Romany and Tom (17 page)

‘You must be joking. They’re all potty.’

One of the staff passed us, carrying a bag of linen. ‘Feeling better this afternoon, Tommy?’ she called out.

My dad flashed a compliant smile.

‘All at sixes and sevens this morning, weren’t we?’ she said loudly. ‘But we’re all here for you, that’s all that matters.’

I smiled at her too. She winked at me. I didn’t ask what had happened. She carried on towards the lift.

We sat in silence for a moment. I wished I knew the best course of action. I wished there was a sign. One minute everything was normal – by which I meant the same as a recognisable and non-frightening past – the next, everything was strange and alarming. Then words came out of my mouth, as if from nowhere: ‘Mum’s doing much better. Feeling stronger. She’s been thinking of getting you back to the flat with her.’

He immediately took my hand. His palm felt cold. I was aware of his bony fingers as they squeezed mine, and the power I seemed to be wielding.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Chapter 16

In May 1971 my dad’s father – my grandpa – died in hospital following a car crash. He was seventy-one. He held the steering wheel with the same white matchwood hands. I was in the car when we crashed, together with my grandma. My recollection of it is as vivid now as when I described it in
Patient
. We were on our way to the swimming pool in Dumbarton in my grandpa’s bottle-green Mini. My grandpa was driving. My grandma was in the back. I was in the front passenger seat, my feet up on the dashboard, my trunks rolled up in a towel held across my chest. We approached the traffic lights at the big crossroads. The lights were red but my grandpa just seemed to accelerate rather than brake. Behind me I heard my grandma shout, ‘Will!’ When I came round, there was a crowd around the car. A tiny trickle of blood was on my ear. I touched it with my fingers. Hundreds of small crystals of glass like transparent cane sugar were all over my lap. The car wasn’t in the middle of the junction – as it would have been if we had continued in a straight line – but pushed over as though we’d turned left but sideways. There was a double-decker bus stopped too. My grandpa wasn’t speaking. He was still in his seat but he looked floppy and awkward, like a discarded puppet. The bus had hit his side of the car on the junction, side on, and pushed us some distance. The steering wheel was very near me, touching my leg; it seemed odd to have the steering wheel that close to me, as though it had been positioned in the middle of the dashboard for use by either the driver or the passenger. My grandma was lying on her side on the back seat. She was saying something to me. Her shoulder seemed tucked behind her back. An egg yolk was dripping off the seat and there were peas on the floor. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. It felt like a minute but it must have been a while for the ambulance to have already got there. A woman I’d never seen before helped me out with an ambulance man. I was barely marked. My grandma had dislocated her shoulder. We had to wait while they cut my grandpa out. The sparks cascaded into the grey afternoon light. In the ambulance, he opened his eyes for a second and said everything would be all right, but then he closed them again. He was very pale. The liver spots on his balding head stood out. His fine wispy white hair was messed up like he had been sleeping on it. He didn’t have his glasses on any more which made him look less like him. I didn’t see him again after that.

I remember the phone call several days later when I was back home in London and the hospital said my grandpa had died. They said the cause of death was pneumonia and a broken ribcage. I wasn’t sure what a ribcage looked like; I wondered if it was like a bird-cage. Every Sunday morning my dad used to shut himself in my mum’s study just before 11.30 a.m. and a couple of minutes later my grandma called on the dot of the half-hour for the week’s news. Their chats usually only lasted about five or ten minutes and started with my grandma saying – as my dad often impersonated, purring his ‘r’s in a comic Glaswegian accent – ‘Anything fresh to report from south of the border, Tom?’ but I remember after my grandpa died there were a couple of weekends when my dad was in there talking for a long time.

I think my dad felt guilty. I’d been only eight, alone on holiday with my grandparents when the accident happened, four hundred miles away, while he was in London still licking his wounds in the weeks after the Dorchester. Even while my grandpa was in Intensive Care I heard my dad criticising his driving one night and referring to him as a ‘stupid old man’. I worried about why he didn’t like him.

