Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  It was only when notebooks were being pocketed and the smell of alcohol was finally starting to defeat the smell of the tobacco that had been used to disguise it (lavender-scented cachous, I seem to remember, were a favourite ploy of the ladies) that they would broach the subject with which of course they had always known they were going to be leading: discland’s most eligible bachelor girl and the man question.

  ‘Miss Cogan’ – a casual crossing of the legs; a rush of blood to the ears (those boiled lugs); perspiration flooding the pancake between nose and upper lip – ‘your love life seems to fascinate a lot of people. They find it strange that a good-looking girl’, etc.

  ‘Not so strange. I just haven’t met the right one. How can I think of marriage until …’ You can easily fill in the rest.

  The unlikely truth is that, although I grew up surrounded by men who were far from shy about showing off their bodies – the boys in the chorus were tirelessly exhibitionistic, rarely bothering to close the doors of their dressing-rooms and padding around more or less a hundred-per-cent peeled – I was alarmingly vague about the male anatomy.

  I had no idea what went on in the downstairs department. Really went on, I mean. I had a vague idea that something was put somewhere, but where and how was a giant mystery.

  (‘Meat injection’, an expression I had overheard once or twice, was pretty graphic. But I remained ignorant as to the exact mechanics, not to mention the motivation. I didn’t even rind out what ‘B.U.R.M.A.’ or ‘E.G.Y.P.T.’ meant on envelopes until long after the war was over. When I was told they stood for ‘Be Upstairs Ready My Angel’ and ‘Eager to Grab Your Pretty Tits’ – and, worse, that ‘N.O.R.W.I.C.H.’ was code for ‘Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home’ – I blushed crimson.)

  All this may seem strange – it may even seem barely credible – of somebody who by the mid-fifties would be able to count Diana Dors and an actress I later learned was known in Hollywood as the British Open, among her friends. But what you have to remember is that we’re still talking about the years of buttoned-upness and relative austerity before the lid blew off in the sixties.

  I didn’t know I was living in ‘the vice capital of Europe’ in 1952, which is the year we moved to London in the interest of furthering my career (I was twenty). I hadn’t yet been introduced to the basement drinking clubs that had sprung up almost outside our front door in Kensington – Frisco’s, run by Frisco himself (‘Ah’s the biggest buck nigger in town’); the little House; Ruby Lloyd’s Maisonette. (I still didn’t drink.)

  One club I had been introduced to – The Court Club in Mayfair – I visited several times without realising that the constant traffic through the curtained door at the side of the bar meant it was virtually a brothel.

  I see now I was green as goose-shit. I knew Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton. I had been to his parties and he had occasionally been to mine. But I was as shocked as anybody by the revelations about his ‘fish book’ – his directory of available knock-offs – and the two-way mirror installed in the bedroom at ‘Bel-Air’, his big house in Maidenhead, and then at his London perch in Bryanston Mews. I suspected nothing.

  I had known Paul Raymond since he was Paul Quinn, touring the number-threes (which were too good for him) with a mind-reading act he’d bought from a couple of palm-readers on Clacton Pier; I’d even known him before that, when he was Geoff Carlson, a part-time drummer and full-time hawker of nail varnish and hairnets at the funfairs.

  I was in a party that he took to Ciro’s the night he was fined £5,000 at the London Sessions for keeping a disorderly house at his Revuebar. (The mood was celebratory; in court there had apparently been talk of ‘lust’ and ‘filth’ and ‘disgustingness’ and he had been prepared for the worst.)

  After dinner we moved on to the Bal Tabarin, Raymond’s club in Hanover Square, where we were joined late by a dark-haired girl with a distinctive gypsy look: high-piled black hair, dark-rimmed eyes, a fortune in loose change worn on chains around her waist and neck. He introduced Liana as the Revuebar’s ‘big vedette’.

  Liana, it turned out, was a snake-charming spesh act: she performed with three boa-constrictors and a python while shedding her clothes and, despite her name and the exotica, talked in a homely North-country accent (Huddersfield–Barnsley, would have been my guess).

