Owning Up: The Trilogy (82 page)

Of all the provincial cities we visited regularly it was Manchester which continued to supply forbidden stories on a lavish scale. It was here for example that Ian and Mick discovered the Caterers’ Club, and full of enthusiasm took me there one grey afternoon after the pubs shut. It was a small room with a bar, originally a shop but with the window boarded up. It was lit by naked bulbs, the floor was bare boards, and on the wall was a hand-made poster which said ‘Try our cocktail, is. 6d.’ The object of the club, according to the yellowing rules, was recreational and social, and designed to appeal to people in the small hotel and boarding-house business. In fact, the clientele were low-grade villains of a Dickensian aspect and the oldest whores in the world. We spent several happy hours listening to one of these: a toothless but cheerful lady called Margaret. She thought we were ‘college students’ and was proud to introduce us as such to her sisters in vice although we discovered that students, while respectable enough, occupied a comparatively humble position in her scale of social values.

‘I’ve been with all sorts,’ she told us. ‘When I’ve got me teeth in and me make-up on like, well, you could take me anywhere. I’ve been to posh restaurants and clubs, with, well, you know – business people.’

Every time another old bag came in, Margaret greeted her warmly, but as soon as she was out of earshot told us, grinning and waving every time she saw her acquaintance looking in our direction, that she didn’t keep herself clean and went with ‘the lowest of the low for a dollar’. Margaret herself, she told us, only went with respectable people, sea captains and the like. She liked the club because they didn’t let the blacks in. Now the Paramount Club, she told us, she wouldn’t go there any more. They let them in there. Not long before she
had
gone in for a drink with a Polish seaman and he’d brought out a great wad of notes to pay. Well, that was foolish of him she agreed. Then he’d gone into the gents and not come out. Well, after a bit she’d asked the owner if he’d been in his gents lately. No, he’d said, why? Had she?

‘Cheeky monkey,’ said Margaret and went on with her story. She’d explained to the owner that her ‘friend’ had gone into the gents twenty minutes before and not come out. He’d gone to look and found him lying face down on the floor.

‘ ’Is wad of notes ‘ad gone, of course,’ said Margaret, and was about to drink when a new thought occurred to her.

‘ ’E were dead,’ she added in a thrilling if unconvincing whisper.

Towards the end of the afternoon we were joined by a friend of Margaret’s, an enormous man of formidable griminess wearing a neck scarf. Whether to take the piss out of us, or because he thought it genuinely funny, he pretended to be a homosexual. His imitation was of music-hall origin and consisted for the most part of wetting an extremely dirty finger every few seconds and applying it to his eyebrows while holding an imaginary mirror with his other hand.

He was obsessed with the meanness of the woman who lived in the room above him and to whom he had frequently lent ‘cupfuls of shugger’ and other household essentials, and to whom that morning he had applied for a ‘bit of bacon fat’. What was extraordinary was the way he said ‘bacon fat’. You could almost see a dirty frying pan with the fat in it. It was almost hallucinatory. Furthermore, he managed to introduce the phrase a surprising number of times into his recital.

‘I said: “Luke, all I’m asking for is a bit o’ bacon fat.” She said: “I’ve got no bacon fat.” Well, I could see ’er frying-pan on’t gas cukor full o’ bacon fat. I said: “What’s that in’t pan? ‘Appen it’s bacon fat.” She said: “Aye, but that’s all t’ bacon fat I’ve got so fook off.” I said, “I will an all and you can stuff yer bacon fat…”.’

Round the corner from the Caterers’ Club was an Indian restaurant where Mick and I often went for a meal. One evening, prior to our appearance at The Bodega, we were just finishing enormous platefuls of fried rice, Madras curry, chicken biriani, chutney, lime pickle and chapatis, when a Mancunian funeral party came in and occupied a large reserved table in the middle of the room. There was a nice old mum, obviously distressed by the loss of her husband, a burly middle-aged son and his wife who had a mouth like a contracted sphincter muscle, an unsympathetic daughter and her hen-pecked husband, a porcine grandson. They were served soup and halfway through a family row broke out. It began when the daughter-in-law asked the daughter to tell her husband to hold his knife properly. Within a moment there was a full-scale shout-up. Cries of: ‘You always thought you were too good for him. Well you’re nothing,’ and ‘Why don’t you say something? After all you’re meant to be my husband,’ were audible among the general confusion. At intervals the poor old mother tried to calm everybody down by pointing out that ‘Dad’s still warm in ‘is grave’, but nobody took any notice. There were too many old scores to settle, too many slights and insults to rake over. Finally both couples and the grandson rose and left at the same time, neither willing to acknowledge that it wasn’t they who’d been insulted, and a minute or two later an Indian waiter came in, cleared away the soup plates and replaced them with enormous helpings of steak and chips. The old lady asked for the manager who turned out to be Irish and refused to refund the price of the steaks although he declared himself willing to let her off the peaches and custard which were to follow. She sat for a moment and then came over to our table.

