Owning Up: The Trilogy (57 page)

This, had I still been performing in the Royal Command concert, would have been a time of mounting excitement. As it was I felt pretty sour about the whole thing. On arrival we took up our position, ships of all sizes as far as the eye could see. A useless congress of metal, I thought to myself. ‘A magnificent spectacle,’ said the commentator over the mess radio. The bullshit was intensified hourly. ‘No overalls on the Upper Deck,’ barked the Tannoy. ‘Collars will be worn until 20000hrs.’

The arrival of the Royal Family sent the press and wireless into that curious state of mind where any sign of normal behaviour on their part was described as if it were a charming form of eccentricity. ‘The Queen smiled at Princess Margaret, who ran back to the car to fetch her shoes. She smiled and said “thank you”,’ explained the
Daily Express.
‘A delightful homely moment there,’ said the radio commentator. ‘Princess Elizabeth has leant forward and made some adjustment to her mother’s veil.’

The inspection went smoothly enough. Three cheers, the guns booming, and a distant glimpse of royalty.

‘If the government is preparing for another war,’ I asked Felix, ‘why aren’t we on intensive training? On the other hand, if we’re as broke as they tell us, why are we spending money on treating the Navy as an expensive toy for gawping crowds, and a means of livelihood for sparrow-brained radio announcers?’

Edward Wood said: ‘You can’t dislike the Royal Family. You can only feel sorry for them.’

That evening writer Chinnery performed his royal conjuring tricks and I got sullenly drunk in Glasgow.

We hung about the Clyde for a few days before heading down the west coast – the
Dido
for the knacker’s yard and me for demob.

The ship’s company was dwindling. The Captain was piped ashore and, later the same day, the Baron left us. His exit was typical, standing on the quay in the pouring rain without an oilskin, shouting obscenities and clutching the recordings of his beloved Johann Sebastian. I never saw nor heard of him again.

We reached Chatham on 8 August and, as there was a bottleneck in the demobilisation program, I was sent home on a fortnight’s leave. This meant that I had my twenty-first birthday in Liverpool and I asked Felix and Edward up to celebrate. My father photographed us, surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins, on the lawn. It was a time of limbo.

I returned, not to the ship but to barracks, and another three weeks passed. I didn’t go ashore. I felt a curious numbing apathy, expecting every day to be sent for and handed my railway warrant to York, where there was a depot for civilian clothing. I was given useless but easy jobs. I felt a sentimental regret for the end of the
Dido,
and even for my release from the Navy itself.

One fine September morning I was sweeping the barrack paths with an elderly Leading Seaman. I was wondering how, without offending him, I could avoid the proposition he was working up to – ‘I’d sooner ‘ave a naughty boy than a naughty girl,’ he told me by way of a preliminary come-on – when I saw hurrying along between the neat flower beds and painted ships’ figureheads, the same agitated White-Rabbit-like Lieutenant who had sent me to the
Dido
over a year before. He told me I should have been demobbed two weeks earlier and seemed to suggest it was somehow my fault. With some relief I said goodbye to the old salt and followed the Lieutenant to his office. Two hours later I was on my way to York.

In the warehouse I chose a brown herring-bone suit, two shirts, a striped tie, four pairs of socks, four pairs of pants and vests, shoes and a fawn mac. There were also a pair of cuff links, back and front studs, and two collars.

These were packed in a box; we had to travel home in our uniforms, and we were warned that if, in the street outside, we were offered six pounds for our civvies we were to refuse, as they were worth at least twice that much.

Nobody offered me six pounds. I walked to the station. It was almost exactly three years to the day since I’d left Liverpool for Skegness. What had I learnt?

How to pipe a Captain on board. How to make rope-ends ‘tiddly’ on deck. How to wank in a hammock without waking up the entire mess. It was time to leave the navy-blue womb, the steel-clad egg. Full of confused but passionately-held theories, and unjustified confidence in my ability to win through instantly, I caught the train home. There was a neat parcel waiting for me stamped OHMS. It contained the Anarchist pamphlets.

OWNING UP

1

Filthy Jazz

My prep-school headmaster Mr Twine was a fat bald brute who aimed, in the decade before the war, to turn little Liverpudlians, whose parents could afford the fees, into tiny Tom Browns.

