The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

  There’s one called ‘Jeepster’; it has these raucous angular guitars which sound exactly how he looks. They strut and throw their head back, pout and do that thing with their shoulders. Did he just say something about ‘the universe reclining in your hair’? He did. The universe! – a place bigger than the world – reclining? – just sort of lying in a hammock, or on a settee. In your hair! I must have a girlfriend. If I have a girlfriend I’ll tell her that she has the universe reclining in her hair and I’ll feel like Marc Bolan. I ask my mum how to get a girlfriend and she tells me to ask my dad. Jack Caveney has a question of his own: ‘What the bloody hell is a jeepster when it’s at home?’ It’s a good question, Dad, I don’t know, ‘I’m just a vampire for your lo oo oo ve . . . ah ah ah . . .’

  What strikes me now (apart from just how tolerant they were) is just how absent music was from my parents’ own lives. If they were courting in the mid-to-late fifties, where was the rock ’n’ roll? Photographs of them from their early marriage show my dad sporting a tame version of a Teddy boy quiff: more Johnnie Ray than Presley. His lapels were thin, trousers wide and tapered.

  Kathleen was a looker, but her style aped that of Hollywood, presumably a much richer source of inspiration than any of the (few) visible female singers of the time. Did they Jive, do the Twist, go to the Hop? Where were they when they heard of Cochran’s death on his British tour of 1960: was it their Kurt Cobain moment? Who did Kathleen have a crush on? What music did they choose to snog to?

  I suspect that their music was the dance halls, and as such was regulated and regimented; something that happened on weekends. They would always get up to dance at family weddings. It was always the same dance, the one where the man gently pulls the woman by the hand and she spins around under his arm, leans back, spins round the other way. Jack would always look as though he was on guard duty on the dancefloor, never catching his wife’s eye but looking around at the buffet, the bar, the queue for the Gents.

  My friend Dave H has written a wonderful book called Why Music Matters. In it he documents the myriad of ways that music connects our inner lives to the world at large, how it helps us to negotiate the relationship between private experience and public identity. The title has been running through my head as I have been thinking about Jack and Kath, and whether it held true for them. My generation take it as an article of faith that music matters, nothing could be more certain (sometimes that belief is the only thing that is).

  For my parents music was Entertainment, the soundtrack to a Night Out – a pair of slippery double-edged terms if ever I heard them. Can you not hear the class-sneer echoing in these words? (The defendants were headed for/on their way back from a Night Out, m’lord.) Is it even possible to use the word ‘entertainment’ without the raising of an upper lip, a tacit admission that there is always the presence of the ‘so-called’ lurking there somewhere, a judgement which must prefix the pleasures of the feckless masses?

  Like my books, records are becoming A Thing. They’re starting to breed. My cousin John – Helen’s brother – has given me his copy of a single that has been obsessing me for months. It couldn’t be less like T. Rex whilst still sounding sort of exactly like T. Rex. But whereas Marc was smouldering and impish, fey and Byronic, this lot look like debt collectors. Me and John are watching them on telly – The Old Grey Whistle Test it must have been. No glitter or feather boas are in evidence here. They’re called Dr Feelgood and they look like they want to have sex with your mum. Or maybe just have.

  The lead singer is wearing a white suit jacket over a black Ben Sherman shirt and dark straight-legged jeans. The bassist is walking up and down the stage as though he is measuring up for a fitted carpet, whilst the drummer – who I would later learn is called simply (and wonderfully) The Big Figure – is as inscrutable as Buddha. And the lead guitarist? The lead guitarist is called Wilko Johnson and looks like no human being I have seen before. There is something Frankenstein’s monster-ish about him, as though he is being constantly surprised – affronted even – by the way in which the various parts of his body have been assembled. Someone somewhere is sending jolts of electrical current throughout his body, causing him to pace the stage in manic pursuit of whichever bastard is responsible. His neck sends his head bolting out in these spasms – convulsions – which seem to punctuate the gaps between each chord.