‘Would you fancy a couple of steaks each?’ she asked us sadly. ‘They’re all paid for and it’s a shame to let them go to waste.’ After our huge meal, we were forced to refuse although, as Mick said, ‘I’d have noshed the lot if I could have done, the poor old cow.’ She quite understood, ate her own steak, paid and left.

Neither of these stories can be dated with any certainty. All I know is that they happened sometime between 1954 when the second band formed and 1958 because after that we left the rather squalid digs we had patronised in that area since we first played for Paddy and began to stay in an hotel the other end of town, an institution not noticeably more luxurious, but with several compensating features. We called it ‘El Sordid’s’.

It was quite a large hotel in an area on its way down. It had a reception desk, a dining-room with separate tables and a lounge with a television set. The proprietor was an elderly sad-faced man with the look of a Lancashire music-hall comedian. In homage to the US airmen who were his main clientele, he wore a shirt outside his baggy grey trousers. On it was a sunset going down behind some palm trees.

You were allowed to lumber back a scrubber, but you were charged for it. If you were alone the bill was a pound for bed and breakfast. If you were with a girl it was twenty-five shillings each, in effect a twenty-five per cent sin charge. There was, furthermore, no truck with the usual polite fiction of Mr and Mrs. Your bill was made out for ‘one couple: B & B…£2 10s.’

In Liverpool I stayed at home, but the band used a shabby lodging house on Mount Pleasant. It was run by a family of Liverpudlian Chinese and was later shut down after police observation. I went back there one night after The Cavern for a drink with Mick, and found an excited family row in progress. Two Chinese men were carrying out a radiogram they claimed belonged to them. Several fights broke out in the hall with some risk to a number of toddlers who were wandering about between the legs of the various factions, eating crisps. A woman kept yelling: ‘You’ve got a lovely wife and kiddies in a flat in Birken’ead and you live over ’ere wid a prostitute!’, but the remark which knocked us out was when one of the Chinese men shouted at another in a strong Scouse accent, ‘Der trouble wid youse is you’re yeller!’

The Cavern, where we played on Sunday nights, has become world famous as the womb of the Liverpool sound, but in those days it was staunchly trad although just as packed and steamy. The audience sat in front of the small stage on about twenty rows of seats or jived at the back and sides of the long low cellar under the sweating brick arches. When we came back from the pub after the interval we could see clouds of steam billowing out from the door at the top of the steep stone steps which led down to the Cavern. It looked as if it must be on fire.

The girls in the audience had that dreamy, rather sad, slightly scruffy look that Liverpool girls have. They were a decided contrast to the Manchester girls of the previous night, who were much smarter, more brisk and matter-of-fact, and tended to have good if stereotyped legs and, less sympathetically, a special mouth with thin lips curving tautly down at the edges. I called this ‘the Manchester mouth’ and it was surprising how often it reoccurred.

My father used to come to The Cavern after dinner with my Uncle Alan. He was usually a little high after his evening session in The Albert, and used to flirt mildly with the girls in the band-room. He called them ‘the band mice’. ‘Mouse’ as an expression for a girl had been widespread in the mid-fifties. Bruce Turner had been responsible for its popularity. ‘Must have that mouse, Dad,’ he used to say, but later it had given way to the word ‘chick’ which, in its turn, had been superseded by the still prevalent ‘bird’. My father however remained faithful to ‘mouse’ until his death. He was very popular with the Liverpool mice because he was affectionate without being at all lecherous. A few weeks after he died we played Liverpool and a girl to whom he had always been warm and friendly asked me where he was. I told her, and her eyes filled with tears. Very sadly she said she could hardly believe it.

