by Gordon Burn
Jackie’s father, whose familiar name was ‘Bunny’, had tried for a jockey at Newmarket in his youth. But he had grown too big-boned for that and had settled for blacksmithing where he was able to maintain his association with his beloved horses, and two in particular – Bill and Billy – in the one-horse village of Chatteris. Bill and Billy were the hearse-horses for the hearse owned by a man with the funny Dutch name of Woglom who owned the general store and also had an icehouse. The horses were shiny and Bible black and on duty they stepped sombre and slow just the way Bunny Mabe had tirelessly trained them to, with windows on both sides of the hearse so you could see the coffin.
All the men on Jackie’s father’s side of the family had been horsemen and he could claim an unbroken link stretching back to the distant days of the early nineteenth century when generations of Mabes worked at the stables in Newmarket Heath and, in a time before the railway, walked horses for up to a week across country to the towns where they were going to be raced. Stories had come down to him about walking highly strung thoroughbreds through the coolness of the night along roads as quiet as garden walks and not encountering a single living soul, because few people travelled after sundown then, unless there was a full moon.
It was this history that, when he first started showing out as a boxer, made Jackie think nothing of getting on his bike and cycling the 72 miles to East London, punching somebody senseless, and cycling the 72 miles home. Sometimes, riding back to Chatteris after a good win at the Devonshire, he would think of his Mabe ancestors leading some snorting Skylark or Gallant Lad home from a win at Goodwood or Epsom or Ascot. Going into a field to relieve himself, he would watch the steam rising and feel the breeze on him and experience the sensation of time collapsing or spiralling in on itself. There was a painted sign outside a church in a neighbouring village he used to pass as it was coming light: EVERY MORNING, THE WORLD ANEW. He’d look across the fen to the towers of the great Cathedral just beginning to become visible in the distance and he’d revel in being alive.
*
Although they didn’t know each other in those days, Ray and Jackie made their first visits to London at around the same time, when bread was rationed and bacon was a commodity changing hands on the black market and the city was still patched with bomb sites.
But these were things that, in all their years, Ray and Jackie had never talked about with each other. Oh, this and that. The odd bit here and there. But never the full story (inasmuch as there can ever be anything like a full story). Never very much about the years of their lives when one lived in the North and one lived in the South and both were foreign lands to the other and London, the teeming Babel and Babylon, was an unexplored alien universe to both of them.
Around the beginning of 1949, when he had just turned seventeen, Ray had been invited to audition for the BBC in London.
This was a momentous occasion, and his mother, Betty, who was earning her living as a barmaid then, had asked the advice of one of her regulars, a gentleman with an attaché case and a dark overcoat with a clerical air who, in his conversation, seemed to be quite familiar with the capital, and whose opinion she valued. Learning from him that the BBC was located at Savoy Hill, she had booked Ray and herself into a small private hotel in a narrow street between the Aldwych and Covent Garden market.
The other guests were mainly commercial travellers who in appearance looked very much like Mr Harris, which was her gentleman regular’s name. But Mr Harris had been inaccurate with his information: the BBC had decamped from Savoy Hill to new purpose-built headquarters in Portland Place and Betty discovered, to her alarm at first, that they had booked themselves into rather a raffish area, shadowed by theatreland and the all-night market on one side and the down-and-outs of the Embankment on the other. (On the opposite corner to where they were staying was a tiny, one-roomed shop which, when his mother sent him into it looking for hairgrips one morning, Raymond discovered sold, in addition to Film Fun and Breezy Stories, postcards from Paris in sealed envelopes, American and French magazines, and books on flagellation in paper jackets. His cheeks caught fire, and he slipped quickly away.)
At home, the whole town went to bed early: the picture theatres closed at ten-thirty, and a quarter of an hour later everybody had left the centre by tram or bus. Here, though, there was a sense of relentless activity and purpose; the streets were thronged day and night with men wearing the checked sports jackets, the pullovers and the flannel trousers that were then the uniform of the spiv, and women wearing the kind of bright brazen make-up that would stop the traffic back home. But Ray’s mum couldn’t say she didn’t like it. This, Betty believed, was ‘the very elixir of life’, as she had heard it referred to many times on her favourite programme, In Town Tonight, which she settled down to listen to at six-thirty every Saturday evening without fail: the announcement ‘This is London!’ and the flower girl murmuring ‘sweet violets’ and the chimes of Big Ben. ‘We stop the roar of London’s traffic to bring you the men and women of distinction, the stars of stage and screen who are … In Town Tonight!’
