Semi-Detached (23 page)

Thirty-five
years on, I went to take a look at
Windsong
while they were laying her
up at the end of the 2004 season. It was a difficult yard to get to, upriver of
the tide mill in Woodbridge, crossed by a railway line, and dirt tracks, where
the Suffolk Heritage Coast dumped its chair manufacturers, plant storage and
sausage makers. The place for a
beating-up in a
low-budget cop
show. The winter facilities were little more than a couple of sheds and a
crane,
in a
field full of boats on sticks.

I sat
on the blue-covered bench seats, my father’s upholstery wearing dramatically
well, and as I looked around and praised aloud the cosy ergonomics of the
neatly arranged shallow interior, I was thinking that I had libelled my own
father in the cause of filial mockery. He hadn’t loaded the boat with woodwork
until it sank beneath his carpentry. His additions, like the little book case,
and the ‘tidy’, were positioned with a
good eye and discreetly made in
dark mahogany. They looked good. It was good that the boat that he lavished
such attention on was going to continue. It was good that what seemed to matter
most to him, his claustrophobic, neat cabin, where he liked to ‘get a
fug
up’ and hide from the world, retained his stamp. Out on deck again under
scudding clouds I paused for a
second. I could see down to the bend in
the river where, fifteen years ago, we had gone out in a boat and scattered his
ashes.

10. The Wake Arms

Six miles below Epping, in
the middle of the forest, I parked my car and walked into the ‘Olde Orleans
Eatery, a Taste of the Deep South’. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A fat
couple and a
baby were eating plates of chips under a
fake
Tiffany lamp, but the rest of the pine-clad multi-levels were empty. I could
enjoy my familiar neurotic dilemma choosing a
place to sit.

‘How
long have you been here?’ I asked the manager.

‘Oh,
ten years now. We’re due for a
refurbishment.’

It all
looked perfectly new to me. ‘What happened to the pub?’

‘Way
before my time.’

On the
way to the cloakroom I peered at the photographs on the wall. They were of jazz
combos: Coleman Hawkins, Bix Beiderbecke and a
young Louis Armstrong,
nursing their trumpets and staring out from sepia reproductions. To most of the
customers they might as well have been the Siberian Accordion Stars. They were a
‘theme’, chosen almost at
random by a marketing man. But the
chip-eaters would have heard of David Bowie, or Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath,
and all of these monsters of guitar-twiddling had actually played this place.
Or not this place, but a sweaty box with black walls, round the back of a biker
pub that used to be on this site, called the Wake Arms. The ‘Olde Progressive
Music Eatery’ must have been rejected as being uncommercial.

There
had always been pop music at home. We had a Dansette like everybody else. My
father carted its nice, gluey, fresh plastic smell home when we were in
rompers. The first forty-five we bought was ‘Multiplication’ (‘that’s the name
of the game’).

The
fanciful plot of my dad’s famous puppet show was based around his experimental
musical purchases. There was an elopement scene (‘James, James, Hold The Ladder
Steady’ by Susan Maugham) . There was a shipwreck (a
bit of the ‘
March
Of The Valkyrie
’, off a
Selections From Wagner
EP). And an octopus
fandango (‘
Do The Mambo Jambo’
, a
bossa nova by God-knows-who, on
an old seventy-eight). My father actually got hold of a
huge quantity of
ancient platters from a
hospital social club clear-out (including some
rare Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence sketches, which I’m afraid we thought were
risible and made into plant pots. Our forty-fives included selections from
The
Boy Friend
and extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Gondoliers.

When I
went back to Epping on my nostalgic daytrip in 2005, the little shop ‘Chew and
Osbourne’s’ was still operating. It had largely determined our ‘collection’
(since my father just marched in and bought a
handful of what was to
hand, to see how his player worked), though I was sorry to see that the booths
with the white holey board, where you could solemnly listen to your choice before
taking it home, had gone.

