Owning Up: The Trilogy (86 page)

In 1960 the trad boom was at its height, and a riot occurred at Beaulieu. It wasn’t a vicious riot. It was stupid. The traddies in rave gear booing the Dankworth Band. A young man climbing up the outside of the palace in the floodlights waving a bowler hat from the battlements. Cheers and scuffles. Then, when the television transmission was going on and Acker playing, the crowd surged forward and began to climb the scaffolding supporting the arclights. The few police and the official stewards struggled with them, and the BBC went off the air.

Gerald Lascelles shouted at a young man to climb down.

‘Say please,” said the young man.

‘Please,’ said Gerald.

‘No,’ said the young man.

Somewhere in the audience was a boy who’d killed a taxi-driver and come to Beaulieu on the money. The papers, of course, had a field day.

The next year there wasn’t a riot. Inside the grounds there were lots of police with dogs but there was no need for them. Modern jazz and traditional took place at different sessions. Anita O’Day, in a lace dress so tight she had difficulty climbing up the steps to the roundabout, sang ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ while the dancers silhouetted against the floodlit wall jumped for joy in the warm night. It was very beautiful.

The trouble was that there were too many people for the village to absorb, not enough lavatories, too few litter bins, Local feeling rose high, and at midnight Edward Montagu told the Press that this was the last festival he would hold at Beaulieu. Trad jazz had outgrown its most typical and happiest occasion.

16

What Has Happened to the Chaps?

During my first year and a half at Tregunter Road I was sexually a freewheeler. One night in a club I watched a coloured girl doing a snake-charming act. When she’d finished and had dressed, and was on her way out of the place, I left the girl I’d brought with me, rushed up to her and kissed her on the mouth. I persuaded her to come over to the bar, bought her a drink and she gave me her telephone number. The girl I’d left so abruptly didn’t say anything but a few days later, following another act of aggressive and quite unnecessary sexual insult on my part, we broke up.

I didn’t do anything about the snake charmer for some time, but one evening I found her name, Cerise Johnson, and her telephone number in my wallet. I rang her up and asked her over. We went out to dinner, back to Tregunter Road, and eventually to bed. I liked her very much – she had an extraordinary line in hot chat – but the next day we went away on tour.

A week or two later it was Christmas and I felt I’d had the whole Christmas thing, so on the way home from a family supper at my sister’s flat I rang Cerise up again, picked her up from the Bayswater Hotel she had a room in, and took her home in a taxi. This time she stayed two days. We saw each other regularly after that and gradually slipped into an affair.

The first intimation of trouble happened the first time I took her to Cook’s Ferry Inn. She had a row with a band – I didn’t hear it actually happen – and threw her shoe in the canal. I put this down to having drunk too many whiskies, bought a new pair of shoes and made Cerise apologise. But it was only the beginning. Cerise was often violent and for the next two years I was seldom without scratches on my face. Before one lot had healed properly there was a new display.

At the beginning of our relationship I was frequently in the wrong. I tried to treat her in the casual way I’d treated my other girl friends and she wouldn’t have it, but later on her attacks were without any basis in reality. It was usually somebody else she went for – a girl she imagined had tried to date me, someone she claimed had insulted her on the grounds of colour. She was extremely strong, and I felt it necessary to intervene, thereby adding fuel to her obsessive suspicions. After the initial outbreak she could usually be persuaded to leave, but once home she’d work herself up into a rage again. This time it was me she went for. She fought like a tiger and was far stronger than I am. Although we usually finished with Cerise riding me, bleeding and bruised, in bed, there was nothing much in it for anybody else. The jazz world is prejudiced to a fault in favour of the coloured race, but they found Cerise a bit much. She’d soon had rows with most of my men friends – girls were of course out of the question – and as Simon refused for a time to allow her in the flat (she’d threatened him with a broken milk bottle and tried to set some spades on us in the middle of Notting Vale during the riots) we found ourselves living more or less in isolation in a flat she’d taken in West Kensington. We went to the theatre and to night clubs, we saw her friends, mostly coloured cabaret artistes, but apart from the band and Wally, the whole of my social life went by the board.

