Owning Up: The Trilogy (69 page)

‘No,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t realised that.’

‘It’s because she wouldn’t wash,’ he explained.

I remembered walking past the ‘loony bin’ with our nurse. If we’d been naughty she threatened to ring up for the van. She used this to frighten us, not only in Wales, but when we got back to Liverpool in late September, and as I lay in bed I could hear the gangs of ragged children from Lark Lane singing in the street:

They will dress you all in blue

Just because you’ve lost a screw.

They meant Rainhill, the Merseyside Asylum, but for me they were singing about the Denbigh Institution.

In Llandudno we played to an audience of perhaps twenty old ladies and gentlemen, most of whom left in the interval. Every time I sang the manager turned off the microphone. Mick controlled himself until after ‘The Queen’ and then blew up. He shouted that the night before we had played to a packed and enthusiastic dance hall in Prestatyn, and that many of the audience would have come along if the concert had been properly advertised. He said it was an insult to me to turn off the mike every time I sang. He threatened to report the whole thing to the Musicians’ Union. Pausing for breath he noted that the manager was smiling delightedly.

‘Everybody who appears here loses his temper with me,’ the man explained with great satisfaction. ‘They all do it. Even the most famous.’

Another Proustian gig was the Civic Hall, Nantwich. We played there fairly regularly right through the fifties.

Outside the Parish Church, not far from the hall, was a billboard painted to resemble bricks in outline. Each brick represented five pounds of the five thousand needed for the restoration fund, and as the money was raised, the bricks were filled in with solid red paint. When we first played Nantwich, Mick and I were in our early twenties and only two or three of the bricks were red. The last time we were there, Mick’s hair was grey at the sides, I had a pot belly and a bald patch, and the wall was almost filled in.

We still played concerts in Liverpool during the winter, and my mother didn’t mind this. There was something possible for her about a concert. In the summer of 1952, though, we did a job which gave her considerable pain. We played in a tent for a week as part of ‘The Liverpool Show’ on Wavertree Playing Fields. Our tent was between a display of cage birds and an exhibition of photographs showing the work of the police. We did two shows in the afternoon and three in the evening. My father quite enjoyed coming along after dinner to pick me up and have a beer or two with the band in the bar tent with its smell of crushed grass, but my mother was worried about who would discover I was working in a side-show. As it happened, the only time she did come she met the ex-chauffeur and ladies’ maid of a late cousin of my grandfather, their faces grim with disapproval.

‘Good evening Aimie. Good evening, Stanley.’

‘Good evening Mrs Tom,’ said Aimie, and then added, ‘I can’t think what Miss ’Olt would have thought about Master George singing in a tent.’

In the same year, 1952, Mick’s passion for dogs found practical expression. In one week he bought an alsatian puppy when he was drunk in London, and a bull terrier puppy in Doncaster. The bull terrier was one of a litter belonging to a fan. Its mother had whelped in a pigsty on an allotment. Mick bought it one afternoon after a lunchtime session in ‘The George’.

For some weeks this animal travelled in the coach. It was Mick’s intention to train it to guard the instruments and uniforms, but because it smelt so strongly of its birthplace, pissed and shitted all over everything, and revealed, even that early in its life, an aggressive and hysterical personality, we raised a corporate objection, and Mick agreed to leave it behind in town.

Doncaster was a town we never played at, but in which we quite frequently stayed. The landlord of The George, a large pub in the market square, had been a pro musician in the thirties and in consequence gave bands special terms and sympathetic treatment. On the debit side he was inclined to go on about the profession and to wake you up by shouting,

‘Come on’t, lad. You’re due on’t bandstand.’

The puppy’s original owner was one of a little gang of staunch fans who used to turn up wherever we played in Yorkshire. He was a cobbler and had a skin curiously like leather of an unpleasing yellow colour. His mates were a varied lot. One was an attractive young man with a cast in one eye whose ambition was to achieve at least three knee-trembles during the course of an evening at the Palais. He usually managed at least two. I once asked him, not how he made the first girl – there is a strong tradition of promiscuity in Yorkshire – but how he got rid of her prior to chatting up the next one. He looked at me incredulously, and then told me, his voice full of ‘ask a silly question’ implications: ‘Aye tells ‘er to fook off.’

