I can’t really remember them, but I know what they looked like because at 17 Zig Zag Road, where my Aunt Joan and Cousin Wesley live, there are lots of photographs of my father and even a few of my mother.
Some of the photos of my father as a boy look so much like me that it’s unnerving, particularly as the boy is often standing next to a young version of Aunt Joan. It’s always my father who’s laughing or smiling in the photos. Aunt Joan just stares down at him, not at the camera.
‘Your aunt idolised her younger brother,’ Cherokee told me. ‘When he died it was as if all the happiness in Joan died too.’
Since then, things had never been the same between Joan and Cherokee either. Paddy told me that the quarrel actually broke out at my parents’ funeral.
In New Orleans, where a lot of great jazz comes from, funerals aren’t sad, gloomy occasions. The musicians give their dead friend a great send-off. So, as everyone stood at the graveside, Cherokee took out his clarinet and began to play. He played ‘But On the Third Day’, which begins slowly and then gets fast and exciting. It can make you feel hopeful even at the worst moments.
Aunt Joan didn’t agree. Her ears are set solid in concrete. The nearest thing to music in her life is the hum of a vacuum cleaner. She regarded the music as an insult to her dead brother’s memory.
As soon as Cherokee had finished, Joan tore into him, right there at the graveside, telling him that it showed a total lack of respect to play filthy music at such a time.
Cherokee pointed out that Clive had always loved music, but Aunt Joan shouted, ‘That music killed him. I’m not going to let you ruin poor Clive’s baby with its vile influence.’ And so began her battle to save me from the filthy music.
CHAPTER FIVE
Two Diaries
Mrs Walmsley said that I should stay at 17 Zig Zag Road until my future was decided. Zig Zag Road is in Clifftown, a little seaside resort on the east coast of England called East Anglia. Red says East Anglia is being eroded by the sea. And, as far as I was concerned, the sooner Zig Zag Road toppled into the sea, the better!
‘Now, Gene, I want you to do something for me,’ Wallaby said. ‘I want you to write a diary.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because I want to know how you feel about things. Share your innermost thoughts with me.’ I scowled.
‘You’ll enjoy yourself at Zig Zag Road,’ Wallaby assured me. ‘You’ll have someone from your own peer group to relate to.’
‘Pardon me?’ I asked, the way I had heard New Yorkers say it. I had no idea what she meant.
‘Your cousin – Cousin Wesley. You’ll have him to play with,’ Wallaby explained.
‘Is that the good news?’ I asked. I knew I was being rude and Cherokee is very strict about politeness, so I decided I’d better stop. But really! It was an invasion of privacy. I didn’t want to tell Wallaby my innermost thoughts! Maybe she’d give up the idea if I wrote utter rubbish, I thought. I imagined my X certificate horror diary:
Dear Diary
I have finished hacking up the bodies and am just starting to feed the pieces down the waste disposal unit. Phew! This is hard work. Some of these social workers are very muscular.
But in the end, I decided against this. Mrs Walmsley might just take it seriously. I could end up in a maximum security unit for disturbed boys. Instead I decided to prove to Wallaby that I had received a good education. She probably thought that all I could manage was a few scrawled, misspelt words. I would prove her wrong!
So I began in my neatest handwriting, checking spellings in the dictionary and using as many big words as I could:
DIARY
June 7th, Monday
(warm sunny day, showers imminent)
My name is Gene Crawford. I am twelve years old and I normally reside with my paternal grandfather, William ‘Cherokee’ Crawford. He is the leader of a jazz band called the Calumet Jazz Band. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of Red Indian history will appreciate why. My grandfather gained the nickname ‘Cherokee’ when he played with the legendary Duke Ellington Band which had a hit with a tune called ‘Cherokee’. He’s been called ‘Cherokee’ ever since. He’s a brilliant saxophone and clarinet player and he can also play the trombone, the trumpet and the piano. In fact he can probably get an accurate note out of any musical instrument.
