Whitethorn (63 page)

The ground floor turned out to be a shop selling not only musical instruments but also electrical goods. It all looked very posh with thick grey carpet on the floor and glass showcases all over the place, filled with expensive-looking goods. I walked up to a tall, slim salesman dressed in a very neat-looking blue suit, blue-and-white striped shirt, starched white collar and blue polka-dotted bow tie with a hanky to match sticking out of the breast pocket of his suit. I told him I had an appointment with Mr Fisher. ‘Take the lift to the fifth floor,' he instructed, then brought his forefinger up to lightly touch his bottom lip, cocked his head to one side and gave me a quizzical look. ‘Hmm!' he said, slightly raising an eyebrow.

A notice stand positioned near the lifts had an arrow pointing to a set of stairs leading downwards, it said: ‘The Music Basement. Recording Sound Booths Syncopation Studio.'

I had no idea what those words meant. The lift neither clanked nor whined but was completely silent, white-walled and enclosed. I pressed the button and the lift glided upwards, and moments later the automatic doors slid open and I'd arrived on the fifth floor. Talk about posh! This was a long way from the rickety killer-stairs in the arcade or even the birdcage lift that juddered and shuddered, shook, clanked and whined on the way up to Jacobs & Tremaine, Solicitors & Attorneys at Law. I wasn't sure I was quite ready for all this opulence and mercantile splendour.

The neatly dressed salesman with the raised eyebrow who had hmm'd me downstairs had left me feeling somewhat disconcerted. I was wearing a brown sportsjacket from the Salvation Army that was a bit too big for me and by no means new. My school grey flannels were a bit too short, as I'd suddenly started to grow. I also had on a plain white shirt and brown shoes (highly polished) and one of Smelly Jelly's frayed-at-the-edges maroon ties. I'd ironed the shirt and pressed my pants under a piece of brown wrapping paper to prevent them from shining, so I wasn't exactly untidy. But I sensed that I'd entered a world a long way away from the Born-again Christian Missionary Society and the squabbling assortment of babble in the arcade beneath it
.

Stepping out of the lift I was confronted by a dozen neat offices running along a corridor, all of which had their doors closed. I could hear a solitary typewriter tapping away, almost emphasising the silence. Fortunately, a large black guy was washing the opaque glass-front of one of the offices. You can tell a Zulu anywhere.

‘
S'bona
,' I said, approaching him.

‘
S'bona, Baas
,' he said, returning my greeting.

‘Can you show me the house of
Baas
Fisher, please?' I asked him in his own language, not knowing the word for ‘office' in Zulu.

He pointed further down the corridor, and placing his cleaning rag back into a sudsy bucket, bid me to follow him.

‘What is your name?' I asked.

‘Union Jack,' he replied, then suddenly halting and standing to attention and saluting, he smilingly added in English, ‘King Georgie, he is my king.'

‘I am Tom,' I replied, just as we reached an impressive-looking office somewhat larger than the glass-and-wood panelled ones surrounding it. An unoccupied secretary's desk stood immediately outside the door. On the door was painted ‘Mr Lewis Fisher. General Manager'.

‘The madam, she is not here,' Union Jack said, again in English, indicating the secretary's desk.

‘
Ngiyabonga
,' I said, thanking him for his courtesy, and he seemed surprised when I extended my hand. He took it and I shook his own in the double-grasp commonly used by the African people. Then I knocked on the door and a voice that didn't sound all that friendly called, ‘Come!'

I opened the door and entered. Mr Fisher looked up from some paperwork he was doing. ‘Oh, is it three o'clock, already?' He capped his gold fountain pen and placed it on the glass-topped desk. ‘Tom, isn't it?'

‘Yes, Sir,' I replied, somewhat nervously. ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, and I have an appointment for the trial trainee music salesman,' I reminded him, just in case he'd forgotten.

