Although our battalion was a shattered wreck, new recruits were beginning to arrive from Canada to provide the required numbers. I continued as a medic under Captain Nick Reed, spending most of my time either at the Casualty Clearing Station or on training courses. Six months later, to my great delight, Nick was sent back to Canada to work on repatriated Canadians requiring plastic surgery. It meant that my mom had her new husband back and safe from harm. By that time, I was just about the best-trained medic in the Canadian army and my stepfather was urging me to study medicine after the war. ‘Jack, those big piano hands of yours have the healing touch. You have a real feel for medicine.’ I confess it was a nice compliment from a man who, while polite, fair and honest, set pretty high standards for his medical staff and wasn’t overly lavish with his praise.
In the meantime we’d pulled together an excellent pick-up group from the few remaining members of the band and were playing at concerts and dances for the Canadian forces and at village dances all over West Sussex. We were also invited to do several gigs for the American air force stationed at nearby Gatwick airfield. With the Americans in the war, jazz, hitherto thought of as Negro or black music, was becoming popular and I guess I earned a bit of reputation for playing piano.
But everything was about to change for me. While many of the Canadian troops in England were sent to the Mediterranean, our battalion, with all its raw replacement recruits, was considered in need of further training and remained in England. Then in December 1942, barely four months after Dieppe, the CBC back in Canada started broadcasting the Canadian Army Radio Show, starring comedians Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. Unbeknownst to those of us in the UK, this proved an enormous success and some smart-ass general decided that it should be expanded to include a touring show to entertain troops both in Canada and overseas. He picked a guy named Rai Purdy as commanding officer.
What followed was a classic case of not what you know, but who you know. In this instance it was Miss Frostbite who knew Rai Purdy and saw this as a way to get me out of what she considered the danger zone. She asked Lieutenant Purdy to recruit me to the newly formed Canadian Auxiliary Services Entertainment Unit on his arrival in England. Rai Purdy, his full name being Horatio, tracked me down and invited me to join him.
He was all smiles and clearly pleased with himself. ‘Jack, I can get you out of this crappy medic’s job and you’ll spend the rest of the war safely tickling the ivories.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I reply politely, ‘but I would prefer to remain a medic.’
His tone immediately changed. ‘Corporal Spayd, you disappoint me!’ he said, giving me a prize-winning performance of hurt and regret.
‘Nevertheless, sir, I feel I will be more useful serving my country as a medic than as a musician.’
My answer clearly annoyed him. ‘There’s a war on, soldier! You will do what you’re told,’ he barked.
Alas, he was perfectly right and despite an appeal from the new MO who had replaced Nick Reed, in December 1943 possibly the best-trained medic in the Canadian army was forced to switch from bandages to band.
Although he was a mere lieutenant, Rai Purdy seemed to me to be rather full of himself and gloried in his new responsibility, which, to be fair, was not inconsiderable. With his radio background he was big on melodramatic introductions and was inordinately proud of the one he’d composed for me and insisted it be used whenever I was introduced.
Introducing Corporal Jack Spayd, the only professional musician in the entire Canadian army who is a recognised war hero, having won the Military Medal for bravery attending to the wounded while in combat, when he was himself severely wounded. I give you the finest jazz pianist in the Canadian army!
I had gone to him and asked for this stupid introduction to be abandoned. Even though there was no formality among the various musicians and entertainers, he’d stood me to attention and, wagging his finger in my face as if I were a recalcitrant schoolboy, yelled, ‘Corporal, my introduction is good for the Entertainment Unit and good for army morale. Do you understand?’
‘No, sir,’ I replied. ‘It is inappropriate and untrue, sir.’
‘Corporal, I will make a note that you continue to be difficult. I will decide what is appropriate and what is not! So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’
The only way I could find to counteract this stupid introduction was to point to my right ear and comment, ‘If you look very carefully, you’ll see the extent of my terrible wounds – my right earlobe is nicked, so naturally I’ll lead off tonight with “St James Infirmary Blues”.’ This implied the band master’s introduction was a deliberate set-up for my explanation. It always got a big laugh as I launched into the famous blues number.
