Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  She’d packed a lot into a short life, sleeping rough in the streets of Soho from the age of thirteen, travelling with a freak show, modelling for Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein among others. And it’s true she attracted a certain following.

  ‘Since I’m a child,’ she’d say, after the latest dirty raincoat merchant had been seen off by the stage-door keeper, ‘things happen to me. I’m a magnet for unbalanced minds. A happy hunting ground, actually. If there’s a maniac within fifteen miles and I go for a walk, he’ll fall on me. Animals, madmen and children. It’s always been the same.’

  But even she found it hard to laugh off the weirdo who started writing her letters on a daily basis. It was clear he knew where she lived, who her friends were, the details of her movements, etcetera. He said he wanted to marry her and together start the master-race.

  She reported it to the police, who said they could do nothing. Soon afterwards the man was found dead in a tiny bedsit complete with the standard sicko paraphernalia: Nazi shrine, guttered candles, volumes on Aleister Crowley, poltergeists, demonology, and a giant blow-up picture of Joy Prest looking down on it all. He was lying on the floor in a leather stormtrooper’s coat that had a suicide note addressed to her in the pocket.

  I look at Francis McLaren. Searching for some identifying mark, anything to beef up what has so far been a rather pallid description, I can see now that he has what looks like wax floe, far too faint to be called a scar, below the hairline on the right-hand side of his face. It’s like the mark made by the soldered seam in the loaf-tin; by a superficial flaw in the mould.

  His complexion is like the threadworm fibres in a clean sheet of paper held against the light.

  ‘People say to me: Didn’t she sing some tripe, when you think about it?’ McLaren is saying. ‘And I say, that’s only because that’s what people wanted in 1956. Otherwise obviously she wouldn’t have done. I mean, they sold. They certainly sell now.

  ‘I’m proud to say she’s enormously expensive. Thirty pounds, the last I heard, for one of the early albums. Beatles collectors have been known to pay twenty pounds for a 45 from 1964 on which Paul McCartney plays tambourine. In the autograph market she’s seventeen-fifty, which I think is incredible for her to be priced at that. You’d pay hundreds for a dress, if you could find one, which you can’t any more. But I’m not in it for the mercenary perspective. I’ve got so many things I’ve forgotten what I’ve got.’

  ‘What was it, do you think, that sparked off your interest in Alma Cogan?’

  ‘My love for her?’ His tone (uncharacteristically bold, bordering on boastful) suggests the terrorist bomber or crack addict opening up for a sympathetic interviewer while having his identity shielded by the dark or, as they do it these days, by computer-blur.

  ‘Maybe I met her at the right time. I only speak from the very humble sort of a fan’s viewpoint, but she did have a very, very strange effect on people. When I track down something new of her and know it’s in the post on its way, I can’t wait to get home from work. I spend several minutes just looking at it, not even touching it, drawing out the anticipation, before ripping into the parcel … Her mother has let me have a lot of things over the years.’

  The girl with the plait is nuzzling the older man’s neck, teasing the hair just above his collar with the pointed tip of her tongue. A few minutes ago an iced cake with sparklers in it was delivered to another table, and now the people sitting at it have turned subdued.

  Reel Match. Skill Cash. Line Up. Super Two. The lights on the bandit go through their vertical fandango. Another run of lights mimicks a stack of silver coins falling. Then everything stops and the orange-yellow central panel flutters for a few seconds like a heart in its syrups and juices.

  *

  We have brought fish and chips from a shop that is not the one we saw in the village on the way here: in this one the old sunset-at-sea splashboards had been replaced by stainless steel and you chose from coloured pictures, like in a McDonalds, and was obviously felt by McLaren to be much more suitable.

  He has brought fish knives and forks and china plates and lighted the red spiral candle on the table. ‘I’ve been putting it out for … This must be its fifth Christmas. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.’

  We both eat facing the television, which shows fogged pictures of me appearing on various sets constructed of cheap fifties hardboard. He has filled his summer holidays and time off from work sleuthing through film and television vaults and archives and paying to have his finds transferred from sixteen-mil to video cassette.