I hoped that the bit about ‘anyone with an elementary knowledge of Red Indian history’ would make Wallaby realise she didn’t know everything. I bet she didn’t know that a calumet was an Indian peace pipe!
Cherokee said that he called his jazz band the Calumets because he thought of musicians as ambassadors for their country. ‘If people like your music, they like where you come from,’ he told me. ‘Jazz unites people the world over. And to be a musician you have to work together. If everybody did that, there’d be no more wars.’
When I showed Mrs Walmsley my first diary entry, she seemed surprised and asked, ‘Who taught you to write, dear?’
I shrugged as if it wasn’t important, but I was pleased. ‘I’ve told you – Red, he’s a teacher. And my grandfather, of course. He taught me to read music too.’
Wallaby looked at the diary again and then closed it sharply. ‘It’s your diary, Gene. It’s meant to be about you, not your grandfather.’ That was a stupid remark as I’d lived with my grandfather all my life and the way he was had decided the way I was.
Then she went on, ‘I know these media celebrity types are different from the rest of us ...’ Wallaby was being completely unfair to Cherokee. He was always talking about people working together as a team – tolerating each other, stuff like that, and here she was talking about him as if he was only interested in himself.
I felt so angry now that I did want to write down my innermost thoughts, just to let off steam. But I wouldn’t dare let Wallaby read them. That was when I decided to write two diaries – Diary A for Mrs Walmsley and Diary B for myself.
DIARY B
June 7th, Monday
So here I am in ‘nice and clean’ 17 Zig Zag Road with ‘nice and clean’ Auntie Joan and ‘nice and clean’ Cousin Wesley. It’s so quiet, I want to shout!! There’s no music at all here – no records, no cassettes. If music comes on the TV, Aunt Joan makes Wesley turn it off. Wesley! What a nerd. He wears a suit all the time! And – get this – a red velvet waistcoat!
Aunt Joan’s cooking is so awful that the Ministry of Defence ought to recruit her. They could use her rock cakes to torpedo submarines and her custard to glue aeroplane parts together. I think she uses a blow torch to cook the bacon. I wish I knew where she kept it, so I could use it to break open one of her apple pies.
I was missing Cherokee, Paddy and the others badly. Funnily enough, keeping Diary B made me feel better.
One of the problems with super neat houses is that there are no hiding places. Aunt Joan probably had a map of where every object in the house was kept. She could even tell if the cushions were upside down! The best hiding place I could find for Diary B was the inside pocket of my jacket. I just hoped it wouldn’t be found.
CHAPTER SIX
17 Zig Zag Road
Although I’d always spent part of every year with Aunt Joan, I’d never got to like life at 17 Zig Zag Road. Do you ever have a dream where you’re suffocating in a long dark tunnel? You say, or try to say, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’ but no one listens and this dull weight presses down on you like a blanket. Yes? Well that was life at Zig Zag Road – with my Aunt Joan as the dull weight.
‘Give her a chance!’ Cherokee would urge me before every visit, but that was the point – she’d never say anything like that. ‘No’, ‘don’t’ and ‘stop it’ were more her style.
With Cherokee if I did anything wrong, I’d apologise and then it would be forgotten, really forgotten. But with Aunt Joan it didn’t make any difference whether I apologised or not, she still droned on and on and on.
Take the incident of the flying eggs, for instance. I’d gone to the f
ridge to pour myself a drink. I closed the door, but as I turned away, my jacket caught the lower edge of the fridge door. The door was flung open again, sort of bouncing against the wall and a dozen eggs in the top section of the fridge door went hurtling across the room. Most landed on the floor, one landed neatly on the teapot and one managed to get as far as the back door mat.
I said sorry immediately, but however many times I explained how it happened Aunt Joan behaved as if I’d deliberately thrown the eggs around the room. ‘Are you sure you weren’t juggling?’ she kept asking. She thinks that if she’s not there to stop me, I’m bound to do something dangerous and criminal. Cherokee would just have laughed.