We had been up to stay with them in their retirement bungalow in Milngavie on the outskirts of Glasgow the previous year. They had only recently moved in. It was on a long curving residential drive high up overlooking the small town, silent except for the wind that got in behind the brick and whistled long hollow sighs. It felt very remote even though there were houses all around. Concrete steps led up to a yellow front door that swelled in the rain and was only ever used for visitors. The sitting room had a bay window that looked north. On a clear day, with my grandpa’s binoculars, I could stand on a chair and see across the town and beyond Craigmaddie Reservoir as far as the ruined Mugdock Castle. It was the first thing I wanted to see when I arrived.

‘Who lives there, Grandpa?’

‘No one, it’s a ruin. Just ghosts.’

When he said the words ‘ruin’ and ‘ghosts’ he sounded like Private Fraser in
Dad’s Army
and it made me shiver and I always asked him to say it again.

The furniture seemed plain and strange. A dark oak sideboard with carved mouldings stood behind the door laid out with a spider plant in a jade-green fruit bowl, a small set of leather-bound books and a Chinese teapot. Next to it stood a folding cake stand; I had to ask what it was. I couldn’t imagine my grandma serving cake on a cake stand, but my dad told me they used to run a little guest house after my grandpa had retired. I wanted to ask what a guest house was, and maybe even what ‘retired’ meant, but I thought that was one too many questions.

On the wall above was a small oval glass mirror and two prints of Buenos Aires brought back by my grandma’s brother-in-law, Harry, who was a merchant seaman. There was an oak dining table in the window that never seemed to be used. (I got the feeling my grandma wanted to lay it with nice crockery when we stayed, but my dad insisted we made less of a fuss, so instead we all had to cluster round the tiny drop-leaf Formica table in the kitchen, while my grandma made a simple tea of potato scones.) A velour three-piece suite with tan vinyl armrests was grouped around a gas fire and a black-and-white TV. Behind one of the chairs was a glass display cabinet with eight sets of china. I used to try and count the teacups without opening the doors. ‘Do you drink a lot of tea then, Grandma?’ I once asked.

I sat there with my dad and watch him stiffen. It was unlike him; he was usually loose and relaxed. He seemed uncomfortable, getting up from time to time and pacing around. Once I found him shivering on the back step smoking, the dank sky shrouding the huddled rows of back gardens and pebble-dashed garages. While I saw fascinating curiosities, he just saw a suffocating asceticism.

His father was born in the mill town of Strathaven in Lanarkshire south of Glasgow in 1899. Some typewritten references left among my grandma’s belongings show he got an apprenticeship at fourteen as an engineer and fitter at the vast Dalzeel Steel and Iron Works in Motherwell. He travelled to New York in 1923 on a steam ship on a work visa to make his fortune, but came back within a year and married my grandma, then Jean Cairns, a baker’s clerk from Partick, in February 1925. She was born Jane, but everyone called her Jean. He was born William, but everyone called him Billy. On their wedding day he was twenty-five, she was twenty-three, and nine months later, almost to the day, my dad was born. After years of factory life where he rose to become a foreman, my grandpa was forced to take early retirement through intermittent ill-health but they moved out of the city and he helped Jean set up a seven-roomed guest house in the market town of Crieff – fifty miles north of Glasgow. They had most of the year to themselves but each summer they rented out the rooms, taking on a girl to help with the serving and cleaning. In the back garden was a vast rock that rose out of the lawn. It gave the house its name – Rockearn – and my grandma told me in the old days an auctioneer used to climb on to it on market day and the rock was surrounded by a sea of farmers and animals. They had looked forward to their retirement in Milngavie but within a couple of years of moving in there was the car crash and everything changed. Jean was widowed at sixty-nine.

One night when I was little older, maybe fourteen, I was standing with my dad leaning on the rail at the Ship Inn as a big black barge crossed slowly in front of us sending ripples of water slapping against the brick pier below, and he said out of nowhere, ‘We could see the canal from Banner Road.’

‘What canal?’

‘It’s not there now. I was four when we moved. Knightswood. My mother and father were so proud. It was only a little two-up, two-down, but it was
Knightswood
.’