  On the sofa we sit, staring at these men possessed. The singer and harmonica player Lee Brilleaux is doing that thing with his fist, battering out the time, punch-conducting the rhythm of the band. His vocals cut in: ‘If there’s som’ing at Ah like / It’s a way ma woman walk / An’ if it’s som’in’ Ah like bedder / Is a way she bab ’e talk . . .’ What happened to all that reclining in your hair stuff? This isn’t that. This is She doing Something, and Doing It Right, whatever that means.

  Records breed records, like all that begat-ing stuff in the Bible: the difference being that in music the genealogy often works the other way. ‘If you like the Feelgoods you gotta like Howlin’ Wolf,’ says the man at the Disc and Tape Exchange, Accrington’s premier music shop, ‘or Muddy Waters . . . or Eric Clapton.’ I have just bought Stupidity, Dr Feelgood’s live album, which has a blistering version of a song called ‘I’m a Man’. (‘I spell “M” “Aaaaaa” “N”’, which, as my dad points out, isn’t really how you spell Man at all.) The man – spelt properly this one – tells me that there is another version, a better version, by The Yardbirds from the sixties, and that if you like this then you’ll definitely like that. He plays it to me. It sounds horrible. It sounds horrible because it isn’t Wilko Johnson singing or Lee Brilleaux harmonica-ing or the Big Figure being a Big Figure. It isn’t in fact Dr Feelgood, and what I like about this song is precisely that it is by Dr Feelgood.

  There was nothing like buying records for reminding you that it wasn’t just records you were buying. Purchasing a piece of vinyl was a way of announcing your identity. It was a pledge of allegiance.

  So the man in the record shop is into the blues, and I am into Dr Feelgood, ragged-arsed exponents of the blues. In a few months I’ll be into ELO, Supertramp and Fleetwood Mac. Soon I’ll discover that 10cc are the cleverest band in the world, with songs stuffed full of irony and pastiche, punning their way through the charts with a wink that only Graham Who-Is-Doing-Very-Well-at-St-Mary’s-College can see.

  Next

  ‘A tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, Mein Herr’

  Sally Bowles, ‘Mein Herr’, Cabaret

  The homework was simple enough. Write about how you understand the word ‘God’ – ‘god’ even. A couple of pages, nothing more. I write something like:

  God is everywhere and God is nowhere. He exists in the world and in me, and He is the bridge between those two things. He is my conscience and He is the feeling of whole-ness. When I think or feel that He is not with me, I go to a place that some people call ‘hell’, but is really just the absence of God’s love and Truth . . .

  And on it went; the quasi-mystic, half-baked theology that only a fourteen-year-old boy who takes his Catholicism seriously could come up with. I remember thinking that I could nick a bit from Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’) but that the priests would probably know. Jock Roland would certainly know and, besides, it’s probably not a good idea to combine plagiarism with religious piety. It won the form prize and ended up being published in the school magazine.

  It is the daily school assembly. There are the usual announcements (list of candidates for detention, sports stuff) followed by the usual prayers. This not-quite-mass tends to be rounded off by a not-quite-sermon, a kind of thought for the day delivered by our headmaster.

  He is already a legend, a hip young-ish gunslinger of a priest by the name of Father Kevin O’Neill. Everyone calls him the Rev Kev, a name that nicely captures his brand of vocation and cool. He wears thick glasses, the kind that used to be called jam-jar and that make him look a bit like Buddy Holly. His hair is black and wiry, worn co
mbed back, as though in homage to a Teddy boy past that he never quite had. He clears his throat, his voice is well spoken without being posh. ‘I would like to thank everyone who submitted articles and poems and drawings to the school magazine . . . It’s been the best year ever.’ (Laughter, he says this every year.) ‘My attention was particularly taken by a piece about a young man’s relationship to God.’ (Fuck!) ‘I won’t name him because I don’t want to embarrass him but I’m sure he won’t mind if I read . . .’

  And read he does. Every fucking word. I am no longer just a quiet and reflective poet, I am now a visionary. Not just Gerard Manley Hopkins, but Moses: Jesus even. After all, He was an only child too (wasn’t he?). Of course I want to melt between the cracks of the assembly room floor, but I also feel myself floating above them. All clichés apply: grounds were summoned up for swallowing, hearts were proudly inflated, faces did indeed colour.

