasts. Her kitchen was not large, but as well as her it contained a very old spaniel, two cats, and a budgie. It was considered advisable to ask for boiled eggs for breakfast.

In the dining-room was an old piano, a sideboard with jumbo-sized cornflakes packets on it, a looking-glass surrounded by photographs of bandleaders who had stayed there and disfigured by musicians who had worked for them. Soon after her accession, somebody stuck up a postcard of the Queen among the other .photographs. On it was written: ‘Lovely digs, Mrs Flanagan’. It was signed ‘Liz and Phil’.

Over the dining-room table with its jug of thin bluish milk, tea-stained sugar, and sliced white bread, was a remarkable lampshade which all of us for many years believed to be made of fur. One day somebody climbed on to a chair to examine it more closely, and in touching it dislodged a thick cloud of brown dust.

The beds were very damp, but once you got warm they were quite comfortable as they exuded a steamy heat due perhaps to the flannel sheets. The banisters, the walls, the handles of the knives, in fact everything in the house, felt both gritty and greasy.

Mrs Flanagan was tolerant of every kind of behaviour except sexual promiscuity.

‘If yer want to go wi’ a scrubber,’ she’d tell us, ‘there’s plenty of them sort of ’otels, but don’t bring ’er ’ere!’

Ken Colyer, the week before he got married, had turned up with his fiancee and persuaded Mrs Flanagan they were already man and wife. Mrs Flanagan always read the
Melody Maker
from cover to cover every Friday in her kitchen, and the following week had come across a photograph of Ken and his bride on the steps of Fulham Town Hall under the legend, ‘Married Yesterday’.

She came storming into the dining-room and brought it to our attention. ‘Wait till I see that Ken Colyer!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll learn ’im! Coming ’ere for a bloody rehearsal!’

If you asked Mrs Flanagan to lend you anything – cards, dominoes, a clothes brush – she would hand it over with a sweet smile.

‘Luke after it luv,’ she’d say, and then add, after a long pause, ‘It were Flanagan’s.’

On the other hand, in Manchester there was never any trouble in finding a hotel where you could lumber back a scrubber. These hotels were usually converted terrace houses in which the original rooms had been split into narrow corridors and minute rooms as though bees had been building a hive in a hollow tree. They were full of half-complete innovations aimed at the American servicemen from the Cheshire airbases who stayed there with their girls on week-end passes.

‘Cocktail Lounges’, remnants of modern wallpapers which ran out half-way round a room, sixpence-in-the-slot electric shavers usually out of order, loudspeakers in every bedroom with a control switch marked ‘Light. Home. Room Service’.

A late-night phone call to book a double room revealed in one sentence the only strict rule: ‘ ’Ave you got luggage, sir?’

Breakfast in the dining-room on Sunday morning was an unreal and dream-like experience due to the fact that the American servicemen’s wives, club hostesses in the main, were wearing cocktail dresses.

It was perhaps because of the number of American servicemen who converged on Manchester every week-end that the city preserved a distinctly wartime atmosphere, wide-open and yet tatty, throughout most of the fifties.

Mick and I, after the jazz club session was over, sometimes went on to ‘The Stork Club’ which had its premises at the bottom of a dark court off Cross Street, and was run by an ex-wrestler called Billy Benny who looked rather like Henry VIII and had a slight harelip. In exchange for a song or two from me, he was prepared to set them up all night.

‘Any time George will thing a thong,’ he told us, ‘I’ll puth up a bottle of whithkey and we’ll make some hap!’

He was also a fund of unsolicited but useful information about his hostesses.

‘They’re no good,’ he’d tell us as two of them swayed past on their way to the ladies. ‘Strictly platers.’

There was also in Manchester a service which until surprisingly recently existed nowhere else outside London, somewhere to eat in the small hours. All round Piccadilly were pie stalls which sold marvellous hot pies: steak and kidney, meat and potato, cheese and potato. The fierce physical pleasure of biting into one of these, a little drunk in the frosty night, is enough, even in retrospect, to fill the mouth with saliva.

There was also a very disgusting all-night restaurant where, one midnight, a drunk American speared a long thin sausage, a part of the ‘Mixed Grill’, and shouted at the apathetic waitress who had just banged it down in front of him: ‘What do you call this for Chris’ sake? A goddam dog’s cock?’

But if Manchester kept alive, despite austerity, everything which was raffish and roaring about wartime night life, Birmingham preserved intact the wartime atmosphere of shortages and rudeness, the grey relish of the puritan in control. It seemed to us that the people of Birmingham were forced to bite their tongues in order to stop themselves from countering any request or demand with the whining reiteration of the sentence, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

Alone of all the big cities, we were never able to discover in Birmingham anywhere reasonable to stay. Most of the boarding houses were run by rat-trap-mouthed women married to Poles. We seldom parted on amicable terms.

Late breakfasts were the main cause. One woman, furious that none of us had come down before half past nine, angrily switched off the wireless which I’d tuned in to ‘Housewives’ Choice’. When she’d gone out again, I switched it back on.

She came storming into the room.

‘Did you sweetch eet on when oi’d turned eet off?’ she yelled.

‘Yes.’

‘Roight. Thet settles eet. Get owt at wonce. All of yow!’

‘Not before we’ve eaten our breakfasts.’

‘Roight. Then oi’ll ring up Sergeant Green. ’E’ll come reound on ’is boike and sort yow lot out! Yow’d better go at once. Are yow going?’

‘No.’

‘Roight. Oi’ll ring up Sergeant Green roight away.’

We finished our breakfasts and left, but Sergeant Green hadn’t appeared. Her husband, who took our money, apologised on her behalf. ‘My wife,’ he told us in his Polish–Birmingham accent, ‘she is very highly strung. Very easily upset yow see.’

But on another occasion it was a Polish boarding-house keeper himself who was our protagonist.

Ever since eight o’clock he had come banging into the communal room where we were all sleeping, and shouted and yelled at us to get up. ‘I wonder what he’d do,’ I asked the chaps, ‘if the next time he comes in we all start to imitate dogs?’ We decided to find out, and had several rehearsals. Some of us barked. Some growled. Some yapped. It sounded quite impressive.

Five minutes later the man came in again. All of us funked it except Mick. His performance wasn’t really up to much. Very quietly and just once he went ‘Wuff’.

Why is Birmingham, the town we christened ‘The Arsehole of England’, so horrible a place? Perhaps it resents its proximity to London. It’s never felt far enough away to develop its own personality. Its only defence is a joyless legality, a ‘holier than thou’ gloom.

Long before it was necessary, Birmingham had developed a complicated one-way system simply, we felt, for the pleasure of allowing you to glimpse at the end of a no-entry street the building you were aiming for, and then forcing you to detour for another three quarters of a mile. Cafés shut earlier in Birmingham than anywhere else. Sundays are deader. The accent more hideous. The pubs more reluctant to sell proprietary brands, more inclined to impose the brewers’ filthy substitutes. A bottle of local whisky once rattled about undrunk in the bottom of the band wagon for over a month, and it is not that we were given to scotch advert chichi. It was simply undrinkable even when we were drunk.