But there was a flaw in the plan. Kath had not thought it through. Mum returned a few minutes before Mrs Clayton should have left, to find the music teacher gone and Kath sitting at the piano alone, her tongue sticking out between her teeth, the better to concentrate. Nothing was said, but relations between Mum and Mrs Clayton the following week were a touch frosty. If the lessons were only going to last half an hour, why didn’t we have Miss Martin and save half a crown?
Sometimes when Kath was practising, the family next door would be stung into action. The MacDonalds were only there for a year. They had two children. Adam was about my age, and we messed around together down the back. His older sister, Moira, had long, dark hair worn in plaits. It was she who played the harmonium that sat with its back to the same wall as our new piano.
Within moments of Kath opening the lid and running her fingers through some hesitant scales or arpeggios, the wheeze of the harmonium could be heard through the plaster. I think Moira only knew one tune, but she could play it until the cows came home. ‘Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh’ would tinkle out on our side of the wall, and ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ would be the homesick dirge that filtered through from number 35. Not that we called it ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’. It was known as ‘Oh, where, tell me where’, because that was what my mother would sing, clearly more impressed with Moira’s playing than that of her daughter. ‘Oh, where, tell me where is your Highland laddie gone? He’s gone wi’ streaming banners where noble deeds are done. And it’s oh, in my heart I wish him safe at home.’
I did not realise then the significance of the lyrics. Before she married my father, three years after the war, Mum had been ‘involved’ with a Scot by the name of John Douglas. ‘Uncle John’ and his sister, ‘Auntie Ella’, lived in Galashiels. We saw them maybe once a year when they came down for their annual holiday in Morecambe. Uncle John had lost a leg in the war, and I think Mum had met him when he was convalescing. He had a false leg fitted and walked with a stick, and when they met, Mum would often walk with her arm in his along the prom at Morecambe, with me and Kath dawdling behind with Dad and Auntie Ella. There was always a spark between Mum and Uncle John. A twinkle in his eye. A fondness in her look. My father never alluded to it, and eventually, by the time I was into my thirties, Mum and Uncle John had lost touch. I suppose she just let it go, probably to my father’s relief. But in the late 1950s, there was always a wistfulness about her when she asked, ‘Oh, where, tell me where is your Highland laddie gone?’ Even if Galashiels hardly ranks as the Highlands.
There were times, when nobody was in, that I would open the lid of the piano and finger the keys. Maybe if I thought hard about a piece of piano music I had heard – something played by Winifred Attwell, or Joe ‘Mr Piano’ Henderson on The Billy Cotton Band Show – I’d be able to play it myself. Perhaps it was all down to intense concentration. Something my mother never thought I had. I tried the technique. It didn’t work, and the piano was, and remains, a mystery.
If it were not for two things, I would have little affection for it at all. The first was a distant cousin. She was called Linda, and had come down to Ilkley from Beverley to visit some other member of the family. They didn’t have a piano, and her mother, anxious that she should keep up her technique while on holiday, had asked if she could use ours on which to practise.
I came home from school one evening to find this blonde vision sitting at our piano and playing like an angel. She looked like an angel, too, her soft bob framing a face with the most melting smile I had ever seen.
It was love at first sight – or so I convinced myself. In my imagination we packed our spare clothes in her music case – a proper one with a shiny metal rod that held the flap in place – and ran away to be together for ever on a desert island where I’d make dens and cook things over a campfire, and she’d play the piano under a palm tree.
I suppose I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. Aware of girls and aware of beauty, but so far uninvolved with either. We had a brief but self-conscious conversation. I could tell that she liked me. There was something in her manner; in the way that she fluttered her eyelashes and looked away when she talked to me. I liked her, too. We spoke again the following week when she came back for the last time. I have not seen her since. I remember only my mother’s disapproval of any further contact, but whether this was due to some smouldering family feud (none of them serious, but each one carefully observed) or the inadvisability of fraternisation between distant cousins I don’t know. We did swap letters, though. Two or three of them. And that was it.
The second and most lasting thing that piano taught me was how to drive a car, several years before I was old enough to get a licence. I found a book in the local library. It recommended that in order to teach yourself the finer points of changing gear, you would need three things: a walking stick, a flowerpot and a piano.
The idea was that you sat at the piano and treated the three pedals as the accelerator, brake and clutch. You turned the flowerpot upside down on the floor to the left of the piano stool and pushed the end of the walking stick through the hole. It became the gear lever. (There was no suggestion in the book that the technique could actually be practised in a stationary car; few people had cars, most people had a piano.)
I followed the directions and, night after night, sat at the wheel of our cottage grand in the front room, until the sound of my revving irritated my father enough for him to suggest that I put the ‘car’ in the garage and go to bed.
The piano disappeared at the same time as Kath’s enthusiasm, Mrs Clayton and my mother’s urge for a new piece of furniture. I never did learn to play it, but I can double-declutch with the best of them.