  ‘I have a self-imposed rule of not stripping off completely,’ I remember Liana announcing at one point. ‘Nothing full-frontal or risqué. Straight Τ and A only. I have always worked on that principle – I look on it as my insurance in life. Who knows – you might one day be prime minister!’

  ‘She’s doing her f-f-f-fire act when we do the turn-around,’ Raymond said, covering the girl’s hand with his own, which was noticeably hairless and weighted with gold sovereigns. ‘Sets fire to a carpet then boogie-woo-woo-woogies on it. Eats fire. Going to c-c-cost us a wedge in insurance. S-s-some versatile girl, this one. Sticks a broom up her arse and sweeps the stage for an encore, eh babes? Finish your e-education, she would. You should pop round.’

  The point I’m trying to make is that, not knowing what we were supposed to be looking for, Fay and I regularly failed to see what was staring us in the face. You could have told us shit was sugar in those days and we would have believed you. We took it all at face value.

  Toot, for instance. Cocaine. Happy dust. I wouldn’t have recognised it if it had jumped up and played ‘Ole Man River’ on the spoons. Or ‘jazz woodbines’, as joints used to be called when they were just making the crossover from the jazzers to the pop boys, and the pop boys’ blissed-out chalky faces were just starting to mingle with the showbix ‘Mantan’ at our parties.

  When I came across some musicians soaking gauze from inhalers for the hit of benzedrine it gave them and they told me it was a new kind of tea they were trying, what did I know? I believed them.

  Self-analysis, navel-gazing of any description, had never been my strong suit. But it’s pretty obvious to me now that I started bringing names from the shows home out of a sense of guilt, as a way of keeping my mother happy, in the first instance.

  My mother, though, was never happy being merely a passive recipient. From the beginning she organised sing-songs, forfeits, ham-and-egg cook-ins (we were never that orthodox), charades.

  Unfazed by having some of the biggest entertainment names in the world in front of her – and a not-untypical gathering might include Noel Coward, Sophie Tucker, Danny La Rue, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Rudolph Nureyev, various Beatles – she’d call for her banjo and knock out some of the oldtime numbers: ‘When It’s Nighttime in Italy It’s Wednesday Over Here’, ‘If I Had My Life to Live Over, I’d Live Over a Delicatessen’ (which John Lannon always particularly requested, although I suspect it’s not the kind of information to set Jez, Hicky, Caro and the other media monkeys’ pulses racing.

  (It certainly didn’t seem to do a great deal for the girl employed by Lennon’s chief American biographer when she tracked me down here – I found her peering through the wisteria into the window one morning when I came back from doing the shopping. ‘Oh brilliant,’ she said through a watery smile, sneaking a quick glance at the train times she had inked onto her inner-wrist.)

  Without us ever doing anything to consciously promote it, Fay and I found we’d got a reputation for being the most happening after-hours spot in London.

  Where we lived was in no way grand – nothing like as grand as most of the people who came there were used to. On the other hand, it wasn’t totally predictable.

  Having (or at least affecting) a rather advanced contemporary taste in decoration, my mother had avoided the showbiz staples of English Vicarage, Hollywood Medieval, Cockney Moroccan and that style that by now is almost generic – flocked lamps, cascade chandeliers, ‘Regency’ telephones, deep blush velour –known in the trade as Chapel-of-Rest Cheesy or Jewy Louis.

  She’d covered the walls and floors neutrally in buffs and drabs and installed a few good pieces of modernist, low-to-the-gro
und Italian furniture. Apart from lamps and some vases and ashtrays, there was little in the way of what she dismissed as tchatchkas.

  ‘Never collect inanimate objects, or in the end they will possess you, and you will lose your freedom,’ she’d say, parroting verbatim the latest gem picked up from the women’s magazines or the radio. ‘Only invest in jewellery, so that if everything else gets taken you still have something left to sell.’

  (‘Was hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman who is always at Alma Cogan’s – by and large charming – parties in Kensington claiming to be her mother,’ Noel Coward noted in his diary of March 5, 1963.

