Dr Aleck Bourne was one of the most distinguished gynaecologists of his day, famous for winning a landmark case after performing an illegal abortion on a fourteen-year-old rape victim, having alerted the police to what he was about to do. He was subsequently charged and acquitted at trial. However, my father had not called on him for his gynaecological skills, but because he was an amateur sculptor and interested in all the arts. Thus it was a kind of social visit, and Dr Bourne sat by my bed as we talked about painters we admired, and about poetry. Afterwards he told my parents that in his opinion I should be encouraged to give up law, since my interests and ambitions were plainly elsewhere. After a long discussion, the die was cast: I would abandon all thoughts of a legal career – and abracadabra, from the moment that decision was made I began to move more easily and the pain quickly vanished.
Over the years, the humane and worldly Dr Bourne and I exchanged letters and he encouraged me to send him my early poems. From time to time he would invite me to dine with him and his wife in their flat above his Harley Street consulting rooms. He’d done me a greater service than he could possibly have realised, and how wise and understanding it was of my father to have called on him.
One thing’s for sure: that is the only time in my life I’ve been treated by a gynaecologist!
* * *
Having informed the not-altogether-surprised David Lewis of my decision to give up law, I now had to think what I really wanted to do. Write poems, yes, and I was doing that more and more, but I would also have to earn a living, as I was being gently reminded. Some evenings I would wander up to Hampstead Village and sit in a café to ponder my future, scribbling away, trying to look like a poet even though on the evidence of what I’d written to date I was far from being one. At that stage my parents had an attractive live-in help from what was then Yugoslavia, whose room was at the top of the house, a few tempting steps up from mine, which was off a half-landing (my parents and younger brother David were on the floor below). One night I made the exciting discovery that a friend of hers, a slim, blonde English girl, sometimes stayed over with her, creeping out in the morning before my unsuspecting parents and brother woke up (David, nine and a half years younger than me, still slept the sleep of the innocent, though he later more than made up for it!). Rather taken by the fact that I wrote, or was trying to write, poetry, the friend suggested I come round to her flat in West Hampstead of an evening to write – an invitation I was not slow to accept. However, once she’d told me her doctor had warned her that if a man so much as hung his trousers on the back of her door she would fall pregnant, I beat a hasty retreat. What had that to do with poetry? You may well wonder.
I’d done well in English at school, and the more I thought about it, the more journalism seemed a reasonable possibility as a career, so I contacted our local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, and the editor, John Parkhurst, was kind enough to say I could work there for six weeks – work experience, we’d call it now. No money, of course, but that really didn’t matter. The Ham and High was considered one of the finest local papers in the country, and I was thrilled to have this opportunity. I later learned that Parkhurst had kept the paper going through the war years, a period that enabled more women to become journalists and receive equal pay long before the vast majority of professions.
He was friendly and encouraging and even more so was his chief reporter, Gerald Isaaman, who took me under his wing. I couldn’t have had a better mentor, for Gerry, who became editor in 1968 and remained at the helm for a remarkable twenty-five years, is a walking encyclopaedia of anything and anybody to do with the Hampstead area. It was under his editorship that the New York Times described the paper as ‘the only local paper with a foreign policy’. These days, having moved out of London, Gerry writes regular features and reviews with great knowledge and flair for the arts pages of the Camden New Journal.
Through Gerry, whose continuing friendship and support I greatly value, I got a real taste of what it is like to be a working journalist. I loved the buzz of the Ham and High office, the constant clack of the typewriters, the reporters rushing in and out, the gossip, the sense of excitement on press day. I was sent to review plays and art exhibitions, accompanied journalists on their not-always-pleasant assignments, especially when there’d been a death or an accident. I went to local meetings, the odd sport event, and shows of all kinds in schools and halls, always doing my best to look cool and not show just how raw and nervous I was. I even reviewed some books but was never let loose on the famous writers and personalities in the area.