On the way back in the car he told me his father had worked all hours to improve his trade and became a machinist – a tool-maker – so they could move again, and at sixteen they transferred to another house in Knightswood, this time with a garden.

‘I was at school,’ he said. ‘I wore a Mackenzie kilt! I can remember cycling home and finding Mother in the new house – it was marvellous.’

Knightswood was one of the major garden suburb developments of the twenties and thirties in Glasgow after the city’s slum clearance schemes. Working-class families who were moved into the smart new-built semi-detached houses and cottage flats were hand-picked, and expected to be principled and hard-working. Everyone paid their rents on time, and there was little or no crime. Probity and godliness were bywords in many of the households but it could lead to a biting austerity in the battle for respectability. ‘My parents scrimped every penny,’ my dad said to me, ‘but it never brought them a moment’s joy.’ Rectitude must have mixed powerfully with the politics of the factory floor. His father came home at night only to lecture on how avarice and capitalism were nothing short of punishable sins. ‘He was a textbook
Christian
Socialist,’ my dad added scathingly. ‘And a
Freemason
– that took the biscuit.’

His mother, meanwhile, dreamed of a university place for her teenage son or a job in the Corporation. School results were the focus of great attention, but, as my dad said, ‘I just wanted to play the piano.’ His precociousness was apparent even as a schoolboy. His old schoolfriend, Eric Monteith Hamilton – who went on to become a jazz archivist and owner of one of Glasgow’s most famous hi-fi shops – sent me an email in 2009, at the age of eighty-seven, about their growing up in Knightswood. He had tracked me down and wanted me to know, before he died, what an influence my dad had had on him – a life-changing influence:

He was very popular, and did things most of us were scared to do. And I must tell you, that while most of us were very clean with nice clothes, Tommy was always immaculate, with nice-cut clothes and smart ties; he always looked good. This was unusual at this time. As you know, he was a good-looking boy, and attractive to the girls. We were not so lucky, as we did not have his assured ways.

When we walked up from school he would beat out rhythms to me. ‘Is this a quickstep, a slow or fast foxtrot, or modern waltz?’ I had to answer, and I tried and tried, until I got it.

When we reached his home we would get a drink from his mum, then [we’d go] up to the piano, for a concert. I lived in Cedric Road, which was only about three minutes away.

Then I started record collecting in 1940, I heard Glenn Miller, and was struck, but Tommy was moving on. He wanted to buy a 12" disc of Bunny Berigan’s ‘I Can’t Get Started’, so he sold his old records to me. We were both so keen.

I was very lucky to meet Tommy, and while he did not know it, he shaped my life in music.

To their credit, my dad’s parents gave over an entire room on the first floor at the front of their Knightswood house on Arrowsmith Avenue for his ambitions. He studied hard – classical music initially – and at weekends he was allowed to take the bus into the city to Buchanan Street to Paterson, Sons & Co. where they sold all the leading pianos and player-pianos and organs, and he was allowed to play on all the top brands ‘to keep them warm’.

After he finished school in 1941 at the age of sixteen he got a gig playing piano for the Jack Chapman band (‘I couldn’t really play at all at that stage’) at the Albert Dance Hall in Bath Street. He’d volunteered for the RAF but was given a deferral because of his age. There were places in several bands up for grabs; many of the best players had gone to war. The opportunity was unique and the money was incredible for a teenager – up to ten pounds per week – while most men in Knightswood were taking home three, factory managers maybe five. His parents were very proud – Jack Chapman was regarded in local circles as ‘such a nice man’ – and they were impressed by an advertisement in the local paper that ran:
The Albert Dance Hall. For Select Dancing
.

One night, not long after starting, he ran into a homesick Glaswegian pianist called John McCormack who was touring with one of the hottest bands at the time, run by the Trinidadian clarinettist Carl Barriteau. In a piece of unshrinking opportunism, my dad suggested that they simply swapped gigs. Before he knew it, it was all agreed, and McCormack had joined Jack Chapman and my dad had left home and was based at the Belle Vue in Manchester with Barriteau, earning twenty pounds per week and flying by the seat of his pants. For eighteen months before call-up to the RAF, he found himself touring the country in the best band around, learning fast and walking on air.