by Ben Watt
When I was eight, I tagged along with my half-brothers on the bus, but they were nine years older than me and soon to leave school. Then, until I got a bike, I went on the bus on my own, but secretly hoped for a lift from one of my first-year teachers, Miss Sworder. She drove a beige Mini Clubman and followed the same route as the bus. I’d sometimes catch her at the traffic lights if she saw me. She was elderly, in woollen tights and brown brogues, but her car was warm, and smelled of face powder and lipstick and the papery dust of exercise books. She drove poorly. She ran over a pigeon once on Rocks Lane; it had been winged and was lying flapping in the road. Everyone else was swerving to miss it, but she was oblivious to its plight and just drove straight over it; I felt it burst under the wheel and she didn’t bat an eyelid. She once unintentionally put two wheels up on the pavement to squeeze past a lorry near the Red Lion and clipped the handbag of a woman standing at the bus stop. ‘We’ll be late, late, late,’ she always chimed. If anything, we were always early.
I hated cycling in bad weather. I wore a leaking yellow cape with thumb-straps that billowed in the rain. Wind was the worst. It came right off the river and blew pitilessly down the long straight unforgiving road. Many times I pedalled into a fierce headwind, making no progress at all – the massive plane trees waving like wet ghosts above – shouting into the noise with tears streaming down my face, ‘Why can’t Mum or Dad take me in the car? Why can’t I get a lift?’ I was regularly passed by my hell-bent wiry chemistry teacher, pedalling scientifically, protected from the elements only by a tightly buttoned tweed jacket and a pair of bicycle clips, and I screamed at him too, into the word-stealing gale.
At the bottom of Lonsdale Road we approached the corner of Barnes High Street and a full view of the Thames across to Dukes Meadows and the hulking one-hundred-year-old grey railway bridge; I thought it cast a baleful shadow on to the river with its thick riveted iron curves and skinhead graffiti. At low tide I used to go bottle hunting amid the carrier bags, the chunks of polystyrene and shredded nylon rope on the squelchy, putrid mud flat for old clay ginger-beer bottles and transparent sea-green glass bottles of R. White’s lemonade with the marble still in the moulded neck; people must have been tossing them over the river wall into the mud and silt at low tide for years from the pubs on the corner. To find an unbroken one made the weekend; you could clean it and keep it, or sell it to one of the little second-hand antiques shops near by for a quid.
‘Know where we are, Dad?’ I said.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Lonsdale Road. Look, that’s the Bull’s Head on the left, and the Waterman’s.’
I was suddenly aware that I was giving him orienteering based on local pubs, not the green promise of Dukes Meadows on the far Chiswick side of the river, or the simple expanse of the glittering tin-foil river we had stood and stared at so often. It struck me that so many of my early memories of my dad were of being with him in pubs.
The Bull’s Head was, and still is, an institution on the London jazz scene. A Young’s Brewery pub, it was presided over for years by a huge huffing landlord called Albert Tolley. As a boy I only remember the thin voluminous white short-sleeve shirts he wore, outside his trousers, with his string vest showing through from the inside. Short of hair, he combed over the remaining grey strands in a defiant side parting. He was popular amongst the jazz musicians who frequented the place.
‘All right, young Tommy?’ he used to say to me.
‘It’s Ben,’ I’d say.
‘Ha ha ha ha hahhhh,’ he’d roar, and ruffle my hair until it hurt.
It became my dad’s home from home. A saloon bar man, he was happiest in the company of quick-witted plumbers and fitters, tenor players and drummers. The Sunday lunchtime trips to the Bull’s Head became a part of my growing up. The back room was famous for its evening and Sunday lunchtime sessions. My dad drank in the bar, leaving me with a Coke and a bag of crisps on the fire escape by the back door of the music room with only Don the doorman for company. Don slouched on a bar stool in the doorway taking the admission money. He became locally famous for his sandals and socks, which in the sexy seventies was tantamount to wearing your underpants outside your trousers. In honour of the Mel Brooks film, he had been given the nickname ‘Blazing Sandals’ by someone at the pub; my dad couldn’t stop laughing about it, and I laughed too, but mainly because my dad was laughing, as I didn’t really know what it meant.