Then I got my big break, for with Easter came the Fair on Hampstead Heath, and I was given the job of writing a lengthy feature article about it. This was my opportunity to show just how well I could write, but as I look at the yellowing cutting now I don’t think I’d give myself many marks out of ten. How pretentious, how embarrassing it is. Under the heading ‘So Noisy, Yet So Happy at the Fair’, I tried to capture the atmosphere, the characters behind the various stalls, the noise, the fun, the smell of hamburgers, the dust, the excited yells of the oh-so-attractive girls in the bumper cars, but it was way, way over the top. And of course, being in the shadow of Keats House, I couldn’t resist bringing the great poet in. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead,’ he wrote, and I quoted his lovely lines towards the end of the article as a sort of grand finale. Whatever they really thought, everyone on the paper muttered nice things and the piece appeared just as I wrote it, under my byline. I bought lots of copies.
For all my faults and faux pas, at least I hadn’t done what my new idol Dylan Thomas had when working on his local paper in Wales. Sent one day to review a new play, the young Dylan had got rather delayed in a pub, as was his wont, but that hadn’t stopped him from handing in a review even though he hadn’t been anywhere near the theatre – which, as his editor sternly told him, was a pity, since a fire had broken out, the theatre had burnt down, and of course there had been no performance.
3
ENTER THE GOONS
Apart from the Pete Brown parties, Saturday nights frequently found me and my friends at one north London home or another, dancing in a sitting room cleared of its furniture to the steady beat of the Glenn Miller Orchestra (oh, the nostalgia of ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Moonlight Serenade’) or the irresistible allure of the evergreen Frank Sinatra, whose Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! album went with us everywhere, along with a portable Dansette record player. Luckily for me, one of my lifelong friends, Anthony Harkavy, played great jazz piano, so he was always in demand to perform at parties, and I was never far behind. In later life, as a lawyer, he was to skilfully advise and steer me through various sticky publishing situations and negotiations, even getting an advance back from the notoriously unreliable Jeffrey Bernard, whom I had unwisely contracted to write a book on his friend, the legendary jockey Lester Piggott.
Anyone who saw the entertaining play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, or who read his columns in The Spectator on which it was based, will need no reminding that, besides his drinking, Bernard was proud of his ability to charm unwitting publishers into advancing him money for books he never wrote. So, after various unfruitful meetings in his flat in Great Portland Street and numerous un-kept promises, we finally decided enough was enough. As a very small publisher we simply couldn’t afford to finance his drinking habits. Serving a writ on Bernard, which in the end we were obliged to do, was not an easy matter, but it was finally served – appropriately enough in a Soho pub, and doubtless not with the beverage he was expecting. Did any other publisher ever get their advance back from him, I wonder? It may have been a publishing first!
I also have to thank Anthony for sitting down one morning a couple of years ago at the inviting upright piano in St Pancras Station and playing that lovely old jazz number ‘Georgia on My Mind’. As he played, with his back to the gathering crowd, a group of tall teenage boys made their way towards the piano, touching it lovingly before turning away. As they did so, I noticed they all wor
e large white hearing aids behind their ears. It was a heart-stopping moment that led me to write a poem called ‘Jazz at St Pancras’, which ends:
Clearly, those boys had heard a melody
we could not, and suddenly the
station was no longer cold, and there
was more than music in the air.
When we weren’t standing around a piano, or partying with Pete, we were listening to the bands of Humphrey Lyttelton or Chris Barber at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, or to the purist clarinet of Cy Laurie at his club opposite the Windmill Theatre in Piccadilly. I always loved the voice of Ottilie Patterson, who sang with the Barber band and was to marry its leader. For me, her ‘Careless Love’ was one of the Seven Wonders, and her voice still thrills me these many decades on, as indeed does the clarinet of Barber’s star performer, Monty Sunshine, attacking the testing, set-piece solo in the classic jazz number ‘High Society’.
It was at the 100 Club that the Skiffle King, Lonnie Donegan, came into his own, not only playing in the early Barber band but having a featured solo spot when the main band took a break. ‘Rock Island Line’ was the number we all wanted to hear, a song I first stumbled on when an excited salesman in a record shop in Golders Green Road ardently recommended it – yes, there were such shops in those days, and we were regular customers.