‘
Ja
, of course, please sit, Tom,' he said in quite a friendly tone, indicating the chair in front of his desk. The office was of a sufficient size to have a separate area with a leather lounge and two matching chairs, a fancy sort of oriental-looking carpet and a coffee-table on which rested a cut-glass vase of yellow roses. On the wall was a large oil painting of an African village with the Drakensberg Mountains in the background. You could tell from just looking that Mr Fisher was a pretty important person and I was surprised that he'd be interviewing such a low-down as me.

Mr Fisher leaned back in his chair. ‘So, what have you got to say for yourself, young man?' he asked.

How do you answer a question like that? ‘Nothing much yet, Sir,' I replied. My instinct told me not to mention my international reputation as a tract writer.

‘Yet?' he seemed amused.

‘Well, I'd like very much to learn how to be a trainee music salesman, Sir.'

‘Well, I must warn you, it's a far cry from the religious business, Tom,' he said, recalling our previous phone conversation. Then he chuckled, though more to himself. ‘There are some people who think jazz is the music of the devil. What do you think?'

I didn't know how to answer him. ‘I've only heard it on Springbok Radio, Sir.' Then I added, ‘It sounded okay to me. Dizzy Gillespie and all that,' I said, remembering a snatch of an announcer's conversation overheard in passing on the radio in the prep room at school.

‘What do you know about music, Tom?' he asked, looking directly at me.

‘Nothing, Sir.'

His eyebrows shot up in surprise, ‘Nothing?'

‘That's why I need to be a trial trainee music salesman, so I can learn,' I said, perhaps a little too ingenuously.

He smiled and leaned forward. ‘Well, at least you're honest, I like that. What school did you attend?'

‘Still attend, Sir. The Bishop's College.'

To my surprise his arms spread wide. ‘Well, I never! Why didn't you say so in the first place, Mr Polliack's three boys all went to Bishop's. I myself wasn't that privileged,' he added.

‘I'm a scholarship student, Sir,' I explained.

‘Not from a wealthy family, eh?'

‘No, Sir.' Please don't ask me any more, I thought desperately, but I need not have worried because I was about to learn the abracadabra, open sesame of the private-school system among English-speaking South Africans.

He seemed pleased. ‘And you need a job for the Christmas holidays?'

I nodded. ‘Yes, please, Sir.'

Mr Fisher, half-rising, reached out across his desk, his hand extended. ‘Welcome to Polliack's, the largest musical emporium in all of Africa,' he said, smiling broadly. ‘Now, let's have your personal details. What did you say your surname was again?'

And so ended my career as a writer of religious tracts and I began as a salesman in the ungodly business of jazz music and what was known in the firm as popular syncopation, a musical style in which Miss Patti Page, among others, featured hugely.

I'm a Lonely Little Petunia (in an Onion Patch)
***

Put Another Nickel In (Music! Music! Music!)
***

Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don't Want to Leave the Congo)
***

Please No Squeeza Da Banana
***

Five Minutes More (Give Me Five Minutes More,
Only Five Minutes More)
***

It Might As Well Be Spring

I could learna set of lyrics in ten minutes, but if my life depended on it I couldn't have hummed the tune to which they were attached. Over Christmas, after the trial was dropped, I became simply the trainee musical salesman and general factotum who appeared every school holidays. Over the following year I learned to fake a musical prowess, listening to the drumbeat in the background, and keeping time by snapping my fingers, or shaking my shoulders, or tapping my feet, and in the process becoming the complete musical phoney. The Boys Farm was paying off at last. A customer would ask me about the latest hit record, and while I found it for him or her, placed it on the turntable and handed them a set of earphones, I'd recite the entire set of lyrics with the result that I fooled almost everyone but myself. I was learning to be a salesman. Smelly Jelly had taught me how to praise the Lord using well-rounded vowels, and it worked just as well with lyrics. I could make a set of inane lyrics in plain-speak sound like the meaning of life to your average teenager, particularly if it was a love song. For instance, with Perry Como's ‘Some Enchanted Evening' I could often reduce a young woman to teary-eyed euphoria and the sale was made long before the actual record started to spin on the turntable.

