Broken Music: A Memoir (8 page)

“Tommy, we’re never going to get to Gosforth Park at this rate.” I manage to suppress my impatience, and with a small hesitation and some steeling of resolve I say, “Why don’t you take this one for a while and I’ll take yours.”

The effect is instant and for the first time he acknowledges the new bike, then looks at me with some suspicion. “Who bought that for you?”

“Me dad,” I reply, reduced to wary monosyllables.

“Why, it’s not your birthday?”

Now I don’t know what to say.

“Did ye get it for passing the scholarship, did ye?”

I don’t answer the question, but I do manage, “Are you gonna take the bike or not?”

He looks from me to the bike with calculated shrewdness, stroking the end of his chin with theatrical exaggeration.

“I’ll give it a go,” he says, with as much condescension as he can muster, putting himself astride my new bike and looking impossibly cool.

I pick up the ancient embarrassment from the gutter and we set off again, Tommy racing ahead and me soon struggling to catch up and cursing the wretched machine with its ridiculous pedals and its crooked wheels.

“Get off and milk it!” shouts some wag on the corner, which only adds a piquant shame to my exhaustion. I can hardly tell him that the gleaming red vision ahead with the whitewall tires is actually mine and that I’m doing my friend a favor.

It isn’t long before I too am kicking the miserable crock into the gutter and cursing the man who made it.

“I suppose ye want your bike back?” says Tommy.

We eventually make it to Gosforth Park and back before nightfall,
Tommy taking the last stage of the relay on the new bike, riding with no hands and circling me derisively.

We part at the corner of Station Road and West Street. He takes his pathetic excuse for a bike and I take mine.

There is only a slight hesitation as we make our way to our respective homes.

“Er, thanks,” says Tommy.

“That’s okay.” I reply.

Tommy has been my best friend for almost six years, and over the next few we will drift sadly and inexorably apart, but it is during this period that I will find a friendship that will endure for a lifetime.

    There was always music in my family; my mother’s piano playing, my father’s singing, even the submusical ramblings of my grandfather Tom on his mandolin engendered in me the belief that music was a kind of birthright.

Agnes’s youngest brother, my great-uncle Joe, used to play the accordion. He would often say, with his customary and self-deprecating humor, that the definition of a gentleman is “someone who can play the accordion”—theatrical pause—“but doesn’t!”

During the war my uncle Joe was “mentioned favorably in dispatches.” His battalion was trapped on a beach in Crete, waiting to be evacuated by the Royal Navy. German Stukas dive-bombed them mercilessly for days. My uncle Joe played the accordion throughout the ordeal, and according to dispatches, “kept up the morale of the troops in the most trying of circumstances.”

Uncle Joe was no blasé hero, he was as terrified as all the other boys on that beach, but I understand why he played that thing as the bombs fell, and I love him for it. He survived the war and played the organ in workingmen’s clubs well into his retirement.

It is another uncle, although not a blood relation but one of my
dad’s oldest friends, who introduces me to the guitar. He is emigrating to Canada and needs to leave a few things behind and asks if he could store them in our loft. One of the items is a careworn acoustic guitar with five rusty strings. I pounce upon it like a starving man in a cake shop, as if it is mine by divine right. I have missed our piano, and I’ve stopped playing the one at Gran’s, not wanting to upset her with my atonal experiments. My mother hasn’t mentioned the piano since the day of the blue van, but I know she’s sad.

The guitar needs new strings, and I need to figure out how to play this thing. Next to the Gaumont Cinema is Braidford’s Music Shop. Mr. Braidford has thick pebble glasses, unruly and eccentric gray hair, and no roof to his mouth. Listening to and translating his utterances can take an agonizing length of time. He has a unique vocal argot that consists almost entirely of vowels. I have seen gangs of teddy boys in the shop, in their long velvet-trimmed jackets, slimjim ties, and built-up “brothel creeper” shoes, entertaining themselves at his expense, snorting behind their hands as he struggles to help them in their spurious requests.

“Half a pound of sausages and two saveloy dips, Mr. Braidford.”

