by Paolo Hewitt
Sammy The Foot is no exception, a jazz dancer of real excellence, capable of busting the kind of athletic and gracious moves that make you ashamed to be within ten yards of him on the dancefloor as he goes into his routine.
When Sammy The Foot and his comrades, some of whom come from as far as Manchester to indulge in their passion, take to the floor, you know it is time to discreetly retire because that space is his true home and although he and his friends never flash it in a look-at-me-I’m-so-great manner, it is still best to simply pull back and watch, rather than compete in any way.
Furthermore, such is Sammy’s love of jazz and dance, that his gears are all old style such as you see in fading pictures of various jazz musicians and their audience, his public attire of ten consisting of such items as large caps, zoot suits and brown and white spats, all of which give you the impression that Sammy just left The Cotton Club in Harlem and waltzed into the present. Today was no exception with Sammy sporting an eye catching grey pin striped baggy suit, a small flower in the left lapel of his double breasted jacket, white shirt and flowered tie, a walking stick and two tone shoes. On his head, tipped at an angle, was a large trilby. Sammy looked every bit the celebrity that he aspired to be and this desire, so legend had it, was first nurtured in him many years ago when he made his first TV appearance, albeit unwittingly, as a little kiddiwink.
The story has it that Sammy was but seven years old when a general election was called and the local Conservative MP returned to Sammy’s home base of Yeovil for the first time in years, a camera crew in tow with which to capture him on the campaign trail routine of kissing bambinos, cuddling old folk and blaming everyone but himself and his party for society’s ills.
Sammy’s folks are Nigerians and you don’t get too many of them to the pound in the British countryside. In fact, you don’t get any so when the aspiring MP spotted Sammy and his mum out and about, innocently walking the High Street to get the shopping, he saw a unique chance to do something for race relations in this country.
‘Hello, young man,’ the MP boomed, picking up Sammy much to his astonishment, ‘what part of the world were you born in?’ The camera zoomed in expectantly on a bewildered Sammy and the old smiling politico who, no doubt, was expecting the name of some far off exotic country that the British had ‘civilized’ not so long ago to drop from Sammy’s lips.
‘Yeovil,’ Sammy said. ‘I come from Yeovil.’
The MP, momentarily stunned and bewildered, froze and then quickly put down Sammy saying, with a smile as transparent as water, ‘Yes, of course you are. Now whose this pretty little girl over here?’ and marched off, praying no one noticed his burning cheeks of embarrassment.
The whole sorry incident was briefly shown on TV that night but with the commentator’s voice running over the film so all you saw was the MP cuddling Sammy and you never heard his words. Through it, Sammy became something of a cause celebre in his hometown, with all the kids at his school treating him as a major figure, ‘because he was on telly,’ until three weeks later the MP was returned to Parliament with an increased majority and everyone forgot the incident and got on with their lives. No doubt the bug of holding centre stage had been planted in the young one from that point on because whenever you saw him you couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by his ability to walk in to any public place and have everything revolve around him and not vice versa, which is how it runs for the majority.
‘Easy Sammy,’ I said, putting away my book, ‘how goes it?’
‘Not too well Mr. DJ man,’ he replied, sitting down next to me and smiling ever so graciously at the lady opposite who was obviously taken with his attire and demeanour.
‘The Loved One is on my case again.’
‘Trouble with your gal?’
‘She tells me that I pay more attention to dancing than I do her and soon she will walk if I do not change my ways.’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘But she’ll come round. I knows it.’
What’s fascinating about Sammy is that the man’s true vocation is not really dancing, although God knows he is a right little Nureyev when he gets going, but it is the art of acting that he has truly mastered. This is his main strength and the reason for my take on him came one night when, in an unguarded moment, he led me through the rhyme and reasons of his life. When Sammy quit Yeovil in his teens, the only offer of a job being at the helicopter factory, he arrived in the Capital knowing neither friend or foe, a major problem for a lot of faces who descend from the hinterlands looking to escape the dull local action of pubs, fights, marriage, mortgage, kids and death. In Sammy The Foot’s case, the idea of hosting a TV show had grabbed him the strongest, a wish no doubt stemming from the infamous MP incident and with that view in mind, Sammy quit home and made for the Capital.
Shocked and troubled at first by the impersonal nature of this city, Sammy spent his first few months in a miserable bedsit, signing on and aimlessly wandering around town looking for a friendly face, going to bed at night not a little scared, until one day it dawned on him that if London was not to come to Sammy, why then, he must go to London and grab it by the scruff of the neck. Jazz music being his first love, a condition brought about by his mother’s pre-occupation with be-bop, Sammy sought out the underground jazz clubs and spent hours leaning against a wall, memorising the moves he witnessed on the dancefloor. Nighttime, at home, he would, much to the annoyance of the neighbour below him, practise these moves for hours on end whilst during the day he scoured the Oxfam shops for suitable gears, knowing full well that when he made his entrance into the life, his eccentric gears style would instantly set him apart. He would also, he recognised, have to hide that part of his nature which was shy and retiring so that he would always exude poise and confidence, qualities that everyone is instantly attracted to if only because they wish some of it to rub off on themselves. Come the day that Sammy The Foot took to the dancefloor, it was with such style and grace that within weeks people were checking for this strangely dressed but brilliant mover and gravitating towards him. Sammy The Foot played his part, coming on mysterious, whetting people’s appetites and all the time building up contacts. In no time at all, he had secured a relationship with a well off gal from the Surrey countryside and moved in with her but his constant drive towards fame meant that he spent a lot of time ‘at work,’ as he called his lengthy stay in club after club, and that had started to bug out his lady.
