The Dreaming Suburb (22 page)

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EDITH CLEGG
never looked back on 1926 as the year of the General Strike. It had, for her, the far greater significance of being “about the time dear Teddy joined a dance-band, and the year poor dear Rudi died, and upset us all so much.”

In the summer of that year Ted Hartnell gave up his part-time job in the furniture mart, and moved an appreciable step nearer Elysium He became, to begin with, the only other member of the orchestra at the Granada, in the Lower Road, and his presence in the minute orchestra pit was due less to his ability to twirl drumsticks, and to Edith's pleas on his behalf to Mr. Billings the proprietor, than to the pressing need for noises-off in Mr. Billings' latest attraction,
Ben Hur.

Mr. Billings had seen a preview of
Ben Hur
at a cinematograph-exhibitors' conference. He immediately recognised the film for what it was, another
Covered Wagon,
with the Bible thrown in, and as such, a possible source of attraction to hitherto cinema-shy audiences, such as Baptists, Congrega-tionalists, perhaps even Plymouth Brethren.

“Point is,” he told Edith, when they were packing up after the second house one night, “point is, we gotter put it over proper! It's big, see? Not just another film, not just a
good
film, but a
Birth of a Nation
—a proper
'Unchback
if you see what I mean! Why, lumme, it's even got Jesus in it! You don't
see
'im, of course—that ain't allowed—but you see 'is arm come out, when 'e gives Ramon Navarro a drink o' water! That's good! That's clever! And we gotter do something about it, something special!”

There was no need to fan Edith's enthusiasm. Jesus or no Jesus she harboured no doubts about liking
Ben Hur,
and
she immediately produced one of those intuitive ideas that Mr. Billings had learned to expect from her.

“I always think,” she said deliberately, “that it is such a pity we have to
see
things without
hearing
them. What I mean is, I can't do really
convincing
bangs, when buildings fall, and cannons go off. I can only ... well ... I can only
suggest
them.”

“Go on,” urged Mr. Billings, digging away with his splayed tooth-pick. “What you leading up to, Miss Clegg?”

Edith drew a very deep breath. She had been awaiting this opportunity for some considerable time.

“Well,” she said finally, “you ought to have an orcehstra for good pictures like this, Mr. Billings ... no, no ...” as a haunted look showed in his eyes, “not a
real
orchestra, I know the Granada can't afford
that,
but a one-man orchestra ... someone who could ... well, make the bangs with cymbals and drums, and do lots of other things, like blow coach-horns in highwaymen pictures, and tinkle things like sleigh-bells. If only we could have
tinkled
properly, when dear Rudi was driving his sleigh away from those terrible wolves! It would have made
such
a difference, now, wouldn't it?”

Mr. Billings considered. The idea was not exactly new, but somehow he had never given it constructive thought.

“'Ow much would a bloke like that cost?” he demanded.

“Oh, I expect he'd be happy to do it for two pounds ten,” said Edith, pressing her stomach, as though the palm could regulate her internal rumblings. “I've got a lodger called Mr. Hartnell, and he can play almost anything by ear. He'd be wonderful, and we could rehearse together at home, if you let me borrow the advance publicity booklets they send you.”

Mr. Billings needed little enough persuading. Within twenty-four hours of this conversation Ted Hartnell was installed in the pit, isolated from his delighted sponsor by a secondhand bass drum, a side-drum, a kettle-drum, a pair of cymbals, and a strange-looking instrument of his own invention that came to be known as “The-All-In”.

“The-All-In” began life as Edith's clothes-horse. Its struts were covered with green baize, and hung around with tubes
of varying length, bottles partly filled with water; and a few coconut shells. Ted could produce almost any combination of sounds with the drums, cymbals, and the “All-In”. During that week's showing of
Ben Hur,
he and his instruments were almost as sensational as the film itself. All manner of authentic-sounding noises emerged from the pit, to the huge delight of Mr. Billings, who sat through seven performances in the first half of the week. When the chariots were racing round the arena, Ted beat a most realistic tattoo on the coconut shells; when the Roman heralds raised their clarions to their lips, he leaped to his feet, and blew a series of blasts on his trumpet; when Ben and his fellow galley-slaves toiled at the huge oars, he beat out a drum rhythm with his foot, and repeatedly dropped a long length of harness-chain into an empty bucket.