The jovial leader of this gang was a rotund man with a nervous and continuous laugh. He lived in a caravan with his pretty, gypsy-like wife, and was a legitimate photographer with pornography as a side-line. As models he used local girls who wished to supplement their earnings in the mills, and some of his friends whom I imagine didn’t get paid at all. He was always showing us his new sets, presumably with an eye to flogging them, but we never bit.

In the jazz world there are one or two people who have a passion for dirty snaps and collect them, but these are specialists. Mick and I were perfectly prepared to ‘have a bird’s eye’ or ‘a squint’ as Mick put it, but not to actually pay out money. Besides, although these rather amateur efforts had a certain naive charm, and suggested, which is unusual in this context, that the participants were actually enjoying themselves, they lacked the precision which is surely the essence of pornography. When Mick looked at them he demonstrated a delusion of his which he never lost. He would tilt the print at an angle as though this made it possible to see more of what was going on.

The pornographer was also something of a pimp – the two professions are often allied. He once told me that there was a female crane driver of his acquaintance who had told him that she was willing to pay ‘twenty pounds for a night wi’ George Melly’. The tart in me was impressed at such a generous offer; the feminine at such a masculine approach; the masochist at the idea of a female crane driver. I asked her pander what she was like.

‘She’s all right,’ he told me. ‘She’s not a beauty like, but she’s got a fair pair of bristols and muscles like an Irish bluddy navvy. By gum she can go and all.’ To emphasise this he raised an arm in phallic imitation and clapped the back of his neck rapidly with his other hand. I declared myself agreeable but we never met.

One morning in the Market Hall, Doncaster, I saw an image so extraordinary and dreadful that I have never forgotten it. Mick and I had crossed the road from The George to buy him a pair of socks. Mick never washed socks on tour. He’d wait until the pair he was wearing became too stiff for comfort and then buy some more. Besides, we both liked covered markets; the mounds of glowing fruit, the carcasses of animals, the fat women holding up cheap underwear in front of their bodies to see if it was ‘them’.

There was a fishing stall and, on a table in front of it, a large tin basin in which thousands of maggots, many of them dyed pink or green, writhed and boiled in the bran.

Standing with his face a few inches from this erupting mass was a child with a huge head. He was wearing a cap as Mongol children often do, and was staring at the maggots with an almost hungry intensity.

8

And So the Band Folded

Commercial stability, a constant struggle during the first three lean years of the fifties, led Mick during 1952 to a further expansion of the personnel. Not content with a four-piece front line, a four-piece rhythm section, and a blues singer, he decided that what the band needed was some glamour, and began to look around for a female vocalist. It was Archie Semple who found her, a London girl of Italian origin called Olga Bagnaro, stage name Jo Lennard, who had begun to sing around a few of the clubs. Jo’s style was simple but her pitch was good and above all she could swing like the clappers not only on up-tempo numbers but on slow ballads as well. She was a pretty girl with big brown eyes, ‘well-stacked’ as they say in American gangster novels, and with an insatiable appetite for carbohydrates, particularly in the form of chips, spaghetti, and cream cakes. She spoke with the soft mid-Atlantic accent of most London girls in show biz, but sometimes reverted deliberately into broad cockney when angry or happy. She lived with her parents in a tenement flat in the Elephant and Castle district, and was a strong local patriot, and proud of her working-class origin. She took me once to her local, and introduced me to a gang of tearaways of her acquaintance. They were real tearaways, nothing to do with the teddy boys who were beginning to emerge at that time. These gentlemen, most of them about thirty, wore expensive, rather conservative, suits and large hats. They managed to look both relaxed and tense. They all drank brown ale.

There was a talent competition on that night, first prize five pounds, and we both decided to enter. Mick wouldn’t have been too pleased if he’d known, but we weren’t earning so much that we could ignore the chance to make some extra money. She sang ‘Them There Eyes’ beautifully, and I sang ‘Frankie and Johnny’ not so well. At the end of the evening the winners were announced. Jo had won first prize and me second. This was in fact as it should have been, but even so I was rather surprised at the result because although she’d sung much better, ‘Frankie and Johnny’ was a showy and eccentric number and I had won the most applause. One of the tearaways explained.

‘Jo ’ad to win, you see, she’s a local girl, like. ’Ope you don’t mind.’ I assured him I was delighted.

