Fifty years on – the Hampstead and Highgate Express features our anniversary concert.
Then, on the day of the concert, I received an early morning phone call from Dave Green to say Michael had been taken into hospital for a heart bypass operation. I was stunned. Aside from my natural concern for Michael, who had apparently had heart problems for some time and had been dodging an operation, what about the concert? Should we cancel? Should we somehow struggle on? After all, tickets had been sold and some of the participants would already be on their way to London. But how could we carry on without Michael behind the piano, directing the music? However, he had told Dave Green that the show must go on, and Dave had sounded out a superb pianist, Barry Green, who was ready to step in, though he couldn’t be there in time to rehearse, as he had an afternoon engagement. So, with Michael’s insistent words in our ears, we decided to continue.
Barry arrived about half an hour before kick-off, and we quickly discussed things as the minutes ticked away. The expectant audience of course knew nothing about all this, and it fell to me to start by breaking the news and explaining a little of the historical background, and then we were off. It wasn’t the evening we had worked for, but the audience seemed to enjoy it and it was better than we expected in the circumstances, Barry rising magnificently to the occasion, as did all the musicians and readers. The evening was even captured on film by the director David Cohen, who had brought a camera crew.
When I eventually got home I found two emails from Michael, the first sent at 5.30 that evening. ‘Hope message reached you re sudden hospitalisation. Rang Dave yesterday and your office. Don’t have your home number with me, but have just received my laptop. Sod’s law is indeed alive and well.’ The second email was sent a couple of hours later. ‘Hope the gig was all OK – I bet it was. Musios are infinitely adaptable when needs be… Am I pissed off.’ I replied at once, telling him how concerned everyone was, how much he’d been missed, and that although the concert had gone well enough it had not been the same without him. I ended, ‘But I told the assembled throng about our meeting at the RFH and all you had done for P and J over the years, so you were there in spirit. Everyone was asking, “When is the next one?” So get well quickly and let’s plan it. I hope everything goes smoothly with the op and look forward to cheering news.’ He was quick to respond: ‘Jeremy, am in Harefield Hospital: bypass tomorrow. Dave Green called in today and told me the gig was wonderful. Yes! Another! Dave reckoned the venue is perfect for jazz. Cheers – and thanks.’ But it was not to be, and we were all shattered to hear that Michael had died during the operation.
Michael Garrick as I like to remember him. We did well over 300 concerts together.
* * *
The lead obituaries in the main national papers did him proud, but they were no substitute, as obituaries never are, for his live, vital presence. The Telegraph began:
Michael Garrick, who has died aged 78, was a composer and pianist whose work extended well beyond the usual confines of jazz; in a career spanning more than 50 years he employed techniques from the genre to create music for choirs, string quartets, poems, symphony orchestras, and even the organ of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The Times referred to his literary leanings ‘that were later manifested in large-scale compositions’, and to his ‘intuitive ear for harmony and a sense of orchestral colour’. In terms of my own life, Michael’s impact had been considerable, and I was pleased to be able to say so at the concert that his sons (themselves top-class jazz musicians) had arranged to follow the funeral, and at which musicians queued up to take part, among them Cleo Laine, whose husband, Sir John Dankworth (for whom Michael had started a jazz course at his music centre at Wavendon), had called him ‘truly of world class’. At the funeral concert I read several poems, two to settings by Michael. We had met as enthusiastic young men and had formed a natural alliance. His settings for my poems were always sensitive and complementary, and even listening now to some of the recordings we made together, I marvel at his lyrical and rhythmical response to the words, and his ability to add a dash of humour where appropriate.
