That was about the time I started leaving my trilby at home.
Five days I laboured and at weekends I played cricket for Barnsley and football for Darfield Road Juniors. As a footballer I was best described as a centre forward of delicate disposition. I was quick and could score goals but I didn’t like getting kicked. Nonetheless, being in the unique position of playing in games I reported, I soon gained a reputation as a forward of great promise. Headlines such as ‘Scoring Machine Mike Nets Hat Trick’ or ‘Promising Parky on Goal Trail Again’ on the sports pages of the
South Yorkshire Times
began to interest scouts from Football League clubs.
At one game we had representatives from Wolverhampton Wanderers, Barnsley and Sheffield Wednesday on the touchline checking out this young player, who, if the local rag was to be believed, was another Tom Finney. They left at half-time thinking, no doubt, that the writer was as witless as the player was useless and not realising how right they were. Nothing deterred me or checked the flow of my imagination.
The Rock Cinema became my second home. I paid threepence for a hard, wooden seat in the front row and when the lights went out would drop to the floor and start crawling to the plush seats at the back. If undetected, I would arrive among the courting couples covered in sweet papers, discarded chewing gum and the rest of the detritus of a busy cinema.
If you were caught you were banned for a time, which meant a visit to the cinema in the next village. This one had half a dozen saddles mounted on poles at the back of the stalls. If you were lucky enough to get one, you could ride into the sunset with Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and the rest of the cowboy heroes of the time.
My bike was a limousine, the Monkton Pit canteen the Trocadero, and Karen, the large-busted woman who served the tea and bacon sandwiches, and whom I fancied like mad, was Jane Russell. I had seen Jane in
The Outlaw
. It took me ages to recover. I lived in a state of unfulfilled desire. The movies fuelled my imagination.
In the austere and gloomy fifties, the movies provided our only alternative view of the world. I knew what the New York skyline looked like long before I saw Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. I knew how Yellow Cab drivers spoke way before I encountered a London cabbie, and when I saw Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca
I fell in love for the very first time. This was not like Jane Russell. This was love, not lust.
As a teenager, gawky and quite shy of girls, I had an uncertain and tentative initiation into love and romance. Sex seemed out of the question. The general opinion was that sex – whatever that might be – was something that happened only after marriage. There were exceptions and I knew one of them. His name was Don and he owned a motorbike. He was also well built and good-looking and a never-ending source of stories about how he shagged this girl and then another. I didn’t doubt him, and his stories tantalised me with a glimpse of what seemed an inaccessible world.
I did my best to remedy the situation. Working on the principle that the best-looking girls wanted to go on stage, I joined the drama group at the local youth club. In my debut I played a dashing cavalry officer in a play called
Captain Carvallo
. Opposite me, playing my romantic interest, was a handsome buxom girl called Tina – another Jane Russell substitute – whom I had long had my eye on. I gave the part my all and much more besides in my efforts to impress the delectable Tina.
We opened at a drama festival and all seemed to go well until the adjudication. The adjudicator said he quite liked what he saw, except he wasn’t convinced by the romantic scenes. He summed up his doubts by saying: ‘The dashing Captain Carvallo would have been even more dashing and irresistible to his partner – not to mention the audience – had he not been wearing odd socks.’
Goodbye Tina.
I decided to use my persona as Mike Bogart, fearless reporter, to pursue my lustful ambition. Wearing my reporter’s outfit, I took a girl called Annie to the Three Cranes Hotel in Barnsley. This was posh. The Three Cranes had the only cocktail bar in Barnsley. Imagining my hero and trying to impress my date, I pushed the trilby to the back of my head and said to the barman, ‘Two Manhattans on the rocks, buddy.’
‘Tha’ what?’ he said.
I repeated the order, whereupon he shrugged and turned to his bottles. A few minutes later he handed me two half-pint glasses of what looked like sump oil with a cherry floating alongside a stick of celery. It cost me a week’s wages and got me nowhere. She was sick over my shoes on the bus going home.
