Owning Up: The Trilogy (71 page)

He was perfectly right. Mick at that moment was sunk in one of his periods during which you would imagine that to play jazz was exactly the thing he disliked doing more than anything else in the world. We limped through the same programme night after night, and his only concern seemed to be drinking with the promoter during the intervals, in order to win a few minutes off our playing time.

I suggested to Archie that we approach Jim Godbolt who, as band agent, was naturally concerned with the quality of what he had to try to sell, and see what we would work out. The outcome was that Jim asked Mick to come round to the office, and when he arrived, he found the three of us sitting like an inquisition under the map of the British Isles with its coloured flags showing all possible venues, and determined to obtain sonic satisfaction. We failed. Mick lost his temper and accused us of conspiracy and blackmail. He told us he intended to pay no attention to what we had to say under these conditions, and we could all get fucked. He stormed out of the office leaving us sitting there. Later he attacked Jim on his own for going behind his back, and me, on my own, for betraying our friendship. What was extraordinary was that he made us both feel real shits, and yet our intention had been to
improve his band
. This was all we wanted to do – to make the band better.

He was therefore not displeased to find Archie and me on the edge of a punch-up. He felt it proved some point.

So Archie left too.

Finally Jo Lennard got an offer to join the Ronnie Scott Big Band, and she accepted. Musically she had become very frustrated with singing the same three or four numbers night after night. Financially Ronnie’s offer was an extremely tempting one, and emotionally she and I had reached a certain impasse. She told Mick of her decision and was to leave in the middle of March.

The band was again contracting.

A few days before Jo was to leave, we were playing a gig in Eastbourne and ran into real trouble. Half-way through the second set a group of yobs came in led by a tall psychopath looking for trouble. They marched up to the stand and began to pull at Jo’s dress. Mick attempted to reason with them, and the leader jumped up on the stage followed by his gang and started a punch-up. In the middle of this the police burst into the hall. The gang-leader shouted a warning and the rumble stopped. Mick jumped off the stand, told the gang-leader he thought he was a bloody fool but wasn’t going to take it any further, shook his hand, told the angry police sergeant he didn’t intend to lodge a complaint, climbed back on the stage, announced the next number, and carried on playing. The police, after circling the hall a few times, left.

A few sets later I was singing a number called ‘Send Me to the ‘lectric Chair’. I was accompanied only by the rhythm section. The front line were having a quick smoke-up in the wings. I became aware that the gang-leader had climbed back on the stage and was advancing on my left. I carried on singing. When he reached me, he grabbed hold of the microphone lead and jerked it so violently that he broke the connection. There was complete silence. He then pulled a chiv out of his pocket and was holding it so that it just touched the side of my throat. He began to mutter threats in a low voice, gradually working himself up to violence. I didn’t move an inch. I felt like a rabbit mesmerised by a stoat. Beyond fear. Somewhere else.

Behind him, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mick creeping out of the wings, and after what seemed like a very long time indeed he sprang and pinioned the yob from behind. Then it all happened. The rest of the gang broke over the edge of the stage like a wave. Pat Molloy put his bass out of danger, and raised a chair. I saw Stan Bellwood bring down the edge of his largest cymbal which luckily just missed the head of one of the enemy. Jo had her shoe off and was using the heel. Everything was confusion, kicking, breaking chairs, shouted insults, blurred faces. Then it was all over. The gang vanished. The police were back, and the gang-leader, his arm bent behind him, was taken away. The manager told Mick to play ‘The Queen’. His reaction was typical.

‘We’ve won half an hour off our time,’ he whispered triumphantly as Stan led in with the drum roll.

The police told Mick and me that we had to appear in court in a week’s time to give evidence against the ringleader. Mick said that it would mean coming all the way down from the north and then travelling back again the same day. Surely there were plenty of witnesses in the audience who saw exactly what had happened and actually lived in Eastbourne? The Inspector looked severe. We were subpoenaed to appear. They’d been after this man for a long time. They needed us. There could be no excuse.