They looked across at ‘Little Ben’ from the window seat that quickly became their favourite at the Corner House opposite Charing Cross station. His mother liked to pore over the long list of sweet iced drinks, of parfaits and sundaes and coupes and splits. Her particular favourite became a tall layered concoction known as an ‘Alpine Glow’ which had something called kümmel poured over it. Ray liked to eat brown bread and butter and drink Horlicks.
Betty gazed in awe at the rippling steel façade of the Savoy, whose bands, the Savoy Orpheans and the Savoy Havana Band, her bastard lying husband Tommy used to play along with on the wireless in the little front room of their house in Turkey Street before Ray was even born. Ray tried to get her to go with him to a tea dance at the Waldorf, which also was very near to where they were lodged, but she said they couldn’t afford it, they weren’t made of money and he couldn’t even persuade her to step across the threshold to sneak a look at the famous sunken Palm Court.
Ray’s audition comprised two parts. In the morning he was shown into a sub-basement deep in Broadcasting House and left there in front of a hand-painted notice which informed him how to proceed. This was a ‘listening room’. A lot of comedians died a death on radio because they were so visual (or because southern audiences couldn’t understand their ‘cloggy’ accents). Here was the programme-makers’ chance to hear them before they saw what they looked like or how they moved. A disembodied voice asked Raymond to state his name and his sponsor and then he stood on the scuffed orange mat as instructed and waited for the green light to come on and proceeded to be mirthful. He pressed the black button under the light switch by the door as the sign told him to when it was over.
Afterwards he returned to his mother, who was sitting upstairs in the churchly commissionaired foyer where he had left her. She said she had seen the band-leader Vic Oliver, who was married to Churchill’s wayward, alcoholic daughter Sarah, and a woman who she remembered had done funny voices on Band Wagon for ‘Stinker’ Murdoch and ‘Big-Hearted’ Arthur Askey, whose face she was sure she recognized from the Radio Times. She was light and flushed with pleasure and would have been happy staying there doing that all day.
The afternoon audition took place in front of the BBC’s Deputy Head of Variety in the Wigmore Hall near Oxford Street. It was velvet-draped and sepulchral and so quiet that you could hear London going about its business outside. Somewhere in the street at one point there was a loud bang, and the sound of air escaping. Ray began perspiring and very soon started to wish he hadn’t let his mother make him wear the new lovat-green jumper she had knitted and his leather-buttoned, cavalry-twill jacket.
The famous Harley Street was near by. And as Betty Cruddas walked as she waited, it seemed no matter where she walked, or how she tried to avert her eyes, her eyes bumped up against surgical stockings and haemorrhoid preparations and cold, saw-like surgical instruments and unblushing displays of medical supp
orts and flagrant, dusty-looking pink trusses, ‘DAMAROIDS, THE GREAT BRITISH REJUVENATOR’ was a sign that Ray pointed out to her using an oily American advertising-man accent and that they both had a laugh over afterwards.
Ray emerged from both of his auditions with respectable results and went home with a promise of future work from the Corporation. Broadcasting on the BBC in the radio days was a sign of prestige and arrival. They employed him steadily for three or four years as the number-two comic and then the compère of variety programmes (‘presenting the people of variety to a variety of people’) made specifically for and broadcast only in the North East region. The problem was that, because the North East had lost its own wavelength at the end of the war, they had to share a wavelength with Ulster, and North of England Home Service programmes were heard only on the whim of Broadcasting House, Belfast. More often than not this meant that, when Betty’s and Ray’s friends and family gathered round a set to hear him on Workers’ Playtime or Wot Cheor, Geordie, he’d be faded out to make way for long dreary hours of Irish jigs and sports news from Ulster.
