Broken Music: A Memoir (10 page)

Mr. McGough will teach us English literature with a fierce analytical precision, dissecting the language like a coroner laying out a corpse and then miraculously piecing it together and breathing it back into life. He can paraphrase the dense couplets of Chaucer and Shakespeare into clear modern English, coldly succinct but somehow with a conjuror’s skill retaining the occult power of the original poetry. He will often halt in midsentence for seconds at a time, as the whites of his rheumy eyes disappear into the roof of his head, where he seems to search for and retrieve the exact word or phrase that will suddenly dazzle and enlighten the murky chambers of what he mockingly describes as our intellects.

From dread of this awkward, eccentric man I will come to revel in
the privilege of his tuition, awed by his austere and devastating command of a language that he wields like a weapon.

That there is some undisclosed sadness in this man’s life is never in question, and he seems to have few if any friends among the staff What is known among the whisperers of the school is that he has no wife or children and lives alone with his father, an unusual arrangement for a man in his fifties, and in more prurient times would beg questions about sexuality and definitions of normality We are thankfully innocent of such prying, and although I am intrigued and fascinated by his aloneness I have no desire to pry further. Many years later I will hear that he returned home one evening to find his father dead and half incinerated in the fireplace, having fallen unconscious, and it is that macabre image that will remain, strangely conflated with the dramas and tragedies that he had guided us through as if he were a boatman on a mythical underground river.

He will take no part or interest in the disciplinary fetishes of the school, he has no need to, and seems to live exclusively in a realm of words. He will guide us through the barren landscapes of Eliot’s
The Wasteland
, Dante’s
Purgatorio
, and the hellfire of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. He will help us uncover the human tragedies of Shakespeare and the petty moral foibles of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. He will instruct us how to decode the parables of Sergeant Musgrave’s
Dance
and Swift’s misanthropic
Gulliver’s Travels
. He will teach us to unravel the plot complexities of Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, and expose us to the subtle aesthetics and social sensibilities of E. M. Forster.

I will become so swept up in these journeys of discovery that I will continue to read and read, long after the academic need has passed. There are no books in my house apart from a Bible and some equally unfathomable engineering texts from my father’s apprenticeship,
but soon books will become for me an acquisitive passion filling up rooms and rooms with their dusty and inert bodies. Like my grandmother, I will never throw a book away, storing dog-eared paperbacks from school or college, year after year, stacked like hunting trophies on makeshift shelves in my rooms. For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you, and to know precisely where each one is located and what was happening in your life at that time or where you were when you first read it is the languid and distilled pleasure of the connoisseur, and this lifelong pleasure I owe to Mr. McGough and others like him.

    Even from the earliest days of my education, I never had much of an affinity for maths. Numbers were cold and cruel abstractions whose only seeming function was to torture hapless souls like me with their strange, puzzling tricks and pointless adding and subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and extrapolating to fearful infinities. I feared them instinctively the way wild animals fear sprung traps. No one in my entire school career so far had ever managed to demonstrate the beauty of an equation to me, or the elegance of a theorem, nor had anyone had the foresight to point out the clear parallel between numbers and my passion for music. My scholarship exam had fortunately concentrated on general intelligence and not math skills, and I’d survived from year to year in a kind of skulking dread of each new mathematical instrument that seemed designed for the sole purpose of tormenting me with its abstract and baffling technology.

Bill Mastaglio had taught maths in the school for enough years to be considered a legend. Of Italian extraction, he had the face of a tough Roman centurion or a Neapolitan boxer, with his broken nose and his sleek black locks combed back severely from a receding hairline.
Bill, and we always called him Bill, tested the whole class at the beginning of the autumn term. He hadn’t taught any of us before and wanted some guide as to the problems he would be facing in the coming terms. I struggled through the paper and waited anxiously with the rest of the class for the results at the end of the week.

Bill walks in on Friday morning with a face like a burglar’s dog, throwing the pile of papers onto his desk with a resounding slap, as if he is delivering a fiat from Rome announcing a mass execution. This is not looking good.

He proceeds, with an increasing vein of irony, to read out the percentages achieved in Monday’s examination.