Why didn’t I leave her? Fear mostly, but also I felt a great affection for her. She could be wounded as well as wound. Although even in the flat, and with no outside stimuli to provoke her, she could suddenly appear possessed and, screaming hysterical nonsense, attack me with such violence that on several occasions I was frightened for my life, ninety per cent of the time she was gentle, loving, erotic and protective. To leave the flat, however, was to court almost certain disaster.

One night we went to a party at the Fawkes’ in Swiss Cottage: a big house, lots to eat and drink; Jimmy Rushing was the guest of honour. Mick was there. So was Pam. Although Wally had seen Cerise in action several times, he knew how much I admired and liked Jimmy and decided to risk it. Within half an hour it had started. I’d gone to the lavatory and when I came back I found Cerise screaming at the foot of the stairs. She claimed that the French
au pair
girl – a plain girl who had by this time fled prudently up to her room – had been making eyes at me.

‘Anaemic white shit!’ Cerise was yelling. Wally was blocking the staircase. Sandy Fawkes and several other guests were trying to persuade her she’d been mistaken. This she managed to twist so as to accuse them of colour prejudice. What made this especially absurd in retrospect was that one of the people so accused was Max Jones, the jazz critic, who if he believed in God, which he doesn’t, would be convinced He was black.

After some minutes, still screaming with rage, she threw open the door of the sitting-room and rushed full-tilt into the rock-like figure of Jimmy Rushing who was sitting playing the piano. He immediately played the opening phrase of ‘Shoo fly don’t bother me’. She called him a white man’s nigger. He took no notice at all.

There was one man at the party who had never met Cerise before, and seeing her surrounded by a large group of Caucasians, he waded in on her side. This was all she needed. Her fantasy had a believer. She went outside into the front garden and began to collect a pile of stones and rocks which she intended to throw at the windows. Pam Mulligan went out after her to try and talk her out of it. I’d had enough and decided to opt out. She’d promised not to make a scene. I’d told Sandy and Wally I’d guarantee this time it would be all right. I felt absolutely miserable. I poured myself out a tumbler of gin and drank it down neat in one swallow. Then I went over to Jimmy Rushing at the piano and asked him to play a blues. He did and I began to sing with the tears streaming down my face. As the gin hit me I slid, still singing, towards the floor and passed out. Mick Mulligan picked me up, according to Wally, as tenderly as if I’d been a sick child, carried me through into the kitchen and put me on the couch. He was arranging a blanket over me when Pam came in from the garden.

‘I’ve managed to calm her down,’ she said, ‘she wants to take George home.’

The next moment personified, according to Wally again, the whole difference between Mick’s attitude to men and women. After all the tender care he’d displayed towards me, he turned to Pam and said: ‘Why don’t you keep your fucking hooter out of it?’

But Pam had succeeded in calming Cerise, who came back into the house, picked me up off the sofa4 threw me over her shoulder like a sack, and marched out.

The strange thing about Cerise was that she took it for granted that I fucked in the provinces. She didn’t seem to care either. Once I caught crabs – she spotted one when she was going down – but she didn’t seem a bit put out. I nervously insisted that you could catch them off a lavatory seat or from dirty sheets. She just smiled and said I shouldn’t go with such dirty girls. I said I hoped she hadn’t caught them from me.

‘Crabs don’t bite me never. Me blood too rich,’ she explained. Furthermore, she wouldn’t let me buy any ointment. She insisted on searching them out herself.

‘I likes to crack ’em between me nails,’ she told me.

It was only in London she expected complete fidelity. She once did a week’s cabaret in Manchester and told me she’d be back on the Monday. On the Sunday night I went out with my sister Andree. She drove me back and said she’d come in for a drink. The door to Simon’s basement flat is round the side of the house in a dark dustbin-haunted alley down some steep steps. As Andrée and I were walking down this passage laughing and chatting, and I was feeling for my key, Cerise spoke from the shadows.

‘Who’s that white pussy you got there?’ I told her it was Andrée whom she knew well. ‘That’s OK then,’ she said. ‘You in luck it weren’t no white pussy you tipping home with,’ and she replaced the heavy iron dustbin lid she’d been holding at the ready.

