Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  In point of fact, I never found it a faithful reproduction at all. It bore the same relationship to music as the heavy wax fruit I associate with my childhood – was there a home that didn’t have its heaped bowl of untouchable, vaguely sinister wax pears and bananas? – bore to the real thing.

  The glissando strings, thunking bass and muted trumpets of the Kaempfert orchestra, all existing in their own channels, all separated out in the hyper-real way that they never could be in reality, seemed to point up the dreaminess and sad separateness of the shoppers as they drifted from homely cabinet model to perspex-and-iridium Bang & Olufsen, from spotlit display to spotlit display.

  I still find watching people going about their everyday business to a soundtrack that I can hear but they can’t – because I’m sitting in a car or coach, for example, or standing at a window the way I am now – inexplicably touching, and once or twice – stopping to let an austerely beautiful but unselfconscious (which was the point) mulatto schoolgirl cross at a pedestrian crossing in New Street in Birmingham, while the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ played on the radio and drops of rain shuddered diagonally upwards across the windscreen – physically wrenching.

  ‘Bye Bye Blues’ has segued (not seamlessly; again there was a couple of inches of tape-slip) into the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’, a song that smooches along at the same clippety-clop, subliminal blood-pulse tempo. And the man in waders is still making his way towards The Terri-Marie in time with the beat, stepping over, occasionally ducking under, the mooring ropes of boats as he goes.

  The psychology behind telephone muzak, of course, is so elementary as to be barely worth stating. It’s supposed to divert your attention from the fact that your time is being wasted and you’re being putzed about.

  There was no muzak in the factories I visited for shows like Workers’ Playtime for a long time; then suddenly it was there as an airy rinse in all of them, all the time, ‘psychologically programmed’, round every corner you turned. The only refuge were the boardrooms where we were given lunch after the broadcasts and presented with examples of the factories’ output – spectacle frames, nylon lingerie, brush-and-pan sets, glass tumblers, continental sausages – as a token of their appreciation.

  Personally I find all kinds of wallpaper music about as relaxing as the yammerings of the happy snappers who used to turn up to take my picture in those days. ‘You know me. This isn’t going to hurt. I’m not going to try anything violent or unflattering. I’m just going to make you look beautiful … Super … Hold it there … And again … One more … Relax. Marvellous. Don’t look so … Did I ever tell you I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin? … Better. I’m not one of them that’s going to poke the camera up your skirt or down your throat … Think happy. Wet the lips. Think top-ten … A little less grin, sweetheart … Better. Skirt up just a little. We’re getting it … This new record’s top-five. Cert.’ And so on.

  The result was pictures I could only bear to squint at at the time and haven’t been able to make myself look at for almost thirty years.

  There has been a single cursory ‘Sorry to keep you’ in the three or four minutes that I have been holding for ——— ——. Almost involuntarily, I hang up on Karen Carpenter in mid-trill, bored with the arrogance of the nothings and nobodies who think a job in publishing or journalism, of either the print or broadcast varieties, is a licence to jerk the strings and watch you jump.

  The telephone down here hardly rang at all for years. On days when I was feeling particularly laid-by and out of things, I’d pick it up whenever I was passing, just for the purring reassurance of the tone.

  The phone still doesn’t ring very often. But when it does these days the likelihood is that it’s one of the people who seem to have got together and, with striking unanimity, decided that Alma Cogan is once more somehow viable.

  No longer merely a washed-up relic of the past, apparently; a piece of pop marginalia of interest only to the unyoung, the untrendy, the unmoneyed and the terminally whacko. But – and I have it here in black-and-white – ‘an iconic performer’, ‘a leisure icon’, redolent of happier, less complex times. She is an ‘emblematic’ figure ‘reflecting the historical moment’; ‘irrefutably part of the fifties Zeitgeist’. Not to mention the fact that she had a colourful reputation in the past for keeping rough as well as more salubrious company, and turns up increasingly in the biographies of dead contemporaries.