“Hanlon 75 percent, Berryman 72, Taylor 69…Hornsby 25, Elliot 23…and lastly, Sumner 2—yes, that’s right, 2 percent.”

“Do you know why you got 2 percent in the maths exam, lad?”

“Er, no, I don’t, sir.”

“Because you managed to spell your bloody name right.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There are some titters from the back of the class.

“Would you mind telling me how someone like you could have survived in this bastion of academic excellence with such a paltry and pitiable knowledge of basic mathematics? I have a cat at home who knows more than you do. How have you survived?”

“Native wit, sir?” There are more titters from the back of the class.

He survives by native wit
was the phrase that my previous teacher had used to describe my faltering progress through the school in my last report. I took it as a kind of compliment and had even shown it to my mother, who gave me one of her wry smiles.

To Bill’s credit and my eternal gratitude from that day on, he literally took me under his wing. Perhaps he saw me as some kind of
tabula rasa upon which he could inscribe the unique signature of his craft, like a missionary teaching a savage to read the word of God. Or perhaps he was just a damned good teacher with a job to do. Once he had set the other geniuses in the class to work he would call me over to his desk, sit me down, and painstakingly, day by day and week by week, reveal the hidden magic of the logarithm tables, the balanced perfection of quadratic equations, and the graceful logic of the theorems. A whole continent was revealed before me, until then concealed under a dense cloud.

As well as being a fine teacher, Bill was also a hell of a storyteller. When things were going well in class, it wouldn’t take much of a hint to start him on one of his sagas. He had fought with the eighth army in North Africa, and marched with Field Marshal Montgomery fighting Rommel, the Desert Fox, and his Panzer divisions from Tobruk to El Alamein. He had changed his name from Mastaglio to Massey in case he was ever captured by the Italians and shot as a traitor. I think Bill taught us almost as much modern history as he did mathematics. Two years later I managed to achieve a surprisingly decent pass in a subject where I had expected to fail miserably, and I owe that to Sergeant Massey, aka Bill Mastaglio, or just Bill.

    Two terms at the grammar school will isolate me even further from my parents. Neither of them has ever read a book to speak of, or understands a word of any foreign language. Apart from my dad’s spell in the army, they have never been out of England. I, on the other hand, learn to conjugate Latin verbs, write in basic French, tackle the rudiments of physics and chemistry, read literature, and study poetry. I may as well have been sent to the planet Neptune for an education, for all the comprehension my parents have of the
work I bring home. This is no fault of theirs, but with only a paltry amount of learning I have managed to become a ridiculous, intellectual snob. The education that they had so wanted for me becomes yet another barrier between us, a Berlin Wall of indecipherable textbooks, theorems, languages, and philosophies, which must hurt and baffle them.

My parents are far from stupid, but in my arrogance and anger I begin to treat them as if they are. Sullen, uncommunicative, and lonely, I have become increasingly restless, trapped in a claustrophobic house in a small town and unable to share my frustrations with anyone. Neither is there any improvement at all in the relationship between my parents, just a grinding war of attrition that wears us all down.

In addition to all of this, my alienation from my old school friends is now total. One evening as I walk home from the station I see Tommy selling the
Chronicle
on the corner. He has a sheaf of newspapers under his arm and catches sight of me trudging up the hill in my uniform, a satchel of books on my back. We had been close for six years, but our friendship cooled in the aftermath of the scholarship results and I haven’t seen him since I started at the grammar school and he went up to the secondary modern. He is wearing blue jeans and shiny black “winkle picker” boots with a Cuban heel. There is nothing remotely fashionable about my claret jacket, my careworn gray flannels, and my hideously sensible shoes. Even a hundred yards away I recognize him, and I can also see a vague sneer playing around his lips. As I get closer he looks me up and down with barely disguised mockery, killing dead any idea of a greeting. I am suddenly angry and ashamed. Our eyes meet for a second and we both look away in confusion. As I walk past him toward the dairy I feel his eyes on my back.

From then on I will avoid the corner of the
Chronicle
office by using
the tunnel to the other side of the station, walking four streets and doubling back. I don’t see Tommy for a long time and we never speak again.