  There is a period innocence to the superficial smoothness, intentional dullness and cheerful banality of the programmes and the way the flying ziggurats and two-dimensional lamp-posts and door-frames quiver perilously in my slipstream.

  He eats with the remote by his plate on the table beside him and occasionally uses it to move a sequence on or freeze the picture. Because they’re black and white, the pictures have a snapshot quality which disappeared with the increased sophistication of the technology and the coming of colour: you turned a switch and this thing came up like magic in the corner, like an exposure making itself in the darkroom. (We all used to watch television with the lights lowered in those days.)

  Run-on like this, the programmes suggest a consistency that is misleading. In the months that sometimes elapsed between TV appearances, my weight, for example, could balloon almost beyond recognition. We were then looking at crash diets, fat farms, polypharmacy and ‘miracle’ cures that involved being injected with the foetal cells of capuchin monkeys or the urine of pregnant women.

  By 1965, as the tape of my last major appearance on television shows, I was svelte, swinging – ‘Let there be Ringo, he makes my heart melt’ if you can believe; ‘Let there be dresses that are more than a belt’; ‘Let there be Dylan, and Dudley and Pete …’ – and on the skids.

  I was down to playing toilets in the North of England where you changed in cupboards or behind piles of beer crates at the side of the stage. At the Marimba in Middlesbrough you had to change in the manageress’s flat above the club, run down the stairs into the street and make your entrance through an audience that had just climbed out of the trees.

  ‘The last time I saw her, it was rather rock-bottom, I’ve got to admit,’ McLaren says. ‘They were gambling in the back, in the same room, and so it was noisy … Oh she’d gone down. She wasn’t doing good dates right at the end. I couldn’t get over it for a long time.’

  When we’ve finished eating, we move to the sofa and start making inroads into the part of. the collection where my chief interest lies. His tape-recordings and audio cassettes fill several shoe-boxes whose outsides are obliterated with information relating to running orders, transmission dates if they were taken from the radio, MDs, track times.

  He tries to keep his end up, supplying background, quoting chapter-and-verse. But I have timed the visit for a week-night knowing he will be back in the land of rubber bands and holiday rotas and who’s-been-using-my-mug in the morning at nine sharp. (Eight-thirty, as it turns out.) And he is already showing signs of flagging. Whole minutes go by without him saying anything, and he looks as though he’s about to nod out. He stops trying to stifle his yawns and starts to rub his eyes, putting some red into the circles of oxidised yellow-blue.

  Eventually he says: ‘Well. I’m sorry. You’re welcome to stay down here for as long as you like. But some of us have jobs to go to in the morning. I must aways to my bed.’ He connects some headphones to the tape machine and pulls on the curly lead until they reach where I’m sitting. The various digital display panels are showing mostly noughts.

  For a few minutes I listen to nothing except his footsteps overhead, going from bathroom to bedroom, putting keys and loose change on the bedside table, draping suit-jacket and trousers over the dumb-valet, laying out fresh clothes for tomorrow.

  I pick a tape more or less at random – The Show’s the Thing, recorded 30th January, broadcast on the L
ight Programme, 3rd February, 1956, the handwritten sticker on the protective perspex box tells me – and shift my position on the perimeter of the sofa so that my back is no longer to the door.

  Low noise. High output. Smooth tape running. Excellent high end linearity. Pure crystal gamma haematite magnetic particles. Tapered and flanged seamless guide rollers. Exact tape alignment.

  The floor is probably flagged, which accounts for the hollows and dips and why walking across it can suddenly feel like being on wet moorland. But it absorbs sound.

  Standing on the bookcase are some flowers in a faceted vase, which itself is standing on a small square of yellowed newspaper. The top shelf is open and lined with books; the lower shelves are concealed behind sliding panel doors.