In fact, all Aunt Joan seems to want is for everyone to be as miserable as she is. And she seems to have managed it with Wesley. He just mooches around, agreeing with everything she says. He’s two years older than me, about twice my height and half my weight. His shoulders droop down as if Aunt Joan’s nagging has made him start to sink quietly out of sight.
Even though I can’t remember my own mum, I’ve seen enough of my friends’ mothers to know they don’t all behave like Mussolini. Seamus’s mum, Paddy’s sister, nags him all the time, but you can tell that she’s doing it for the best.
‘Ah Seamus, look at you! What a sight! Tidy yourself up my lad!’ she’ll say. But then she’ll add something cheerful and she’ll have a smile in her eyes when she’s speaking, so Seamus actually seems to like her nagging.
And when I stay at his house in Kerry, I feel like one of the family if his mum starts to nag me too. But I never feel at home in Zig Zag Road ...
CHAPTER SEVEN
Misery
DIARY A
June 12th, Saturday
(clear and sunny)
I am staying here with Aunt Joan. It is very nice here. My room is very nice. Yesterday we had steamed cod and cabbage for tea. It was very nice.
DIARY B
June 12th, Saturday
The cod we had yesterday was greener than the cabbage! Wesley made a joke about it being ‘the piece of cod that passeth all understanding’. Piece of cod, peace of God – get it? I thought that was pretty funny, but Aunt Joan certainly didn’t. She told him he was being blasphemous and that he must set me a good example ‘because Gene usually has only musicians to mix with’. Aunt Joan can make ‘musician’ sound like something you find blocking a drain. I know she reads Diary A when she’s dust-busting my room, so I’m going to put her right on a few things.
DIARY A
June 14th, Monday
(dull and cloudy with occasional drizzle)
A musician’s life is a very demanding one. It requires hard work and dedication. Some people think that a musician’s work begins when he arrives on stage, but they’re wrong. Even the best musicians have to practise many hours a day. My grandfather, Cherokee Crawford, practises before every performance and he’s been playing for fifty years. His fans say he has natural talent, and he does, but that talent is developed by lots of hard work. Furthermore, every musical instrument is precious and must be cared for. It takes at least a year to get a wooden clarinet to a condition where it can be played in front of an audience. When musicians are touring they have to pack and care for their own instruments. Red, our bass player, always buys two plane tickets – one for himself and one for his double bass!
DIARY B
June 14th, Monday
Aunt Joan sent me to school today with Wesley. I’d always managed to avoid this before by visiting Zig Zag Road in the school holidays. But because it’s weeks until Wesley gets his summer vacation, Aunt Joan and Wallaby thoughtfully managed to make arrangements with the school authorities for me to attend – ‘good for peer group bonding’, I understand. I expected to be trailing about after the school’s biggest drip. But I was in for a surprise.
The first surprise was his nickname. I’d imagined a few of my own and none were complimentary. But as soon as we walked into the playground a little kid came up to him and said, ‘Will you help me with my maths homework, Prof?’
‘Yup. Usual place,’ answered Wesley.
‘“Prof”? Why did he call you that?’ I asked.
‘It’s short for professor.’
‘Yeah – I guessed that. But why “professor”?’
Wesley shrugged, but I soon found out. He’s brilliant! He’s not just cleverer than the other kids, he’s cleverer than most of the teachers! He’s taken all his exams early and passed them all with top grades.
In fact, the school has a problem keeping him busy. He spends some of his time helping the little kids. He even helps with the problem kids. There’s one boy called Mickey who got into a fight with the French teacher when he tried to stop him setting fire to his wooden ruler. Mickey threw his desk at the teacher! Wes is the only person who can handle him.
But Wes isn’t a show-off. Everyone seems to like him, even the tough kids. He still slouches about, but it’s a happier slouch than when he’s at home.
Aunt Joan has never given a hint that he’s clever. And she never encourages him. She’ll even stop him doing homework to get on with some ‘real work’ like polishing a sideboard. I think she’s rotten not to praise him a bit.