The pioneering Lyttelton band was a main attraction then and was to remain popular right up to Humph’s death in 2008. As I tried to pluck up enough courage to ask one of the many long-haired beauties who lined the walls to jive, I little thought that I would one day become the proud publisher of this famous Old Etonian trumpeter.
Going to the 100 Club – drug-free, I imagine, in those days – seemed daring at the time, a kind of rite of passage, and I tried to relive those days in more recent years when Humph and his devoted manager (and later partner) Susan da Costa would invite me to hear the band at the Bull’s Head in Barnes – the music rather more mainstream then than the Dixieland fare I seem to remember from my youth, but every bit as potent and transporting. And on one memorable occasion, for the launch at a club in Dover Street of Humph’s book, It Just Occurred to Me…, not only did the band turn up to back him on a couple of numbers, but we were treated to the wonderful voice of Elkie Brooks. Carole and I became close to the dynamic Elkie and her husband Trevor when, a few years after Humph’s death, we published her frank autobiography Finding My Voice, and indeed she would jokingly call me her ‘brother’.
Elkie Brooks joins Humphrey Lyttelton at the launch party for his book It Just Occurred to Me…
* * *
If, earlier, I held my father Joe responsible for my early boxing activities, I must also credit (and thank) him for my meeting and later involvement with the Goons, which all started with the arrival of that Arch Goon Spike Milligan in my father’s consulting rooms. I must have been around fifteen or so then, and The Goon Show was at the height of its popularity. At the time there were other popular radio comedy shows such as Take It From Here, Hancock’s Half Hour and Round the Horne but, brilliant though these were, the innovative, surrealist humour of The Goon Show was startling. As well as writing most of the show’s scripts, Spike also performed in it every week alongside the multi-voiced Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, with two musical interludes featuring the Ray Ellington Quartet and Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player.
Having to write, rehearse and perform in a new episode every week for weeks on end took its toll on Spike, as he confessed in an interview years later: ‘The pressure and the tension of keeping up the standard drove me mad. I dedicated my whole life to it, seven days a week … I gave my sanity for that show. It was terrifying, sheer agony. It wrecked my first marriage, and it wrecked my health.’ He was counting on my father, to whom he had been recommended by his GP, to help him through his various crises. I should explain that my dad had become a leading medical practitioner of hypnosis, using it as a psychiatric aid to get to the bottom of particular problems. At that time hypnosis was looked on with a degree of suspicion by the medical establishment, but my father (who was always strongly against the use of hypnosis for non-medical purposes, such as entertainment) had remarkable success with it in a number of areas, including asthma, nail-biting, stammering, insomnia, sexual problems, smoking, depression and childbirth. I myself had a wisdom tooth out under hypnosis, with no pain at all and everything healing more swiftly than the dentist thought possible. After my father died, I found a thick file of touching letters from patients thanking him for his patience, understanding, kindness and care, and testifying to the effectiveness of his treatment. There were also many similar letters from doctors who had referred patients to him.
My father rarely listened to the radio and had no real idea who Spike was when he first came to see him, though he knew from my mother that he was famous. Being a blunt Yorkshireman, that fact cut little ice with him, and when Spike’s opening sally was, ‘I don’t trust doctors and I don’t trust you,’ my father simply responded that he wasn’t there to prove himself and pointed to the door. ‘I think we can get on,’ said an impressed Spike, stopped in his tracks, and thus began a lifelong friendship of great trust and affection, with my dad coming to the rescue on a number of occasions when Spike hit one of his frequent bad spots. There were periods when he was in our house almost every night, and over the years our home became a haven for him, my mother’s table coupled with my father’s medical skills proving an appealing combination.
I have memories from that time, too, of dropping off Barry Humphries and an attractive lady friend somewhere in West Hampstead. That was long before Dame Edna became a sensation, and I can only imagine he’d come to us with Spike for tea. Through my later involvement with Punch magazine and friendship with its editor, Alan Coren, we published Punch on Australia, which Barry edited. As I’d never really got to know him, when my father died in 1990 I was immensely touched to receive a phone call out of the blue from Barry saying he just wanted to tell me how sorry he was to hear the news and how much he’d liked my dad.
