Absolute Beginners (7 page)

I was having a wash down, at the bathroom sink, when up came the Hoplite, nervously patting his hair which was done in a new style of hairdo like as if a large animal had licked the Hoplite’s locks down flat, then licked the tip of them over his forehead vertical up, like a cockatoo with its crest on back-to-front. He was wearing a pair of skintight, rubber-glove thin, almost transparent
cotton slacks, white nylon-stretch and black wafer-sole casuals, and a sort of maternity jacket, I can only call it, coloured blue. He looked over my shoulder into the mirror, patting his head and saying nothing, till when I said nothing too, he asked me, ‘Well?’

‘Smashing, Hoplite,’ I said. ‘It gives you a rugged, shaggy, Burt Lancaster appearance.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ the Hoplite said, ‘it’s me.’

‘It’s you, all right, boy. Of course, anything is, Fabulous. You’re one who can wear
anything
, even a swimsuit or a tuxedo, and look nice in it.’

‘I know you’re one of my fans,’ the Hoplite said, smiling sadly at me in the mirror, ‘but don’t mock.’

‘No mockery, man. You’ve got dress sense.’

The Hoplite sat down on the lavatory seat, and sighed. ‘It’s not dress sense I need,’ he said, ‘but horse sense.’

I raised my brows and waited.

‘Believe it or not, my dear,’ the Hoplite continued sadly, ‘but your old friend Fabulous, for the first time in his life – the
very
first in nineteen years (well, that’s a lie, I’m twenty, really) – is deep, deep, deep in love.’

‘Ah,’ I replied.

There was a pause.

‘You’re not going to ask me with who?’ he said, appealingly.

‘I’m so sure you’re going to tell me, Hop.’

‘Sadist! And not
Hop
, please!’

‘Not me. No, not a bit, I’m not. Well – who is it?’

‘An Americano.’

‘Ah.’

‘What does this “Ah” mean?’ the Hoplite said suspiciously.

‘Several things. Tell me more. I can see it coming, though. He doesn’t care.’

‘Misery! That’s it.’

‘Doesn’t care for the angle, Hoplite, or doesn’t care for you personally, or just doesn’t care for either?’

‘The angle. Not bent at all, though I had hopes that perhaps he dabbled … And he’s so, so understanding, which makes it so, so, so much worse.’

‘You poor old bastard,’ I said to the Hoplite, as he sat there on my John, and almost crying.

He plucked at a piece of sanitary tissue, and blew his nose. ‘I only hope,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t turn me
anti-American
.’

‘Not that, Hoplite,’ I said. ‘Not you. It’s a sure sign of total defeat to be anti-Yank.’

‘But I thought,’ said lovelorn Fabulous, rising from his seat and strolling across to gaze out on the railway tracks, ‘you didn’t approve of the American influence. I mean, I know you don’t care for Elvis, and you do like Tommy.’

‘Now listen, glamour puss,’ I said, flicking his bottom with my towel. ‘Because I want English kids to be English kids, not West Ken Yanks and bogus imitation Americans, that doesn’t mean I’m anti the whole US thing. On the contrary, I’m starting up an anti-
anti-American
movement, because I just despise the hatred and jealousy of Yanks there is around, and think it’s a sure sign of defeat and weakness.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said Fabulous, a bit sarcastically. So, really to hurt him, I made as if to use my towel again, and didn’t.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘to support the local product. America launched the teenage movement, there’s no denying, and Frankie S., after all, was, in his way, the very first teenager. But we’ve got to produce our own variety, and not imitate the Americans – or the Ruskis, or anybody, for that matter.’

‘Ah, the Russians,’ said the Hoplite, with a dreamy look coming over his pretty countenance. ‘You think they have teenagers over there as well?’

‘You bet they have,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you talked to any of the boys who’ve been over for the Congresses? They’ve got them just like us. But where the Russians fail, is sending us propaganda, and not sending us anyone in the flesh to look at, or to talk to.’

The Hoplite was getting a bit bored, as he does when it goes off the gossip kick into ideas. ‘You’re such a clever boy,’ he said, patting me on the shoulder, ‘and such a hard judge of the rest of us poor mortals … And deep down, I do believe, you’re quite a patriot.’