He wouldn’t hear the call from London again for a further six years. By which time he had comprehensively Italian-Americanized his appearance and deregionalized his accent and become personable, prosperous, ochre-faced, slick. They were years that gave him the chance to get his ducks on the pond, as he would later (often) say.
There is a respectable chance that while Ray and his mother were sitting over their austerity-busting luxuries in the Corner House in the Strand, Jackie was in the Coventry Street Joe Lyons not far away, where he was liable to be mixing with the prostitutes who worked the pavements of Shaftesbury Avenue and Lisle Street (‘You’ll always find a smile in Lisle Street’ was the joke there), and the Cypriots and the ‘Malts’ who were their ponces, and visiting Americans in forces bands who were exempt from the Musicians’ Union ban, and men who fancied themselves on the cobbles but who you would never get in a ring, and junkies clutching their scripts for the all-night chemist in the Circus, and servicemen and brasses fresh in from the Potomac Club or the Bouillabaisse or the Fullado, stumbling on doctored whisky, and Tubby Hayes and Stan Tracey and other young English players who would congregate at the all-night Coventry Street Corner House to meet the American jazzmen there and listen to their stories about being in Benny Carter’s band and playing with legendary figures like Dexter Gordon in unattainable meccas like Memphis and Chicago and glean ideas from them. They had a band in the gallery in the all-night Joe Lyons and the waitresses all wore smart little black dresses and were known as ‘nippies’, presumably because they nipped in and out smartish to take the orders and get the food for the faces and the chaps, and all human life was there in those days really, as the saying went. A thousand stories under the sky.
But, after Chatteris, it was Hackney that for Jackie on his first visits had seemed like the big beating heart of the West End. And for a while they had managed to convince him that the West End was where he was. There were quantities of drink and women, strings of Christmas lights, pungent and exotic smells; the press of bodies, the occasional flashes of bright modernity in the close huddled streets. And, hick that he was – carrot-cruncher, shit-kicker; he knew the words – Jackie had been taken in. There had been distraction enough to keep his attention for a while.
As a boy, when he came from Chatteris to the East End, he loathed London so heartily that he would cycle home through the night after a contest, or bribe a lorry driver with half his purse to give him a lift home. As a prospective champion, and even as a prospect whose brilliant future was irretrievably behind him, the bright lights could not be too bright for Jackie, the dance bands could not play too long or too loud; the party could not be too frolicsome.
After a bout at one of Mr Solomons’ celebrated smokers at the Café Royal, for an example, he would take the pats on the back and pocket his nobbins and then after a few drinks in the company of the punters, managers, corner men and boxers who jostled each other in the bar at the Regent Palace Hotel, which was dependably a maelstrom of fight chat on those nights, he’d take off with his pal, another young fighter called Sammy Silver, for Toliani’s Latin Quarter or the Café de Paris or, occasionally, depending on how the spondulicks was holding up, such a place as the Empress Club in Berkeley Square where the lardee went to tear up the rug. After that it was on to the Corner House or one of the tea stalls that ringed the piazza at the all-night market and then sometimes, if he was very lucky, Jackie would end up going home with one of the nippies from Joe Lyons, a lively little brunette called Greta. Greta was half on the game, but if she didn’t have a paying customer she’d let Jackie go back with her to her place in Phoenix House, a rabbit warren of tiny apartments above the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road, where she’d let him have one on the slate.
Afterwards, with the dawn coming up, he’d walk through Soho, where the last stragglers from the spielers and near-beer joints would be sharing the pavements with people going to work in the snack bars and kitchens and the newly delivered ice blocks which would already be starting to melt. The seen-it-all, white-overalled dairymen would be making their deliveries and the Continental butcher could be receiving the day’s horse sections.
