Thus attired, we would stand and listen to the new Be-Bop, only moving to nod our heads to the beat of the music, or give a V sign to the musical morons who would sometimes appear wearing college scarves and bearing signs proclaiming ‘Trad Is Best’. I don’t know what was happening in the rest of Britain but we felt like pioneers of a new music. We were isolated, even reviled by the rest, but we were certain that what we had discovered was both a new form of musical expression and one that would enrich our lives in future years. And so it proved.
Certainly, in my case, it allowed me during my years in broad casting the confidence and determination to promote what I believe to be the best in popular music against an ever-rising tide of musical bilge that nowadays swamps radio and, in particular, television. Looking back, I see a remarkable generation of young people who might have been neglected but would not allow themselves to be ignored. In retrospect, what is most admirable is that we made up our own minds about what we wore and listened to and how we behaved.
During my apprenticeship on the
South Yorkshire Times
, I was transferred a few miles down the road to South Elmsall to work for another boss, Arthur Mosley. He was a local entrepreneur and owned a venue called the Miners at Moorthorpe. Every Saturday he would hire a jazz band and, for an extra bob or two, I took tickets on the door. It was a blossoming time for British jazz and I had a front-row seat. I also learned at first hand the strange habits of that peculiar tribe known as musicians.
During the interval I would visit the dressing room and ask what the band required in terms of food and drink. Many of the requests were unprintable as well as unattainable, at least in that part of the South Yorkshire coalfields in the 1950s. But that is how I first met Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Chris Barber, Jimmy Deuchar, John Dankworth and Cleo Lane and many others. I saw what turned out to be Cleo’s debut with the Dankworth band. I remember she was wearing a flimsy blue dress and looked somewhat awkward on stage. But it all changed when she started singing.
It was in the dressing room at the Miners that I first met Benny Green. He was playing in Ronnie Scott’s band and was sitting in a corner quietly reading a Penguin Classic. Later on, when I was at Granada Television working as a producer, I worked with Benny on a weekly jazz programme. No one cared more or wrote better about the music he loved than Benny Green. Like John and Cleo, his fastidious, uncompromising promotion of his craft inspired succeeding generations of music lovers and musicians.
The same could be said about Humphrey Lyttelton, another I first came across during my stint as a doorman all those many years ago. None of us could imagine what the passing years would bring. The drummer in Humph’s band was a young lad called Stan Greig. Two or three years later we met in Port Said. He was a soldier playing the blues in a bar and I was the youngest captain in the British army. We were both part of a military operation that became known simply as Suez.
8
PRIVATE PARKINSON
I was deferred from National Service, meaning I entered the service of Her Majesty a year later in order that I might complete my three-year apprenticeship as a junior reporter. It also gave me a year to think about how I might avoid National Service altogether. I didn’t fancy two years marching up and down being bullied by sergeant majors, which my colleagues who had already done their time assured me was what happened.
There were others, a minority, who, while not exactly enjoying it, spoke of the benefits of living away from home and expanding the boundaries of their lives. In the forties and fifties the greater part of the population did not travel abroad. None of my family had voluntarily left the country. Only those taken away by the war or National Service had viewed the world outside the acres of their birth.
While the prospect of foreign travel was seductive, I decided I would rather stay at home. How to get out of it? I could go down the pit, but that wasn’t even worth considering so long as I was ‘Jack’s lad’ and lived at home. I could become a Quaker, but that wouldn’t get me out of National Service, it would merely guarantee I’d drive an ambulance or carry a stretcher. One of my friends said a mate of his had gone to his medical doused in his mother’s perfume and wearing a pair of his sister’s frilly knickers. The examining officer sent him away for psychiatric examination and the shrink declared him unfit for purpose. I thought seriously about this but decided against it. Two years in the army would be paradise compared to living in a mining village with the reputation of being a ‘wrong ’un’, as they used to say. In any case, I didn’t have a sister.