‘You bet I’m a patriot!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s because I’m a patriot, that I can’t bear our country.’

The Hoplite was at the door. ‘If you’re interested at all,’ he said, ‘there’s a party tonight, mine hostess being Miss Lament.’

‘I’m not sure I care for that gimmicky girl,’ I said. ‘What sort of party – is it special?’

Dido Lament, I should explain, is a female columnist,
and that actually is her name, or rather, her maiden name. Lament is known among us kids because she did a big investigation round the coffee bars in the days when the Rock thing first broke, and got taken up by all her clients in High Society – or rather, by the bus-queue masses who read about them in her column.

‘Oh, the usual SW3 trash,’ said Hoplite, waving his hands about disdainfully, though I know full well he just couldn’t wait to go. ‘Advertising people, and television people, and dressmaking people and show business fringe people – all the parasites,’ he said. ‘Henley, I know, is going, and have reason to believe, is taking Suze.’

‘He is?’ I said, showing no sign of grief to this bit of pure camposity called Hoplite.

‘And Wizard should be there,’ he went on, ‘up to no good, I doubt not, the dear lad …’

‘YOU STUDS UP THERE!’ came a great yell from the stairs. ‘Come down and see your doll!’

This was Big Jill from her basement sector.

‘Oh!’ Hoplite cried. ‘I do wish that female
talent-spotter
wouldn’t shout so! Go to her if you want to, child, but me, I’ve got much better things to do.’ And blowing me a kiss, he tripped off down the stairs, very sadly singing.

‘Five minutes, Jill girl!’ I yelled over the top of them.

Because, first of all, I wanted to glance at a snap of Suze that was taken of us both one day up on top of the Monument there in the City by a kid I handed my Rolleiflex to, to snap us, and which shows us, she standing
in front, and me standing round behind her, holding her arms, and looking over her head just after kissing her on the neck. And as I wandered round, putting on a garment here, and a garment there, I carried this photo, and propped it up somewhere when I had to use both hands, and gazed at the bloody thing and thought ‘Oh Christ, it was only just one single summer ago, what’s the use of being young if you’re not loved? Well, all right – what
is
the use? What is it? Or is that obvious, I mean my question?’

So that was that, and down I went to see Big Jill.

But on the first floor landing, opposite Mr Cool’s room, I noticed the door was left open, which was a sign I know that Cool had something he’d like to say to me, but was too damn proud to ask me to step in. If it had been anyone else, I would have just let the hint he dropped there where it lay, but with the coloured boys you’ve got to be so careful, or otherwise they put it down to prejudice. So I put my head around the door, and jeepers-creepers, nearly had a fit because would you believe it, there were
two
Mr Cools, one coloured, and one white, or so it seemed.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Mr Cool, ‘this is my brother, Wilf.’

‘Hi, Wilf,’ I said. ‘That’s crazy!’

‘What is?’ said this Wilf.

‘You being the brother of my favourite Mr Cool. It nearly shook me rigid when I saw the pair of you.’

‘Why did it?’ said this white-skinned number, who struck me, I must say, as not being at all a swinging character like his brother – in fact, quite
un
-cool.

‘Wilf’s on his way,’ said Mr Cool.

‘Yem,’ said this Wilf, and ‘see you.’ And he shook hands with his brother, and went out past me with not so much as a genuflection or a curtsy.

As soon as he’d gone, I said, ‘Cool, please excuse me, but I don’t quite dig the scene. I was quite polite to your brother, wasn’t I? but he just didn’t want to know.’

Mr Cool was standing very still, and very lean, and very all-by-himself, and said, ‘My brother’s come to warn me.’

‘Of what? News me up, please.’

‘Wilf’s Mum’s by another man, as you’ll have guessed.’

‘Well … Yes … So …?’

‘He doesn’t like me much, and my friends he likes even less, specially my white ones.’

‘Charming! Why, please?’

‘Let’s not go into that. But anyway, he gets round the area and knows the scene, and he says there’s trouble coming for the coloureds.’

I laughed out loud, but a bit nervously. ‘Oh Cool, you know, they’ve been saying that for years, and nothing’s happened. Well, haven’t they? I know in this country we treat the coloureds all like you-know-what, but we English are too lazy, son, to be violent. Anyway, you’re one of us, big boy, I mean home-grown, as much a native London kid as any of the millions, and much more so than hundreds of pure pink numbers from Ireland and abroad who’ve latched on to the Welfare thing, but don’t belong here like you do.’