  He doesn’t know me yet, the Rev Kev, though I want him to. He has only been the head for a couple of years, taking over from Father Cassidy, a man about whom people used the word ‘kindly’ partly because they didn’t know what else to say about him.

  Father O’Neill wasn’t anybody’s idea of kindly: he was a rock star. It was said that he smoked ‘pot’. He was into Stevie Wonder – not like Enid’s pretence of being into David Bowie (setting us ‘Space Oddity’ for Prac. Crit. only works if you have heard the record, Mr Lawrence) – but properly into him, concert-going and all. He rarely wore his dog collar, but when he did it served to remind you/me that being a priest was both nothing special and yet something extraordinary. It said, Here is a man who is devoting his life to Life, that banal, troubled and troubling thing. It said, It couldn’t be easier, this priest thing: you just have to listen to people and do what’s right, maybe offer them guidance when they’re stuck or compassion when they’re in trouble. Yet it also announced, This priest thing is a thing like no other. You are willing to embrace people in all their pettiness and spite, love them precisely at their most unloveable, forgive them at their most unforgiveable.

  And he teaches English. I love Jock Roland – I want to be Jock Roland – but he’s not going to forgive me all my trespasses. And besides, he’s got a wife and child. I look at their pictures as I stand in his bookshop asking what to buy next. I’m jealous of his kid. I quite fancy his wife.

  Apparently Father O’Neill teaches Beckett! Beckett! I have tried three or four times to read Molloy and each time I seem to get further away from it. I tell this to Jock Roland – I bought the bloody thing from his shop after all – and he tells me that this experience (the desire to read, the failure to understand, the going back to read) is a very Beckettian way of reading Beckett. I should carry on, learn to fail better, listen to the language.

  I wait for the Rev Kev outside his office. It’s on a school corridor and I know the other kids walking past assume I’m in trouble. I quite like this, the thought that they think I’m in trouble. Even though I’m not. I’ve never really been in trouble.

  He is walking along now, heading for his office, key in hand. ‘Are you waiting for me?’ ‘I’m . . . I wrote . . . I’m Graham Caveney.’ (I hate my stupid name. It always sounds as though I’m swallowing the last bit.) ‘I wrote that thing about God.’ (That thing! About God! Those two things shouldn’t go together: I’ve made the Divinity sound like a shopping list.) ‘Ah, yes. Come in . . .’

  We drink coffee and talk about books. He is relaxed in a way that makes me feel relaxed, interesting in a way that makes me feel interesting. He was delighted to read my meditation (a meditation, that’s what it was!) on God and he thinks that yes I’m right, it isn’t just that God is in the details but that God is, as it were, The Details. Transcendence isn’t something magical: it is something verging on the banal, the everyday certainly. And that’s what makes it magical.

  Have I tried D. H. Lawrence? He was saying something similar although from a very different position of course. (Of course!) I tell him about Beckett and he makes the same point as Jock Roland, except that he says that the next time there is a performance – Godot or Krapp – we (the school?) should go. You’ve never been to the theatre? I hadn’t. You must. That’s where Beckett comes into his own. (But isn’t it weird being a . . . well . . . a . . . priest and liking Beckett, who didn’t . . . you know . . . believe in . . . ?) Not at all. The God that Beckett didn’t believe in didn’t exist; that’s why he didn’t believe in him. (I haven’t a clue what this means but I love it. It is the cleverest thing anyone has ever said to me.) Beside, he, Samuel Beckett, believed in words and we all know that . . . (‘In the beginning was the word’?) . . . laughs . . . Correct. He knew that I’d been an altar boy and we have a moment about Father Mac. He, the Rev Kev, is reading Philip Roth. Had I? I should. What was I working on (working on!) next? Yes, writing. He’d be happy to.

  Julie wants to talk about how reading and writing are important to me. Or the ways in which they are important, and how words can conceal as much as they reveal. She says they can help us to hide from ourselves as well as understand ourselves. And that this often looks like the same thing.