Every now and then he would pop out and ask if I was OK, maybe stand for a moment, pat me on the head, and then slope back into the bar. I can remember thinking that he was to some extent encouraging me to listen and absorb, but I was also conscious of an invisible screen between us when it came to the music, as though it was so much part of his life that transference of something so deep was almost impossible. It seemed he was leaving it up to me, that there was nothing he could impart. I felt awkward and thought I should just stand there and do my best.
Nonetheless, I was transfixed by the jazz room. I was never allowed inside because of my age, but gazed into the darkness of that magical place: the stubby low bar stools; the threadbare fag-butt-burnt carpet; the chalky posters; the portraits of jazz legends; the soft glow of the cigarette machine; the low stage; the microphones and cables; the clink of glasses; the idling exhaust of smoke hanging like low cloud; the murmurs of approval and spontaneous whoops and bursts of applause. It was light outside, yet dark inside the room, and it seemed so rebellious to not turn the lights on and see what you were doing in the middle of the day. It was a secret world – not like Sundays at all.
As a kid who had seen Marc Bolan and Sweet on TV, I thought how unremarkable jazz musicians were in their appearance, and wondered if they had just got out of bed; many of them probably had. The resident trio of Tony Lee, Tony Archer and Martin Drew seemed so gloomy. It only took a couple of choruses before Tony Lee’s shiny bald head was glistening and his huge hands were striding across the piano, but his face and Zapata moustache remained a picture of despondency. Tony Archer on double bass wore loud Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned uninvitingly to the chest; I thought this was a bit off-putting on an old man, although he was probably only in his thirties. When the soloists played I was transfixed. I loved Bobby Wellins’s tone when he played the slow ones; it was a sad, warm, resigned-but-resilient sound that spoke to me even as a boy. When I first heard Don Weller play – a vast vagabond of a man with a dishevelled beard and a tenor saxophone that spat splinters – I thought he must make a frightening dad.
I found the jazz I heard mysterious and difficult and gripping, played by unfamiliar people who were often quite scary, people it would not be easy to get to know. Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I sensed it was like a secret society: language-less men with so much to say, who came alive through music, who understood each other and revealed so much through beats and notes, each with a common hinterland. When a session ended and the lights came up, it was as if a spell were broken, and as they packed away their instruments they returned to being just quiet, unexceptional men: self-protective; self-effacing; internalised. I don’t think I ever quite shook this off. Maybe it informed my relationship with my dad.
After the Sunday session was all over, I was allowed into the room and stepped up on to the stage and touched the piano, which I thought was a very daring thing to do. The grand piano was like a holy relic. When they replaced it with an upright they took the covers off to increase its volume in the room, and I adored its skeletal appearance, the rows of felted hammers, the thick wound strings. Very occasionally my dad played the piano after everyone had gone home, and the glasses were being cleared away and the ashtrays emptied, and even though a few of the regulars stood in the doorway and whistled a bit and shouted, ‘Yeah, Tommy,’ his playing made me think he was lonely inside.
‘What are you thinking, Dad?’ I said, as we turned into Barnes High Street.
‘It was all a long time ago,’ he said.
‘Good memories, though?’
‘I can’t remember.’
I wondered what exactly he couldn’t remember. Just the faces? Or was much of it now just rubbed out?
Back then, he bristled with confidence. He insisted on driving to the pub and driving back several hours later. He assured my mum that the car ‘knew its way home’ and that negotiating the dark tree-canopied roads by the ill-lit common, keeping a steady thirty miles per hour past the front door to Barnes Police Station before driving in a straight line over the two consecutive railway level crossings, and swinging in between the extremely narrow concrete gateposts leading to the car-port at home presented absolutely no problem to a man of his intuitive driving skills, however many he had drunk; and to his arguable credit he pulled it off, week after week. Then one day in the early seventies my mum insisted enough was enough; if he didn’t end up in a ditch by the side of the common, then they’d lose a gatepost they could ill afford to replace. She said that he must take up cycling.
