by T E Kinsey
He reached out for the sticks but Ivor held on to them.
‘No, I mean I can’t reach the drum,’ he said. ‘You must be about nine bleedin’ foot tall. How am I supposed to reach the drum from down here where the normal people live?’
The band laughed again, and a few moments later they had found an old beer crate for the boy to stand on. He held out the sticks.
‘Like this?’ he said.
The drummer adjusted his grip slightly and Ivor smiled. That felt right.
He tentatively tapped the snare drum. It was loud. Much louder than he had expected. He tapped it again. He had the feel of it now.
‘Want me to show you again?’ said the drummer.
‘No, I’ve got it.’
He tried the figure slowly. The sticks bounced off the taut drum skin faster than he could control them, and the little flourish ended in a chaotic, rattling jumble.
To Ivor’s surprise – and immense relief – no one laughed.
‘Give it another go,’ said the drummer.
Ivor tried another four times, each time getting a little better but each time ending in a clattering mess.
He took a deep breath. Steadied himself. And had one last try.
He rattled through the little drum figure at full pace and finally got it dead on. The band applauded.
‘You want to watch out, mate,’ said one of them. ‘The sweeper-upper’s after your job.’
From then on, Ivor spent all his spare time in the orchestra pit, watching, learning, and asking endless questions. The percussionist gave him an old pair of sticks to practise with, and he drove his family mad, tapping out rhythms on any available surface. But it paid off. Later that year when the percussionist was ill, Ivor stood in. His proficiency earned him the nickname ‘Skins’. The name also suited his skinny – though he preferred ‘wiry’ – frame, but people seldom commented on that, nor his short stature. What struck almost everyone who saw him was the smile. Few had ever said he was handsome, but the warm, cheeky smile, so freely offered to almost everyone he met, guaranteed that a fair proportion of them would later declare him ‘oddly attractive’ or ‘weirdly good-looking’. His personal favourite had been a girl from Tottenham who had said, ‘I don’t know what it is . . . there’s something about you . . . is it your hair?’ He was very proud of his hair. By the time he was eighteen, he had left the theatre and was working as the drummer in a ragtime band with his old mate Barty.
Barty Dunn had known Ivor since they had played together on the streets of Hornsey, where they grew up. Unlike his diminutive pal, no one was ever in any doubt as to why they found Dunn attractive – he was most definitely the good-looking one of the pair. Tall, athletic, and with the darkest blue eyes anyone had ever seen (or so he had been told, many, many times), he was everyone’s idea of handsome. He was generally genial and charming, but was given to bouts of melancholy brooding which, to Skins’s perpetual bafflement, seemed to make him even more attractive. While Skins was bouncing around, larking and joking, trying to charm the girls, Dunn just had to, as Skins put it, ‘stand there looking sullen’ and the girls would ‘throw themselves at him’.
Although Dunn’s family had been no better off than their neighbours, they had aspirations for their children (more often characterized as ‘ideas above their station’) and the young Dunns were all encouraged to learn musical instruments. Barty was given piano and violin lessons and worked hard at both, but the first time he saw a double bass he knew that was the instrument for him.
His parents couldn’t properly afford the battered second-hand violin they’d bought him from the pawn shop, and they certainly couldn’t stretch to something as exotic – and inconveniently huge – as a double bass, so he admired the instrument from afar. But he put a few pennies away each week from his job at the Barratt’s sweet factory in Wood Green, and by the time Skins was ready to join a ragtime band, Barty had his own double bass and nothing could stop him following his old pal on the path to fame and fortune.
Black American soldiers had introduced the boys to the new ‘jazz’ music while they were serving in France, and as soon as they were demobbed, they had set about assembling a group of like-minded musicians to take London by storm.
It had taken them four years and many changes of personnel to get what they were after, but eventually they had the band they wanted. Gigs were hard to come by at first – clubs were still a little suspicious of the new music – but slowly the doors started to open to them as the ‘bright young things’ demanded the music they were listening to on their gramophones. The Dizzy Heights had arrived.