  (‘What a truly odd phenomenon. Whoever it was said we can’t choose our parents must surely have had Mrs C. – could there ever have been a Mr C? – in mind. Somebody ought to drop the word that professionals really must be allowed to show off to their hearts’ content, without too much competition from amateurs. Rather gratifying, though, to have the Paul Beatle at my feet for much of the evening. The drummer, however – Ringo? – remains butchily surly.’)

  There would be no point giving a roll-call of all the people who packed themselves into our small rooms like rice in a bowl between, say, 1956 and 1964, when for a time London really did feel as if it was the centre of something. It wouldn’t be a case of dropping names so much as spilling them like marbles.

  Let me just say that, in that period, virtually everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment, plus painters, book writers, politicians, academics, sportsmen (and more than a smattering of gentleman villains and others ‘from the flip-side of the social disc’ – Donald Zec in the Mirror), came and went.

  ‘You know, this place has become a kind of Lincoln Tunnel,’ I remember a visiting American drawling on one occasion. ‘I know by coming here I’ll meet all passing traffic.’

  When the time came and I was no longer the hotcha-potatcha I once had been (and it was always coming), I had plenty of favours to call in. Not that I ever had to do much calling, to be truthful.

  There wasn’t a party in London – and few outside – that I couldn’t be guest-listed for, if I said the word. I was constantly on the receiving end of offers of tickets, holidays, expensive dinners, clothes. A number of people whose names you would recognise, but who want to remain anonymous, continue to slip the occasional life-saver into my account. This cottage, the childhood home of a friend of a friend, is just one example of supporters rallying round.

  It had become obvious to other people that I was going to have to get out of London long before it became obvious to me. But when it happened, it happened with more of a whimper than a bang. There were no histrionics; no chewing the scenery. I didn’t disgrace myself in public. The police weren’t involved. It was simply that, after years of steadily upping the intake, the drink started to have a depressive effect. There were some small signs of memory loss. I was rarely up and about before mid-afternoon. Then I sneaked into the papers again.

  The celebrity snappers hadn’t wasted any film on me for a long time; in fact, they made a point of gloomily turning away whenever I de-cabbed. Then one day, because I happened to be standing shank-to-shank at a reception with somebody high on the current wanted list, I turned up in the ‘candids’ section of a Sunday supplement.

  ‘Sugar in the morning, sherbets in the evening …’ the caption read. ‘Oh dear. Who let Aunt Bertha in?’ The picture, basted in the usual citric, achromatic light, was of a piece of meat with a grease-mottled, lipstick-smeared glass in its hand.

  The chipolatas clamped around a chipolata turned out to be my fingers. The meaty midgets head-butting each other were my knees. The red tones had been brought up in the printing so that all available flesh (too much – very much too much) looked flayed; it was mottled, purple-on-purple, like hung game. As for my face. I won’t begin to describe my face.

  The calls started coming in straight away – geared-down Sunday-morning voices trying to gear up to a sense of weekday commiseration, outrage, concern. ‘Think of yourself as a great glass bell, yeh? Filled with junk, yeh?’ monotoned one born-again chanter or meditator, newly put in touch with her breathing planes and alpha waves. ‘Clear the junk out, y’know, and then polish the bell so it can reflect what you really think and feel.’ Peppy advice. Fax’n’info. Bits of jolly-up. On and on.

  ‘Let me tell you something Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “I was drunk for many years”, he wrote in his notebook, “and then I died.”’

  ‘Of course you know what your trouble is. You’re life-lagged.’

  But they could have saved their breath, well-meaning as it (mostly) seemed to be. That picture was all the prompting anybody could need. I was out of there already. I was already gone. Faded, as my friend Sammy would say, in bolivion.

  *

  I had hoped to get to the village during daylight. But I’d ended up taking a later, and then a still later, train. So now it was dark.

  The cottage, when we eventually arrived there, was on the edge of the village, just off to one side of a lane, standing on a small quay on its own.