My speech made no impression on Mr Cool. ‘I’m just telling you what Wilf says,’ he answered. ‘And all I know is, he likes coming here so little it must be
something
that makes him feel he ought to.’

‘Perhaps your mother told him to,’ I suggested, because I always like to think that
someone’s
female parent has maternal instincts.

He shook his head. ‘No, it was Wilf’s idea,’ he said, ‘to come.’

I looked hard at Mr Cool.

‘And if anything should happen,’ I asked, ‘whose side would your brother himself be on?’

Mr Cool blew out some smoke and said, ‘Not mine. But he felt he had to come and tell me.’

As I stood there looking at the Cool, it struck me so hard how absolutely lonely the poor fucker was – standing there all on his Pat Malone, and yet so resolute, so
touch-me
-if-you-dare … And the nasty question grew up also in my mind as to what I might be doing if there should be trouble here in Napoli – I, the sharp kid, the pal of the whole wide world. Were those really my principles, or was it all on top? And although I knew it was the wrong thing to say, and knew it positively at the very moment, I found myself saying to Cool, ‘Tell me, Cool, you’re not short of anything, are you? I mean, I couldn’t help you out with any loot?’

He just shook his head, which was quite awful, and I was really relieved that Big Jill hooted up the stairs – much louder, this time, was only two floors away – ‘STUD! Are you coming down to me?’

‘Coming, doll,’ I shouted and, with a wave to Cool, went down to Jill in her nether regions.

It needs a bit of an effort of imagination to see what the little Les. butterflies see in Jill because she is, to say the very least of it, so massive, and though I know she’s blatant and masterful and all the rest of it, and wears slacks, of course, and even would do to a wedding at St. Paul’s, I’m sure, she isn’t beautiful in any way that I can see, or even
glamorous
. In fact, if it wasn’t she’s a city girl, you’d somehow imagine her handling horses – and perhaps, come to think of it, that is the appeal to the young chicks.

‘You’re late,’ she said, ‘you horrid little studlet.’

‘What do you mean, “late”, Big Jill? Did you and me have any sort of an appointment?’

She grabbed me abruptly like an ourang-outang, lifted me two feet off the floor, and banged me down again. ‘If you were a chick,’ she said, ‘I’d eat you.’

‘EASY, lady-killer,’ I cried. ‘You’ll get me entangled in your cactuses.’ Because it’s true Jill is a great collector of indoor plants, in fact they sprout and dangle all over her basement rooms, and in the area as well.

She pushed a cup of coffee in my hands and said, ‘Well, how’s your sex life, junior, since the last time we met?’

‘We met two days ago, Big Jill. It hasn’t changed since then.’

‘No? Nothing to report?’

Big Jill was standing looking at me, legs apart, with that sort of kindly, ‘understanding’ look that irritates
you when the person just doesn’t dig anything whatever about your inner character and pursuits.

‘You don’t understand as much as you think, Big Jill,’ I said, voicing my thoughts to her.

‘Oh!’ she said huffily. ‘Please pardon me for existing.’

‘All that I mean, dear,’ I said, to soften up the absurd old cow, ‘is that your attitude to all those kicks is much too expert. You know so damn much, you know so damn little.’

Big Jill now dropped the wise old elder sister thing, and said, ‘Clue me then, teenager. My big ears are flapping.’

‘All I mean, Big Jill, is that you can’t say, “How’s your sex life?” just like you say, “How’s the weather?”’

She sat down wrong way round on the chair, with her arms resting on the back of it, and her big tits resting on her arms. ‘Obviously,’ she said.

‘The whole thing about sex,’ I said to her, ‘is that it’s all very easy, and all very difficult indeed.’

‘Ah …’ said Big Jill, looking tolerant and amused, as if I was putting on a show for her.

‘I mean, anyone can have a bash, that’s obvious, there’s nothing to it, but is there any pleasure?’

‘Well, isn’t there, big boy?’ she asked me, giving a great, fat smile.