Looking back I believe he must have been mad, or perhaps he drank. In fairness to my mother and father they had no idea what went on. Twine was constantly stressing that a term’s notice was required, and we had seen too much of what happened to boys living through that term to complain.

‘
Proditor –
masculine – a traitor,’ he would mutter as he set about them, for he believed Latin prose to be the foundation of everything.

During the summer term, if a Test Match was taking place, we were expected to eat our bright pink mince and leaden jam roll in attentive silence, and listen, with real or simulated interest, to the BBC commentary. Any whispering, if detected, led to either a slippering or being hauled to our feet by the skin of the cheek and shaken to and fro.

‘It’s the pestilential day-school system,’ Twine would shout as he hammered the side of our skulls with the knuckles of his free hand.

In me he sensed a contrary spirit, and almost every day would fire questions as to who bowled.the last over or was fielding at silly mid-off. As I never knew (‘give me your slipper, Melly Major’), I was very relieved when rain stopped play, and even now the sentence ‘and we return you to the studio’ holds an irrational beauty.

Very often the announcer, in a suitably apologetic voice, would introduce a record by Ambrose and his Orchestra or Roy Fox and his Band. At this the headmaster, with the hysterical violence which characterised all his movements, would push back his chair and attempt to silence the ancient set before the first note.

If, as usually happened, the switch came off in his hand, he would drown the music, as he fumbled to replace it on its axle, by shouting ‘filthy jazz!’ at the top of his voice.

Sitting po-faced under a sepia photograph of giraffes in the East African bush, I would mentally add jazz to Bolshevism and the lower classes (
‘Spurni profanum vulgus’
) as things I was in favour of.

As a matter of principle I began to listen to Henry Hall instead of ‘Children’s Hour’ when I got home at night. My headmaster and I had one idea in common. We believed jazz and dance music to be interchangeable terms.

After centuries of purgatory those souls which are imperfect but not eternally damned gain the portals of heaven, and, much to the disapproval of my prep-school headmaster, I was sent to Stowe.

The great house in the landscaped park full of flaking temples and mouldering follies, the Voltairean scepticism of J. F. Roxburgh, the tolerant oddness of the wartime staff were a heady mixture. I was, on the whole, very happy there.

One summer evening a friend of mine called Guy Neal, whose opinion I respected, asked me to come and hear a record; it was called ‘Eccentric’ and was by Muggsy Spanier. Guy explained that the three front-line instruments – trumpet, clarinet and trombone – were all playing different tunes and yet they all fitted together. We listened over and over again until it was dark. I walked across Cobham Court to my dormitory a convert.

Later that term I was passing an open study window and heard the most beautiful sound in the world. It was Louis Armstrong playing ‘Drop that Sack’. I didn’t know the boy who owned it, but I knocked on his door and asked if he would play it me again. I discovered that throughout the school were little cells of jazz lovers. Slowly I Jearnt something about the music and its history, most of it inaccurate, all of it romantic. I heard my first Bessie Smith record. It was ‘Gimme a Pig-foot and a Bottle of Beer’.

All over wartime Britain, at every class level the same thing was happening. Throughout the thirties a mere handful of people had remained interested in early jazz. They corresponded with each other about the music, published transitory typewritten sheets, and spent their week-ends junk-shopping for rare records among the scratched and dusty piles of Harry Lauders. Suddenly, as if by some form of spontaneous combustion, the music exploded in all our heads.

I left Stowe and went into the Navy as an ordinary seaman. I took my gramophone and records with me, and at training camp, in Chatham Barracks, and on my ship I found two or three people with the same obsession.

In the
Dido,
in the chain locker, I and a few friends gathered like early Christians in the catacombs to listen to our records. One of them told me that he had heard there was a live revivalist jazz band which played in a pub on the outskirts of London. Actually it was the George Webb Dixielanders but I never got to hear them. I didn’t really believe it was possible to play this music any more. I imagined that the secret had been lost like early cubism. I knew intellectually that the Spanier ragtime sides had been recorded in the early forties, but I didn’t believe it emotionally. All real jazz existed in a golden age before big bands and riffs and saxophones and commercialism had driven the jazzmen out of the garden. Even Louis wasn’t the same, not with those slurpy sax sections behind him. I played my records and dreamed of New Orleans, and the river boats, and the beautiful high yellow whores shouting: ‘Play it Mr Jelly Lord’ to Ferdinand Morton in the brothel parlour.