The shed at the end of the alley down the side of the house was tidied in readiness and two headlamps, a yellow reflective belt and a fashionable ‘space-frame’ racing-green Moulton bicycle with small white tyres and a high saddle appeared. She was rather pleased with my dad’s ready acceptance of the new routine; I even overheard unexpected light talk of a new fitness regime too. In fact, she called me over to the sitting-room window and we waved him off to the pub at eight o’clock on a mild April evening on the first ‘trial night’ (as it was referred to), and a little later we retired to bed.
The alley down the side of the house in those days benefited in winter months from a warm orange glow that spilled over the wooden fence and was cast by the outside light above our neighbour’s back door. As soon as the clocks went forward, however, our neighbour was in the habit of turning it off.
We were woken at around midnight by a colossal clanging racket. By the time I was out of bed and at the window I could see lights on in other houses in the road.
It turned out that after three hours of steady drinking in the pub, my dad had successfully managed to put on his reflective belt the right way round; he’d illuminated both of his lamps correctly, negotiated two roundabouts, the darkened common, two sets of level crossings and our narrow gateposts, but – flummoxed by the unexpected absence of the warm glow from our neighbour’s back-door light – had lost control of the bike down the side of the house and ploughed straight into three large metal dustbins and a garden rake, injuring his elbow and, for good measure, writing off the bike.
My mum was incandescent with suppressed rage at breakfast the next morning as I got ready for school.
‘Look on the bright side, Romany,’ he said the next evening. ‘At least the gateposts are still standing.’
I turned to look at him in the car. He was ageing so quickly – such a small man, somehow shrunken. He seemed to be growing more and more like his own soft-edged mother. The backs of his hands were bruised, as if stained with purple ink. He was tapping his feet up and down on the black foot mat to an imaginary beat. It was exactly what his mother used to do, only she would accompany it with a dry toneless whistle to the tune of an imaginary Scottish tattoo that used to drive us all round the bend.
‘There’s Barnes Pond, Dad, and the Sun Inn, look,’ I said. (Another pub, I thought.)
‘No swans,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘No swans on the pond. Used to be. We had swans on the river that came right up to the house in Oxford. Very majestic creatures.’
He turned and glanced at the pub and rubbed the full face of his index finger right across the closed top lid of one eye.
‘You and Mum used to go there a lot,’ I said.
‘Did we now?’ he said in a measured tone.
It was an odd turn of phrase. It came out sounding as if he was tired of being shown pubs, and that he was sensing something disingenuous in my voice – castigatory even – as though he thought I was trying to prompt him into an admission of some kind. But then the thought receded and I wondered if I had merely projected my own feelings on to him, and he could quite possibly just not remember.
We turned right at the pond and down towards the abandoned police station, and right along by the common.
‘Do you remember Colin Welland’s house, Dad? The playwright. Just back there.’
‘Do I?’
‘Of course you do! You did some decorating for him.’
‘That’s right. I did. You’re right,’ he said, suddenly brightening. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed. You have got a good memory, Ben.’ We turned into Vine Road. ‘Never much liked him though. Very full of himself.’
We drove along under the beautiful arch of lolling and embracing winter-bare trees, and on up towards the old pale blue railway signal box, now derelict. The gates were open. We trundled over the level crossing, down the short dip with the recreation ground on our right, and up to the second set of gates. The signal box that used to stand there had been knocked down.
Back then, I could see right up into it if I was waiting for a train. On hot days, the signalman kept the door open and I could see the rows of gleaming polished levers and machinery used to operate the points. You had to be strong. Young lads often got the job, and in the summer holidays, they’d be wearing cap-sleeve T-shirts and handkerchiefs round their necks like roadies for Rod Stewart, and teenage girls gathered under the box to watch and giggle as the latest sweating recruit worked the levers; he would be loving every minute of it. Sitting there on my bike waiting for the gates to open in my school uniform I thought it was one of the coolest jobs in the world.
We drove up and over the line and down the other side, past the scruffy green open space where I used to play football until it was dark on Sunday afternoons with anyone who wanted a game, or sneak under the rope – draped by the Council to protect the cricket square – to bowl on a real wicket.
At the pillar box we turned right. I drove quietly down the dead-end road and stopped outside number 15.
