Owning Up: The Trilogy (74 page)

The problem no longer existed, but there was still a linguistic block. We had for some time no adjective to describe South London in general and Pete Appleby in particular. We could and did say that Pete’s clothes, for example, were typical of South London, or that he had a very South London approach to driving the bandwagon, but we knew there must be a word for it, and at last I found it.

I was reading Mayhew’s
The London Underworld
in the wagon and came upon a description of a gentleman who had crossed Waterloo Bridge and entered ‘a transpontine brothel’. From then on Pete’s clothes were transpontine clothes. Pete’s driving was transpontine. Pete himself was transpontine.

Of course he had a come-back. Once he had understood that the word meant nothing more than ‘across the bridge’ (and yet for the rest of us how much more) he pointed out that to him ‘All you cunts is transpontine.’ He had logic on his side, but he knew it didn’t work.

Pete didn’t drink and had a fantastic reserve of energy. It was natural, therefore, that during the five years he was with the band, he put in most of the driving. He was paid for it at so much a mile, but although this certainly influenced him, it wasn’t the only reason he drove so much. He genuinely had a feeling for driving, and also enjoyed the power it gave him over the rest of the band. The times he liked best were when he was the only driver in the band. Very often the bass player was also a driver, and towards the end Mick raised the energy to reapply for his own licence but there was a year or two when Pete alone was legally entitled to take the wheel.

During this period, if he was angry with the rest of us for hanging on at the end of a dance or jazz club to drink when he wanted to drive home, he would wait until we were on the outskirts of London and then pull into a layby for an hour’s sleep. On two occasions during rows with Mick he found himself in the happy position of handing in his notice, and then giving Mick the keys to the wagon knowing full well that he would have to be placated, persuaded to take them back, and drive on. To remember his cry of ‘ ’oo’s the driver then?’ is still sufficient to stimulate my adrenalin.

As a driver he was a natural, although given to taking considerable liberties. He was always very polite to lorries, making the accepted signals, and flicking his lights on and off, but he couldn’t bear being overtaken by a private car and when this happened would chase it mile after mile. If anybody irritated him he would lean out of his window and shout: ‘Where did you learn to drive?’ or, if there wasn’t time for the whole sentence, he would make do with ‘Cunt!’

There were times when a gentleman so addressed would take advantage of the traffic lights burning red at the next intersection to jump out of his car and threaten Pete with physical violence. When this happened Pete would point over his shoulder with his thumb to where the rest of us sat unaggressively in the back of the wagon and explain laconically: ‘There’s seven of us.’

Cars were Pete’s god, and the garage, pronounced ‘garidge’ in the accepted transpontine manner, his church. He was always driving up to the meet in a new second-hand model, and spent a lot of time on long journeys explaining the complicated deals he was engaged on with various used-car firms. Needless to say he was always the winner in these transactions.

Pete, despite this one extravagance, always seemed to have plenty of money. As I said he didn’t drink. ‘Don’t see no point in it,’ he explained. ‘Pissing all you get up against a wall and making cunts of yourselves.’ On the other hand he gambled, but unlike the rest of us, won consistently. Here his non-drinking certainly helped. During the long smoky nights in hotel lounges or boarding-house bedrooms, while the rest of us became more and more befuddled as the bottle passed, Pete, clear-eyed and obsessed with the will to win, played us like a matador plays a bull. He was a brilliant bluffer, and knew how to needle us into exasperating raising and frighten us into throwing in good hands when he had nothing. When he pulled off a coup, ‘Packed ‘ave yer? Beaten a Queen ‘igh could yer? Thought so,’ his shoulders would gyrate in such an ecstasy of glee as to suggest that he might at any moment leave the ground. As well as being a good player, he was also diabolically lucky.

Drummers have an enormous sexual potential for a certain type of girl, and Pete, although small and no beauty, had considerable charm. He looked not unlike Frank Sinatra. His reaction to being told this was in fact typical of his own special line of mock-modesty. ‘Funny you should say that,’ he would tell the girl as he packed up his drum kit at the end of a dance with a special puzzled frown on his face. ‘Several girls ’ave said it. Don’t see it meself though.’