I had received my call-up papers and was preparing myself for the inevitable when what seemed the perfect get-out occurred. I had gone to Oxford to see an aunt who lived in Summertown in a street smelling of bread and cream cakes from a nearby bakery. A delicious place. I loved walking in the town, watching the cricket in the Parks. It was here, as a child, I had stood at the pavilion gates and watched the mighty Australians play the university. My great hero, Keith Miller, swept past me and as he did so he drew his hand over his hair and I could see he had a comb concealed in the palm of his hand. It was a traumatic moment. I hadn’t realised that gods used combs or that heroes possessed human vanity.
Fifty years later I went for lunch with Keith Miller in Australia and in the lift going up to the restaurant he swept his hand over his head.
‘Still got the comb in there?’ I asked.
I told him how I knew.
‘Still got the same comb,’ he said.
In 1954 this walk to the Parks had a special significance. I had been ordered to report to Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire in ten days’ time. My rail pass was in my pocket. This was to be my last taste of freedom for two years. I was thinking all these things while walking down the High Street when I felt a terrible pain in my side, underneath the rib cage. It felled me.
I lay in the street certain I had been shot. I looked for assistance, but people stepped around me and only one or two bothered to give me even a second look. I assumed they thought I was drunk, a student reveller from yet another all-night party, who ought to be doing National Service. I managed to crawl into a shop and tell the girl I was very ill. She phoned the ambulance and I spent the next three weeks in hospital recovering from a spontaneous pneumothorax.
My nurse, who looked like Vera Hruba Ralston (a Hollywood B movie star who sensibly married the head of a Hollywood studio instead of waiting for me), told me that what had happened was a one in a million chance, that for no reason whatsoever the membrane surrounding the lung punctured and let in air, causing it to collapse. She said I ought to feel flattered because it only happened in young fit males.
The doctor said much the same thing. He stuck a large needle in me to draw off the air and then said it would take a week or two for recuperation during which time I would be taught how to basket weave. I told him I was due to go into the army.
‘That’s out of the question, at present,’ he said.
My heart sang.
‘But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be fit as a flea in a few months’ time,’ he added.
So I set about making the most of my basket weaving. My teacher was a pretty girl who looked like Patricia Roc. I became her star pupil. By the time my next army medical was due, I could weave lamp shades as well as baskets. The doctor said I seemed very fit but he didn’t want me to join the infantry. He categorised me as ‘fit for lines of communication anywhere’, which basically meant an office job.
They put me in the Royal Army Pay Corps and sent me for basic training to Devizes in Wiltshire. Putting me in the Pay Corps was a serious piece of miscasting. I could add up, but not without moving my mouth. My results in maths examinations over the years certified me as innumerate. If National Service was brought back today it would be the equivalent of putting Wayne Rooney in the Education Corps.
I started looking around for alternatives and discovered that young journalists were being encouraged to take up PR work in the army. I wrote to the War Office asking for a transfer but in the meantime buckled down reluctantly to the task of becoming a soldier. The records show I became Private Parkinson RAPC, army number 23131269 on 7 July 1955.
Generally speaking, we were a scrawny lot. There were not too many fat children around in those days. When we piled out of the trucks that brought us from the station and assembled on the square, we had that silly bemused look of contestants at the very beginning of shows like
I’m a Celebrity
. . . We were awaiting an indication of whether or not it was going to be a bearable time. We soon found out.
Our sergeant was a Scot with the sharpest crease in his pants I had ever seen. He said his name was Furlingham and he was going to transform the shambles before him into fighting men. Or he was going to die in the attempt. Or, alternatively, or more likely, we were.
We were herded into Nissen huts and I found myself a bunk between a loud jolly lad from Birmingham called Nick and a pale fragile-looking youth called Quint who turned out to be a bed-wetter. His condition was not helped by the bullying he received from the NCOs because he couldn’t march. He was one of those unfortunate people whose lack of coordination meant that as his right leg went forward so did his right arm. Instead of looking like a marching soldier he resembled a marionette. At first this amused the NCOs, then it infuriated them. Quint became the target for their anger. There was nothing we could do except try to help him change the sheets when he peed the bed.