By the
time we were ten we had become more discriminating. Woolworths used to do
cheap cover versions: extended players with three tracks on each sides, ‘indistinguishable
from the real thing’, except that they were on red plastic. A vinyl warning: ‘This
is not a real record’. Nobody much cared who recorded the originals of ‘Venus In
Blue Jeans’ (‘She’s everything I hoped she’d be’) or ‘Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey’.
But ‘Love Me Do’ was different. Even we could tell it was a bit gormless to
have the cover version of that.

The
Beatles singles came into the house on the original discs, in the weeks that
they were released. ‘
I Want To Hold Your Hand
’ was particularly
significant. It was mine. I bought it with my birthday money. We were Beatles
people, then. My mother watched the Stones on
Top of the Pops,
and
fretted about the unhygienic nature of their hair. At thirteen we rather agreed
with her. They were too noisy and had aggressive lips. The records we had in
our wooden box with the lifting lid (which my father had knocked up for us)
with its natty sixties red-and-white washable gingham-print vinyl sticky-backed
cover, were all sing-alongs.

Then I
used my accumulated Christmas money to buy a
whole Beatles LP:
Help.

It
caused consternation. I can remember my mother trying to talk me out of it. I
would only listen to it once. Next week there would be other pop records. It
was an utter waste of money. Wouldn’t I prefer to buy a
telescope? But I
prevailed. And I still have my copy. It didn’t really fit on the record player,
though. The huge disc overhung the edges of the tiny turntable.

It must
have been some time around then that I fancied being a pop star and took up
guitar lessons. I never practised. My guitar had particularly poor ‘action’,
the strings seemed a
long way from the fret board, and it took all my
strength to play a
single note. I am afraid that my favourite bit was
walking through the town carrying the thing: I imagined everybody thinking, ‘there
goes Griff “Guitar” Rhys Jones, the good-rocking eleven-year-old,’ but I didn’t
want to learn to play ‘
My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean
’ anyway.

Later,
my brother came home from his boarding school under the influence of
traditional jazz. (This is why I know of Coleman Hawkins.) He belonged to a
club
in Midhurst and wore a duffel coat, but Chris Barber was gradually being pushed
out by the blues, and the blues were going electric Alexis Corner and John
Mayall were twanging along in the wings.

My
sister and I used to go to a
youth club in Epping up near the Catholic church.
It had started as a Saturday-morning cinema, showing black-and-white cowboy
serials to a
noisy full house. It was presumably a Jesuitical plot, but
I don’t remember that the Lone Ranger ever converted anyone to Catholicism.
Later in the long summer holidays we just hung around there. I remember the
hall with its tall windows and stacking tables. The sun was shining and making
glaring yellow hot spots on the parquet. There was a bigger record player
there, with more powerful speakers, and we played records during the summer
afternoons, but we began to play one record over and over again. When it
finished we rushed to stick it back on. Suddenly, with the big noise, bigger
than the radio or the piddly little gramophone in the corner, what had seemed
messy began to sound glorious, what had seemed disordered began to take on a
visceral excitement. ‘I can see for miles and miles,’ the Who sang.

At
school, these discoveries got to be carefully passed along. The whole point of
the group ethos of the gang era was these shared enthusiasms, determined by
group loyalty. Upper Five was on the first floor of the main block. It was
right at the end of a
long corridor. It was 0-level year. We were coming
under increasing pressure ‘to succeed’. The form master, Mr Best, told us,
rather ominously to enjoy the summer vacation. It was the last one free of work
before the end of our finals, six years hence. This was utter nonsense, but it
lodged, and I blame my entire lazy existence on
it.
With the prospect of
nothing but work ahead, I determined to take every opportunity to enjoy myself
while things were a little slack.

When
the exams finished we weren’t allowed to go home.

We had
to take part in a series of improving activities organized to ‘prevent our
minds atrophying’ (and to justify the huge fees charged for the boarders) .
There were lectures by distinguished parents, including, excitingly, George G.
Ale, out
of Private Eye
(an
Express journalist
and father of a
ginger-haired twerp in a boarding house). He turned up and growled at us from a
podium. Someone who worked in the BBC made us pretend to be a
news room,
and a plainly crazed big-game hunter banged away with his walking stick to
change slides of ‘the six killer animals’ (the water buffalo being the most
dangerous). But the most vivid was made by a
doctor enthusiastically
documenting the physical effects of a
variety of venereal diseases. It
was an extensive, timely and wide-ranging dissertation, accompanied by highly
coloured slides of venereal warts, and the regular chair-scraping thump as
another boy fainted in the dark.