  I open one far enough for a snowstorm paperweight to roll out, followed by an old typewriter ribbon. The paperweight is one of a collection, packed into the shelves along with lengths of flex, place-mats, a box of Christmas tree lights, some bald tennis balls, a toffee tin containing scraps of wool, needles, buttons, cottons …

  Wedged in the darkened side I can see a cornflakes box which has been crimp-sealed at the top and bound with wide rubber bands. When I take it back to the sofa to inspect it, it turns out to contain a collection of tape-spools, all with miserly amounts of tape on them, and the single cassette to which their contents have obviously been transferred.

  When tape recorders came into wide recreational use in the fifties, and could be bought on the never-never, I started to get crank tapes through the post in addition to the usual creepo crank letters.

  Most were from men who had developed obsessions about my breastbone, armpits, fingers, leg-hair, ankles. (‘I was in the second row, first house at the Alhambra, Bradford on Tuesday, and I came in my trousers when you reached in the air and I got a glimpse of the dark under your arm towards the end of ‘Blue Skies’. Now I’m lying here and …’)

  But many were from women (all seemingly in the WAAFs), lying on plastic-headboarded beds in limp-curtained rooms, doing themselves with rolled magazines, the handles of hairbrushes, the heels of shoes, moaning and gasping my name.

  You could spot a heavy-breather in the opening seconds from the ambient noise of doors being closed, footsteps crossing floors and the incidental fric-frac of the microphone being set up.

  I recognise it now as I clamp the headphones on and substitute the night-time sounds of this room (the whisper of the tape hubs, the noise of my own breathing, the packed silence bearing down from outside) for the sounds of another room committed to tape twenty-odd years ago.

  (Sound of door banging.) (Crackling noise.) (Footsteps across room and then recording noise followed by blowing sound into microphone.) (Voice, quiet, unreadable.) (Coughing.) (Throat-clearing.) (A man’s voice.) ‘Alma you know what I’d like I’d like you to wank me off all over your fat beautiful tits. Then I’d like to put my swollen cock in your mouth, pull the …’

  Fast-forward. Play. A different man’s voice. ‘… twirl your tits around my mouth, bite off both your nipples at the same time. Lick your pubes. Suck …’

  The liquid crystal figures flicker as if caught in a sharp draught. Overhead, Francis McLaren moves in bed.

  I replace the tapes in the Kelloggs packet and put them back where I found them.

  Among the books lining the upper shelf are a set of textbooks or encyclopedias with plain brown wrappers and small windows in the spines giving their titles tooled onto burgundy leather. The books are closely packed except for ‘Biology’ and ‘Mathematics’, which have something inserted between them that prevents the covers from touching.

  Exploring with my fingers. I discover a strip of cheap varnished wood of the kind you find on sale in souvenir shops at the seaside: on one side are four spots of Blu-tack, as smooth and flat as the surface they recently adhered to; on the other, the transfer of a figure in a blue crinoline dress and, in painted letters to the right of it, the words: Alma’s Room.

  The house where they discovered the mutilated remains of Mrs Crippen (stage name: ‘Belle Elmore’) was a stone’s throw from the Finsbury Park Empire; it was turned into a theatrical digs by Sandy McNab, the Scottish comedian, after Crippen was apprehended and hanged.

  When they searched 10 Rillington Place after arresting the necrophiliac murderer Christie, they found, in addition to a number of women’s bodies, a tobacco tin containing four lots of pubic hair.

  In those instances where the tapes aren’t sufficient to fill a shoe-box completely, McLaren has made up the extra volume with tissue paper. The box containing the tapes relating to the year 1964 and, I suspect, the object of my visit, is roughly half and half. I pick out a cassette dated December 26th, 1964, and load it into the machine.

  It’s a fragment of a Christmas show which went out that evening on Radio Luxembourg. According to the information given on the box, I sing three numbers: ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, in the slow-tempo Streisand version; a pretty, schmaltzy song, ‘This Time of Year’, and ‘Little Drummer Boy’.

  The tape in fact begins towards the end of ‘Happy Days …’ and proceeds uneventfully until a few lines into the second track. Then the headset communicates a sensation which is like falling through several hundred feet in an air-pocket, with the accompanying drop in air pressure.

