Broken Music: A Memoir (17 page)

“Don, do you know what they call somebody who hangs out with musicians?”

“No, boss.”

“A drummer! And while we are on the subject, ‘Tiger Rag’ is not a race. I thought the club was on fire last night, the way you were playing it.”

While our fearless leader is giving us our nightly pep talk, he is leaning casually against the bingo machine and absently playing with the delicate plastic membrane at the end of the tube, the one that holds the balls in place.

“Sting, dear boy…” He’s been calling me that for weeks now. I must have worn the damned sweater but once, and yes it did make me look like a wasp, with its black-and-yellow hoops, but this stupid name is beginning to stick. “Would you mind terribly…?”

Snap!

There’s a sound like a starting pistol in the tiny room.

“Oh shit!”

The tiny and crucial piece of plastic has snapped in his hand; all of us are in shock. This is not just vandalism; we are in a workingmen’s club and we know this to be nothing less than mortal, bloody sacrilege. Gordon’s expression has lost all of its irony. His mouth hangs open in horror, with the doomed and piteous look of the condemned.

Just at this point the club chairman, an officious sneer of a man that Gordon refers to as the Syrup (so black is his hair, and in so much profusion for a man of his age, that it can only be a wig), bustles into the dressing room with two of his henchmen. They have come to wheel the precious bingo machine out onto the stage, handling it as if it were the Ark of the Covenant.

Gordon is like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming truck, but before he can explain the awful tragedy that has occurred, the club chairman, hairpiece ever-so-slightly askew, is already launching into him.

“Now, you lads had better be playing some tunes from the hit parade tonight, so the lassies can dance, none of that jazz rubbish you played last time you were here.”

Gordon bravely tries to set things to right, “But …but …”

It is too late. The Perspex box is now being wheeled into its place in the center of the stage. The pompous chairman gives us one final glower before he strides out like a tragic actor.

The noisy club is immediately hushed as the chairman braces himself in front of the mike.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you will be entertained tonight, if I can call it that, by the Phoenix Jazzmen. They’re not exactly my cup of tea, but some of you may like them.”

Gordon whispers to Ronnie to go out and start the van in the car park while we watch aghast as the disaster unfolds before us.

“And now, without further ado, the high spot of the evening, for a cash prize of one hundred pounds …”

The club secretary is seated behind the machine. He has the switch between his fingertips as the audience sit, poised and expectant with their bingo cards and ballpoint pens. The atmosphere is charged with high drama.

“IT’S EYES DOWN FOR A FULL HOUSE, MR. SECRETARY. PLEASE, THE SWITCH.”

The switch is pulled, the fan begins to whir, and then all hell breaks loose. The horrified audience are bombarded by a relentless hail of luminous Ping-Pong balls, landing in glasses of beer, lodging themselves in wigs and cleavages, and bouncing disastrously under the feet of tumbling tray-laden waitresses.

The Phoenix Jazzmen are frozen at the open door between the stage and the dressing room, and there is the unmistakable look of guilt and shame upon all of our faces. The club chairman, with a face like death, slowly raises an accusatory finger at the doorway and now we hear a primal and gut-wrenching howl of outrage from the floor that wouldn’t be out of place at a public hanging. We run for our lives.

    My final year at college has settled into a routine of lectures, essays, and working weekends with the Phoenix. I have one more
teaching practice before I qualify. They send me to a little village in the Lake District called Threlkeld, lying on the northern slopes of Blencathra, the forbidding and broody mountain fell known locally as Saddleback.

Megan’s teaching practice is in Wallsend, of all places, and we have to accept that we won’t be seeing much of each other for about five or six weeks.

Threlkeld sits in a wide glaciated valley between Keswick in the west and Penruddock to the east. Behind it and to the north are the dramatic fastnesses of Blencathra and Skiddaw, and a mile across the valley, the gentler slopes of Clough Head. The schoolhouse is a dry stone structure of local granite and slate and comprises only two classrooms and a gray schoolyard beneath the shadow of the mountain. The school has been there for most of the century and can’t have changed perceptibly in all of that time.

There are two members of staff. The headmaster, Mr. Sturridge, a craggy, kindly man in his sixties looking forward to retirement next year, and Mrs. Anders, a cantankerous though not too unfriendly spinster displaced recently from Keswick by the “droves of summer tourists” who descend on the town like locusts in their hiking boots and anoraks. She prefers Threlkeld, a backwater by comparison, nestling discreetly and quietly on the lower slopes of the mountain. Mr. Sturridge has been teaching here since the war, and in the muted gray tones of his clothes and hair, and the sculpted angles of his face, he seems to be cut from the same rock as the dry stones of the school wall. The children seem well adjusted and happy. It’s easy to imagine them remaining in the valley always, leading uncomplicated country lives watching the busy traffic on the main road to Keswick with a calm indifference and a shrug of the shoulders. I quickly fall in love with this place, and take to “fell
walking” every night after school, turning from the climb every few steps to look back at the distant stillness of the valley under the sweeping clouds.

At the weekends I return to Newcastle, spend Friday night with Megan, and play Saturday with the Phoenix in some social club for a tenner. Sunday lunchtimes I’ll play with the Big Band at the University Theatre and then on Sunday afternoon drive back across the Pennines to my digs in Cumberland. The road over the hills is usually empty on Sunday evening and after it has ascended steeply to its summit at Ambleside there is a good fifteen-mile stretch of meandering downhill curves where the gradient is gentle enough to turn off the engine and coast with the handbrake and the roof open all the way to Penrith. I’ve saved enough money to buy a new car, and it feels like I’m sailing in a land yacht. I’m so happy with the wind in my face and the sun’s rays spreading below the cloud base to the west and the car running silently all the way down to the waiting valley.