What is perhaps missing from this description is how likeable Pete was. His very outrageousness worked in his favour. His self-dependence and absence of self-pity commanded a certain respect. He had one very comical delusion, namely that everybody was blind outside the band. Time after time he would be caught pulling faces, and if anybody struck him as particularly ridiculous, he would hold up his open palm and jab at them from behind it with the forefinger of the other hand convinced that they wouldn’t see what he was doing.

I was glad to hear recently that his cheek, his outrageous poise, remains unimpaired. Not long ago the Chris Barber Band booked in at an hotel and saw in the register that the Donegan group were staying there too, and that Mr and Mrs Appleby were in room eight. They crept up in a body and threw open the door hoping to catch Pete in some embarrassing situation or at least to discomfort him.

‘ ’Ullo boys,’ he said getting out of bed in his immaculate pale blue silk pyjamas. A mound of bedclothes showed where ‘Mrs Appleby’ lay concealed. Pete grinned and with a quick movement whisked the clothes off the bed revealing a naked young lady looking none too pleased. ‘ ’Ow bad!’ said Pete Appleby.

Like Ian Christie and Pete Appleby, Frank Thompson joined us from Alex Welsh. He had from Mick’s point of view a great advantage. He owned a station wagon and was prepared to rent it to the band for a very modest sum per week. This seemed to solve the transport problem. With Pete and Frank both able to drive, we could travel overnight, and accept bookings hundreds of miles apart on consecutive dates, a necessary lumber while we were re-establishing ourselves. Furthermore, the cheapness of the wagon meant that Mick could take jobs at a much lower rate than was possible in the grandiose days of coach hire. However, as with so much to do with Frank Thompson, it only seemed to solve it. His station wagon was so old, and broke down so often, that Mick was always having to hire fleets of taxis or take the whole band by train, so that in the end it worked out as a very expensive form of economy.

Inside Frank Thompson’s head a permanent fairy godmother waved her wand. All pumpkins were coaches. AH rats were coachmen. His wagon was a case in point. Whatever went wrong with it, as far as he was concerned it remained a new and efficient machine.

Frank’s appearance was against him. He was short and yet gangling. His hair, although heavily Brylcreemed, fell down in a lank cow’s lick over his forehead, and stuck up in spikes on the crown. His complexion was yellow, his skin rough and engrained with grease from repairing his vehicle, and his teeth were green and furry. His most memorable feature was his nose, a Cyrano-type organ, enormous and snub.

He didn’t drink alcohol, but in pubs would order a pint of orange squash. This going down was an unattractive sight. The same applied to his consumption on every possible occasion of large and squashy cream cakes.

Perhaps his best cabaret, and it lost nothing from daily repetition, happened when the van stalled. There was no question of a self-starter, and Frank had to get out and crank it into life with the starting handle. This seldom took less than nine or ten attempts, but it was his timing which, if he had been a comedian, gave the performance its distinction. He was out of sight behind the bonnet for a count of nine, and then on the ten his face in agonised profile would shoot up in front of us to an accompanying lifeless cough from the engine. Very often the handle kicked back, and Frank would stagger about the road in a dramatic fashion clasping his wrist.

I believe it was Ian who first pointed out that this scene had very much the flavour of
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday
, a film most of us had seen, and we took to chanting the name ‘Hulot’ every time Frank cranked up the handle. We prolonged the first syllable on a rising note while he remained invisible and then shouted the second syllable as loudly as we could as he sprang into view. By about the sixth repetition he very often lost his temper and used to pace off and sulk round a corner for a minute or two.

We also called him ‘Hulot’ as a nickname, although after a time this got to be pronounced ‘Youlow’ in imitation of Pete Appleby. Pete, of course, hadn’t the faintest idea who the original Monsieur Hulot was. He never took in anything outside his own interests however much it was talked about in the wagon, but he was delighted with the name, and was even willing to overlook that it contained two syllables.

Frank Thompson’s delusions extended far outside the confines of his van, but what was so extraordinary about him was that he never seemed to mind our being able to compare what he said with the reality. He told us for instance that he had a flat in town and a house in the country and this turned out to be a single room with a sink and the use of the bathroom m a small terrace house in Clapham, and his mother’s identical house three miles further out into the suburbs.

Like the rest of us he was frequently in a financial mess but he found it necessary to tell us: ‘You know it’s an extraordinary thing. Whenever I get into money difficulties another legacy falls into my lap.’

He was not a bad-hearted person at all but, like the boy at school who is always bullied, he managed to bring out the worst in us all.