Simon didn’t bar Cerise from the flat for long and we sometimes stayed at her place, sometimes mine. One afternoon Cerise was cleaning the flat as I was expected back that evening. Simon was putting on his BOAC uniform to go to London airport. The bell rang. It was Victoria back from Rome with nowhere to stay. She asked Simon if she could stay there.

Simon told me later that he drove his scooter out to the airport trembling with nerves. He was convinced Cerise would murder Victoria. She didn’t though. When I came in after the job she told me coldly that my wife was asleep on the divan in the sitting-room. I went in to say hello, and Victoria kissed me affectionately. Cerise and I went to bed.

‘She must go in the morning,’ she said not unreasonably, ‘I’m your woman. How she think she tip in here after three year and give you tongue sandwich?’

Next morning I told Victoria she’d have to find somewhere else. Cerise was quite calm if unfriendly until she’d gone. Then she let fly.

I didn’t contradict her. I was so relieved that nothing terrible had happened. Victoria found a modelling job and a basement flat in Chelsea. Cerise and I lived together much as before for another five months.

Then suddenly she told me she’d decided to go and work on the Continent. She’d been offered a job in Paris, fares paid, and decided to take it. I went to the airport to see her off. I stood on the roof of the new Queen’s Building and watched her walk – she walked beautifully – towards the plane. I couldn’t believe she was going. After two years I was sad, but my strongest feeling was relief.

I went over to spend a week with her in Paris shortly afterwards. I’d promised. It was all right, but we both knew it was over.

I came back to London and within the month Victoria and I said, well, it might work this time.

It didn’t work at all. Within a month of being together again we both knew it. There were concrete reasons of course, things either of us could point to as to why it didn’t work, but the real reason was that we didn’t add up. We weren’t a couple.

We moved first to a basement flat in Swan Walk. Here we got on very badly. Then, both of us imagining that if we had something solid there was a chance to build up a relationship again, we bought a house on Hampstead Heath. It didn’t do any good either, but as it was bigger, we got on better. There were even days when it all looked possible. We’d go to the pictures and come back arm in arm, we’d have a nice dinner together at Wheelers, but nothing came of it. We started to lead our own lives. It wasn’t hell or anything like it. More a cushioned limbo.

Appleby had left the band to join Donegan and was replaced, after a week or two, by a plump funny manic-depressive from Bristol called Fat John Cox. He was a dandy with little feet for whom nothing ever went right. He was married to a beautiful German wife he’d met in Cologne. He called her ‘Missus’. He called the conductor ‘Leader’. He moaned and complained about everything in his strong Bristol accent. He looked, like a lot of fat men, rather lesbian. He was interested in sadomasochistic fetishism and eating. He sometimes tried to go on a diet, would hold out for a day, and then go to a pie stall and eat six pies.

We ran through an exceptional number of bass players in 1960–61. The most memorable was called Cliff – small, bespectacled, with a fine crop of acne. We nicknamed him ‘Weasel’. He was much younger than us and got everything wrong. He was Ian’s particular
bête noire
on two counts. The first day he joined the band, he observed in his whiny transpontine voice that it was surprising there should be three public school boys in the band. Mick – Merchant Taylors’, me – Stowe, himself – Alleyn’s. The Bird’s face was a real joy at that moment. On the other hand he offended Ian’s feeling for the good life by getting everything wrong. Favourite fish – cod; in a restaurant he’d order a drambuie with his soup.

Ian and I went fishing whenever we had a chance. I got better at it, much to Frank Parr’s annoyance. He used to enjoy it when I came back in the evening with nothing to show for it. ‘Caught anything?’ he’d ask with an infuriating smile on his face. The first time I was able to say yes and produce a pound grayling was a sweet moment. I began to welcome Scottish tours.

Mick and Frank played golf together. Mick usually won and Frank would lose his temper and attack the putting green. This very much offended Mick’s sense of propriety as did Frank’s habit of playing stripped to the waist on fine days so as to expose himself to ‘the currant bun’ or ‘big fellow’ as he called the sun. Eventually, despite his pleasure both at winning from Frank and making him lose his temper into the bargain, Mick wouldn’t play with him any more.

We did a tour of Ireland in 1961. I neglected to do any Flook strip and got back to find an angry Wally biting his nails and five days backlog. This was the only time this happened.