To mark the first anniversary of his death, a tribute concert was arranged at the Purcell Room in November 2012 as part of the London Jazz Festival, at which his sons played and invited me to read. I’d written a poem called ‘Some of Those Days’, which referred to a song made famous by Sophie Tucker, a favourite of my mother’s, who used to sing it. At Mike’s funeral concert, the fabulous Norma Winstone had sung a chorus from that number as a lead-in to my reading of the poem, and we’d planned to do it again at the Purcell Room. Norma had worked closely with Michael over the years and had sung at several poetry and jazz concerts, so it seemed appropriate. But for some reason she’d had to cancel and Jacqui Dankworth took her place, generously agreeing to learn the song and singing it slowly and movingly alongside my reading of the poem. It was to lead to fresh beginnings.
* * *
I now had some forty new poems. It was at the Hampstead Theatre, where Carole and I had gone to see Maureen Lipman in a play called Old Money, and were congratulating her on her performance over a drink in the foyer afterwards, that Mo suddenly said, ‘Isn’t it time you had a new book of poems? I’d be happy to do some readings with you to help promote it.’ (Strangely, it was at the same theatre some four years earlier, when we’d gone to see her daughter Amy Rosenthal’s engrossing play about D. H. Lawrence and his circle, On the Rocks, that, encountering Maureen in the foyer, she’d introduced us to her companion – Guido Castro. ‘No need to introduce us,’ Carole had responded, to Maureen’s surprise. ‘Guido is my cousin!’ And what a lovely, cultured, gentle man he is, and how extraordinary that he’d entered Maureen’s life and added an extra link to our already close friendship.)
It was a generous offer of Maureen’s to read with me, but though I had the poems, finding a publisher was an altogether different matter. I would never, as I explained to Maureen, publish my own work, and while many years earlier I had been in the midst of the poetry world and publishing regularly in various poetry magazines, the years and editors had moved on. I was really starting all over again, and frankly didn’t relish the thought of the rejections I would surely receive. Then, by a stroke of luck, I found myself in correspondence with Andrew Croft, a remarkable man whose publishing company, Smokestack, publishes only poetry – and poetry of a high quality and wide range with an international focus. Andy, himself a considerable poet, was ‘committed’ in a way that anyone with such an important but essentially uncommercial list would have to be. I floated the idea of a ‘New and Selected Poems’, drawing from my early books now long out of print, and adding new poems. Andy responded promptly, urging me to send the new ones, coming back with the exciting proposal that he publish an entirely new collection and think about my ‘Selected’ suggestion later. He explained that the Arts Council had shamefully withdrawn its grant and so he had to manage things carefully from a cash-flow point of view. This meant that, given the commitments he already had, he would not be able to publish my book for another couple of years, but if I was prepared to wait, he was game. His enthusiasm and positive response to the poems I’d sent him was all-important, and given that I’d already waited a great deal longer than that, I readily agreed. Some two years later, in September 2014, Blues in the Park was ready to be launched at the lovely Daunt bookshop in Marylebone High Street – containing not forty poems now, but over sixty. I couldn’t have been more thrilled at the prospect, but there was a shadow over it all, and our world was about to be turned upside down.
* * *
Our friendship with Dannie Abse had remained as close as ever, and he and I had enjoyed reading together at another poetry and jazz concert, this time at the Hungerford Arts Festival at the invitation of Elizabeth Davis (formerly Rose), who organised the classy annual festival and is much featured in these pages from the time we worked together as editors of The Goon Show Scripts and then as Robson Books’ first editor. While ther
e was no Michael Garrick, the trio that had played at Hampstead agreed to participate, as did Dannie and Alan Brownjohn. At the ill-fated Hampstead anniversary concert, Adrian Mitchell’s daughter Sasha had made a big impression singing and reading one of Adrian’s poems to Michael’s setting, so I invited her too. We drove to Hungerford together, and it was good to get to know her better and to chat about her father, who’d died in 2008 and to whom she had been very close. I had given many readings with Adrian but I had never really got to know him well (for which I blame myself). He projected a tough persona, and I guess I was a little shy of him, though he was always friendly and willing to join the fray from the first concert on. Indeed, he’d written to me warmly from Iowa in May 1964, where he was writer in residence and running a writers’ workshop, saying, ‘I’ll be home in a month. Have written many poems … can I come back in the word circus? I miss it, man. So could you let me know what’s happening? Hope all is well with you both and your book is doing well. Yes.’