He was the only casualty. The rest of us developed our own way of dealing with the abuse, which, generally speaking, involved keeping still and staring straight ahead while some corporal stood two inches from your face and abused you.
‘Parkinson, you are a big Yorkshire prick. What are you?’ they would say, and you would tell them in a loud and sincere voice.
We knew it would pass – twelve weeks basic training and then a cushy job in an office adding up army pay. We also knew we were just the latest in a long line of young men who had been forced to join up and face the same ritual of abuse. It wasn’t personal, except for one instance.
I had my hair cut very short before Devizes because I didn’t want scalping by an army barber. Two days into our training we were marched into the regimental barber by a corporal who was himself a National Serviceman but had been made power mad by the stripes on his arm. He was one of Quint’s most persistent abusers. When it came to my turn I looked in the mirror and thought he couldn’t cut it much shorter. I saw the barber glance at the NCO, who smirked and gave him the wink, whereupon he took the shears down the centre of my head leaving just a stubble. I have always had thick hair and the sight of my shaven head both shocked and angered me. I noted the amusement of my tormentor and vowed to get even.
It was July and a pleasant summer. When we were not marching we played football and cricket and learned how to shoot. In the evenings we pressed our uniforms with hot irons and brown paper, and polished our boots with burnt Cherry Blossom and spit. These were the bullshit days and, we told ourselves, they would soon pass. We were not let out to visit Devizes town. They no doubt thought the locals might recoil at the sight of us.
The only entertainment was a concert in camp. Top of the bill were Denis and Sylvana, the couple I had taken home for Sunday lunch in an attempt to make them into stars. Denis was even more rouged and camp than I remembered. She was still beautiful but a touch wan. Perhaps she was pining for me.
I told my mates I knew them but they didn’t believe me. After the show we waited outside for them to appear. I removed my cap so that she might recognise me the better, forgetting I had only a bit more hair than a seal.
‘Hello again,’ I said when she appeared.
She looked at me, or rather through me, thrust an autographed photo into my hand, and disappeared, leaving behind a whiff of perfume. I never saw her again. For a while, my colleagues referred to me as ‘Mr Showbiz’.
We did a series of intelligence tests and a few of us were marked down as potential officers with a chance to attend a War Office Selection Board. We had to have proof of passing at least five O levels. I had two but didn’t see why that should stand between me and the chance to wear a better uniform. I said I had five O levels and was awaiting my certificate confirming the fact, but it had been delayed because my parents were skiing in St Moritz. This delayed the reckoning long enough to get me confirmed as a candidate. Thereafter I stalled them with a heartbreaking letter, stating that an elderly aunt, making her way to the post office, with the certificate in her hand, was knocked down by a double-decker bus. She survived being run over but the certificate didn’t. I heard no more.
The War Office Selection Board was where I began fully to appreciate the difference between a state education and public school. Faced with a task of getting six soldiers across a wide gorge with only a piece of rope, an empty oil drum and a step ladder as equipment, I was bemused. The question, it seemed to me, was not so much how but why? For the public schoolboy who had served in the cadet force it was simply an extension of the school curriculum.
I watched and learned.
I soon worked out that what impressed the observers was a confident assertion of authority, a demonstration that no matter how confused he might be, the leader of men gave his orders in a loud and clear voice. The fact that he and his troops ended up in the gorge instead of across it seemed not to matter. It was a clear demonstration of that most famous of all army maxims: bullshit baffles brains.
I passed and was sent to Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot. Here I encountered a superior kind of abuse. Our drill sergeant was a fierce north countryman with a habit of marching at your shoulder and delivering, in a low conversational tone, the most unforgettable observations. One day he was drilling us at a fast pace across the square when he came alongside. He said, ‘Your marching is horrible, a disgrace to the British Army, an insult to manhood. What is it?’