‘She thinks I should be at home with her every night,’ he explained to me as we hurtled down the dark tunnel, the tube rocking from side to side, ‘but how am I to meet people if I don’t make the rounds. You tell me.’
I had no answer to his question and even if I had I wouldn’t have spilt it because ten times out of ten it is never wise to get involved in a couple’s runnings for the partner in distress only wants to hear what they want to hear, and no matter what you say or reason, their heart, not their head will guide them each and every time. As the heart has no use for reason, the only time to give forth your opinion is if your closest link comes to you for advice or wisdom and you state all of the above. Otherwise it is best to take the fifth on the grounds that you may incriminate yourself and a friendship, and as nothing is worth that, I changed the talk.
‘You out and about last night, Sammy?’
‘That is exactly my point,’ he said, determined to take the weight off his shoulders by talking it through.
‘Last night, there was an all nighter going off down Hammersmith way. I inform my lady that I will be present and correct and that I would very much like her to accompany me. She tells me, that she is sick of my stepping out, that I am just using her for cashola purposes and that if I do not stay in and miss the jam then we are finished. I tell her sure, babe. If that’s what you want. But first I must go out and buy some cigarettes. Of course, once I am in the night air the bug bites me, so I figure I’ll just slip over to the dance, spend half an hour at best and then return home.
‘I reach the club and be
fore I know it I am being approached by two TV people who are wishing to make a film about the jazz scene. We exchange numbers and I am to go and see them next week.’
‘That’s great Sammy.’
‘Not for my lady it isn’t. When I got home I tell her of my great fortune and that everything will be alright. She told me, ‘really’. Then went back to sleep.’
‘So where are you heading for now.’
‘Blackpool.’
‘Blackpool?’
‘Yes indeed. I am off to munch on rock and see the famous lights.’
‘And,’ I said cottoning on, ‘to attend the Jazz weekender that is going off there.’
‘Yes but look, if you see my gal you haven’t seen me, okay? I am considering going invisible over the next few days just to get my head into shape over this sorry state of affairs.’
‘Sammy, none of my business but you have been with your gal longtime and you shouldn’t distress her too much. At least bell her.’
‘Maybe,’ he said with a shrug and tossing a sly wink at the woman opposite who, having followed our every word with great indiscretion, promptly turned red and looked away, ‘and maybe not. I know what you’re saying but she has to learn that I don’t rush around for just my benefit but hers as well. If she can’t see that, why then, what can she see?’
The train pulled into Kings Cross and Sammy jumped up. ‘Gotta slide, this is my stop. Go well, Mr. DJ man and no whispering in the corridors. I’ll check you at The Unity soon. Know what I mean and mean what I know? Laters.’
‘Laters, Sammy.’
No doubt about it, our brief conflab had been a pleasant diversion from my own woes and worries but pondering on Sammy The Foot’s relationship got my HQ whirring away and soon I was relating it all back to my present unhealthy condition and wondering what would have happened if I and the First Lady had kept it together, and where would I be now, and what would I be doing, and all those other pointless notions that you fall into thinking about when self pity wells up and spreads itself inside of you.
I should explain here something about this teenage trauma which haunts me so and which kicked off, back in the days of my schooltime, and introduce to you one Miss Tuesday Driver, First Sweetheart of my life, a cool, collected woman who had my heart flipping this way and that for all the time I knew her. Tuesday always was and always will be ten steps ahead of everyone else, walking the paths no one else dared to with a determined self belief in herself that rubbed everybody up the wrong way. She came to my attention when her and her mother, the father has passed away at an early age, moved to London and she enrolled at my school just as the fourth year was fading out. I didn’t even notice her presence in our class until the afternoon, one of those hot sticky days where all you could do was gaze out of the window and wish you were miles away, drifting away on a barge that gently carried you up and down the gentle Thames, sunning yourself up, quenching thirst, listening to music, and then suddenly realising that it wasn’t the bees that you could hear droning around and about you but the relentlessly dull words of the ancient, white haired history teacher that stood before you, delivering the same lecture that he had given all his life to, as far as he was concerned, the same pupils but with their names changed. Just as he was finishing off some business about Roundheads and Cavaliers, there was the sound, from the back of the room a chair scraping against the floor.
‘Excuse me sir,’ came a female and unfamiliar to me voice, ‘I don’t mean to be rude but surely in the period that you are talking about, Cromwell was responsible for launching an invasion of Ireland, the consequences of which are still us with now as we see on our TV’s most nights.’