Now here's a funny thing. My Salvation Army too-big brown sportsjacket and my too-short school grey flannels, my turned-up-at-the-collar white shirts and frayed-at-the-edges Smelly Jelly black or maroon ties seemed to add to my musical authority. I became the teenage eccentric, the one-off, the
wunderkind
, all the while using influence I didn't have. Kids would wait for me to serve them, ask me earnest questions about the artists and hang on every word I uttered as if I was the Holy Grail of pop music. ‘All you need is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses,' Graham Truby of the first-day ‘Hmm' would declare. ‘A little myopia to add to that hapless boy musical-genius look.'

The point being the sniffy Graham of the tucked-in-at-the-waist blue suit, striped shirt, bow tie, matching handkerchief and pronounced lisp disliked serving the kids. Bobby Black, who was the department head, a jazz drummer in black stovepipe pants, jacket down to his knees, black string tie, lolly-pink shirt and shoes called winklepickers so pointed that if he kicked you up the arse you'd end up with lockjaw, stuck to selling jazz. He had a semi-famous band called Bobby Dazzle that played strictly purist jazz, jazz and only jazz. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and so on.

The three of us turned out to be an ideal combination for the music basement. The adult jazz
aficionados
were drawn to Bobby with his gollywog hairdo, long sideburns and early teddy boy suit. Graham greatly fancied himself as Mr Opera, Ballet and Classical music, attracting the pretentious, the serious-minded and the older foreign-accent customers. While the young and uninformed, the musical plethora were left to ‘Fitzy', who knew the words to every popular song you could name and left you feeling like a champion because you knew enough to have purchased a hit song before it became one. Smelly Jelly's born-again imprecations such as ‘Praise the Lord! Praise His precious name, my dear brother in Christ' became adapted to the music biz in statements such as, ‘Yeah, good one! You've so very prudently picked Patti Page, the Princess of Pop!' Or to a pretty young girl customer, ‘Perry Como will touch the love chords in your deeply musical soul!' My customers ate all this rhetoric up in spoonfuls, and I confess I enjoyed the attention. Here was a place you didn't have to hide from the front. At the end of the day Mr Fisher simply looked at your sales figures.

Thank goodness my sales were pretty good as we were on a salary and commission, and by the time the July holidays came around I'd made sufficient money to buy myself an entirely new outfit. The pair of honey-coloured corduroy trousers I'd lusted after for a year, dark-brown suede brothel creepers with thick crepe rubber soles, three new shirts, two knitted ties, a Fair Isle jumper and a brand-new, properly fitting Harris Tweed sportsjacket. Six months saving, but worth every penny. It was the first time ever that every single thing I wore was brand-new and in the latest fashion. Boy, was I ever pleased with myself!

I remember it was a Saturday morning, the busiest time of the week because the shops closed at noon. I arrived in the music basement looking like a million dollars only to be confronted by Bobby Black.

‘What the fuck?' he said, staring at me. ‘Graham, get here quick, man!' he shouted across the basement.

‘What's the matter?' I asked, smiling proudly, thinking he was pulling my leg.

Graham now stood at Bobby's side, forefinger poised on lip, free hand placed on tucked waist, head cocked. ‘Oh dear! Oh dearie me!' he exclaimed.

‘What?' I asked again, hunching my shoulders and spreading my hands.

‘Home!' Bobby ordered, pointing to the stairs.

‘What's wrong, Bobby?' I asked, totally bemused, looking down at my brilliant new duds.

‘You've just fucked your entire image, son! Now go home and get into your usual gear and get back here, pronto, we've got a busy morning ahead of us.'

‘And wash that ghastly Brylcreem out of your hair!' Graham added.

If I sound like I was killing them at Polliack's, while I was doing well enough I was still the kid around the place doing chores and messages when it wasn't busy in the basement. I seldom got a lunch hour as I'd have to mind a floor while the floor manager of, say, the electrical department – ‘fridges, washing machines, toasters, radiograms, floor polishers, electric fans and the new-fangled dishwashers' – was out to lunch. I was never allocated lunch-hour duty at front of house, the grey-carpeted ground floor. This, I knew, had a lot to do with my being a callow youth in the Salvo gear that worked so well for my persona in the basement.