  Next

  ‘To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.’

  Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

  Kathleen was worried about my eyes, all this reading, can’t be good for them. It’s not the only thing she was worried about, mind you. Along with thousands of others, she had lost her job at the mill. She did a couple of jobs now. In the mornings she worked as a cleaner at the local bingo hall. I would help her out during my school holidays, sweeping up mounds of disused sheets, their random patterns of numbers all punctuated with felt-tip pens like some unseemly trace of lipstick. There were three of them – my mum, my Aunty Margaret and a woman called Theresa. I remember them making me coffee with Carnation Milk and joking that they needed to have a fag with theirs because ‘a drink’s too wet without one’.

  At lunchtimes Kath worked in a factory canteen, up near Clayton, past Accy Vic and down towards the Stanley ground. She would heat up cans of soup (‘something hot’, a phrase in which the something being hot always seems more important than what that something is) or make them doorstop sandwiches with gooey white bread that held your fingerprints. At night it was back to the bingo hall: selling the sheets of numbers that she would sweep up the next day, serving tea and biscuits, checking the numbers of ‘another lucky winner’.

  Before my book habit became terminal, I would go with her in the evenings, awed by the theatricality of the place. Like so many bingo halls, it had been a picture house in a previous life. The customers were virtually all women (men were tolerated so long as they were accompanied, like dogs in the park) and would vary from those who got ‘all dolled up’ to those who didn’t really see bingo as going out at all, for whom it was an extension of their living room. The latter would arrive in their slippers, their hair in curlers (but under a headscarf). Next to them would sit women who Jack would describe as ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ – a category which I didn’t understand but was keen to know more about.

  The caller was invariably a man, a failed club-comic-type in an over-starched white shirt who wore too much cheap aftershave. ‘All the sixes clickety click . . . One little duck number two . . . unlucky for some thirteen . . . two fat ladies eighty-eight. And those luuuurrvely legs eleven . . .’

  The place would go mental, wolf-whistles and cat-calls, a scary mixture of parody and Pavlov. ‘Here’ signalled that we had a winner and it fell to Kath or one of the other women to read out the numbers on the card back to the caller. Winning numbers verified, the winnings would be paid out according to a Line or a Full House. Drama over, a new one begins; eyes down, look in.

  But I’m not going with her to work any more. In fact, I’m not really going anywhere any more. What I am doing is sitting in my room and reading, and it’s starting to worry my mother. We’re sitting in a cafe in Accy Market. We are eating pla
te meat pie, chips and peas (mushy, naturally). It is a Friday. I remember this because we usually ate fish on Friday – a mini-Lent Catholic abstention – but today we are eating meat, and we are eating out.

  She asks me about school and how if there’s ever anything wrong I can always talk to her or Dad about it, and that I’m not to think that they won’t understand, because even though she knows I don’t believe them but they were young too and she does know how hard it can be especially being an only one and that she and Dad love me and only want what’s best and want me to be happy but that you don’t seem happy and is it something at school and the work – the work, is it that you can’t keep up with the work . . . ?

  What I want to tell her is that I love the work and I love the school. I love John Roland and I love the Rev Kev. I love Beckett because I don’t understand it and Harper Lee because I do. I love Eric Stewart for singing that he’s not in love in a way that suggests the exact opposite and I love Noosha Fox for telling me how sorry she is that she’s only got a s s s single bed.

  I don’t say any of this. Of course I don’t. I’m a teenage boy, a teenage boy with grammar-school ambitions, raging hormones and a crushing over-estimation of my literary sensitivity. I think I know what she thinks. I think she thinks that she’s spoiled me, that this is the only-child moment that people (I am sure) warned her of. I don’t reassure her on that score either.

  What I do do is to mumble something about Blackpool, how I don’t want to go, getting too old, would rather stay at home. She doesn’t kiss me, not in public, not since I told her not to. What she does is that thing where she puts both of her hands on the side of my face, brushing my hair from my forehead with her thumb, almost as though she’s taking my temperature.