‘Oh, of course there is, in that way, yes, but there isn’t really, because you can’t have it just like that without messing something else that matters up, and this brings you badly down.’

‘Even if you like the party of the second part, it brings
you down?’ said Jill, getting interested, as I could see.

‘If you
like
the other number, I mean like the looks of them, really dig them sexually – and I mean really – then it isn’t quite so bad, because at least you’re only acting like a pair of animals, which isn’t a bad thing to do … But even then, you’re still wrought badly down.’

‘Wrought down because you might lose them?’

‘No, no, not that. Because you’ve not really got them, because they aren’t the person.’

‘What person?’

‘The person you really dig, with all of yourself, your other half you’d give your life to.’

‘You’re not referring to marriage, are you?’

‘No, no, no, no, no, Big Jill.’

‘
To
love
?’

‘Yep. That’s it. To it.’

Big J.’s eyes were pale, so that she seemed to be staring into herself, and not out into the room at me.

‘You ever had that combo?’ she enquired.

‘No.’

‘Not even with Suzette?’

‘No. Me, yes, I was ready for that everything stage of it, but for Suze it was only a head, bodies and legs thing, when it happened.’

Big Jill looked wise, and said, ‘So it was really you who broke it up, then.’

‘I suppose you could say so, yes. I wanted more from Suze than she wanted to give me, and I just couldn’t bear anything that was less.’

‘Then why you still trail round after her? You hope she’ll change?’

‘Yes.’

Big Jill heaved herself up, and said, ‘Well, boy, I can tell you something, which is she won’t, Suzette. Not for ten or fifteen years she won’t, anyway, I can promise you that. Later on, when you’re both a big boy and girl, you might be able to wrap a big thing up …’

I’d moved away, and was looking out into her area Kew gardens. ‘If I can work up the strength of will,’ I said, ‘I’m going to cut out seeing Suze at all.’

‘Don’t turn your back when you’re talking, son. You mean live on your visions like a monk?’

I turned round and said, ‘I mean shut my gate to all that nonsense.’

Big Jill came over too. ‘You’re too young for that,’ she said. ‘If you do, you’ll only do yourself an injury. You shouldn’t give up kicks till they don’t mean a thing to you any more.’ But she was quite a bit edgy, I could see. ‘You’re a romantic!’ she said. ‘A second feature Romeo!’ and she took back my coffee cup as if I’d tried to rob her of it.

Well, there it is. That’s what always happens if you try to tell the
truth
, they always want to know it, and nag you and persuade you against your better sense to tell it, and then they’re always angry with you when they hear it, and dislike you for it. And, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t even the truth I’d told Big Jill, in one respect: and that is, Suze and I hadn’t made it, actually, though we’d sailed right up close so often. But even when the scene was set,
and we both meant business, it hadn’t happened, and I’m not sure if the real reason for this was her, or me.

I thought of all this, as I climbed out of Napoli into London, up towards N. Hill Gate. And straining up the Portobello Road, I passed a crocodile of infants, and among them a number of little Spadelets, and I noticed, not for the first time, how, in the underground movement of the juveniles, they hadn’t been educated up yet to the colour thing. Fists and wits, they were what mattered, and the only enemy was teacher. And as I walked on along the Bayswater Road, just inside that two miles of gardens, so pretty and kind by day (but not by night), I went on thinking, as my Italian casuals carried me on.

Perhaps Big Jill’s right, I think too much, but the sight of these school-kids reminded me of the man who really taught me to think at all, and that was my elementary schoolmaster, called Mr Barter. I know it’s un-sharp to admit a schoolteacher ever taught you anything, but this Mr Barter, who was cross-eyed, did. I got in his clutches when I was eleven, and the glorious 1950s had just begun. On account of schools being blitzed when I was an infant (which I can hardly remember, only a bit of the buzz-bombs at the end), I had to walk a mile up into Kilburn Park, to the place where this Mr Barter gave his performance. Now, dig this – because this was it. Old Mr Barter was the only man (or woman, too) in all the schools that I attended, before I packed that nonsense in three years ago, who actually made me realise two things, of which number one is, that what you learnt had some actual value to you personally, and wasn’t just
dropped on you like a punishment, and number two, that everything you learnt, you hadn’t learnt until you’d really dug it: i.e. made it part of your own experience. He’d tell us things – for example, like that Valparaiso was a big city in Chile, or that x+y equals something or other, or who all the Henrys were, or Georges, and he’d make us feel this crazy stuff really
concerned
us kids, was something to do with us, and had a value. Also, he made me kinky about books: he managed to teach me – to this day, I don’t know how – that books were not just a thing like that – I mean, just
books
– but somebody else’s mind opened up for me to look into, and he taught me the habit, later on, of actually
buying
them! Yes – I mean real books, like the serious paperbacks, which must have been unknown among the kids up in the Harrow Road those days, who thought a book’s an SF or a Western, if they thought it’s anything.