It was good to hear about a softer, more private Adrian. He had become a hero of the left with such poems as ‘Tell Me Lies About Vietnam’, and had a loyal following. The large audience for his memorial concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which Carole and I went to and at which a number of poets and musicians performed, attested to that. In the car, I played Sasha a recently released CD of a live poetry and jazz concert of ours at which Adrian had read. She hadn’t heard it before, and listened intently, especially to a poem of Adrian’s called ‘Pal’ which she was going to read to music at Hungerford, noting his pace, rhythm and emphasis.
At that stage of his life, Dannie was no longer alone. In 2008, he had given a reading at the annual Torbay Poetry Festival, and afterwards had signed a book for an ‘attractive’ lady and been struck by her sympathetic response to the poems he’d read (he had included several about Joan). Her name was Lynne Hjelmgaard. Next morning, by chance, they’d met again on Torbay Station, waiting for the train to London, and on the journey home he discovered that, though much younger than him, she was a widow with a family, and herself a published poet. They became partners, and Lynne – gentle, admiring, caring – brought comfort and love to Dannie’s later years. As Dannie wrote in the final pages of a revised edition of his autobiography, Goodbye Twentieth Century, ‘Joan had been my heartbeat, and still is, but my life of bereavement has changed too, has become, because of Lynne, more sunbright.’ Lynne, for her part, has written about how the Torbay Festival changed her life, and how thankful she was to have gone there.
Lynne had been with Dannie at the Hampstead anniversary reading (her first taste of poetry and jazz) and was with him at Hungerford. It was a warm and friendly occasion; Dannie was in great spirits and read with his usual style and charm, and I could not have imagined it would be the last time we would read together. Nor could I have envisaged, when we met up one evening not very long after for our traditional salt beef sandwich (it was always either that or a local pizza), that it would be our last sandwich together. Dannie was in a buoyant mood, and very talkative. He’d had backache and a few niggling aches and pains, but had just received the results of various tests, which were all good, and he was gratified too, despite his strong socialist leanings, to have been awarded a CBE for services to poetry. In addition, he’d just finished reading all the entries for the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize, for which he was one of the judges. He had always appeared the maverick, the outsider, and I sensed he felt he was finally getting the serious recognition and respect that had in some way eluded him in certain quarters. Another reason for his upbeat mood was that, thanks to its intrepid artistic director, Leonie Scott-Matthews, the Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead had recently put on his Pythagoras, a play he’d written some years earlier and totally revised. And there had been an evening devoted to him at Jewish Book Week which I introduced and at which Diana Hoddinott read some prose extracts from his books alongside Dannie’s own reading of his poems.
Dannie had seemed relieved to get out of the house for a few hours and chat, as BBC Wales were making a film about his life and work and had been interviewing him for much of the week, which was tiring; they had also interviewed me about Dannie just that day, spending quite some time going through and copying some of the many photos and posters I had. He was pleased to hear about that, but unusually anxious about the fact that they were planning to film a reading he was about to give with Lynne, and I think he found it helpful to discuss the poems he might read. I suggested to Dannie that it might be an idea to start with a story I’d heard him tell about the time he was reading at a rather formal event in Wales where he was given an overlong introduction by a local dignitary called Jones, who kept curtailing his surname to ‘Abs’. Eventually, Dannie interrupted him, saying, ‘Please do call me Abse,’ emphasising the ‘e’, whereupon the chairman responded, ‘Thank you, and you can call me Jonesy.’