When the party had finally wound down and the last of the guests had tottered tipsily on to the streets, the band retrieved their instruments and cleared the makeshift stage. Eustace Taylor packed up his trumpet, Benny Charles his trombone. Blanche and Puddle had a saxophone and a clarinet each. Elk Elkington put away his banjo and Mickey Kent tied a length of string to his speaking trumpet and slung it over his shoulder.
It was getting on towards dawn and the buses and trams were already running, taking the early starters to work, but they served just as well to take the late finishers in the band home. All except Skins and Dunn.
Skins and his drum set had been turned away from more buses and trams than he could count (‘You can’t bring all that tat on here, mate – what do you think this is, a bleedin’ totter’s cart?’), and the one time he’d tried to get it down the escalator at a tube station had ended in disaster. Dunn and his double bass had fewer problems by comparison, but it was still like travelling with a drunk friend, and he, too, had been turned away from many a bus with a weary ‘Only room for one more, mate, sorry.’
They had the use of a storeroom at Tipsy Harry’s if they wanted it, but it wasn’t always convenient and they often needed somewhere else to store their bulky instruments. Fortunately, Barty Dunn ‘knew a bloke’ who ran a shop on New Row, near Covent Garden. In return for free admission to any club the boys happened to be playing, and the occasional complimentary drink, he let them store their instruments in the shop’s stockroom. The only problem that remained was how to get them there.
To this end, they had invested in a large handcart which would carry Skins’s drums and Dunn’s double bass and still leave room for any extras – their best suits if they’d been playing somewhere posh, or a crate of beer left over from the show, perhaps. Most often the space was occupied by Dunn’s romantic conquest of the evening, who would giggle her way round town before he whisked her back to his digs in Wood Green.
Tonight, though, Dunn had left the party with only Skins, his bass, and a few bottles of champagne liberated from the party on his way out.
‘Unusual for you to be bird-less after a gig,’ said Skins as they wound through the deserted West End streets, pushing their clattering cart. ‘Although it’s been happening a lot lately, hasn’t it?’
‘A worrying trend, mate,’ said Dunn. ‘That one with the massive feather on her headband kept giving me the glad eye, but by the time we came off she was canoodling in the corner with some chinless twit with a monocle. A bleedin’ monocle.’
‘Losing your touch, then?’
‘Do you know, I think I might be. It’s been weeks since I’ve had so much as a chaste peck on the cheek. What if I’m getting too old?’
‘You’ve only just turned thirty.’
‘Five years ago,’ said Dunn. ‘I’m ancient now. No one wants to go to bed with an ancient bass player.’
‘Look on the bright side, though. There were times not so long ago when we didn’t think we’d live to see thirty. But we got through it. And you’ll get through this little drought. And you’re a jazz musician. We’re cool. The kids love a musician.’
They had arrived at the shop by now. Skins let them in and Dunn helped him lug his drums and traps case through to the back. With the gear safely stowed, they locked up and leaned the cart against the wall. They said their goodbyes on St Martin’s Lane and Dunn strol
led off towards the bus stop, whistling a tune they’d been trying to learn after hearing it on a gramophone record brought over by some visiting American musicians. Skins carried on up past Seven Dials and on towards Bloomsbury.
By the time Dunn got to Finsbury Park, the sun was up and people were already making their way to work. He couldn’t face the two-and-a-half-mile walk home, so he opted to wait for a tram to take him to Wood Green.
Barty Dunn made his way round the corner from the tram stop at Wood Green, to the little terraced house on Coburg Road where he rented a room from Mrs Phyllis Cordell. She had lost her husband and both her sons in the Great War, and had welcomed Dunn into her home. She was grateful for the much-needed rent, and for the company of the rakish musician who added a bit of glamour to the otherwise perfectly ordinary, working-class street. Although, by Dunn’s reckoning, she was not much more than ten years his senior, Mrs Cordell doted on him like an indulgent mother, chuckling over his tales from the clubs and clucking over his hangovers and minor ailments.