There was a brief, stunned silence. Then a few giggles and then, before the teacher could muster a reply, one of the lads shouted out, ‘yes sir, what about Cromwell and the paddies!’ Half the class cracked into laughter and Miss Tuesday Driver simply collected up her books and majestically walked out. ‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?’ the History Man demanded but Tuesday was out of the door before his words could even reach her. She turned up for class the next morning, after everyone had seen her emerging tight lipped from the Head’s office, by which time I was head over heels and the boys were all calling her Maggie, after our glorious PM. Then and there I prepared to move everything in sight to win her over, a task made predictably easier by the aforementioned caveman types running a mile everytime she came into view. At that point in my life I was consumed with shyness when it came to gals and so when, that very weekend, I bumped into her at a record fair, my heart skipped a double beat. Uno, because she was standing right beside me flicking through the seven inch singles laid out on a table, and I had never been this close to her, and due, because women are a rare sight at such functions as they are at those antiquated men only clubs for retired bankers (rhyme it) and colonels, the sort you read about with increasing incredulity in those posh magazines they leave out for you at the local surgery. Tuesday seemed lost in her mission and so when I ventured a brief, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ it was as if I had just awoken her from some trance. She looked at me questioningly until she was able to fit the face and then gave me a small nod of recognition.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said as if making an important discovery. ‘It’s a bit pricey here, isn’t it?’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Girl soul.’
‘As opposed to boy soul.’
‘Definitely. Women sing it better than men. They’ve got more to lose and you can hear it.’
I was intrigued by her outlook just as I was by her appearance which consisted of a smart white raincoat, a small black woollen hat that rested on the back of her head and tried to stem the long black hair that fell inexplorably down her back, black Sta-prest looking trousers and a pair of penny loafers.
She had small, piercing blue eyes, a nose that turned up ever so slightly and a wide mouth that always gave the impression that she was brooding about something.
‘Is there anywhere you can get a coffee around here?’ she suddenly asked.
‘There’s a place across the road,’ I replied.
‘Good.’
Tuesday began to walk off and then turned back to me, myself and I, standing quite transfixed. ‘Coming?’ she said with a smile. ‘I won’t bite.’
Over the cappuccino swing, Tuesday told me of her background, growing up in South Ireland amidst beautiful countryside and living the village life. When her father suffered his second heart attack and passed from this earth to the next, the mother, distraught and unable to live with the memories, moved to London in search of a new land. Tuesday was 14 years old.
‘My father knew he was weak physically and so from an early age he prepared me for his passing. He talked to me about it and said I had nothing to fear and not to worry or grieve over him as he was going on to a much better place where we would eventually meet up again. I believed him. I still do.’
Tuesday (so christened because that was the day of her arrival) and her mother moved in with friends first, and then a distant uncle let them rent one of his properties, a run down house that they were doing up in return for rent, and as this was down the way from my school, that’s where she had landed. When I unravelled my story, born and bred in London, P&M still together, happy childhood, it sounded, next to her fable of loss and journey, quite commonplace. Yet Tuesday listened to my particulars as if I was relating the most exciting story in the world and I found myself gladly falling further into her universe. I asked her out. She blushed just a touch and said, ‘sure, why not? But what ever will your friends say about you being seen with Maggie, eh?’
‘That,’ I replied, ‘is of no interest to me.’
Even so, under her insistence, we kept our liaisons something of a secret from the Pleb Patrol that stalked my school and, six months later, on a night etched forever in my HQ, we lost our virginities to one another in a small hotel pad, room 77, that we both saved up to hire. The one incident that I
will never forget from that night happened when, so overcome by the nervous excitement of it all, the booking in under different names and the growing realisation that what I had dreamt about every night for what seemed like forever, was actually going to happen, I rushed everything and finished way too early.
Turning my head away from her in burning shame, I crumbled against her body waiting and wishing for the sheets we lay on to wrap themselves around me and whisk me up and away to anywhere but this room. But that gal of mine had a real heart. She simply lifted up her hand, placed it on my head and stroked my hair.
And then she said, ‘I’m so glad that it was you. It was lovely.’
Tuesday taught me many things in the following months that I still abide by, such as always go with your feelings, whatever the cost, and never be scared, for no matter how bad things are there is always the way through. It explained why, as soon as they could, the school let Tuesday go and she happily made for the exit, strong in the knowledge that no matter what the odds she would always pull through. I dug that gal big time and there was nothing else to tell me differently until that nightmare evening when my heart took a blow that it is only now just recovering from.
I had gone to pick up Tuesday for an evening of cinema and cappuccino and so could not understand why, when I reached their house, all the lights were off and no-one was in. I rang the bell repeatedly and even chucked a couple of small pebbles at the window. Nothing doing. I went home and awaited her call. For two days there was nothing but big silence. Worried now that some great misfortune had overtaken them, I went back to their abode that afternoon.
When I reached, the sight of some builders erecting their scaffolding at the front of the house caused my heart to sink. Stopping one of them I asked him his business.
‘We’re turning the house into flats,’ is all he would say. ‘What about the people who lived here?’ I anxiously asked.