As we walked back to the digs Mick said that as we were lumbered he could at least get his coat replaced. The sleeve had been torn in the fight, and it was a Corporation dance. It would happen in Eastbourne, of course. We’d played some of the toughest towns in the British Isles, and it had to go and happen in Eastbourne where the old come to die. The next day we drove up to Grimsby to play a couple of nights at the Gaiety, followed by an American camp somewhere in Lincolnshire on the Sunday, a job in Chester on Tuesday, a day off on Wednesday (Mick and I would have to travel overnight to give our evidence), and the Denbigh Asylum job on the Thursday.

Diz had replaced Jimmy Currie on a temporary basis. Nobody, especially him, ever thought of him as a permanent replacement. His temperament was too mercurial to allow him to keep a job for long. He was with us until either we found somebody else or he got fed up.

Jo’s last official job was the final night at Grimsby, but as she wasn’t joining Ronnie Scott until Wednesday she decided to do the American camp as well. We were driving back to Doris’s afterwards.

We did the jobs in Grimsby (‘Very nice, Mick. Good show, George’) and on a cold March evening drove off into Lincolnshire to find the US base.

Most travelling bands at that time played a lot of bases all over the country. They were indistinguishable; a huge gum-chewing sergeant in charge of us, a sergeants’ mess in a modified Hilton Hotel style, an audience which didn’t want to know, a drunk who kept on asking for ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’, very long hours, one-armed bandits to tempt us to throw away more than we were earning, the provoking sight of huge steaks with French fries disappearing into the faces of the crew-cutted elephantine-arsed army of occupation.

I can’t remember anything special about that evening except for a notice which read: ‘No lady guest will be permitted to attend open night in the Sergeants’ Club with more than one member of same during any one month.’

At last we finished, and after a few drinks climbed wearily into the coach. It was freezing cold, and Jo and I sat next to each other under a rug. We felt a bit drunk and sentimental. It was our last night together. The driver climbed in and started the engine. We drove off. Soon the heater began to work, and Jo fell asleep on my shoulder.

It was about four o’clock and only twenty-five miles from Grimsby. In relation to the job in Chester the next day, Grimsby was in the wrong direction, but we’d decided to go back there because we could leave all our things, and besides it would have been hard to find digs in the middle of Lincolnshire to take us at that hour.

At six o’clock, as the first cold grey streaks of dawn were smearing the eastern sky, we were still careering through the flat countryside. Mick emerged from under a coat, and having peered at his watch asked the driver where the fuck we were.

‘Och, I got a wee bit lost,’ came the answer, ‘but we’re nearly there noo.’ Grumbling but reassured, Mick crawled back under his coat. I was awake, Jo’s head on my shoulder. I lit a cigarette and stared out of the “window. We seemed to be approaching a town of some size. It must be Grimsby. The driver seeing a town on the flat horizon, and an apparently straight road ahead of him, put his foot down; but the town was not Grimsby, and the road was not straight.

We were on the outskirts of Boston fifty miles from our destination. We knew the town well as we had often played at a hall called ‘The Gliderdrome’, famous for its white-hot stoves, a unique and dangerous method of heating which effectually prevented brawling, and also for an eccentric member of the public, a young man who appeared in full evening dress, stood in front of the bandstand, bowed to the audience and then raised a baton he had been presented with by Joe Loss, and conducted us throughout the evening.

We had even considered staying in Boston that night, but had decided against it because it was a hard place to find digs. We had memories of a night when we had been forced, by lack of accommodation at any price, to sleep in the coach, taking occasional little walks through the freezing streets to try to get warm.

If all had gone well, in a few minutes we would have drawn up in the main street, recognised the ‘Stump’, the famous church spire so popular with suicides, and rounded on the driver, but the road was not straight.

Three quarters of a mile out of Boston it suddenly bent, and at the same time crossed a bridge over one of those canals which irrigate the flat fields of Lincolnshire and are called ‘ditches’. The driver had his foot down. He didn’t see the bend in the road until it was too late. He braked. We skidded across the road towards the low stone wall of the bridge. I was awake and saw it happening. I felt entirely detached, almost a spectator. I seemed to see it all from outside and from various angles, as if I were watching a film.