The search for the willing girl, willing to cure my ignorance, was fruitless but fun and, no matter how urgent it might have seemed, it was very much incidental to a developing conflict in my life, whether to be a journalist or a professional cricketer. My twin heroes at the time were Neville Cardus, who wrote about cricket and music for the then
Manchester Guardian
, and Len Hutton who opened the innings for Yorkshire and England.
My dilemma was perfectly summed up in a cartoon in
Punch
magazine, which showed two children standing next to wickets chalked on a wall. One child was a ragamuffin, the other a bespectacled swot. The one wearing specs says to the other: ‘No, you be Neville Cardus today and I will be Len Hutton.’
I wanted to be both.
I was doing well as a junior reporter on the
South Yorkshire Times
and could see a future ahead. At the same time I was playing for Barnsley in the Yorkshire League and competing for a place against some promising young talent. My team-mates included Dickie Bird and Geoffrey Boycott.
7
ALL THAT JAZZ
Brass bands provided the background music for life in a pit village. I grew up listening to the virile sound of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Best of all was marching in time to its music at the annual miners’ gala. On that day, all the bands in the coalfield turned out, the miners and their families united behind swirling banners bearing messages such as ‘Succour the Widows and the Orphans’. It was a time when we declared our independence and our solidarity, as well as the music of our culture.
The first time we marched I sat astride my father’s shoulders. The last time was after his death, in the late seventies, and I was a guest of honour. That was during a period of turmoil in the coalfields and it was a very political event. Arthur Scargill was leading his Yorkshire miners, and Michael Foot and Mick McGahey, the deputy leader of the NUM, marched with us in the front line.
I said to Arthur, ‘Lot of press photographers around,’ indicating the snappers following our progress.
‘Mainly Special Branch,’ said Arthur. ‘After this there’ll be a file on you at Scotland Yard.’
I hoped he was kidding.
I judged the Miss South Yorkshire Coalfield contest in Lock Park and when it came to presentation time Arthur said to me,‘I suppose you know what we’re going to give you?’
‘A miner’s lamp?’ I said.
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘But not the tourist version.’
He handed me a battered lamp, one which had spent some time underground. ‘This was your dad’s.’
My mother decided I should have piano lessons. She had mistaken my love for music for a desire to play it. Or maybe she thought contact with Chopin and Mozart and the like would steer me away from the decadence of my new heroes, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Miss Green was a wispy lady who had played at the Rock Cinema during the silent era and now taught piano for a living. She had to compete with my mates who would play cricket and football outside our front window. She came to our house every Wednesday and with great patience endeavoured to make me into a piano-player. After eighteen months I could play the first four bars of Handel’s ‘Largo’ (simplified version). I didn’t give up. Miss Green just stopped coming.
My lack of talent as a musician did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm as a listener. We had five or six nonconformist chapels in our village and there seemed to be a never-ending production of
The Messiah
shifting from one to the other. Me and my mate Barrie would sit in the wooden bum-numbing pews and stare, transfixed, at the heaving bosoms and jiggling adam’s apples of the visiting singers. Even though the performances were enthusiastic rather than memorable, it seemed to me the glory of the music somehow triumphed. It has certainly stayed with me throughout my life.
Barrie treated these occasions as more of a fashion event. After all, where else in a mining village could you find women in long satin dresses and men in tails and starched white collars? Barrie himself was the arbiter of fashion in our village. He was a tall, big lad with soft brown and permanently startled eyes and not a hair out of place, like his great heroes Fred Astaire and Peter May, captain of Surrey and England. He loved dressing up. In a pit village this could cause some consternation among your peers. It didn’t bother Barrie.
While we were still in school blazers or duffel coats and chukka boots, he favoured the city gent look; pin-striped suits, waistcoats, patent leather shoes, club ties. Instead of playing football he joined the local hunt and turned up outside our house one day astride a chestnut horse and wearing full hunting pink, accompanied by a gang of snotty, dribbling kids who thought he had arrived from Mars. He seemed oblivious to convention and the misgivings of his fellow men.