It will be almost ten years later, when I am at college, that Dad asks me if I’ve heard about my friend Tommy Thompson. He still thinks that we are best friends even though I haven’t seen Tommy in years.

“He came in from the Penny Wet on Saturday night, must have had a skinful, got home, put the gas fire on, forgot to light it, and fell asleep. They found the poor lad dead next morning.”

I will take myself down to the river with my thoughts, and from the ferry landing look across to the town of Hebburn, ghostly under a veil of fog on the other side. The lapping of the slow gray waters seems to soothe me as they move inexorably to the sea. When I was younger and listening to the pulpit brogue of the Irish priests I would confuse Hebburn with the heaven that would be our promised reward for remaining good “Catlicks.”

“Is that where ye are, Tommy?” I whisper quietly as if he could hear me, but there is no answer.

The boy who was my best friend has died, and for the first time I am aware that there is a strange and terrible guilt attached to death and its survival. Part of you rejoices that it was not you who was chosen, part of you is ashamed and regretful that you made no effort to rebuild a bridge to someone whom you’ve had the privilege of knowing intimately, and now it can never be built again.

    Music has always been my refuge from sadness. The guitar I inherited from my uncle John now has decent strings, and I’m no longer making the “broken” music that so upset my grandmother; in fact I’m making a lot of progress, but the limitations of my first instrument
are holding me back. There are things that I simply can’t do with this primitive heirloom.

From the money I earned on the milk rounds I have saved up enough for a new acoustic guitar that I’ve had my eye on. It has been hanging from the wall in Braidford’s Music Shop for three months now. I go and see it after school every evening, praying that no one has bought it. It is a beautiful steel-stringed instrument with a blond finish, an ebony fingerboard, and delicate marquetry inlaid around the sound hole. It costs me sixteen guineas, which is a large amount of money, but I’m in love for the very first time.

I first heard the Beatles in my final year at junior school. I remember being in the changing rooms of the swimming baths. Mr. Law had just supervised one of our chaotic and impossibly noisy trips to the baths—by “supervised” I mean that no one had actually been drowned. We were drying ourselves off and, as was our custom, flicking towels at each other’s genitals. It was at this point that we heard the first bars of “Love Me Do” from a transistor radio in the corner. The effect was immediate. There was something in the sparseness of the sound that immediately put a stop to the horseplay. John’s lonely harmonica and Paul’s bass played “two to the bar,” and then the vocal harmony moved in modal fifths up to minor thirds and back again to a solo voice on the refrain. Not that I could articulate any of this at the time, but I recognized something significant, even revolutionary, in the spare economy of the sound, and the interesting thing is, so did everyone else.

By the time “She Loves You” reached number one in the charts I was already at the grammar school, but it wasn’t the confident primitivism of the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus that excited me so much as the G major chord with an added sixth that colored it at the end of the coda. An old dance band cliché, but when the Beatles used it there seemed to be a subtle irony at work. Again, I couldn’t articulate
this then, but I knew instinctively that it was pointing to a level of sophistication that I hadn’t been aware of in pop music until then. The Beatles would succeed in manipulating as many musical forms into their songs, whether classical, folk, rock and roll, the blues, Indian raga, or vaudeville, in a dizzying and seamless pastiche of ideas and cultural references. It was music without frontiers and the ubiquitous soundtrack for a generation that thought it could change the world.

Jim Berryman, in his otherwise excellent biography,
A Sting in the Tale
, claims that I was outside the City Hall when the Fab Four played there in 1963, and that I managed to grab a lock of McCartney’s hair. This is of course fantasy, and would have been out of keeping with the budding intellectual pretensions that I was nurturing at the time. But it is impossible to stress too much the influence that the Beatles had on my early life, and the fact that they came from a similar background to my own was fundamental to the vague plans of escape and glory that I was hatching in my imagination. Lennon and McCartney were both grammar school boys from humble roots in Liverpool, a town not dissimilar from Newcastle. From their initial chart successes they went on to conquer the world with songs that they wrote themselves. This gave an entire generation of musicians the confidence and permission to at least attempt the same feat.