Until Joe corrected me, I’d always thought that ‘St James Infirmary Blues’ was one of the greatest of all American blues songs, originating in the eighteenth century as a Negro folksong called ‘The Gambler’s Lament’. In fact, according to Joe, it went way, way back to sixteenth-century England. ‘The Unfortunate Rake’ was the most common of its various titles over the past four hundred years or so. It tells of a young soldier who laments the death of his fine lady in St James Hospital for lepers. Having spent all his money on whores, he then sings about his own inevitable death from venereal disease. When the folksong reached America in the eighteenth century, the wayward youth’s premature death was put down to gambling and alcohol, and since then the lyrics have been adapted repeatedly, but the unforgettable tune remains unchanged. I was intrigued by the song’s long history, so as soon as I could get to a library, I looked up St James Hospital and discovered it was demolished in 1532, thirty-two years before Shakespeare was born. In its place Henry VIII built St James Palace, still on the same site in the heart of central London today. I visited the palace once, and standing beside the guard I took out my harmonica and played the ‘St James Infirmary Blues’. Soon enough an old guy stopped and listened. He had sharp blue eyes and spiky grey hair swept back like a hedgehog. When I’d finished playing he pointed a gnarled forefinger at me and said, ‘Thank you for remembering, son.’
The Entertainment Unit was based in London and we spent the remainder of the war touring the UK performing for troops and civilians. The group we’d formed before I was forcibly drafted to the Entertainment Unit had played mostly on Saturday nights for our troops and on one or two occasions for the Americans at the local Gatwick airfield. It was here that I was invited to join one of their local poker games and soon after became a regular, playing whenever I had the chance. It was a pretty decent standard and another reason why I didn’t want to leave my battalion or West Sussex.
One of the Yanks, an air force sergeant named Sam Schischka, one of the regular players, suggested I look up his cousin, US Marines Master Sergeant Lenny Giancana, who was part of the marine guard at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He assured me he ran a pretty good poker game and was also a jazz fanatic and so I would be welcome. ‘I’ll give him a call in London,’ he promised. ‘He’ll take good care of you, Jack, buddy. He’s a member of the family.’ I was not to know until some time after the war that ‘the family’ wasn’t meant in the domestic sense.
Lenny Giancana proved to be everything his cousin promised. He loved jazz and invited me to play in his sergeants’ mess and, when off duty, attended every concert where I was playing in and around London. When it came to poker he really knew his onions and ran a serious game where I struggled to stay ahead and in the process learned a whole lot. In poker luck is one thing but experience is everything.
He would often urge me to come to Las Vegas after the war. ‘Hey, buddy, you cain’t go back to Canada. No way, man. It’s fuckin’ cold up there. Freeze ya balls! You gotta come Stateside – Vegas, that’s where the sun shines all year round and the girls are happy to oblige a good-lookin’ jazz musician like you. Jack, the family they gonna take good care of you, buddy. You got the hair and skin to make you a honorary I-talian.’ He laughed. ‘You’d pass for a wop any day
the week, buddy. You come see us, we gonna treat you real special.’
I recall asking him how come his cousin was called Sam Schischka. ‘That’s Polish, isn’t it?’
He sighed. ‘My old man’s sister married a fuckin’ Polack. Never did work out any good. Useless fuck! We got only Sicilian blood in our family since fuckin’ Noah. Then he come and contaminate. But she brought Sam up I-talian, he got the dark eyes and hair, so that’s okay. Now he included in the family.’
At first I thought he was simply being nice about my coming to Nevada, but he persisted until I was forced to say, ‘Lenny, when we’re demobbed I’m thinking of taking a scholarship from the Department of Veteran Affairs to study medicine.’