She didn’t mind the strange hours he kept, nor did she bat an eyelid at the seemingly endless succession of pretty young ladies who emerged from his room just after lunch several times a week. She made them a cup of tea and offered them a sandwich, chattering away as though she was delighted to have them in her home. Which she was. But she didn’t expect to see them again. She knew it would be a different face that came blushing into her parlour next time.
This was the sole source of friction between tenant and landlady.
‘I don’t mind who you spend the night with,’ she had said one afternoon as she handed him yet another cup of tea. ‘And I don’t mind what you get up to when you do. Lord knows I’d enjoy a bit of that meself if I ever got the chance. Not that I ever will. Woman of my age.’ She laughed at the very idea of such a thing. ‘But I don’t want to see you ending up lonely. You need to find a nice young woman. A war widow, maybe. Settle down. Make a life for yourself. A family. You need a family around you. Everybody needs that.’
‘But what would you do then, Mrs C?’ he’d asked with a smile. ‘I can’t leave you on your own.’
‘I’ll have Gallipoli,’ she said, and patted the gormless mongrel’s friendly head.
She had adopted the dopey dog a few years earlier and had named him after the disastrous campaign that had taken both her boys from her. The neighbours had tutted.
‘You don’t want to be calling him that,’ one had said. ‘It’ll be like dwelling on it. You should put it all behind you. No good’ll come from reminding yourself of it every time you call the dog in.’
But she had insisted that it would be a comfort. The name of her new canine companion would take the sting out of it.
‘It might have took my boys,’ she had said, ‘but now I can hear the name and think of this little fella instead. I can remember my boys as the two handsome lads who went off to war, and Gallipoli as the silly little mutt who keeps me company now they’ve gone.’
It didn’t make sense to anyone but her and Dunn.
He let himself into the darkened house with his latchkey. Mrs C always left him a glass of milk and a tongue sandwich on a shelf in the larder – ‘just in case you’re hungry when you get in’ – and he sat at the kitchen table and ate it while he waited for tiredness to tell him to take himself off to bed.
Gallipoli had heard him come in and stirred himself from his basket by the stove to see if there might be any food on offer. Dunn peeled a slice of tongue from the generously filled sandwich and shared it with the dog, who ate it greedily. He lolled sleepily against Dunn’s leg for a few moments more, but when it became evident that there was to be no more to eat, he padded back to his basket and settled down again.
‘Room in there for an old soldier?’ said Dunn, but the dog was already asleep. ‘Better get myself upstairs, then. See you tomorrow, old mate.’
After a quick visit to the toilet in the tiny backyard, Dunn trod lightly up the stairs and into his room. Mrs Cordell had taken the wartime blackout restrictions more seriously than most and had run up thick, heavy curtains to try to stop light from spilling out on to the street.
‘What you doing that for?’ her neighbour had asked. ‘We’ve got the streetlights half covered up.’
‘And when the zeppelins come,’ said Mrs C, ‘they’ll see your house, not mine. You can come and sleep in my parlour when they bomb you out.’
‘What are they going to bomb us for, all the way out here?’
‘The sweet factory. Good for morale – sweets. They want to break us, them Germans.’
‘Liquorice Allsorts,’ laughed her neighbour. ‘Vital war supplies.’
Mrs Cordell had blacked out her windows nevertheless, and her neighbours had nervously followed suit. Now, nearly seven years after the end of the war, the blackout curtains served to supply semi-nocturnal Barty Dunn with the darkness he needed to sleep his way through the morning.
He threw his clothes over the back of the chair and all but fell into his bed. Sleep came almost immediately.