Since we’re on the subject, and I can’t cause any more red faces than I already have, I’d also like to mention that the second great influence of my life was something even more embarrassing, and this is that, believe it or not, I actually was, for two whole years a
wolf cub
! Yes – me! Well … this is the fable. I got swung into that thing when, like all kids do, I was called up for the Sabbath school, and I soon told that Sunday lot it could please take a walk, but somehow got latched on to this wolf cub kick, because it started to fascinate me, for the following reasons. The first week I attended, dragged there by Dad, the old cub master, who I now realise was a terrible old poof, said that he wanted my attendance to be voluntary,
not forced, and if after a full month I found they made it so attractive I’d want to come of my own free will, then would that show? I said, sure, yes it would, thinking, naturally, the month would soon pass by, and they began to teach me a lot of crap I found, even at that age, absolutely useless and ridiculous, like lighting fires with two matches when matches are about the cheapest thing there are to buy, and putting tourniquets on kids’ legs for snake-bites when there aren’t any snakes in London, and anyway, what if they bit kids on the head or other sensitive parts? Yet gradually, all the same, to everyone’s astonishment, I did actually begin to be a raver for those weekly meetings in the Baptist corrugated iron temple, because I really felt – don’t laugh – that for the first time, here was a family: at any rate, a lot, a mob, a click I could belong to. And though that dreadful old cub master with his awful shorts, and his floppy khaki hat, was queer as a coot and even queerer, he didn’t interfere with any of us kids in any way, and actually succeeded in teaching us
morals
– can you believe it? Well – he did! He really did. I can honestly say the only ideas on morals I know anything of, were those that bent old cub master made me believe in, chiefly, I think, because he made us feel that he liked us, all us grubby-kneed little monsters, and cared what happened to us, and didn’t
want
anything from us, except that we look after ourselves decently in the great big world hereafter. He was the first adult I’d ever met – even including Dad – who didn’t come the adult at us – didn’t use his strength, and won us over by persuasion.

That brings me to today, and to the third item in my education, my university, you might say, and that’s the jazz clubs. Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz – quite frankly, I don’t really care
what
you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really understand it
all
– I mean, certain LPs leave me speechless. But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. The result of all this is that, in the jazz world, you meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions – in social directions, in culture directions, in sexual directions, and in racial directions … in fact, almost anywhere, really, you want to go to learn. So that’s why, when the teenage thing began to seem to me to fall into the hands of exhibitionists and moneylenders, I cut out gradually from the kiddo waterholes, and made it for the bars, and clubs, and concerts where the older numbers of the jazz world gathered.

But this particular evening, I had to call at a teenage hut inside Soho, in order to contact two of my models, by names Dean Swift and the Misery Kid. Now, about Soho, there’s this, that although so much crap’s written about the area, of all London quarters, I think it’s still
one of the most authentic. I mean, Mayfair is just top spivs stepping into the slippers of the former gentry, and Belgravia, like I’ve said, is all flats in houses built as palaces, and Chelsea – well! Just take a look yourself, next time you’re there. But in Soho, all the things they say happen, do: I mean, the vice of every kink, and speakeasies and spielers and friends who carve each other up, and, on the other hand, dear old Italians and sweet old Viennese who’ve run their honest, unbent little businesses there since the days of George six, and five, and backward far beyond. And what’s more, although the pavement’s thick with tearaways, provided you don’t meddle it’s really a much safer area than the respectable suburban fringe. It’s not in Soho a sex maniac leaps out of a hedge onto your back and violates you. It’s in the dormitory sections.