I recall his look of alarm. ‘Shit, man, you goin’ back to school? Whaffor? Medicine? Hey, Jack, what you saying to me? You kiddin’ me or somethin’? What kinda bullshit is this? Goddamned doctor can mend a broken body. Jazz pianist good as you can mend a broken heart!’ He pointed to my big hands. ‘God, don’t go put no surgeon’s knife in your hands. Nosirree, no way! Them fingers meant for one thing, for playin’ fuckin’ piano like a fuckin’ angel, man!’ He’d laughed. ‘Also,’ he pointed upwards, ‘the Big Man gives you good poker hands real regular and that ain’t just luck, buddy.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘You got it, man. In Vegas you gonna be a big hit, Jack. You can play two ways, piano and poker. Where I hail from, that combination’s just about the most perfect a man can get himself.’
And so I eventually played my final piano note in London some time after the war in Europe came to an end in May 1945. The Japs were still fighting in the Far East but this too came to an abrupt halt in August when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. If these so-called atomic bombs brought hostilities to a sudden end they didn’t affect the Entertainment Unit. There were still tens of thousands of our guys milling around England waiting for a ship to take them home and they needed entertaining. So it was business as usual for us. Finally most of the Entertainment Unit was repatriated, but Horatio John Purdy hadn’t forgiven my intransigence and set up a series of solo concerts for me, so that I was among the very last of the musicians to be demobbed, arriving back in Toronto in March 1946, ten months after VE Day.
Lenny Giancana was right. It was freezing in Toronto.
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE GOOD PART OF returning to Toronto was finding the now Mrs Gertrude Reed settled in and a very happy woman. There was no doubt Nick Reed was being loved to bits, and he seemed calmly content – in his world of burn victims I guess normalcy was a blessing. My mother looked splendid and seemed to have gained in confidence. Under the guidance of Miss Frostbite, she had learned how to behave in company, and, in her stylish new clothes, she looked the part of a top surgeon’s wife. In fact, she confessed to me that, after all the years of hand-me-downs, the most difficult part of becoming Nick’s wife hadn’t been the novel sensation of conjugal bliss or sharing a double bed again but the seemingly simply act of going into a dress shop to purchase something off the rack for herself.
‘Miss Frostbite took me into Eaton’s to buy a dress to wear to a fundraising do at Nick’s hospital,’ she recalled not long after I had returned to Toronto. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink the night before, and that’s not an exaggeration. When we got off the trolley car outside the shop I froze, absolutely terrified. Miss Frostbite took me by the arm and urged me on but I couldn’t, for the life of me, budge. It was like I’d been cemented in, Jack.’
I laughed. ‘When was the last time you’d been to Eaton’s?’
‘Oh my, let me think . . . 1929 . . . just before the Wall Street Crash. Miss Frostbite wanted to buy new shoes as well, but that was going too far; I had the shoes Miss Bates gave me, which were still good, the ones I wore to all your concerts, and the fashions haven’t really changed all that much. The lovely new dress she made me buy was all that was needed and I felt very smart.’
I grinned. ‘She finally got you into the shop then?’
‘Yes, but the worst part was that I felt so guilty.’
‘Guilty? What for, spending money or for creating a scene on the pavement?’
‘Yes, both, but mainly for not going to Mrs Sopworth at the Presbyterian Clothing Depot! All those years she’d keep an eye out for me, dropping me notes: Gertrude, I have a little something I think you’re going to like. Or she’d say, “My dear, I have some good practical delicates”, meaning of course, undies.’ She smiled. ‘She was generally right, too, about me liking it.’
Miss Frostbite had also made her change her hairstyle. ‘“Gertrude, you have lovely hair but that long, straight look just has to go, it’s much too plain. Nice, but rather too predictable,” that’s what she said to me. I nearly died at the very thought. All those bitter nights when you soaked my chilblains and then brushed my hair – they’re among my most treasured memories, Jack.’ She smiled rather sadly. ‘“No, it mustn’t be cut, I can’t have it cut,” I’d insisted. “Cut?” she said. “Who mentioned anything about cutting? It’s beautiful, my dear. I thought just a bit of a wave, a la Veronica Lake.” Can you imagine, Jack? At my age, with hair like a film star . . .’