  I should feel flattered. Instead, it makes me feel like one of those villages that were flooded to make reservoirs at the end of the war and that then miraculously reappeared during the long, parched summer of 1976. They became popular tourist attractions, drawing picnickers like flies, and provided an excuse for a great deal of misty-eyed, inter-generational reminiscing: there was the dairy and over there the Big House; there was the steeple that seemed to reach miles into the sky. All of course only identifiable now as mossy scabs and stunted earthworks.

  There’s a national characteristic you must have noticed: if there’s one thing people in this country like better than pulling somebody down, it’s putting them back again. They beat you about the head then pass you a bandage. It’s so British.

  I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have welcomed the gesture at certain moments in the past, when I was finding the applauseless life an inconsolably hard one to live.

  To be famous, it was once put to me, is to be alone but without being lonely: like Achilles in his tent; like Lindbergh in the Spirit of St Louis, flying over the Atlantic, while the world waits for him to land.

  An alternative definition, of course, is the inability to be alone or be yourself without an audience; to be unable to exist without constant, positive feedback.

  ‘Do you know who you are!’ a man cried out in excitement once, rushing up to me in the street. ‘And you’re standing here! I can’t believe it! You’re here.’

  ‘Well I have to be somewhere,’ I said, and he seemed to find that a satisfactory answer: it seemed to confirm for him that I wasn’t merely made up of light and Ben-Day dots, equal parts cathode ray and newsprint; that somewhere behind and beyond all that I was in fact flesh and bones

  It’s a long way from that day to the point I am at now where – to risk sounding like one of the new Armani mystics, the ‘designer Buddhists’ you currently read so much about in the papers – I have adopted a tranquil, uneventful life of passive acceptance. I live in pleasant, unembittered obscurity and feel at ease for the first time in my own skin. Cleansed of fame and its unquenchable cravings.

  There is a word for what I have come to regard now as my first life. Nabokov used it once: ‘A stranger caught in a snapshot of myself.’ ‘Alma Cogan’, a fantasy of beehive hair and bouffant skirts, ostrich plumes, Leichner colours and tarmacadam lashes, is something I no longer feel able to associate with me. It feels as far away as the doodlebug and the Victrola.

  So how is it that the letters and calls from the the-way-it-was, way-we-were, return-with-us-now, kiss-and-tell franchisers and packagers are able to get under my skin and breech my defences so effectively? Why do they hit my system like the first drink of the day (a big gin-and-tonic at 6.30 on the nose, in the present regimen)?

  If this was a different medium I could use computer graphics to show you: there’d be cartoon crowds, cinemas, taxi-cabs, power stations, chefs’ hats, VDUs and supermarket trolleys all spilling out of envelopes and pouring from the earpieces of telephones to indicate city energy; city chaos; the invigorating unfakeable urban clang and clamour to which I confess to being helplessly addicted. Caught off-guard, it can sometimes tear me up with longing.

  The usual form, I’ve been discovering, is a letter carrying a vogueish logo – Art Deco, constructivist, cleverly mismatched hieroglyphs – followed by a call from a person whose position usually advertises itself through one of the ‘fast-track’ Telecom technologies.

  There’s the long hold accompanied by muzak, as demonstrated; the cordless model – good for mobility and giving a
n acoustic impression (not necessarily accurate) of the executive dimensions of the room the call is coming from. Lastly, there is the increasingly popular car-phone.

  Calls from car-phones always sound as if they’re being made at eighty miles an hour on the motorway or from halfway up a cliff-face, which I suppose is part of their appeal. Every time I pick up the receiver and hear the now-familiar wh-o-o-oosh, I have to know where the caller is as we speak.

  The replies – heading up Park Lane towards Marble Arch; crossing the Hammersmith flyover going to Chiswick – are always evocative enough to haul me out of my immediate surroundings for the duration of the call: I’m not in the world of tide-tables and seagull droppings, but in a place where the ‘in-car environment’ of thrashing newspapers and swirling ash perfectly replicates the outdoor environment of sweet diesel and graffiti and blinding grit. Ο city lust!