My inability to get out of doing something I don’t want to has been a lifelong curse. Most folk are sensible enough to smile sweetly, politely decline an unappealing offer, then turn and walk away. I am more likely to miss the moment at which withdrawal can be managed gracefully and end up hurtling headlong into the abyss of embarrassment because of my unwillingness to offend or disappoint. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I am the male equivalent of Ado Annie in Oklahoma – I’m just a guy who can’t say no. It has been thus ever since I was small.
Street Theatre
The rough lane that sloped past the back of our row of terraced houses, between the dwellings and their short, narrow gardens, was known, with that classic northern capacity for stating the obvious, as ‘the back’. It was almost entirely un-made-up; a rough and uneven compaction of native soil and the ashes from fireplaces and back boilers that had been dumped on it at the dawn of every day for over a hundred years – apart from the patch behind Mr Barker’s house.
The Barkers were a childless couple, and Mr Barker, apart from being a special constable and wearing white sleeves over his navy-blue tunic when he directed the traffic on the gasworks corner on bank holidays, seemed to have more time on his hands than most of the dads. As a result, the bit of back outside his house was concreted. Not evenly, in one great slab, but in sections that he had laid bit by bit – when he had the time, the inclination and the few bob necessary to invest in another bag of cement.
By the time I was eight or nine, the Barkers’ bit of back was entirely of hard standing. The mums liked it because it was the one stretch of ground they could walk on without sinking up to their ankles in wet weather when they were wearing stilettos, and the kids liked it because it was a good place to play games that needed an even surface.
Occasionally Mrs Barker – a martyr to headaches – would have a bit of a turn and come out and live up to her name, shouting at us to clear off and wringing her hands under her pinny when we got on her nerves, but for most of the time she didn’t seem to mind us being there.
I don’t know whose idea it was initially, but the upshot was that ‘Barkers’ Square’, as it came to be known (all ten feet of it), would make the perfect performance area.
At the very mention of the word ‘performance�
��, you couldn’t see Mickey Hudson, Dokey Gell or Robert Petty for dust. They were down by the bus-garage wall kicking an empty baked-bean can. There remained Pauline Cawood, Virginia Petty (Robert’s older sister), Jane Evans, Philomena Forrest and the only lad in the street not given to causing offence. Me.
You can look at this in several ways: I was weak and feeble; I was trying to be helpful; I had an inbuilt desire to perform from an early age; or, far more likely, I had not fully considered the implications. You can rule out the fact that I was up for a snog. That particular use for a girl wouldn’t occur to me for three or four years yet.
As I remember, I had my back to the wall. Literally and figuratively.
‘You can be the master of ceremonies,’ confided Jane Evans, stroking her bunches.
I liked the sound of being master of anything so I just shrugged.
‘Yes,’ agreed Philomena, the little one who bit her bottom lip when she hit you. ‘You can announce us.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
Pauline whipped out a large picture book from behind her back. ‘This.’
I leaned forward to look at the glossy jacket. It showed a photograph of a man and a woman, both wearing eye shadow and holding a strange pose. Then I read the title: The Princess Book of Ballet.
That should have been the moment. The moment at which I ran in the direction of the baked-bean can. But I didn’t. I stayed rooted to the spot thanks to the natural curiosity that has helped widen my interests in all things cultural for a little over half a century.
Pauline opened the book and the other three grouped round her. I kept a safe distance.
‘I like this one best,’ said Jane, pointing to a picture of a man in tights who was holding a girl in a short net skirt above his head with one hand. ‘“Paz de Dukes,”’ she said.
‘Yes, I like that one, too,’ agreed Pauline.
‘I’ll be the man, and you be the woman,’ said Jane.
Philomena kept quiet, probably relieved that being the shortest of the quartet, she wouldn’t have to lift anybody up, never mind with one hand.
It was decided that Virginia, the blonde, would be in charge of the advertising break, where television commercials would be sung to give the others time to change their costumes.
I was a bit worried. I mean, what if Jane dropped Pauline head first on to the concrete of Barkers’ Square? And there were technical and artistic considerations, too. Who would supply the music and the costumes? I might be unable to say no, but I’ve always been practical.
All of these doubts were brushed aside. ‘We can find the costumes at home and I can bring my record player,’ said Jane with a dismissive wave of her arm.
It was pretty clear that in spite of being the master of ceremonies, my role was subservient to those of the main performers. Even the advertisers. All I would have to do was provide the links. Talk while they changed their costumes. And turn on the record player.
The girls sat down in a circle and decided on the short programme. Jane and Pauline would perform the ‘Paz de Dukes’ from Swan Lake (Jane had the music for that so there was no problem there), and Philomena would do a short character dance of her own devising, with her dog, to whatever other bit of ballet music could be found.
Virginia would choose three commercials with jingles that could be sung during the brief intermission.
After consultation with Mr and Mrs Barker, the date was set for the following Friday. Oh, and another duty of the master of ceremonies would be to make the poster. The one that would be nailed to the Barkers’ fence. Because I had the set of poster paints.
I remember being nervous that fateful morning, but it was too late now. The day dawned fine and fair, but I couldn’t see how the brief programme would in any way attract mums from up and down the street to come and watch. Not when it was in competition with washing, ironing and getting ‘him’ his tea.