‘Last time you were here,’ she said quietly, ‘it was raining, and I come in all wet, and he said me tits was smaller and must have got shrunk in the rain. I’m very sorry to think he’s gone.’

My father didn’t like The Cavern because it was so hot and crowded. About 1959 we moved to a much larger club, The Mardi Gras on Mount Pleasant, a few doors away from the Chinese Hotel. This was much bigger and quite plushy, and he liked it better, but I always preferred The Cavern. It had far more atmosphere.

Just before we transferred the management had begun to use a Beat group sometimes, instead of a local trad band during the intervals. In 1963 when the trad boom began to fade a little these took over the whole session. Among the other groups were ‘The Beatles’.

The word ‘scrubber’ has cropped up quite frequently in this story, and perhaps the time has come to attempt a precise definition of what it means, or rather meant, for I understand that in the Beat world it has become debased and now means a prostitute. In our day this was not the case. A scrubber was a girl who slept with a jazzman but for her own satisfaction as much as his. Each scrubber had her own area, would turn up at the band’s first job within her boundaries, sleep with the musician of her choice that night, travel on to the next job with him, and such jobs after that as lay within her province, and leave the band when it crossed the border into the next scrubber’s territory. I don’t mean to suggest that there was only one scrubber in each area, in fact many of them travelled in pairs, but that each individual was faithful in her fashion to one member in any given band. In her fashion, because many of them were very experimental sexually and would take part in gang bangs but only with the permission and participation of her regular partner.

Most scrubbers specialised in men who played a particular instrument. There were scrubbers for bass players, drummers, clarinettists, bandleaders, singers, and so on. Scrubbers were not distributed over the whole of the British Isles. In London and the towns within an eighty-mile radius there were lots of girls who did a turn, but no scrubbers in the full sense of the word because the bands usually travelled back to London the same night. Other areas, Scotland for example, were too imbued with the puritan tradition to tolerate the scrubber. In fact, scrubbers were mostly to be found in an area stretching from the West Coast to the East, but ending at a line drawn through the Potteries to the south and Newcastle upon Tyne in the north. It was the Alex Welsh Band who invented the name for this area. They called it ‘The Scrubber Belt’.

Once in Barrow-in-Furness, Pete Appleby and I picked up two scrubbers and, at their suggestion, drove out of town to a field above the sea. While on the job I heard Pete shriek with laughter and lifting my head discovered that a nearby furnace was blasting and the landscape for a moment or two was as bright as day. ‘ ’Ow bad,’ Pete told the rest of the band later. ‘I’m lying there feeling up this chick when it all ‘appens, and suddenly I can see old Fat’s arse going up and down like the clappers!’

The two most famous scrubbers of my time, who invariably cropped up in any conversation between jazzmen whenever they met, both came from Yorkshire. From Leeds, Jean Patterson set out each week-end in search of pleasure. In Bradford, Mucky Alice studied her
Melody Maker
to decide where to aim for after work on Fridays.

Jean Patterson, a big bonny girl with a friendly warm smile, was famous for her experimental temperament and her formidable breasts and was equally popular with both British and visiting American bands. Once she came round to pay us a social call in the band-room at Sheffield City Hall. She had with her another girl, older than herself and very anonymous in appearance.

‘Be careful what you say in front of my friend,’ warned Jean. ‘She’s not like me. She doesn’t like a bit of fun.’

A friend of mine on a recent trip to America wandered straight off the boat into a bar where a coloured trio were playing. Just after he’d bought his first beer, the leader made an announcement: ‘Our next selection,’ he said, ‘is an original by our bass player. He entitles it “Theme for Jean Patterson”.’

A month or two ago I invited an American blues singer to come and spend the day with us. As we live rather far out, I arranged that we should pick him up at his hotel, and at the agreed time knocked on his door. ‘Come on in,’ he said, ‘I’m just up.’ He was pulling on his undervest. Through the gap between his extended arm and torso I saw Jean Patterson zipping up her skirt. ‘It’s fucking Melly,’ she said.

She looked marvellous, brown, relaxed and happy. She came to lunch and stayed until it was time for her to catch her train north. She radiated contentment and reaffirmed me in my belief that what you really want to do, provided it respects the identities of other people, is the basis of a workable morality.