In a few hours, men would be forming a straggling queue along Great Windmill Street in front of the Windmill Theatre, whose boast during the war had been ‘We Never Clothed’. By 11 a.m., the peeping Toms would have gathered on the corner of Archer Street opposite the hallkeeper’s office at the Windmill hoping to catch quick flashes of the girls running up and down the stairs to and from the stage in their plumed head-dresses and pasted-on tassels and stars. (A narrow window on the last half-landing before you reached the Solomons gym looked straight across Great Windmill Street to the ‘undressing rooms’ of the theatre’s lovelies and was also always heavily subscribed.) There was a convent a few doors along, and sometimes as Jackie washed up there in that pre-dawn hour it was possible to hear the nuns singing Gounod’s ‘Sacré Cœur’.
He had been entrusted by Mr Solomons with the key to the gym. And, after cadging a warm roll or a sweet-smelling cinnamon Danish from the still-shuttered ‘Nosherie’, which occupied the ground floor of the building, Jackie would climb the stairs to the ‘Palace of Sock’, as it had become widely known, and flop down on the old couch in the laundry room under the picture of a platinum blonde in a pea-green bathing costume stuck to the wall with a piece of soap, and wait for ‘Jolly Jack’, the boss, to arrive and announce with the bravado of his arrival that it was time to commence getting into another day.
Actually, on most days, ‘the motley throng’, as Mr Solomons called them, would have gathered around the whisky cabinet in his inner sanctum by the time he rolled up, the motley for the most part consisting of the boxing writers for the daily papers, give or take the odd shvartzer or provincial promoter. The scribes themselves would have been beaten to it by several hours by the boxers and trainers and the various gym rats and hangers-on who would already be spilling sweat sparring, working on the light bag, the heavy bag, the tattoo ball, etcetera. The gym would already be loud with the kind of effort befitting its reputation as the forcing house of champions and giving the sense that it was a place of serious endeavour. But it was only with the arrival of the nabob of the noble art himself, Mr Solomons, every day with a bang and a crash that the Solomons gym could be said to truly spark into life.
Mr Solomons never simply walked in anywhere. Mr Solomons pushed his way into offices, conversations, all through life. Big, blustering, fast-talking, fast-living, glint-eyed, bulbous-nosed, Mr Solomons (motto: ‘All the world’s a fiddle!’) was one of the most controversial, colourful and supremely sure-of-himself members of the managerial ranks. Habitual wearer of a snap-brim trilby, a tie that needed volume control and a suit with enough padding in the shoulders to pack Harringay (these were his own lines, it’s why he got so much ink; he was very good), he also unfailingly wore a yellow rose in the lapel of his camel’s-hair topc
oat and had another waiting in a stem vase in his inner office to be sniffed and turned and finally threaded through the buttonhole of his suit jacket.
Where to begin with this Mr Solomons, who the Game hadn’t seen anything like since the days of cigar-smoking Joe (Yussel the Muscle) Jacobs, Hymie Caplan, Dumb Dan Morgan, Jimmy (The Boy Bandit) Johnston, Billy McCarney and other managers with more colour than their fighters? And the aforementioned were all Yanks. Perhaps the oddest thing about Jolly Jack was that, despite all the best efforts of himself and his fastidious wife, Fay, and in spite of the masking masculine odours of cigar smoke and the high-class (black-market) ‘Tweed’ cologne which he took care to splash on, he always smelled faintly but unmistakably of fish.
‘King Cod’ was Jack’s other nickname away from the ring, based on the early-morning business he ran with his brother Maxie at Billingsgate, wholesaling prime mackerel, haddock and hake. ‘I started on the up and up slapping fish on a slab. And as with fish, so with fights. Only more so. If you sell fish – as I do – give ’em big fish. If you promote fights – as I do – give ’em big fights. Stick to this way of doing business and you can’t go wrong. Maybe! Kin-a-hora!’ (Which means: ‘May the evil eye not fall on me’; ‘Touch wood’.)
Almost all of Mr Solomons’ first wave of visitors, in a phrase coined by one of his cronies, the News of the World’s boxing man, Frank Butler, were men who were ‘tenpercental’. Milling around in the gym and the outer office when the boss breezed in would be club-owners, bouncers, bruisers, burglars, ex-boxing champions, con men, ponces, pickpockets, fences, racketeers, car salesmen and visiting Americans in dark glasses; all desirous, all itchy and soliciting a piece of his time.