The teaching practice is a success, largely because Mr. Sturridge seems to like me, so much so as to offer me a permanent job there in the autumn term. He tells me that the kids like me too. I’m very flattered and I thank him for the compliment, but ask for some time to consider the offer.

That evening I climb up to the top of Clough Head. On the crest of the high ridge I turn back and I can see my life spread out like the valley below me: growing old like Mr. Sturridge, a village teacher, gray-headed and stooped, with worn leather patches on the elbows of my jacket, going home each night to a stone cottage on the hillside with an older Megan standing in the garden, roses in a trellis around the front door, a wood fire in the hearth, my books and my music, idealized, peaceful, devoid of complexity or worry or the vanity
of ambition. Whatever is comforting about this image of a possible future, however different it is from the harsh industrial landscape of my childhood, it holds me for no more than a moment and then it is gone. I know the answer I shall give the headmaster, and as the evening draws in I make my way at a brisker pace down the mountain to my digs in the village.

It’s a Friday evening; I’ve driven back from the Lake District having completed my teaching practice like everyone else in our year, and there will be a small celebration at our friend Tim Archer’s flat.
Tim is one of the stars of Megan’s drama course. He has a streak of charismatic madness, which may or may not be a studied pose, is balding prematurely in an interesting, intellectual sort of way, and displays a permanent manic energy, like a demented marionette, but I suspect it is Tim who is pulling the strings. He is wearing a homemade badge with the name M. PROUST stenciled on the front. Megan and I are both very fond of him, and his pretensions are invariably self-deprecating, if not always amusing. Just about everybody in my year is there, the boys nursing cans of lager, the girls sipping cheap wine, Bob Marley singing “No Women, No Cry.”

Meg is chatting animatedly with Derek, an old friend of Gerry’s from Leeds. He’s ruggedly handsome, with a straggly geography-teacher-cum-mountain-climber’s beard and piercing blue eyes. I am talking with two girls from the English course. In such social circumstances, Meg and I feel that we don’t have to be hanging on to each other for dear life; we try as far as possible to exude an air of sophisticated ease with each other, to be able to flirt without provoking comment or jealousy. I will admit that Meg is far better at this than I am, but I’m learning.

We are all comparing notes about the tribulations of what looks like becoming our chosen profession. I’m still wistfully hoping that something will turn up to prevent me having to teach, as I cast what I think is a subtle albeit proprietary glance toward Derek and my girlfriend.

Everyone gets a bit drunk and we dance a little, talking until the early hours and aware that after one more term our carefree student days will be over. I’m both relieved and in dread of the prospect of teaching full time.

Megan too has had a very successful teaching practice in Wallsend, and later that night she tells me that she was surprised at just what a tough place my old hometown is. I tell her about my job
offer and my idealized vision of the future, and she smiles in response, kissing the side of my face, but says nothing.

    On most Saturday evenings at around six o’ clock I meet up with the other members of the Phoenix Jazzmen in the bar of the Douglas Hotel near the Central Station. We normally have a drink together and then take a couple of cars to whichever club we are playing at in the area. The drives are rarely more than an hour and I often share my car with Ronnie and Don. This is usually hilarious in that they each compete with the other about who can tell the most outrageous stories from the old days. Bands they played in, women they’d known, and ridiculous venues at which they’d performed.

“We once played a gig at a nudist colony in Cleethorpes, and they wouldn’t let us wear our band uniforms, I mean I was all right being behind me drums, but poor Ronnie here with only a piccolo to protect his manhood…. Well, there were this old bird in t’ front row with an enormous pair of…” etc. etc. etc.

Whether any of these stories was true or not was beside the point, they were remembering what was for them a golden age when they were young and wild, and I wouldn’t have questioned the veracity of their stories for all the world. We would laugh all the way to Teeside some nights and often all the way back.

This night Ronnie and I are already in the Douglas bar playing a quick round of dominoes when Gordon, our fearless leader, walks in with a crestfallen expression on his normally impudent face.

“I’ve just called the agent, which is lucky because the club’s double-booked us. Bastards! Anyway, we’ve saved ourselves a drive to Stockton. Where are the others?”

Gordon is gutted, for while we don’t make very much for our efforts on a Saturday night, usually about a fiver each, it definitely keeps the wolf from the door.

“Can’t the agent get us another gig?” I ask.

“Nah, it’s too fuckin’ late.”

We resign ourselves to the luxury of a Saturday night off and wait for the others.

When it looks as if my elders and betters are going to make a night of it in the bar, I make my excuses and head off home to surprise Megan, although by the end of the evening I’ll wish that I had stayed.

    “What do you mean you didn’t know?” says Gerry, incredulous. “I knew about Meg and Derek weeks ago, and I was in Bristol.”

We are sitting in the Cradle Well bar in Jesmond, it is almost two weeks later, and there are two half-finished pints on the table between us. Gerry has quit his nightclub job in Bristol and is looking for work playing music in Newcastle. And despite the gloomy cloud that Megan has cast over my life I’m glad to see him, although he’s hardly a ray of sunshine.

I suppose my old friend is trying in his own way to be helpful in pointing out my near total blindness with regard to Megan, whom I had begun to think of over our almost two years together as my soul mate and my happily-ever-after. The fact is he’s making me feel a lot worse, if that’s possible. I haven’t eaten in eight days, I’ve lost nearly a stone in weight, and I haven’t shaved, which is pathetic because I’m beginning to look like that bastard Derek.

“Anyway,” says Gerry, “she was my girlfriend. You stole her off me.”