He started work at the pits but then he joined the Household Cavalry. While I was doing my National Service and working at the War Office, I was walking past a mounted guard in Horseguards’ Parade one day when I heard, from underneath the helmet, a voice say, ‘Ayup, Parky, old lad.’ It was Barrie.
Some time after leaving the army and working for a while in the drinks business, with an office in Mayfair, he returned to Cudworth and, no doubt finding the contrast difficult to accommodate, was soon occupied inventing the adventures and disguises that ruled his imagination.
He decided to compete in a car race to a vineyard in Burgundy, and to make the trip as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He found a second-hand American jeep and persuaded a friend to accompany him dressed as General George Patton.
With General Patton driving and Rommel wearing an iron cross and a monocle, they set off on the first leg of their journey. They were just outside Warrington when they started to feel hungry and stopped for fish and chips. General Patton sat outside while Rommel joined the queue in the chip shop. The rest of the customers tried hard to ignore the fact they had been joined by a German officer speaking English the way Germans did in movies.
Approaching the woman at the head of the queue, Rommel said, ‘I’m in ze big hurry. Can I get ze fish and cheeps before you?’
‘Of course, love. Are you going anywhere nice?’ said the woman.
‘I’m off to invade Moscow,’ said Barrie.
‘Very nice. I hope the weather stays fine,’ said the woman.
‘Ve are lost. Can you show us ze vay?’ asked the Field Marshal.
He and General Patton were waved off by their new-found friends, who advised them to head for London and ask a policeman. They arrived in France on the commemoration of VE Day and were detained for a while by the local gendarmerie. Barrie was one of the most extraordinary characters I have ever encountered, possessing that eccentricity of manner and style that is so peculiarly English.
He told me that the funniest line he ever heard, which summed up the unintentionally surreal humour of working-class communities, was delivered by a friend explaining why he admired Barrie’s father. Barrie’s dad had a retirement job tending the boiler room at the local cinema. After his death the friend was trying to define to Barrie what he thought about his dad. ‘He was a good man,’ he said. Then, searching for an example, eventually added, ‘He kept them boilers spotless.’ We decided, there and then, this was the epitaph we would both settle for.
The only other teenager in our group to challenge Barrie’s unconventional dress sense was Freddie Handley. He was another important influence on the way music played a significant part in my life. When we discuss music and teenagers nowadays the two are synonymous. Indeed, the market for popular music is aimed at and dependent upon what young people buy. In the fifties, teenagers were simply a group of people going through an awkward phase, which ended, in the main, at the age of sixteen when the majority would get a job, learn some sense and begin to earn a living.
The fashion at the time was the so-called New Look, which was out of date by the time it reached us. The newest suits for men were demob suits, often characterised by square shoulders and pleated backs. The popular music was what mum and dad played on the gramophone – Al Martino, Perry Como, Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet and Lita Roza enquiring ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ These were the chart-toppers. The brash newcomer and American superstar was Guy Mitchell who announced himself with ‘She wears red feathers and a hula hula skirt’ – a huge hit in 1953. Teenagers were ignored and left to find their own music. And we did.
A major influence on our lives was American Forces Network. Set up by the Americans for their troops in Europe and available – just about – on our primitive radios in Britain, it introduced my generation to jazz. It was on AFN I first heard Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams and the like. Then came Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. They stood music on its head. Listening on AFN was one thing, finding the music they played in record shops in Barnsley quite another. Somehow Freddie Handley found a way.
He produced a stack of records of the new music and hired the bandstand at Lock Park. There, once a week, Freddie and his disciples would meet to listen to this new music played in a bandstand on an old record player. What is more, we would dress up for the occasion. Freddie was the first to wear what later became our uniform – drape jacket, drainpipe trousers and shoes with crepe soles so thick and cumbersome they looked and felt like you were wearing a landing craft on each foot. Hair was short on top, long at the sides, and swept back into a DA (duck’s arse). Freddie was the first man in the whole of Barnsley to wear sunglasses at night, and the only man in Yorkshire, outside the odd seller of French onions, who wore a black beret at all times. This, in honour of his great hero, Dizzy Gillespie.