We crashed through the side of the bridge and out into the void beyond. The coach turned over in the air. Splinters of glass, luggage, instruments and bodies obeyed the law of gravity, but almost indolently, almost outside time. I remember shouting, ‘Here we go’, and thinking ‘this is probably my lot’. Then the coach hit the water twenty feet below.

In the ordinary way, they told us later, the ditch would have been twelve foot deep so we would have drowned. Later in the year, they pointed out, it often became little more than a trickle so we would have been smashed to pieces. As it was, after a moment or two watching myself struggling under water, I was able to stand up in four feet of water and look about.

The coach was on its side, so that above us through the broken windows we could see the cold grey sky. We counted each other and we were all there. Paul Simpson had a badly cut hand, and I had a cut under one eye and a bleeding finger. Everybody else seemed all right. I began to shiver.

Jo was crying and we all patted her on the back to cheer her up. This was the worst thing we could have done, because several long splinters of glass had punctured her back and lung cavity.

Diz Disley climbed out through the emergency door and waded ashore. He came back in a few minutes with a ladder. ‘Me bling ladder,’ he explained in a Chinese accent. He used it to make a bridge between bank and coach and some of us climbed across it. The others waded to the opposite bank and scrambled up it. In two small parties we advanced on the two houses at each end of the bridge. The noise of the crash had woken them and their lights were on.

The house which Disley, Jo, Paul and I were soon to disrupt was a villa belonging to the local photographer. It was of modernistic tendency and had petrol blue tiles. The photographer’s wife seemed very kind. She put Jo, who by this time was feeling very ill, to lie down on the sofa in the lounge, and rang up for an ambulance. She showed the rest of us up to her bathroom and went to make some tea. Diz and I shared a steaming hot bath giggling with hysteria. As my finger was still bleeding badly, I decided to go to the hospital in the ambulance. Jo was on a stretcher. Paul had convinced himself that he had cut a tendon in his hand and would never be able to play again.

When we got to the hospital they rushed Jo in for an examination and left Paul and me sitting on a bench in the emergency waiting-room. I had got the chats, and made lots of jokes while they were stitching up my finger. The sister didn’t smile. When she’d finished she said that she was surprised I could make jokes when the girl who was with me was quite likely to die. They were going to operate immediately, but there wasn’t much hope. I hadn’t realised she was even seriously hurt, and asked if I could wait while they operated.

While I was sitting there, a priest hurried past into the theatre. He had come to hear Jo’s confession and give her the sacraments.

They took two hours operating. When they’d finished, the sister, who by now could see how upset I was, came and told me that, as she was a strong girl, the surgeons thought she had a fifty-fifty chance. They wheeled Jo past on a trolley. She had no colour at all. I took a taxi and went back to the band.

By this time the photographer’s wife had largely recovered from her attack of warm-heartedness. You couldn’t exactly blame her. Half the mud from the ditch was all over her fitted carpets, and her lounge was full of jazzmen dropping ash all over everything and making a terrible noise. Mick was in the hall on the phone to Godbolt, and it was all getting too much for her.

Even so the couple in the small house on the other side of the bridge, although they had no bathroom and no telephone and he was a farm labourer, couldn’t do too much for their contingent.

Mick saw me come in (‘Would you mind wiping your feet?’ asked the photographer’s wife) and asked me how Jo was. He asked, of course, quite casually, imagining as I had that she was suffering from shock. I told him they thought she had a fifty-fifty chance. He put the phone down on the table – I could hear Godbolt’s voice barking irritably – and I told him what I knew. He picked up the phone again and told Jim to let her parents know.

He finished talking to Jim and rang the hospital (‘I hope you’re keeping an account of all those phone calls,’ said the photographer’s wife) and asked how Jo was. No worse, they told him, but of course it was too early to say anything definite.

Mick sent the rest of the band home by train, and he and I moved into a pub in the town. We drank about a bottle of rum a day for the next two days and never got drunk. We had settled on rum as ‘comforting’.