  I have not met Cat from the Nostalgia Book Club, or Shale or Linzi from Not Forgotten magazine; Brick from Charm records, Gully from Star books, Devora from Penguin, or Roxy, Tawatha, Gun, Dyck, Kaff, Swoosie, Chicken or Jalet from Bonham’s, Christie’s (there is apparently unprecedented demand these days for pop-related knick-knacks and memorabilia), the BBC and Channel 4. But the names themselves, neither entirely natural nor entirely invented, not quite kosher and at the same time not really smile-when-they’re-low showbiz, seem to sound a warning.

  Read them and you find yourself looking for the tell-tale white wart of Tipp-ex. Roll them round your tongue and you get an idea of what having a split-palate must be like. Say them aloud and the result is queerly cracked; disconcertingly off-centre. They are names that suggest the kind of ambiguities and complexities I have become unused to, hunkered in my bunker, buried in my ‘healthy grave’ (the Rev. Sydney Smith) down here in the country.

  The man on The Terri-Marie by this time is doing something which, in boating language, is probably called ‘slopping out the bilge’. He’s standing on the deck of The Terri-Marie throwing water overboard from a plastic bucket.

  And now the phone is going again. It’s going to be ——— ——, oozing apologies and the usual charming horse manure. I know without meeting him that, if I ever did meet him and offered a straightforward ‘How do you do?’, he would shift his glass from one hand to the other, tilt his head to what he considers its most pleasing angle (expertly-cut slabs of hair realigning themselves impressively in the light) and say: ‘I do fantastic!’

  I’m tempted. Of course I’m tempted. My idea of happiness is the Happy Hour: a bare-brick bar with the office-bound straggling in wall-eyed after a trying day; the Nat Cole and Swingles tapes being swapped for Elvis’ ‘Suspicious Minds’ and the volume simultaneously going up; cold beaded bottles and expensive nibbling bits going on to some no-questions business tab.

  I could say ‘yes’ to a bit of that. I could say ‘yes’ to quite a lot of it, if I’m honest. But I have to bear in mind the almost inevitable consequences and something I recently wrote into my book.

  ‘A normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspires to – the aim must be to operate on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of people – like every natural process, human life gravitates toward moderation.’ Gone over in acid-yellow over-marker, meaning ‘v. imp.’

  In other words, it wouldn’t be hard to get talked back into rejoining the conga-line of the professional attention-grabbers and pathologically unignored. Devora says she’s convinced she could get a book ‘into the sellers’; Brick writes that he’s already got the main promotional chat shows ‘locked up’.

  All things considered, and everything being equal, though – ‘Per ardua ad astrakhan’ is a phrase which suddenly presents itself here – I think I’ll stick.

  There’s some potatoes that need pulling; there’s a dog in the kitchen whining for his feed. So here I go. I’m walking away from this broop-broop. Watch me now.

  Three

  ‘Beginnings.’ ‘Solace.’

  If you could wish to have two words spring out of the dark at you, you couldn’t wish better than these. If it happened to be the darkness enfolding the countryside where you were about to begin a new life – so much the better.

  ‘Beginnings’ – pokerwork lettering on a piece of varnished blond timber – was illuminated in the headlamps of the taxi when we pulled over to let a car squeeze past us at the top of the narrow lane. The car was travelling uphill, away from the village of Cleve, which was our destination, and it slid like a bolt along the high hedges whose sides were grooved smooth from a thousand tight negotiations like this.

  We had one more pull-over to make in the dark on the steep gradient. Then ‘Solace’, the name of an old tub, was suspended in the lights as we carefully negotiated the last corner at the bottom of the hill: the letters were sharp-edged and oddly permanent-looking against the boat’s flaking boards, which were mainly that mysterious secondary colour, apart from their paint, which very old boats have.

  I had another look at the piece of paper containing the directions which I had been reading aloud to the driver, and realised then that the lighted windows that we’d seen before bearing left round the end of the estuary were the windows of the cottage to which we had been blindly descending.