  Lights were burning in one of the rooms and there was smoke rising from the chimney – the work, I knew, of a Mr Brotherhood, who lived nearby and took care of the place when it was empty.

  The panting of the taxi sounded loud and queerly familiar in such an unfamiliar place. When I had paid him, the driver drove to the end of the quay, where his lights swept along an outbuilding and then settled for a couple of seconds on a boat slip where the quay dwindled informally away to seaweed and stones. He did a tight turn, tooted and sailed past me with a wave.

  I watched while he went over the stone bridge we had crossed coming in the opposite direction, and marvelled that half an hour could have him back in the land of bar-fights, Kebab-U-Likes, and puke-ups in the back seat.

  It was June and there were certain accents on the air which of course I had no way of naming (plants, flowers, all manner of maritime and rural things). There were boats moored to the quay, and standing out of the water on the edge of the quay, balanced between trestles. Viewed at such close quarters they appeared as strange as Venusians; they loomed above me, and I felt a compulsion to step forward and touch one, put my hand against its rippling flank, as if it was a thing in a zoo. Smaller boats were moored out in the river. Their metal masts made a clean clinking sound in the dark as hawsers (I guessed they were called) and other bits of metal beat against them.

  The background to all of this, though, the incidental music about to be prioritised now, was the sound of water. It reminded me of something. And what it mostly reminded me of was itself: water lapping in even waves against the hulls of boats with odd kitschy names and breaking on the bits of shingle beach.

  But as I stood and listened and it grew louder – it was now the only sound there was – it reminded me insistently of something in addition to – an approximation of – itself. But what? I couldn’t remember. And then I remembered. It was the sound of a thousand working men drinking a thousand pints in the loud swilling sheds where I ended my professional career.

  Drinking on that scale and in those circumstances can set up a sustained note, a kind of drone, which could – frequently did – throw me off-pitch. I hear the crack of coarse fingers against a microphone and the plaintive – self-pity can be a voluptuous pleasure; I can get a lump in my throat for myself – ‘Give the poor cow a chance!’

  *

  I found the key where I’d been told to expect it, under a spongy log to the right of the front door. The door opened into a small flagged space with a scrubbed bench and a plain shelf above it holding a decoy pigeon, a child’s torch and a single (adult) glove. There was a row of painted nails – the paint smooth from where it had accreted over the generations, drip-on-drip – for hanging coats. A kitchen – stone-flagged also – was off to the left. The sitting-room was up three stone stairs to the right, with another room up another short set of stairs at the far side of it.

&
nbsp; I was struck immediately by the sense of solidness and permanence, the simple volumes and surfaces, the absence of pretence. All the walls were thick, rendered in irregular plaster with primitive storage spaces, repositories of family pictures, common family detritus, chiselled out of them.

  The walls by the doorways had been worn smooth over the years, and there was efflorescence running along under the ceilings. I noted multiple examples of discoloration and variegation, like ancient maps or age blotches on skin.

  All this I absorbed in an instant. In the next instant, having arrived at the heart of the house, I experienced what I can only call a grace state.

  When I think of the moment now I think of it as consisting entirely of three kinds of mixed but incompatible light: the light from the fire that Mr Brotherhood had set, liquefying the ceiling and walls; a swimming-pool light coming from sun on the river, delirious, mutable, rinsed blue; a buttery summer evening light falling on the backs of sheep being herded down the lane running close to the rear of the house.

  And what about the figure? Where am I?

  Paint me black. A full-length standing figure in silhouette – dense, matt. Eyes and features blank with nothing to indicate that what I’m thinking is this: I have arrived. I will be happy here. And then when the time comes I will leave with reluctance but without regret, to go back into the world.

  Four

  There was a magic act popular in my time. It involved, as many of these acts did, a volunteer from the audience coming up on to the stage.

  For this particular trick, the volunteer was shown a number of books and invited to pick a single title (the books were ‘presented’ by the magician’s assistant, balancing on the balls of her feet and wearing a scooped-out sparkling leotard, in the time-honoured fashion).