First Time Solo

by Iain Maloney

  ‘Didn’t you get caught?’

  ‘Aye, but by then Ma had too much tae worry about with Da’s drinking, and Alec was old enough tae gie her a mouthful. She still tried tae make us go, but she knew she couldnae force it. Then we started hanging around the Party, earning a bit running errands for them. They always seemed to make more sense than the church. They were all for helping the poor, no taking their money and using it for gold candlesticks and fancy dresses.’

  Saturday after parade we were given our freedom. St John’s Wood was stuffed with RAF and we wanted to get away. Terry and I decided to walk into town. About halfway down Edgware Road, Joe caught us up. None of us had been into the city before, other than passing through on the day we arrived.

  ‘So, what’s everyone up to the day?’ said Joe.

  ‘A bit of business,’ said Terry. ‘Then a pint. Then I’ve a surprise for you, Jack.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘One you’ll like.’

  ‘I don’t like surprises,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got plans of my own.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Joe. ‘What you up tae?’

  I waved my Melody Maker. ‘There’s a record shop in Soho.’

  ‘A record shop? Did you bring your gramophone with you?’ said Terry.

  ‘No. But I just want to look. Maybe they’ll know about any jazz clubs.’ I’d slung my trumpet into my small kit bag, taken it along. I didn’t want to be caught out if, by some lucky chance, some band leader happened to say Hey, our trumpeter got bronchitis. Don’t suppose there’s anyone in the house who can stand in. Take a step.

  ‘Jazz? Now there’s an idea,’ said Joe.

  ‘You like jazz as well?’ I said.

  ‘Course. I told you on the train, remember? Best jazz drummer in Scotland.’

  ‘I just assumed that… wasn’t—’

  ‘You assumed I was full of shite?’

  We turned left onto Oxford Street, busy, noisy. ‘Well, you also told me you were a spy.’

  ‘Aye, fair point. But no, the drumming bit’s true. Mind if I tag along tae the club?’

  ‘I don’t even know if there is one, but aye, all right.’

  ‘You said you were a trumpeter,’ he said. ‘On the train. Was that shite?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Terry. ‘He’s got his bugle with him. Stashed in amongst his kit.’

  ‘Maybe he’s hoping they’ll make him the bugler.’

  ‘The bugler?’ said Terry. ‘And do what? You think during an air battle they have a bugler in a kite buzzing round playing charge and retreat?’

  We laughed at the image, a bugler in a Spitfire, canopy slid back, blowing away as we engaged the Luftwaffe.

  ‘Right,’ said Joe. ‘I’m off tae Highgate Cemetery tae pay my respects.’

  ‘Do you have family down here?’ I asked.

  ‘No exactly, but someone who’s important tae my family. Karl Marx is buried there.’

  ‘So, we get our first afternoon off since we arrived in this city and you want to spend it in a graveyard visiting a dead German?’ said Terry.

  ‘Aye, you got a problem with that?’ Terry shrugged. ‘Anyway, how about we all meet up in a pub later,’ said Joe, ‘and Jack can tell us where the club is.’

  ‘Hey, what about my surprise?’ said Terry.

  ‘Can we no do both?’ said Joe.

  Terry thought for a minute. ‘Sure, I don’t see why not. Say, the pub nearest the Soho underground about fourish?’

  ‘Aye.’

  I nodded. What could happen at four in the afternoon?

  ‘Right,’ said Terry. ‘See you later then, Joe.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You’re off to visit Herr Marx, yes?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘At Highgate Cemetery, yes?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That’s back the way we came.’

  ‘Ach for fuck sake.’

  The record shop was bombed out. Some time ago, it seemed. Half the street had gone with it. I went into a Lyon’s for a cup of tea and a think. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. I’d the whole afternoon to myself in the capital. What to do? I looked through the Melody Maker but no inspiration. There were the parks. Sit on the grass with the paper, doze against a tree. Seemed a waste. My first weekend in London, to spend it doing what I’d do on the farm with a free half hour. The afternoon began to stretch out ahead of me. I was, I realised, looking forward to seeing Joe and Terry again. Both of them. They were an odd pair, Terry calculating behind an ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ facade. Joe all passion and energy. He probably did make a hell of a drummer.