DIARY A
June 17th, Thursday
Yesterday I had a very enjoyable day at Wesley’s school.
My cousin Wesley is extremely brainy. He is certainly the cleverest person I have met around here! I expect his mother is very proud of him and constantly encourages him with words of praise.
DIARY B
June 17th, Thursday
I’ve brought my clarinet with me, but every time I get ready to play, Aunt Joan finds some excuse to stop me. Yesterday she told me that I’d wake the neighbours – and it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. She also took a good look at the mouthpiece on my clarinet and said that the reed was unhygienic. ‘It must be alive with germs!’ she told me. ‘You shouldn’t keep sticking something like that in your mouth.’ I pointed out that this is just what we do with toothbrushes, and they’re meant to help to keep us clean, but it’s not worth arguing with my Auntie Joan, she just moans about everything. In fact, I think I’ll rechristen her ‘Moan’.
DIARY A
June 18th, Friday
June, as everyone knows, is in SUMMER, but we at 17 Zig Zag Road are going to SPRING clean. Of course, the spring cleaning was done in spring. But now we are going to start all over again. Every curtain must be taken down and washed, every carpet rolled up and beaten. All the furniture must be moved, polished and pushed back again. Here at 17 Zig Zag Road, we spring clean in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
DIARY B
June 19th, Saturday
Help! The spring cleaning has begun! Why can’t dust which has got under the carpets stay there, I want to know? It seems rather a neat place to keep it to me.
DIARY A
June 20th, Sunday
After church, my Aunt Joan kindly allowed Cousin Wesley and me to watch television. Wesley likes the game shows on satellite TV. His favourite is called ‘Guess what?’ People who are related – a husband and wife or mother and son, for example – come on and one has to guess what the other has decided about something, like ‘Would he choose the strawberry jam with lumps in or the one without?’ It’s very exciting.
DIARY B
June 20th, Sunday
Am I stuck here with a lunatic or what? Wesley is the biggest drip I’ve ever met. What does he see in those stupid game shows? Who cares what type of jam someone likes? I hope the guy falls in a big bubbling tub of it. And there’s something really weird about keeping clothes as free of creases as Wesley does. I thought he was clever! I guess he disconnects his brain when he comes home.
But I’ve got to admit he has got a sense of humour. When Moan brings up the flying eggs yet again: ‘Be careful, Gene. Remember what you did with the eggs!’ Wesley’ll say something to try to get her to lighten up. ‘Eggsactly’ or, ‘Don’t crack up, Gene.’ He d
oesn’t actually manage to make Moan smile but at least she stops scowling.
‘Can’t she lighten up?’ I complained to Wes as Moan thumped and scrubbed her way around the house. ‘Lighten up’ was one of Red’s favourite phrases and as I said it I realised it wasn’t very appropriate for Moan. She could give Hulk Hogan a run for his money.
‘She gets her fun in different ways to the rest of us,’ explained Wes, sounding unconvinced.
‘Red says a real sense of humour is when you can laugh at yourself. He smiled for weeks after he was arrested in New York!’
‘I suppose he’d never have stopped laughing if they’d put him on Death Row,’ countered Wes.
‘Red’s got more sense of humour in his little finger than Aunt Joan’s got in the whole of her ...’ I trailed off, a mental picture of Moan’s entire bulk would quieten anyone, but an idea had occurred to me. It was diabolical and brilliant! If I’d been in a cartoon, a lightbulb would have been flashing above my head.
‘What is it?’ asked Wes. ‘What?’
‘You know “Life’s a Laf”?’ I asked. Of course he did. Next to ‘Guess What’ it was the most moronic programme on TV. People sent in videos of things like cyclists falling into pot-holes and bridegrooms keeling over at the altar. It was presented by a grinning Liverpudlian who kept chuckling and saying, ‘Ee, Life’s a Laf.’
Wes said it now. ‘Ee, Life’s a Laf, course I know it.’
Cherokee Page 2