His real triumph, however, came later, when, within a few weeks of
Ben Hur,
Mr. Billings secured a feature showing of a French Revolution picture called
The Tragic Queen.
There were plenty of routine noises-off in this film, galloping horses, salvoes of cannon, and the clash of arms on the staircase of Versailles; but the scene in which Ted excelled himself was the final act of the tragedy, when Marie Antoinette's tumbril drove through the massed ranks of the terrorists, and the victim attempted to make a scaffold speech above the monotonous roll of drums. Urged on by Edith, who, with shining eyes, was thundering out the
Marseillaise,
Ted flung himself into the business of producing an increasingly rapid tattoo on kettle and side-drums, the rhythm culminating in the final shattering
“kerlunk”
on the bass drum. This signified the fall of the knife, and produced gasp of horror from electrified audiences. Mr. Billings was so excited that he almost tumbled from the front row of the balcony into the one-and-nines.

On the final night of
The Tragic Queen,
Ted had an unexpected visitor.

When the auditorium had cleared, a slim, willowy young man lounged down the centre aisle to the pit, where Ted was packing up for the week-end. Mr. Billings had left early with the takings, and Edith was responsible for locking up.

The young man leaned heavily on the brass rail, introducing
himself by a grubby visiting card that read:
“Al Swinger and his Rhythmateers”,
and underneath, in small italics:
“Musical Engagements—Dancing—Occasions—Parties”.
And beneath that again, in even smaller italic:
“Hot and Classy”.

Al had a waxen complexion, a pigeon chest, a large curved nose, and small, over-bright eyes. Hunched over the rail he looked like an ailing and uncomfortably perched eagle. He used a shiny dress-suit, and a laboriously-acquired Manhattan accent.

“You sure c'n use dem drums, brother,” was his opening remark.

Ted flushed. He was a very modest young man.

“I got no room here,” he apologised; “you need plenty of space to really beat it up!”

Edith smiled at the visitor. She liked Teddy to be praised.

“I'll have to lock up the front,” she told the visitor, “but you can stay, then we can all go out the back way.”

After Edith had gone Al slowly extracted a bar of chewing-gum from a packet, and flicked it into his mouth.

“Chew?” he asked Ted, proffering the packet.

Ted shook his head, and began to slip the canvas cover on the big drum. He performed the office lovingly, like a young mother tucking her baby into its cot.

Al Swinger chewed stolidly for a moment. Finally, he said: “How long you been working in this flea-pit?”

“Just a few weeks,” Teddy told him.

“Like to play in a real band?”

Ted stopped in the act of loosening the tension of the kettle-drum. He looked hard at the visitor, then at the card on the piano lid. He swallowed once or twice, giving himself time to master his excitement.

“This
your
band?” he asked.

“Ur-huh,” said Al. “Nice li'l band. Got a broadcast lined up. Go places. Better all the time. Drummer's left us. Been run in, silly sod. How about a fiver a week? Make more some weeks. Split commission.”

Ted Hartnell was unable to speak for a moment. His hands trembled on the drum-braces. Edith came plodding back, the foyer keys jangling in her hand. Al turned to her.

“You the boss?”

Edith said no, the boss had left after first house. Al shook off his lethargy, jumped the rail, and flung open the piano.

“Okay! Let's have
Valencia,
and give it all you got, brother!”

His fingers slipped over the worn keys. It was not the
Valencia
Ted and Edith sometimes played, during their front-room concerts. It was full of what Edith would have called “twiddly-bits”, so full indeed that the melody was sometimes difficult to follow, although the rhythm was there, heavy and insistent. Teddy forgot Edith, and forgot where he was; he ripped the cover from the bass drum, and flung himself into an accompaniment. Between him they made the cinema rock with sound:

Valenciaaaa !...
Land-of-orange-grove-n-sweet-content
you-call-me-from-afarrrr … di-bom-di-di
bom-di-bomiddy… bom-di-bomiddy…

Ted did give it all he had, hurling himself at the drums like a frenzied savage each time Al lifted his fingers from the keys at the end of a phrase. It was a number in which a good drummer could make his presence felt. It left
Red, Red Robin,
and similar numbers a long way behind.