It only took Skins about twenty minutes to walk home from the shop. He and his wife, Ellie, lived in a Georgian town house on a leafy street not far from the British Museum. The house was part of a row of similarly impressive dwellings, each fronted with white-painted stone at the ground floor, with dun-coloured bricks on the three upper floors. A gate in the black-painted railings opened to give access to the ‘area’ below street level – the servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance to the house – while the front door was reached by climbing a flight of six stone steps. The tall windows on the first floor gave on to narrow balconies which none of the street’s residents ever used. It was rather more house than anyone expected a jazz drummer to live in, and they were right to think so – it was Ellie who had bought it for them using money from her inheritance.
Under the terms of her father’s will, the entire – quite substantial – family fortune should have become hers when she married. When the trustees in America had learned that her husband-to-be was a musician, however, they had invoked ‘the gold-digger clause’. It had been inserted by her father’s lawyers to protect her from such undesirable ne’er-do-wells and had frozen the bulk of the money until the tenth anniversary of their marriage.
Under pressure from her Aunt Adelia, they had grudgingly released enough to enable her to buy a property in London suitable for a member of the Wilson family of Annapolis. There was an annual allowance, too, sufficient to keep her comfortable. But the trustees handled the household bills and servants’ wages themselves and were unwilling to allow her control of the full amount until they knew that this Maloney fella meant business.
Skins let himself in. It was half past four in the morning so there was no one about. Even the housemaid – who, it seemed to Skins, was always working – was still fast asleep. He knew he should be, too, and that if he got his head down as quickly as possible, he’d be able to spend some time with Ellie and the children before he had to go out to work again.
Like Dunn, though, he found himself too wide awake to go straight up and instead went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of cocoa. He took it through to the drawing room, where he planned to sit in his favourite armchair and read yesterday’s paper.
When he arrived he found Ellie lightly snoring in her own favourite chair, her dark hair strewn across the winged back and the paper resting on her delicate nose. He gently touched her arm and she stirred.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘What are you doing down here?’
She folded the paper and sat up. ‘Catherine had a nightmare so I went to try to comfort her. By the time she was settled I was so wide awake I thought I might as well come down here and wait for you.’
‘Poor kid. Is she all right?’
‘She’s fine. But how are you? You must be done in.’
‘I’m fine, too. And all the better for seeing you. I wish I’d known you were down here, though – I’d have made you some cocoa.’
She smiled. ‘I was hoping to be able to welcome you home, but I nodded off. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Anything good in the paper?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘There never is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why we bother with it. We hardly get time to read it, and when we do, we just complain it wasn’t worth reading.’
‘We need to keep up with current affairs,’ she said.
‘And why’s that?’
‘I come from a very political family. We like to keep our fingers on the pulse.’
‘Which is why you used to be a nurse, obviously. It all makes sense now.’
‘The metaphorical pulse, goofus.’
They had met in Weston-super-Mare in 1910 when Ellie was touring Europe with her aunt. That trip got ‘a little out of hand’ and the two women were spirited home by the American embassy after a series of unpleasant incidents at their hotel. But the encounter at the Arundel Hotel where Skins and Dunn had been playing with Robinson’s Ragtime Roisterers had changed their lives forever.
Skins had managed to hand her his calling card before she was whisked away, and the two youngsters struck up a transatlantic correspondence that carried on uninterrupted until the war. Their letters became more sporadic as the mail ships began to face attacks in 1915. The last letter Ellie received from him told her that Skins and Dunn had volunteered together for the Middlesex Regiment and were certain to be in France by the end of the year. Ellie had no intention of leaving it at that. She had a plan, and it only took three years of working her way round the local aid stations in France to get it to work perfectly.
Skins had thought himself lucky to get all the way to the summer of 1918 with only minor scratches and a bruised ankle to show for it. Then, one bright, sunny day in August 1918, a stray shell landed directly in front of his company’s trench. Skins was leaning against the wall telling a joke about a talking dog when the shell exploded. The sturdy construction of the trench had protected him and all his friends from the blast, but the signpost on the trench’s lip, pointing westwards and indicating that Tipperary was ‘a long, long way’, did not fare so well. It was knocked over by the force of the explosion and landed on Skins’s unprotected head, knocking him unconscious.