During this period my other interest was Surrealism. At the Naval camp in Pwllheli an old school friend called Tony Harris Reed and myself wrote poems, made collages and objects, and eventually wrote to E. L. T. Mesens, the leader of the Surrealist movement in England. We got a reply from Simon Watson Taylor, its secretary, inviting us to come and see him in London. Stationed in Chatham I took him at his word, and wasn’t at all surprised to find he owned a huge collection of jazz records. Many of these were extremely rare, and the early blues singers were especially well represented. He even had Cleo Gibson’s ‘I’ve got Ford Engine Movements in My Hips’, a holy grail among collectors, a title to intone over the ritualistic sharpening of the fibre needle, now of course issued like nearly everything else on an LP.

After demob I came to London to work for E. L. T. Mesens at the newly reopened London Gallery. Although by this time there was quite a lot of live jazz to be heard nobody told me about it. In fact Humphrey Lyttelton had formed his own band and the Graeme Bell Australian Jazz Band had arrived via Czechoslovakia to insist in the face of extreme opposition from the rhythm-club purists that the music could be danced to.

It was at a farewell concert for the Graeme Bell Band at the Scala Theatre, Charlotte Street, that I first heard live revivalist jazz (the word ‘traditional’ was not at that time in use). I saw a poster for it and decided, although extremely sceptical, to risk the disappointment that I believed inevitable.

The theatre was full. The curtain rose. I don’t remember who the opening band were. It is very likely they played badly – most of the small bands did. For me that day it didn’t matter. They were playing ‘real’ jazz, and to my cloth ears it sounded just like the records. I came out of that concert a changed person.

I had discovered too that Humphrey Lyttelton played every Saturday in a hall above the offices of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, off Leicester Square.

You queued outside and filed slowly past the windows of the society with their big photographs of little bruised backs, beds made of rags and newspapers, the real belts studded with brass studs, and the plump and smiling children ‘three months later in the arms of an officer of the society’. With painful slowness you shuffled up the staircase, paid your entrance money to one of the Wilcox brothers at a table by the door, and walked into the crowded and expectant room. It is difficult to imagine now, all these years later, the atmosphere. At last Humph’s great foot rose and fell to thump in the first number.

In the intervals we crammed into the big pub across the road. Like gods, Humph and Wally Fawkes drank with their peers. Beryl Bryden, covered then as now in a large floral tent, pushed her way to the bar like a giggling rhinoceros.

I began to buy the
Melody Maker.
From it I discovered there were other jazz clubs on the outskirts of London, and I set off night after night to look for obscure pubs in Clapham, to penetrate (‘the 144 bus stops outside the door’) that mysterious area of canals and gasworks to the east of Finsbury Park.

I began to know my fellow addicts. My appearance, eccentric enough in the rather conventional cast-off clothes of a much larger uncle plus a few
objets trouvés
like a knitted Victorian waistcoat made me easy to remember if harder to love. My violent enthusiasm, frequent drunkenness and personal manner of dancing attracted a lot of not entirely kindly amusement. Much later I discovered that Humph had christened me ‘Bunny-Bum’.

Above all I had resolved to become an executant. Too lazy to learn an instrument, I had decided to sing.

2

Good Morning, Magnolia

The very first time I had gone to the Leicester Square Jazz Club I asked Beryl Bryden if I could join her in a duet. I had her cornered against the
art nouveau
ironwork of the lift shaft and didn’t see how she could refuse. Actually, although I didn’t realise it at the time, she used the classic evasion.

‘I’d love to,’ she said, ‘but I’ll have to ask Humph.’

My chance came a month or two later.

‘Grand Jazz Band Ball’, said the
Melody Maker’s
advertising column. ‘Fully licensed – Cy Laurie’s Jazz Band – Eel Pie Island.’