Dannie had just finished reading his brother Leo’s last, posthumous book, a psychoanalytically oriented biography of Daniel Defoe, and we went on to talk about the colourful, controversial Leo, who had died six years earlier, Dannie lamenting that he had never told his brother how much he admired him. I had never heard him talk that way about Leo, and I can’t imagine Leo was the kind of man it would have been easy to say such things to (nor could I envisage him returning the compliment, though I know Leo greatly admired his brother’s poems). Dannie had been particularly struck by the quality of Leo’s writing and the remarkable range of his vocabulary. ‘I’ve always prided myself on having a wide vocabulary,’ said Dannie, ‘but Leo’s was far more extensive.’ How amused the competitive Leo would have been to hear his brother say that! I gave Dannie an invitation for the launch of my book, and he took out his diary and noted the date, relieved that it didn’t clash with a Cardiff City match. Nothing had really changed!
How distressing it was, then, to get a worried phone call some days afterwards from Robert Kirby, Dannie’s devoted agent, asking if I knew what was wrong with Dannie. They’d had a lunch date which Dannie had cancelled, saying he was gravely ill. I sat in silence in my office, staring at the receiver, thinking back to our very recent dinner together. He’d looked so well, as vital and lively as ever, and I’d told him so. I hesitated, not knowing whether to phone him or not, and what to say if I did. After some minutes, I slowly dialled that number I knew so well. Dannie answered. ‘I’m glad you phoned,’ he said, before I could utter a word, ‘I was going to phone you and Carole tonight.’ He then went on to tell me he had cancer in a number of places, that it had spread and was terminal. He had opted not to undergo any treatment. ‘Come round as soon as you can,’ he added. ‘I’d like to see you both.’
We needed no prompting and were there early that evening. Dannie sat in his usual armchair in the front room where he wrote, facing the television where he’d watched Cardiff City lose so many crucial matches. He spelt out the bleak news, saying (as we started to interject) that he knew treatment wouldn’t work and that he was not prepared to put himself through it – a tough and brave decision for a doctor to make. He added that he was sorry he would be unable to make my book launch. How unimportant the book seemed in the context of this terrible news, but as it happened I had received the first copy that day, and I gave it to Dannie. Looking through it carefully, he asked me to sign it. He had already read most of the poems in manuscript. I remembered what he’d said about not having told Leo how much he admired him. I was not going to fail on that score with Dannie, and inscribed the book accordingly. He smiled, and leant forward so we could embrace.
We visited Dannie daily, and whenever the talk turned to poetry he visibly perked up. In fact, it was difficult to believe he was so ill. But after just a couple of weeks we got a call to say he’d weakened suddenly, and he died that night, on 28 September 2014, just six days after his 91st birthday.
After he’d gone, my mind was numb for quite some time but eventually I managed to write two poems for Dannie, the first rather raw one being set in th
e lovely Golders Hill Park near both our homes, where, amidst the peacocks and deer, he loved to walk – as Carole and I had done one fateful evening, thinking of Dannie close by and nearing the end. I called it ‘Poet in the Park’, and here is the middle section:
Now, as the low September sun
crowns the trees and the empty
lawns gleam in the evening light,
the silent park is like a stage set
waiting for something to begin.
But it won’t.
Amazed as we are by the beauty
of it all, we know that nearby, in the
book-lined room where you wrote
and read and loyally watched
that maddening Cardiff team of yours
blow it yet again, and as light flickers,
a final whistle is about to go.
* * *
I felt honoured when the family and Lynne asked me to read Dannie’s powerful and emotive poem ‘Last Words’ at the funeral at Golders Green Crematorium, after they too had read and spoken, and following the playing of a movement from Schubert’s String Quartet in C major, which Dannie loved. A week later, Cardiff City included a photo and lengthy piece about him in the programme for their home match against Nottingham Forest. There was also a tribute at half-time. And the following spring the club planted a tree for him in Cardiff City’s garden of remembrance, the plaque saying: ‘Dannie Abse. Acclaimed writer and Bluebird’.
Under Cover Page 43