‘There you go, Dad,’ I said.
It was our old house.
Chapter 12
With the car windows down I could imagine the wind rustling in the huge twin copper beech trees that had stood outside the house – one at the front, one at the back – for as long as I could remember. They were so tall that they were higher than the house itself and their mahogany leaves changed colour as the months passed – old gold, henna, ginger, burnt orange – gathering in the front garden and alleyway in autumn like the sweepings of broken and torn pieces of dark parchment. I used to ride my bike through them, listening to them crunch under the thin tyres.
The house seemed smaller. Semi-detached. Quite squat. But still quiet and insulated from the world. No passing traffic. A coveted dead-end road on the edge of Barnes Common. Christmas lights were on in the downstairs front room. So different to how I remembered it: the darkened bedroom of my ancient grandmother. The house was converted and divided back then. A self-contained flat at street level. It was the only way my mum and dad could afford it back in 1962: they bought the top two floors; my grandmother paid for the ground floor. We all used the front entrance, but we had to go upstairs to our flat door, while my grandmother’s door was right there in the hall. I was a baby in a cot in that room above the porch. Born in the December of the brutal winter of 1962–63. Thick fog on the night I was delivered. I wasn’t allowed outside for three months. There’d be ice on the inside of the window in the morning. I glanced up at the single dormer window in the slate roof and pictured the old temporary partition walls in the top-floor bedrooms, put up when everyone first moved in in order that my half-brothers and my half-sister could all sleep up there.
Looking again at the first-floor window above the porch I thought back to the late autumn of 1970 after it had been turned into my mum’s little office. I would have been almost eight. I pictured her typing energetically, basking in the glow of success after her trip to Mexico to interview Burton and Taylor, my dad in th
e back bedroom feverishly writing arrangements for his new jazz orchestra residency at the Dorchester in the coming new year. It must have been a good time, each of them with a sense of purpose, the relationship balanced, twin layers of lightning.
It can’t have been easy for a few years before that; their careers were going at different speeds. Her acting ambitions long gone – and with the older children more independent – my mum had been writing showbiz features mainly for She magazine since 1963. She used to love recounting her favourites, the ‘goodies’, as she called them: a young ambitious David Frost at the Waldorf; a badly hung-over Richard Harris slumped before her horizontally, dressed only in a shortie silk dressing gown and a pair of tennis socks; a nervous Michael Caine on the eve of stardom in The Ipcress File in 1964 in his flash new flat at Marble Arch with its freshly hung Japanese grass wallpaper, Dino storage units designed by Zeev Aram in the sitting room, and pristine navy-and-chocolate curtains in the bedroom. ‘I’ve only brought an electric razor and a teaspoon from my last place. I’ve already spent three grand on this flat,’ he said. ‘I’ve gone for just a five-year lease, as I reckon I’m either going to be rich enough to live here, or so poor that’s all I’ll be able to afford. So five years is about right. If the film flops, I’ll not go out; I’ll sit here on my own till the rent runs out.’ By 1969 she was doing ten major feature interviews a year. She meticulously collected the published versions in her scrapbooks, among them, Rod Steiger, Glenda Jackson, Anthony Hopkins, Goldie Hawn, Woody Allen.
In contrast, my dad had not had any decent work in over four years, and you could say nothing serious in almost eight. Unwilling to compromise his musical principles, he had watched the wave of pop music that came in the wake of The Beatles wash many of his dreams away. Interest in big band jazz faded. Ironically he was asked by George Martin at Parlophone to work on the Beatles project as an arranger right at the beginning but, sticking to his guns, said no. In the event, his days leading and composing for a big swinging successful jazz orchestra stuttered to a halt in the mid-sixties. While my mum was working in town three days a week – sometimes not getting home until ten – and travelling abroad on assignments three or four times a year, he had managed to fill the ensuing gap with only a couple of years as a jobbing arranger for the BBC and a false start writing for the difficult early months of London Weekend Television. With four teenage stepchildren and me, he had been forced to accept an unexpected role as house-husband. I am sure it isn’t how he imagined it would turn out, at the peak of his powers when he first met my mum.