But come they did, and the motley collection of chairs from all the kitchens down our side of Nelson Road were pressed into service – pink ones with spoked backs, blue ones and chipped white ones, posh chrome bar stools with padded black vinyl seats, and even the odd rush-seated ladder-back found their way into three serried rows of seating.
We didn’t charge – that would have been pushing it – but come two o’clock a good dozen and a half spectators had turned up to watch. Mainly mums, with the odd reluctant and bleary-eyed dad who was on shift work.
I’d found a white shirt and a red bow tie, and made my own clipboard from the back of a Kellogg’s cornflakes packet and a bulldog clip. (Practical again, you see.) I strode out on to the square and announced the afternoon’s performance: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Barkers’ Square and this afternoon’s ballet to be performed by Jane Evans and Pauline Cawood, with a speciality dance by Philomena Forrest and her dog, Laddie, and adverts by Virginia Petty.’
A ripple of polite applause followed and I began to feel optimistic.
‘First, the “Paz de Dukes” from Swan Lake.’ Except that it wasn’t really the ‘Paz de Dukes’. Jane and Pauline had thought the better of any form of lifting on concrete and settled instead for Jane playing both the handsome prince and the wicked von Rothbart with no discernible difference between the two.
I turned on the record player and lowered the needle. Pauline did try to start the performance to the sound of the Temperance Seven playing ‘Pasadena’, but decided, after a few bars, that it wasn’t really the right rhythm, so I removed Mrs Cawood’s favourite record, which she had clearly substituted for the Tchaikovsky, and tried again.
Better luck this time. To the soaring orchestral accompaniment, Pauline teetered on in her best white party frock with a pink sash and began to pirouette across the square, until she reached the privet at the other side and lost her balance. Having extracted herself from the hedge and brushed the dead leaves from her sleeve, she pirouetted off in the other direction and continued back and forth like this in dizzying motion until the music reached a dramatic crescendo.
At this point, Jane leaped noisily from the Barkers’ outside toilet in a grey gymslip and V-neck sweater with a golden cloak over her shoulders. She jumped around the square in ever more gigantic leaps, propelled by a new pair of black plimsolls, and eventually paused to explain her actions. ‘You will turn into a swan, now I will be gone!’ she exclaimed. It was a brief performance. Pauline continued pirouetting, with no sign of any sort of transformation, and Jane disappeared back into the toilet and refused to come out. Nerves had got the better of her. As the music pounded on and Pauline was in serious danger of collapse due to an excess of pirouetting, I pleaded with Jane to vacate the privy. To no avail. Through the keyhole I could hear stifled sobs, while the music built to its grand finale.
I gave up on Jane, lifted the needle from the record and stepped forward to announce the intermission. It was not necessary. At that moment, powering their way sideways through the Barkers’ garden gate and on to the square came Virginia and Philomena in a Tiller Girl formation of two, kicking up their legs and singing ‘Have you tried Robinson’s lemon barley, lemon fresh, barley smooth? If you haven’t tried Robinson’s lemon barley, well … you should!’ And then, as if by design, they were lost from sight behind Mrs Barker’s washing.
There was no more. Three adverts had been planned. Only one had materialised.
I stepped forward to announce the next act, only to see Philomena’s dog, Laddie, rushing off up the back after the coalman with his owner in hot pursuit, biting her bottom lip in between yelling at him, ‘Laddie! LADDIE! Come back here, you little bugger!’ But Laddie had gone, and with him any hopes we might have had of a longer performance.
The first and last ballet to appear on Barkers’ Square had lasted, at most, four minutes. But as the uncomplaining mothers lugged their furniture back into their kitchens, I did hear at least one of them describe the afternoon as ‘unforgettable’.
Mickey Hudson, Dokey Gell and Robert Petty were stil
l down by the bus garage wall kicking their tin can when I caught up with them. They said nothing. And for that I was deeply grateful.
Just in case a picture is emerging of a pathetic little wimp who was happier playing with his plants than a football (which I was) and with girls rather than boys (which I wasn’t – well, not till later), I would like to point out that there were times when I could be ever-so-slightly daring.
I would climb trees for apples (one sprained wrist and two experiences of being winded), scale rocks on the moors with the agility of a gazelle (one sprained ankle), and wade across the River Wharfe (but only in summer when it was low).
My cricketing prowess was, it is true, limited, and my footballing skills even less worthy of note, but when it came to a vivid imagination, I was never found wanting. Sometimes, though, with the encouragement of mates in the street, things did get a bit out of hand.
Playing With Fire
We’d done all the things you normally do – played kick-can down the bottom of the street and cricket with a tennis ball against the bus-garage wall, and we’d no money to go and buy seeds from Woolies to sow in Mickey’s back garden, so the two of us decided to have a fire.
That was the great thing about Mickey’s back garden. Unlike ours, on the other side of Nelson Road, which backed on to the gardens of the houses in Wellington Road, Mickey’s back garden was surrounded by old stone buildings that were used by a local builder for storing stuff. There were no windows in the sides that faced on to the garden, and the hedge at the bottom was too thick to allow anyone walking down the back lane to see in.
Nobbut a Lad Page 17