The old man goes into one of his interminable stammers, as if the words themselves are fighting for breath. It seems to take an eternity but eventually, and with some anger, he is able to blurt out, “Aieees a oozic sho …”

“What’s he say? Can’t you speak proper English, old man?”

I desperately want to be brave enough to tell them, “He says it’s a music shop, you fuckin’ idiots.”

But instead I’m silent and ashamed, ashamed of being young and ashamed of my cowardice. I’m terrified of the teds and they don’t even register that I exist.

“All right then, how about a can of tartan paint? A packet of nail holes?”

But they’re already bored and start to bundle out of the shop laughing and sniveling on the sleeves of their draped jackets, drunk on the delusion of their own wit.

I like old Mr. Braidford, and I like his shop. It’s like Aladdin’s cave to me. The window is full of long-playing-record sleeves and the latest single releases. As you walk in the door there is a mechanical bell and a
Melody Maker
chart of the top twenty. The Springfields, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, Billy Fury. On the wall are acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins, and behind the counter, a couple of trumpets and a tenor saxophone, but the centerpiece of the entire shop is a Burns electric guitar, just like Hank Marvin’s of the Shadows. I can’t imagine anyone in Wallsend being able to afford such a thing, but people come from far and wide to see it, and wonder at its mystery. Not being privy to the science of amplification I imagine that you just plug it into the wall and out come the most wondrous sounds. I imagine myself standing on a riser above a sea of dry ice as a TV audience of young women screams hysterically at me on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
.

In a drawer behind the counter Mr. Braidford keeps sets of guitar strings. For the princely sum of two half crowns I purchase a set of Black Diamonds, and a further five shillings, begged from my mother, gets me
First Steps in Guitar Playing
by Jeffrey Sisley. This book will teach me how to tune the heirloom guitar and introduce me to the rudiments of strumming chords and reading music. I’m in heaven.

I become utterly obsessed with the guitar, and spend every available moment hunched over it, gazing into the sound hole, playing the same sequence of chords over and over again.

I’ve often thought that playing a musical instrument is an obsessive-compulsive disorder or a symptom of being socially inept, but I can’t decide whether playing an instrument makes you socially inept, or you’re a sociopath to begin with and you play an instrument as some sort of consolation. Needless to say, with the guitar, I become
even less communicative at home during this period and can readily escape into the hermetically sealed world of my own making.

Because I’ve won the scholarship to the grammar school I have lost all interest in my junior school. I basically stop working or even pretending to. Mr. Law resents this greatly, as I’m one of only four boys to pass the eleven-plus examination in the whole class. “Arrogant,” he calls me in front of everyone.

It won’t be the first time that I’m accused of being arrogant, but I’m not arrogant at all, just lazy. Anyway, this school is boring and I’ll be gone to another one soon.

    Since my mother’s love affair, sex seems to have sprouted up everywhere like an explosion of wild crocuses after a long winter. The headlines are screaming SCANDAL, PROFUMO, KEELER. Mr. Macmillan’s government seems about to fall. Cinema posters have overnight become lurid sexual tableaux, advertising “naughty romps” and “bawdy tales.” The newspaper shop in the High Street is awash with near-naked women leering invitingly from the covers of magazines and paperback books. At home we have an album of Julie London’s; on the cover she is wearing an extremely low-cut evening dress. Put the edge of your hand over the bottom of the cover and she looks completely naked. This provokes such a stirring in my loins that I have to run outside and climb the lamppost in the back lane, but that only makes it worse. I can stay up there for hours. My nocturnal adventures too are becoming obsessive (now that I know it’s not blood on the morning sheets) and my mother is too embarrassed or feeling too guilty to say anything about the less-than-discreet evidence of my activities. Besides, I’m still sure that this phenomenal discovery is mine alone, not having confided it to any of my friends, who I’m convinced simply wouldn’t know what I was talking about, even Tommy. Confession is now utterly out of the question and I am
privately exultant in my sin. I have a grossly inflated image of myself as one of God’s fallen angels.