In
between times, hanging about in Upper Five, no longer playing football,
Holloway, Horth and I were perfecting our impression of Joe Cocker doing ‘A
Little Help From My Friends’.

‘Eeeeee,
eeeee, eee.’ It was particularly enjoyable to froth and go all twitchy in
imitation of the convulsive Nottinghamshire groaner. And to do the high-pitched
guitar with the scratchy distorted ending. Gotley came in from his own classroom
next door and, inter alia, gave us his own educative lecture. It wasn’t pop we
were interested in. It was ‘underground’. He and Tompsett had a
collection
of Pink Floyd albums, Jefferson Airplane albums, the Fugs and Quicksilver
Messenger Service. He and Gotley were already into Zappa and Beefheart. We
gazed in admiration at the inner-sleeve pictures of men wearing fish masks, top
hats and fur coats.

Gotley
pointed out the complicated psychedelic graphics of the titles of the Grateful
Dead offerings. If you squinted at them, you could see they said ‘take acid’.
Tompsett turned the photograph of Bob Dylan on the cover of
New Morning
upside
down. If you looked very carefully you could see a man with a
trumpet up
his nose.

A
teacher suddenly came in.
‘
What
are you all doing skulking in
here?’

‘Nothing,
sir.’

‘It’s a
lovely day. Get out and be in the fresh air.’ But it was too late for that
.
That was all finished.

We were
outside the science labs when I was first introduced to the
Melody Maker.
The
back pages had thick and inky lists of gigs. The names were arranged like
wrestling posters. You could go and see bands by rote: Blodwyn Pig, the Edgar
Broughton Band, the Third Ear Band, Quintessence. They were appearing at
somewhere called the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, in central London, but there
were also venues in Ilford (The Red Lion), or (blimey) Epping, where I lived,
at somewhere called the Wake Arms. They weren’t famous groups, but we liked the
names: ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Uriah Heep’, ‘Family’. It wasn’t pop. It was music.
And Tompsett had been going to these places since he was thirteen.

Tompsett
had bog-brush hair and buck teeth, one of which was slightly discoloured. Adam
Hennicker Gotley was short and never fitted his clothes. They were both the
sort of humans that authority figures tend to distrust on sight. (Adam is a
probation officer now) They were physically unsuited to conformity. I believe
that Tompsett managed to annoy the headmaster simply by existing. His Christian
name was Fabian. Mr Sale would have found such a gesture unusually suspect.

There
were plenty of genuine rebels in the school. There were boys like Morris, who
adamantly refused to conform. He led his third-eleven team in dancing through a
cricket match, and then at the termly event called ‘trials’, where we each
had to be assessed in a
sequence of athletic events, he skipped his way
around the compulsory mile, while the playboy spiv of a senior gym master, Mr
Shortland, looked on and went red. (Even skipping, rather an exhausting show of
mettle, to be honest, got him well within the specified pass rate.) When the
Corps was inspected by a general (who flew down in a
helicopter) and he
finally got to the field service unit — a
special division, seemingly
invented for those of us who were considered incapable of charging and marching
— it was Morris who stepped forward and presented him with a
Peace
Pledge Association leaflet and a
daffodil.

There
were naughty and dangerous boys, who asked disruptive questions, smoked under
the stage and were suspected of being on drugs, like Martin (everybody was
called Paul or Martin) . Above us there were serious offenders who were
occasionally threatened with expulsion. But they were often protected by a
magic
halo of achievement. In the end, it was poor, hopeless, misguided Peters who
got the sack. Boastful Peters, ever eager to please the gym masters; willing
Peters, who became some sort of staff sergeant in the Corps, and paraded around
with bits of coloured rope around his armpit; silly Peters, who stupidly
boasted about trying a joint within hearing of a
science master and was
summarily kicked out.