  The driver seemed to realise this without me having to tell him. ‘Nearly got you home, young lady,’ he said (a sure sign that the years were starting to take their toll – the years and the efforts of my liver to process the brave intake of the night before: the truth was I was still quarter-cut). And then, ‘And you, mister’ to the dog, who was spiralling up in excitement at the back of the man’s head, in between scuttling from door to door.

  *

  I had been pathetically reassured to see a rank of what I regarded as ‘London’ taxis waiting with their engines turning over at the station. Then I had been just as pathetically disconcerted to find myself cheated of the familiar, unreproducible, to me dependably balm-like and curative sounds and smells of the classic black FX4, ‘the special FX’.

  The back of the cab, I soon saw, had been turned into a replica of the shoebox rooms in the sodium-coloured towers and terraces which made a corridor out of the city for the first three or four miles.

  There was what had once been a brightly coloured, now uniformly greasy piece of carpet remnant covering the floor; a stretch-cover so pocked with cigarette burns it resembled nylon netting lay over the passenger seat. Two dish-type lavatory deodorisers were stuck to the back window and a black metal grille had replaced the sliding glass confessional of the London cabs.

  The grille was necessary, the driver told me, on account of the number of Navy fares he picked up after they had been lagering hard on The Steyne (rhymes with stain). ‘Usually it’s just verbal they give you, but sometimes it gets more heavy. You get stacked by women even – smashing you over the head with bags full of deodorant.

  ‘I had one of them do a nasty on me in the back there last night. I only smelled it when I pulled over for a smoke. Sitting at the edge of a wood down by Wollaton here, breathing in the clean air, listening to the owls – “the loud-hooting owl/That loves the turbulent and frosty night/And hallooes to the moon”. (Was this supposed to ring bells?) Then I suddenly get hit with a whiff of that. I tell you. Nice people.’

  The shift from city-and-suburban to country-creepy (hedgerows high as houses shoring up a vast unvariegated blackness; skidding and skeetering movements picked up in the sweep of the car lights) happened abruptly. So abruptly that electric advertising signs from the main road were momentarily imprinted as after-images on the pitch dark, and the sense of strangeness and panic nearly overwhelmed me.

  My banishment happened (can this really be right?) six, seven years ago, in the late seventies/early eighties. I spent most of the seventies living on or just above the cake line (a crack borrowed from the original cast album of Pal Joey which has proved endlessly useful for deflecting cat-house queries about my circumstances).

  I
’ve never been ashamed to admit when I’ve been broke. As my bobbeh and zaideh used to say, What’s to worry? You’ve heard of people so poor they thought knives and forks were jewellery? So poor they … Those old chestnuts. Well that was my parents’ parents. Both sets. But regardless of how broke I’ve been, I have rarely denied myself certain basic luxuries: good gargle, good music, fresh flowers, taxis.

  Few evenings were ever able to live up to the taxi-ride through the London dusk which began them. The contrast between the blank, dim, gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity outside (plus of course the couple of stiffeners I’d tucked away before leaving home) never failed to produce that perfect balance between excitement and boredom, anticipation and relaxation that is the condition in which I’m sure most people would live all their lives, if they had the choice.

  I always was a great go-outer. My appetite for the social whirl even surprised me sometimes. In the ten or so years before I decided to cut out and head for rural entombment, socialising – partying, lip-flapping, throwing it back – was all I seemed to do. If I wasn’t preparing for a drinks, a first-night, a private view, a record launch, a supper, I was picking myself up from the night before. (The formula: sleep, ice-cream, plenty thick brown tea.)

  What can I tell you? I enjoyed it. Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of the shallowness, the fatuity, the whatever you want to call it, the truth was that I got a kick out of mingling with faces from the shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper.

  I liked chewing the fat with the hacks and the stars of the day; adored getting slewed; lived for the moment when the weals and eructations on the hand of the wine waiter, the powder congealed in the crowsfeet and clogging the pores of the waitress offering stuffed dates, quails’ eggs, chicken satay, tempura caused feelings of almost overwhelming tenderness to well in me. (Always the signal then to slow up.)