When they had finished and Al slammed down the piano lid, Edith applauded.

“Why, that's splendid,
splendid,
Teddy!”

“We'd do a lot better on a real Joanna,” said Al, and Edith notice that the pallor of his cheeks was now relieved by two bright red spots, each the size of sixpence. “You'll pass, brother! We rehearse in the Assembly Rooms off Black Horse Lane. Look in, ten tomorrow. I'll have a contract out.”

He climbed out of the pit, and lounged off towards the fire-exit.

Edith moved forward to guide him, but he stopped her with a languid wave. He seemed to be moving in familiar surroundings.

2

Al Swinger was shrewd and business-like. His terse manner of speech, his lounging movements, the impression he gave of trying to be someone or something he had only read about in magazines, or seen in places like the Granada, failed to conceal the fact that he was a dedicated man, dedicated to jazz music in a way that Ted Hartnell would never be. Al carried his obsession a stage further than Ted, into the realm where it ceased to be a pastime, and became a commercial ambition, where it linked up with contracts, white ties, silver-plated saxophones, and dining out in expensive night-clubs. He liked and trusted Ted from the start because he saw in him a devotion to jazz that was objective and unlikely to involve him in competition with the band-leader. Competition for leadership had already caused the dissolution of two of his dance bands, and he had recently turned away some promising material on this account What he was searching for were bandsmen who loved their work, but lacked personal ambition; in Ted Hartnell he found the ideal drummer.

Al believed in re-investing most of his earning in the orchestra. That was why he paid Ted a starting-wage of five pounds a week, at a time when few of his engagements earned a ten-pound gross. His margin was narrow, but he kept his team at a high pitch of enthusiasm, and the “Rhyth-mateers” were beginning to be known as far afield as Lew-isham and Catford. They had their own transport, a converted lorry, and an excellent array of instruments. They were still small-time, but Al had made up his mind that, providing they kept their heads, they would move into the bigger time in a year or so. Other, less disciplined bands were already there, broadcasting, and touring the seaside resorts in summer and one day, he assured Ted, the name Al Swinger would mean something in the dance-band world.

Edith missed Teddy very much during those first hectic months. He slept late in the mornings, of course, and they were able to take lunch together, but she had the matinée at two o'clock, and he was usually gone by the time she came home to tea. She left coffee in a thermos flask on the kitchen
table, and she usually heard him come in, between two and three a.m., but there were no more front-room soirées, no more long, gossipy meals in the kitchen, with Becky, and Lickapaw. It crossed her mind that, now he was on the road to fame and fortune, he might seek more expensive lodgings, but she never let herself seriously entertain the prospect of losing him, any more than she contemplated a future without Becky, or the cat. It was lonely for Becky now, with herself at the cinema from two till five, and from six to eleven, but there were minor consolations. First, the drain on their capital had been stopped and they were even saving a little, then, Lickapaw was getting older, and spent less time away from home on the slates of Delhi Road. Finally, there was her work, and after work, her press-cutting books, and her portrait gallery.

The gallery was very extensive now. All the wall-space of her bedroom had been used up, and glossy pictures of Navar-ro, Lewis Stone, Adolphe Menjou, and dear Buster, with his large sad eyes, had crept like a tide into the bathroom and even the lavatory. Dotted about the house were nearly a dozen pictures of Rudi, two of them signed. His occult eyes contemplated her from beneath flowing burnous on the landing, and his nostrils flared at her from an unusual angle on the stairway ceiling. Number Four was a shrine to Hollywood, but the ark of its tabernacle was Valentino, Valentino the Sheik, the Son of the Sheik, the Cossack, the Torreador, the Gaucho.

3

Edith saw the poster when she was on her way to work, shortly before two o'clock one afternoon.

It was standing outside the, newsagent's, at the corner of Lucknow Road, advertising an early edition of
The Star.
It was scrawled in charcoal capitals and it screamed:
“Valentino Dead”