At school, besides Tommy (when he’s there), I have befriended the more delinquent elements in my academic group, largely for protection but also out of a genuine fondness for and fascination with the underworld of smoking, swearing, and shoplifting. While I don’t partake directly in any of these activities, my closest friends do, and I will often tag along like some sort of foreign correspondent, neutral and observant. Woolworth’s on the corner of Station Road and the High Street seems to be the mecca for light fingers and deep pockets. The back of the Ritz is where the dexterous art of rolling your own cigarettes is perfected, soon to be superseded by the Rizla rolling machine, accompanied by much cursing and expert spitting. The only activity I will take any active part in is fighting, albeit unwillingly. I have been at least a head and shoulders in height above everyone in my peer group since I began school, and while this doesn’t seem to bother the thugs in my own class, it really upsets the thugs in the older forms, especially the smaller ones. I am forced against my better judgment to fight these idiots after school behind the Ritz. As I have been lifting metal crates onto milk trucks since I was seven, the contest is usually somewhat uneven, and winning is only marginally less painful than losing.

But the Ritz is also the site of happier memories. I saw my first movies there: Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, Doris Day in
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
. My brother and I spent many afternoons there when Mum wanted us out of the house. We never called them movies at the time, we called them “the pictures.” The town had boasted half a dozen picture halls at one time, but by the end of the fifties this had been reduced to two, the Gaumont and the Ritz. Philip and I went to the Ritz to see
The Guns of Navarone
, with Gregory Peck and David Niven. We even got in to see
The Carpetbaggers
by asking an
adult in the queue to masquerade as a guardian so we could witness the forbidden decadence of a restricted film. On Saturday mornings the Ritz hosted what it called the “ABC Minors,” showing children’s cartoons and serials. This was a great treat, but in my usual overwrought and literal thinking I became convinced that my brother and I were there under false pretenses, imagining that you had to be the son of a miner to gain admission. We kept up the pretense, going unnoticed for a couple of weeks until my brother, who was given to violent and absurd arguments, got us both banned for life for a fracas during an episode of
The Cisco Kid
. The most striking memory of all of these films was the shock of Technicolor in the dark theater, which made the gray streets waiting outside in their drab monochrome even grimmer than they actually were. I began to believe that the world beyond the iron grays of the Tyne and the colorless battleship sky above it existed in a completely different universe of color, chromium and canary yellow, magenta and cobalt blue, which we would only ever see daubed onto these celluloid fairy tales that would so captivate and enthrall us on long wet afternoons.

I think I learn as much about the world from the pictures as I do at school, although I’m considered to be bright by most of my teachers, even by Mr. Law, who doesn’t particularly like me. So I’m hived off with the other “bright sparks” to a special enclave on the right of the classroom, away from my friends and populated mainly by the girls. I sit next to Brian Bunting, a sweet, intelligent boy who “has a problem with his glands.” Brian is extremely large and the butt of much sadistic humor from the thugs on the left. Because of my embarrassing height, I’m something of a freak myself, and have a degree of empathy and intellectual understanding with Brian that I don’t share with the rest of the class.

One thing I do enjoy at school is singing. We learn hymns and carols and folk songs, which we chant in unison accompanied by an
upright piano. I do have a voice, but when Mr. Law tests us in solo flight, I adopt the lumpen tones of my delinquent friends rather than reveal the voice that would lose me friends and influence. Mr. Law will often look up puzzled when he hears a clear and resonant soprano from somewhere in the back, but he never finds out who it is.

Brian and I and two other boys, as well as about nine of the girls, have won places at the grammar school. As a result there is an increasing sense of alienation from my erstwhile compadres, such as Tommy Thompson, who are doomed to the academic “poorhouse” of the secondary modern, where the thresholds for achievement and opportunity are depressingly low. They know this; the teachers know this; and so do we, the chosen ones. We shall wear uniforms that will set us apart, we shall learn Latin and calculus so that we think differently, we will be given expectations so that we will behave differently, and we will embrace this separation as our right. The scars of this institutionalized cruelty remain to this day, on both sides of the division.

By the time I begin my first term at the new school, Khrushchev and Kennedy will be facing off in the North Atlantic over some missile bases in Cuba and the short-lived détente at 84 Station will have come to an end. The world seems to be bracing itself for a descent into chaos and horror, while life in the house above the dairy will degenerate into a series of squalid, ugly conflicts.