  I ordered another pot of tea, and started writing a letter home. I addressed it to all of them, though really I was writing to Lizzie. When I thought about Ma, jumpy, ever on the verge of tears, I couldn’t think of anything worth saying. Da and I communicated in short bursts. A letter to him would be a line or two, and I’d be lucky to get a line or two back. ‘You fine?’ ‘Aye. You?’ ‘Aye.’ Lizzie was different though. She was seventeen, though I often forgot that she aged at the same rate as me. I had to count from her birth date to be sure. I wrote about Joe and Terry, described them to her, hoping she’d laugh. I told her about the London streets, the bomb craters, the people sleeping in Tube stations. Careful of the censors, I said little about our routine. I paid up, went back outside. Might as well take a walk, soak up the atmosphere. I retraced my steps to Hyde Park and went in. Getting off the road and onto the grass was bliss. Among all that concrete and stone, I was missing air breathed out by trees. I wandered aimlessly, drawn towards the water, the Serpentine, and toured its banks. On the other side I saw a uniform like mine, a face I recognised. It took me a moment but it was Doug, the lad from the mess who’d told us about the zoo in Paris. He saw me too and waved, pointed to the bridge. ‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘Having a stroll?’

  ‘Like yourself,’ I said. ‘My plans were bombed out.’ I was aware of my accent in front of Doug.

  ‘A common hazard in London, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Are you from London?’

  ‘No, Yorkshire, but I’ve been down a few times before.’

  ‘What are you up to today?’

  ‘I was just on my way to the Natural History Museum. Have you been?’

  ‘No, I didn’t even know there was one.’

  ‘Oh, it’s magnificent. They have a diplodocus skeleton, the most awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever seen. Care to join me?’

  The museum wasn’t too far away. The diplodocus skeleton had been dismantled and stored in the basement but we happily passed a couple of hours with the fossils, marvelling not just at the array of extinct life that had walked the Earth, but at the people who had discovered a lost world. Random facts from school kept popping into my head, prompted by the displays. The science teacher at school, Old Milton, had filled my head with facts. A polymath the way all country school science teachers must be, he taught us everything from botany to thermodynamics. Most of it gone two minutes after the exams ended.

  ‘I would’ve loved to be a palaeontologist,’ Doug said. ‘Like those Parish vicars, sermon on Sunday and letters to the Royal Society the rest of the week. Tramping over the countryside, digging into mountains to uncover the secrets of the planet, unearthing knowledge about the time before mankind ever set foot on her surface.’

  ‘A nice career,’ I said. ‘Outside.’

  He nodded. ‘To piece together the deep past. It’s almost impossible to picture what it was like when the dinosaurs ruled and man was a small mammal yet to evolve very far. Today everywhere you look there are signs of our presence. Even in the remotest parts there are the marks of habitation. Walls, ruins, scars of agriculture, geometric shapes, straight lines that nature herself would never produce. Back then, during the Jurassic, the Cretaceous periods there was nothing anywhere that was unnatural. Forests, jungles, swamps, deserts, mountains and seas, all of it teeming with life evolving unhindered by hunters, by logging, by mining or fishing.’

&nbs
p; I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me directly. Maybe if he’d been alone, he’d still have voiced these thoughts. I allowed myself to drift with his accent. I imagined Inverayne without any signs of human life. The dykes gone, the animals roaming free, no smoke in the air, no sound of industry. It did seem peaceful, but empty. ‘The world would get on fine without us.’

  ‘It would. The dinosaurs ruled the world once, and where are they now? In display cases. Stored in the basement. Who’s to say it won’t happen to us? Our time here is infinitesimally small in the span of geological time yet we fill it with such importance, as if while the dinosaurs were here the world was just waiting, killing time until we showed up to dredge the oceans, strip the forests and empty the ground.’

  ‘So was that your plan before the war? Science?’

  ‘I didn’t really have a plan. The same as you, I suspect. We’ve grown up with this war. But no, as much as I love science, I have no real aptitude for it. Poetry is more my thing. Science can be beautiful but poetry always seemed more… perfect, somehow. More… deep. Deeper. Evolution is an elegant theory, but it can’t fire the soul they way Eliot can. Have you ever read Eliot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what’s your passion?’ Doug asked.