He eventually got engaged and on tour he used to put a large photograph of his fiancée by his bedside. In Scotland Paul Simpson, who was with us during one of our tromboneless moments, pencilled in a moustache on the young lady’s upper lip. Frank was furious, although he couldn’t find out who’d done it, and actually suspected his main persecutors, Ian Christie or Pete. It wasn’t of course a kind thing to do, but then Frank’s reaction was so typical as to alienate any potential sympathy.

‘I’ve rubbed out the moustache,’ he told us as we loaded up the wagon next morning, ‘and I forgive whoever did it, but…’ he paused to give what he had to say its full weight, ‘if they’d have drawn in breasts I’d have killed them.’

Mick had decided to make it a small band this time, so with clarinet, drums and bass fixed up, he’d only a piano player and trombonist to find. Our first pianist – they were always changing – was a tall Glaswegian called Angus Bell.

The first time I met Angus ‘Miff’ Bell we nearly had a fight. It was several years before he joined the band and just after he’d come down to London to earn his living as a pianist. It took place in Henekey’s Cider Bar in Kingly Street, a favourite fall-about station for the musical profession at that time.

We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance. I was at my fattest and was wearing, Miff told me later, a red waistcoat obviously dating from my slimmer days. He took an instant dislike to me, and I to him.

After some minutes’ conversation I began to realise from certain remarks of his that he was a Scottish nationalist, and I had the audacity to disagree with him… I knew, of course, that Scottish nationalists existed but never imagined that I might meet one, particularly in the jazz world, and thought that a few words would convert this tall dour Scot from his convictions. Miff, much to my surprise, told me to get stuffed.

By the time he joined the band he’d turned against these ideas and indeed like all ‘ex-people’ – ex-Catholics, ex-Communists, etc.–had turned against his previous convictions with a special violence. What he hadn’t lost, indeed what had probably attracted him to fascism in the first place, was a constant manic rage, only now it’s found outlet, to my continued pleasure over six years, in ferocious black humour.

Miff’s daemon demanded a considerable quantity of drink in order to materialise. He remained faithful to malt whisky, a taste acquired in his Scottish nationalist days, and he became very anti-Sassenach when he couldn’t get it. Although he no longer rooted actively for The King over the water, he remained in this, and much else, a convinced patriot. Every time we crossed the border into Scotland he would sing ‘Speed Bonny Boat’ in that curiously exaggerated ‘rrrolling’ tenor deriving from the late Sir Harry Lauder. When he was really raving Miff would begin to caper around doing what he called his ‘bits and pieces’.

‘Finger in bum. Finger in mouth,’ he would shout in his distinct brogue, suiting the action to the words, and then, after a few more seconds of ‘leaping aboot’, he would yell,
‘change fingers!’

His imitation of the Pope was another speciality. As this had to be performed sitting down it was usually given in the wagon. It was a generalised picture of the head of Christendom rather than a portrait of any particular pontiff. I deduce this because it didn’t alter at the death of Pius and the election of John. It consisted of pulling out his thin face until it turned crimson from lack of breath and at the same time squinting at his nose. Then, raising two fingers in benediction, he would slowly lean backwards on his seat until his legs, bent at the knee, rose into the air presenting his bottom to the spectators.

Miff’s mother-in-law – she was a lowlander and very anglicised so he called her ‘Mummy’ – gave him an old fur coat to wear in the wagon on cold winter nights. This did him good service for some years, although the sight of his ginger hair and freckled snub nose emerging from the shabby but feminine collar was a distinctly comic sight. At length he decided that the coat had to go and waited for a suitably symbolic occasion.

This materialised in Scotland while we were touring the Highlands. Although Miff had been brought up in Glasgow he had in fact been born in a market town in the Western Highlands, and one morning as we passed Very near it, Miff asked Pete to stop the wagon. There was a signpost pointing down the road towards the village. On it was written: ‘To the Free Kirk. One mile.’ The ‘Wee Free’, that most narrow of all churches, still dominates large stretches of the Highlands with its joyless hellfire puritanism. Miff hung his coat on the signpost and pinned a note saying: ‘A present from Angus Bell to his native village.’ At his suggestion Mick got out his trumpet and blew the ‘Last Post’ while the rest of us stood in a circle at the base of the signpost and pissed on the coat in the cold bright morning light.