Although at first Jo was perfectly friendly to me, she paid me no particular attention, but after a month or two she began to sit by me in the coach, eat with me in cafés and restaurants, and drink with me in pubs. From then on we were a couple.

For some months we hesitated on the edge of marriage. I used to go and eat at her parents’, huge and delicious dishes of chickens in spaghetti. I was taken to meet her rich uncle, a bookie with a flat in Kensington, all lilac wallpapers and Hollywood bed-ends, and a pretty blonde wife with a surprisingly dirty laugh. I met her grannie too - she called her Nanna – a tiny, old lady in a dark kitchen who showed me family records out of a mother-of-pearl box.

Jo’s father, a hairdresser with a hairline moustache, said to me one day: ‘We don’t mind Olga being with a band. She enjoys it and she likes you.’ He paused and then added, slowly: ‘But if anything happened to her, I’d be round.’ I looked at the budgerigar climbing its ladder and, as they say in Yorkshire, thought on.

Jo and I didn’t get married for a number of reasons. A considerable barrier for me was the fact that she was a Roman Catholic. I was, after all, a militant atheist and the idea of marriage in the vestry of a Catholic church with a promise to bring up our children in the faith would have been a lot for me to swallow. The main reason, however, and it is, after all, a valid one, was that we were not really in love. We liked each other very much indeed, but we weren’t in love.

Eight musicians and two vocalists was a large personnel for a touring band, but one day Mick announced that we were to have another addition. This was Mike Lawrence, the singer who had been given such a bollocking by Doreen Porter’s mum down the Metro Club. Mick had, of course, tried to justify this – as a commercial band we needed a male commercial singer to handle ballads and waltzes, etc. – but the fact was Mike had asked Mick for a job one night when Mick was stoned.

He joined us three weeks early. We were on a short tour of Ireland, and he turned up, without any explanation, in a small market town in the west. This was a real lumber. The promoter of the tour, a young Dubliner, believed it was possible to fit eight musicians, their instruments, two vocalists, and himself at the wheel into a Volkswagen. It was
just
possible, but extremely uncomfortable. After Mike’s unexpected arrival it was three vocalists and this
was
impossible. Luckily most of the time we were unconscious from lack of sleep and draught Guinness.

At the beginning of the tour Mick tried to protest to the promoter about our travelling conditions and indeed much else, but he took no notice at all. He just smiled politely as though Mick was discussing the weather. On the very first day, driving out of Dublin to a job a hundred miles away, he suddenly stopped the wagon and disappeared for over half an hour without any prior explanation. When he got back Mick asked him where he’d got to go. ‘To Mass,’ he said and drove on. As it was the week after Easter this happened fairly often, but in a short time the agnostic section of the band learnt to head for the nearest bar which was usually the nearest building, and often – another thing that surprised us – a grocer’s shop.

Most of the jobs we played were in small places, and indeed the first night we drew up in front of the hall to find the caretaker driving out some chickens with his broom. The MC wore evening dress which had gone green with age and was so rotted it could scarcely support the row of medals he had won in the revolution. We had, of course, rehearsed the Irish National Anthem, ‘The Soldier’s Song’, a stirring tune of great length which, unlike ‘God Save the Queen’, it is impossible to cut, but this was the first time we had played it in public. Irish dances go on even longer than Scottish dances, often until three or four in the morning, but at last it was time. The MC announced the National Anthem and stood stiffly to attention. We began. But in the middle a patriotic but very drunk young man climbed up on the stage. We were a bit nervous. Did he consider our version lacked sufficient fervour? Did he consider it an insult that we, bloody Saxons, should play it at all? But in fact he only wished to sing the words. He started out of key, and then fell down still singing. Our first Irish dance was over.

That night we had been surprised to find a couple of crates of Guinness on the stand for the musicians. We put it down to the size and rural character of the village, but even in the larger towns it was the rule and, after the dance was over, we usually found ourselves drinking Irish whiskey with the manager until broad daylight. Throughout the tour Mick spent quite a lot of time indignantly telling people he was English, but his Irish blood, however much he denied it, showed itself in the way he launched into ferocious arguments during these drinking sessions. There was one row about birth control which would have ended in blows if everybody hadn’t been too drunk. Mick raved on in defence of Durex Limited while the manager and his friend shouted him down with cries of ‘ ’Tis worse than murder so it is!’