  It stabilises – ‘Evergreens are snowy white/Sleighbells ring through the night/This time of year’; then the same thing again in a less stomach-rolling version.

  It continues in this way for the remaining seven minutes – lurching from almost perfect clarity and balance in one passage, to what could be a third-or fourth-generation, or even older, copy in the next.

  It’s as though dropouts caused by physical damage to the tape, or sections of tape corruption or decay, have been laboriously reconstituted, layer on layer, and the original magnetic impulses boosted back to nearly full strength. There is evidence of dub-editing, splicing, and sophisticated electronic enhancement of the final product.

  Yet, for all that, a fluctuating, almost subliminal undercurrent of discords and weird microtones persists; the tracks are punctuated with indistinct muffled cracks and swoops.

  There is none of the hyper-reality that characterises even the oldest of the other tapes. The density of information is low and resonates with the acoustics of a particular room at a particular but, as it has proved, infinitely reclaimable moment in time.

  *

  It is only since they reopened the search for bodies on the Moors that it has emerged that Ian Brady bought Myra Hindley a pop record every time he decided to do another killing.

  On the day of Pauline Reade’s death it was the theme music from The Hill, a film they had seen together at a cinema in Old-ham. On the day they murdered a twelve-year-old called John Kilbride it was Gene Pitney singing ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’. For Keith Bennett it was Roy Orbison’s It’s Over’; and for Edward Evans, whom Brady murdered with a hatchet on their living-room carpet, it was Joan Baez’s version of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.

  ‘Girl Don’t Come’ by Sandie Shaw was Brady’s present to commemorate the murder of Lesley Ann Downey. But ‘Little Red Rooster’ by the Rolling Stones is the record that Hindley would associate with this killing. That’s what was playing at the funfair in Miles Platting in Manchester when they approached the ten-year-old girl and asked her to help them carry some shopping back to the car and then to their house.

  Like all their child victims, according to Myra Hindley, she went ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’. It was between five and six in the evening on Boxing Day, December 26th, 1964.

  *

  McLaren is sleeping half-propped up in bed with his head tilted towards the door. He has grown a pale stubble beard in the last two hours. He’s wearing pyjamas and a tweedy dressing gown under the blankets and when he opens his eyes seems unsurprised to see me standing by the bed.

  A plastic strip shading the light in the headboard has buckled from the heat. My picture smiles do
wn from a poster for a bill at the Ardwick Empire, with Eddie Arnold, Mr Everybody, Alf Carlson, Continental Contortionist, Devine and King, Professors of Music, Raf and Julian, Two Wrongs Make A Riot, and the Lyn Bahrys, Fast and Furious, in support.

  *

  They drove Lesley Ann Downey to where they were living at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in the Hattersley district of Manchester, where Hindley knew Brady had already set up his camera, tripod and lighting equipment in the upstairs back room. The tape recorder was under the bed, hidden by a sheet.

  Brady made the little girl take off her clothes and pose for pornographic pictures on the bed, before raping her and strangling her with a piece of string. Hindley, standing by the window while all – some – of this was going on (the black wig she had worn to the funfair removed or still in place?), tuned the radio to Radio Luxembourg, allowing my voice to bring the message (which is really radio’s only message now) that the rest of the world was still there and all right.

  She interrupted her reverie to help Brady pack a gag into Lesley Ann’s mouth, and to run a bath to get rid of any dog hairs or fibres on her body.

  pa-ruppa-pum-pum …

  WOMAN Will you stop it. Stop it.

  (Woman’s voice, unreadable)

  (Child whimpering)

  MAN Quick. Put it in now.

  (Child whimpering)

  (Retching noise)

  (Retching noise)

  I am a poor boy too pa-ruppa-pum-pum …

  CHILD Please God. I can’t breathe.

  CHILD Can I just tell you summat? Please take your hands off me a minute, please. Please – mummy – please.

  So to honour him pa-ruppa-pum-pum …

  MAN Why don’t you keep it in?

  CHILD Why? What are you going to do with me?

  Shall I play for him pa-ruppa-pum-pum …