* * *
The Goon Show was recorded on Sunday nights at the BBC’s Camden Theatre before a live audience, and tickets were like gold dust, with crowds jostling on the steps of the theatre, pressing to get in. Often I was lucky enough to have two tickets, and the extra one was sometimes a winning card in wresting a date from a reluctant girl. At school everybody imitated the show’s famous characters – and the voices of Eccles, Moriarty, Bluebottle, Henry Crun and Neddie Seagoon echoed round the playground and school corridors.
It’s hard to convey the power of radio in those days, and to what extent The Goon Show permeated the lives of so many. None of my friends would miss an episode, or the repeat, and those recordings were wondrously exciting, the audience warm-up sessions every bit as enthralling as the show itself. Once the large orchestra, under its director Wally Stott (later known as Angela Morley), was seated, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe would enter stage right to huge applause from the theatre audience, which usually included a number of well-known showbiz personalities. Harry would somehow loosen Peter’s trousers so that they fell to his ankles, before launching into a high-pitched version of ‘Falling in Love with Love’, his fabulous voice spiralling to the Gods. Then Peter, his trousers now safely up, would move through the ranks of the orchestra to the drums, whereupon Spike would enter with his trumpet, and Dixieland mayhem would ensue. After that we were sometimes treated to a number from Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet. Eventually the straight-faced announcer Wallace Greenslade would somehow get everyone under starter’s orders, and they were off.
I became very friendly with Max Geldray and his pretty young partner, Barbara. I often visited them at their home in Highgate, listening to records and just talking, for Max loved to talk. Sometimes he would actually play for me, putting on a recording of one of the big bands and playing along with it – as well as his tremendous sense of rhythm, he had a phenomenal ear. A pioneer of the chromatic
harmonica, Max was one of the first players to adapt the instrument to the demands of swing music. Born in Amsterdam, he’d formed his own band at an early age before joining the famous big band of Ray Ventura in Paris, appearing with many of the stars of the day. I enjoyed hearing him recall his days in Paris and friendship with the legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, and how they’d meet up late at night in the cafés of Montmartre, playing together until the small hours. There was one story I hadn’t heard before, about the famous Quintette du Hot Club de France, which featured Django and the great jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. One day they were invited to perform at a nudist camp’s annual ball. When the organisers tried to persuade them to appear in the nude as a courtesy to the guests, who’d be similarly unclad, they had demurred – until the fee was trebled. The big night came. Duly unclothed, they started playing as the curtains opened – to reveal the cheering audience fully and formally dressed in black tie and dinner suits, the ladies in long dresses. A student prank.
Max Geldray, the great harmonica virtuoso and Goon Show regular.
Great though he was as a jazz musician, Max was no actor, and his English, while good, wasn’t perfect. Spike, who had a cruel streak, loved to give him comic lines to read on air for the simple joy of hearing him stumble over them in his soft, hesitant voice. I was rather in awe of the mercurial Milligan in those teenage years, though he was always extremely friendly and interested in whatever I was doing. He never talked down to young people, and there was something of the eternal child in him, for all his quicksilver brilliance, which is perhaps why he was able to write comic verse that was so popular with young readers. As Spike became as much a family friend as a patient of my father’s, from time to time he’d invite us to parties at his house in Holden Road in Finchley, or to dip in the large inflatable pool in his garden. The trouble was, you never knew what mood Spike would be in, or when he’d suddenly turn tail, bid everyone good night, and vanish to his room. Sometimes he would send telegrams with instructions to his then wife, June, who of course lived in the same house! Once, he was accused of shooting at his neighbours’ dog because its constant barking unnerved him. There was the time, too, when he walked into an undertaker’s, lay down on the floor and cried ‘Shop!’ But when Spike was up, he was very, very up, the Irish stories and inventive wit flowing like the red wine he liked to drink. (Mention of red wine reminds me that Spike could also be generous: when Carole and I celebrated a special wedding anniversary, he sent us a bottle of wine with a note saying, ‘Enjoy this with a good meal.’ It was a bottle of Chateaux Margaux, bottled in 1964, the year of our marriage, and worth several hundred pounds. It was a long time before we could bring ourselves to open it.)
Under Cover Page 3