I looked more closely at her hair. She still wore it down to her shoulders but sort of softly curled, falling across her right eyebrow. It looked very glam and its blue-black gloss was still as deep as ever. Gosh, she was pretty, and with her straight nose and her new-found happiness, the new, improved Gertrude Reed was even more of a pleasure to be around.
While she and Nick were both keen for me to share their house, I knew my stay would be a short one. In fact, if I hadn’t thought she’d be terribly upset if I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t have stayed with my mother in the first instance. She and Nick needed time alone together, not a great lump of a returning soldier landing on their doorstep and messing up her neat-as-a-pin home. If I was going to stay in Toronto, which in my mind seemed increasingly unlikely, I’d get a place of my own.
The little house was everything she could have wished for, small and cosy and not all that different on the outside from our original Cabbagetown home. The big difference was that it was in a nice downtown neighbourhood and she and Nick owned it outright. Despite the post-war shortages it was nicely appointed, with a parlour (now referred to as the lounge room) featuring Mac’s wedding present, a second-hand chaise longue he’d found somewhere, and repaired and freshly varnished and upholstered in Miss Frostbite purple. With his penchant for hoarding I have no doubt the purple velvet was left over from a past Jazz Warehouse foyer job.
The post-war Mac was happy as a pig in a wallow, with plenty of work to keep him out and about. When he was home he spent all his time in his workshop in the backyard. He’d had heating and electric lighting installed so he could spend his evenings there safe from Dolly’s acerbic tongue, her presence restricted to the evening meal and a goodnight grunt. He’d taken to making guitars as a hobby. ‘Just you wait, Jack, jazz soloists – just a singer on guitar – are gonna be the next big thing and they’ll all want custom-made guitars.’
‘Sing while playing the guitar? Yeah, blues maybe, but jazz? I’ve heard Django Reinhardt, but he doesn’t sing and he often plays with a jazz violinist – Stéphane Grappelli. They set up the Quintet of the Hot Club of France,’ I said, showing off a little. ‘Even then, I don’t think you’re going to get too many imitators. Solo guitarists? I can’t see it, Mac.’
‘Mark my words, Jack, the jazz singer guitarist – solo – will be the next big thing.’
‘Cost a bit to set up, won’t it?’ I asked.
‘Jack, that’s the nice part, the twins are backing me, anything I want.’
Mac loved jazz and as a craftsman he never cut corners, so a handmade Mac guitar would be a nice thing to possess. He seemed pretty certain about what he was saying, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for his prediction to come true. In the meantime, Mac was enjoying himself, and it was long overd
ue. I was happy for him.
The twins were well on their way to making their mark in respectable financial and property circles, backed, as I mentioned, by the advice and financial help of Mr Logical and the services of his bank. Whether they continued to provide their unique services to him as part of the deal I shall never know, but it looked as though they were destined to become very wealthy, their past as high-class whores soon forgotten. It was as if the trauma of war and the euphoria of a lasting peace had expunged any dubious aspects of their pre-war past. There would always be a few old families whose doors would remain firmly shut to post-war upstarts such as the twins, but new money had a way of overcoming most obstacles, providing one behaved oneself, and if Mommy and Daddy were not up to the mark, you kept them out of sight, used your knife and fork correctly, voted for the right party and donated to the right charities.
For her part, Dolly was now established as the ‘Queen of Quilt’, having won a blue ribbon at ‘The Ex’ (Canadian National Exhibition) in the last show before Canada got serious about the war. She had set up the Dolly McClymont School of Quilting, also financed by the twins, in a new shopping centre they partly owned together with Mr Logical and his bank. According to Mac, she was becoming very popular. It seemed her forthright, no-nonsense style was proving to be an asset. ‘She gets results. People say she’s the best in the biz,’ Mac claimed, not entirely without a sense of pride in his churlish spouse, who, though I found it hard to believe, may well have softened now that she was financially independent and free of Cabbagetown and the constant grind of poverty.
Jack of Diamonds Page 41