The coffee spot where I hoped I’d find my two duets was of the kind that’s now the chicest thing to date among the juniors – namely, the pigsty variety, and adolescent bum’s delight. I don’t exaggerate, as you’ll see. What you do is, rent premises that are just as dear as any other, rip up the linos and tear out the nice fittings if there happen to be any, put in thick wood floors and tables, and take special care not to wipe the cups properly, or sweep the butts and crusts and spittle off the floor. Candles are a help or, at a pinch, non-pearl 40-watt blue bulbs. And a jukebox just for decoration, as it’s considered rather naïve to
use
one in these places.

This example was called Chez Nobody, and sure enough, sitting far apart from each other at distant
tables, were the Dean and the Misery Kid. Though both are friends of mine, and, in a way, even friends of each other, these two don’t mix in public, on account of the Dean being a sharp modern jazz creation, and the Kid just a skiffle survival, with horrible leanings to the trad. thing. That is to say, the Kid admires the groups that play what is supposed to be the authentic music of old New Orleans, i.e. combos of booking office clerks and quantity-surveyors’ assistants who’ve handed in their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing, when it all long ago began.

If you know the contemporary scene, you could tell them apart at once, just like you could a soldier or sailor, with their separate uniforms. Take first the Misery Kid and his trad. drag. Long, brush-less hair, white stiff-starched collar (rather grubby), striped shirt, tie of all one colour (red today, but it could have been royal-blue or navy), short jacket but an old one (somebody’s riding tweed, most likely), very, very, tight, tight, trousers with wide stripe, no sox, short
boots
. Now observe the Dean in the modernist number’s version. College-boy smooth crop hair with burnt-in parting, neat white Italian
rounded-collared
shirt, short Roman jacket
very
tailored (two little vents, three buttons), no-turn-up narrow trousers with 17-inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointed-toe shoes, and a white mac lying folded by his side, compared with Misery’s sausage-rolled umbrella.

Compare them, and take your pick! I would add that their chicks, if present, would match them up with: trad.
boy’s girl – long hair, untidy with long fringes, maybe jeans and a big floppy sweater, maybe bright-coloured never-floralled, never-pretty dress … smudged-looking’s the objective. Modern jazz boy’s girl – short hemlines, seamless stockings, pointed-toed high-heeled stiletto shoes, crêpe nylon rattling petticoat, short blazer jacket, hair done up into the elfin style. Face pale – corpse colour with a dash of mauve, plenty of mascara.

I sat down just beside the Misery Kid, who was eating a gateau and had everything horrible about him, spotty, unpressed, unlaundered, but with the loveliest pair of eyes you ever saw, brown and funny and appealing, I can only say, not that the Kid ever asks you for anything, as he only speaks in sentences of four words at his most voluble.

‘Evening, Kid,’ I said. ‘There’s been a small disaster.’

He just gazed like a fish: brows up, but not really curious.

‘You recollect the snaps I took of you as the poet Chatterton with your bird as your Inspiration in some nylon net?’

‘So?’ said the Kid.

‘It’s all right, my client’s not bounced the order, but I’ve developed the stuff, and your chick came out too indistinct by far.’

‘She not meant so?’

‘She’s meant to be vague, Misery Kid, but she’s meant to be visible behind that nylon net. Well? I expect she must have moved.’

‘You pay us for a second take?’

‘Certainly, Mr Bolden. But I can’t pay for anything till I give the prints to Mr X-Y-Z.’

‘Who he?’

‘The client.’

The Misery Kid picked his nose and said, ‘This client no deposit?’

‘No. We’ve just got to do it all again, Mr Kid, to get our money. Can you raise your partner?’

‘I dunno I know,’ he said. ‘Bell me tonight, I tell you.’

He got up, not showing his feelings, which was really rather heroic, because here was this trad. child, alone among the teenagers, in the days of prosperity, still living like a bum and a bohemian, skint and possibly even hungry, but still not arguing about the loot. If he’d argued, he’d have got some out of me, but to argue when the dirt dropped down on your head was contrary to his whole trad. ideology. As the Misery Kid passed by the Dean on his way out, Dean Swift looked up and hissed at him, ‘Fascist!’ which the Kid ignored. These modern jazz boys certainly do feel strongly about the trad. reaction.