  ‘Music,’ I said. ‘Jazz.’

  ‘Ah, jazz. Listening or playing?’

  ‘Both. I play trumpet.’

  ‘Like Louis Armstrong.’

  ‘You know Armstrong?’

  ‘I assume you are a fan?’

  ‘Satchmo? God, when I first heard that sound I didn’t even know what was making it. It was unearthly. When I found out it was a trumpet I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen a brass band play in Aberdeen one time, military marches it was, rubbish, and I couldn’t believe it was the same instrument. Well, obviously we couldn’t afford a trumpet so I got a wee pipe, and then a recorder, had to make do with those, but when I was fifteen my older brother, Dod, got hold of a trumpet for me. One of this pals at school had one but never used it. They joined up together, him and Dod. Do you like jazz, too?’ I asked him.

  ‘My brother is the big fan,’ he said. ‘He spent time in Paris before the war.’

  ‘Paris? Nice.’ The clubs, the smoke, the music. Clubs. A sudden thought. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  We looked around for a church. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Three thirty.’

  ‘Damn, I’m supposed to meet friends at four.’ ‘Near?’

  ‘Soho. A pub.’

  ‘That way,’ he pointed. ‘But you’d better hurry if you don’t want to be late.’

  ‘Would you like to come along?’

  Doug thought for a moment. ‘Yes, why not? All I have to do is go back to the flat and the chaps I share with are not the most congenial of men.’

  They were waiting. Joe gave me an earful. He’d already got a few drinks in him and herded us towards the bar with orders to ‘catch up’. Terry was at the bar, chatting up the landlady or cooking up some deal. We got pints in and joined Joe at the table. He fixed Doug with a boozy glare.

  ‘I’ve seen you afore.’

  ‘Yes. We spoke in the mess.’

  ‘Ats right. Elephant man. Dog chops.’

  Satisfied, Joe lifted my pint and took a big gulp. ‘Thanks, big man.’ I rolled my eyes and got another. Joe drummed on the table, softly at first but quickly getting carried away. Doug lifted the glasses before they spilled. ‘Get yer ain,’ said Joe, taking both pints off him.

  ‘You’re a drummer then?’ Doug said.

  ‘Aye. Well spotted. Best jazz drummer in Glasgow, all of Scotland, everywhere, the world. You a jazzman elephantman?’

  ‘No,’ Doug replied.

  Joe stopped drumming, fixed him with his glare again. ‘No? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you like music?’

  ‘I like music fine. I just don’t play jazz.’

  ‘What do you play? Accordion?’

  ‘Rugby.’

  Joe shook his head. ‘Poor man. You should play something. Guitar maybe. You’d suit a guitar. Here, have a pint on me,’ he said and handed Doug his own pint back. ‘Where’s that Welsh git?’

  ‘At the bar,’ I said.

  ‘Good man.’

  I was watching Terry. He’d finished talking to the landlady and had spotted a piano against the back wall, wandered over to it. I followed. He lifted the lid and fingered a few keys. It was slightly out of tune and the high notes tinkled more like cowbells than milk bottles but in a war you do what you can. ‘I didn’t know you could play,’ I said.

  He looked over at the landlady. ‘Don’t mind, do you, love?’

  ‘Depends on how good you are. If you’re a trial to listen to that lid’s coming down on your fingers faster than you can say Duke Ellington. Is he with you?’ she nodded at Joe.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Terry, sitting down at the keyboard.

  ‘Well can you control the language on it? Never heard swearing like it.’

  ‘We haven’t had any luck so far,’ said Terry. ‘He’s a Jock, you see. Likes his swearing. Something about a lack of vitamins.’

  She went off muttering. He began slowly, picking his way through the first few bars, the tune rolling out. An upbeat number, swinging, but with a melancholy refrain. Beautiful. The piece settled into a three chord progression, bashed out, all complexity gone in a final climax. Repetition, and lots of it, but with an exotic hint of something. That’s where the trumpet would be. I had it in my bag. Should I?

  A few people clapped when he finished. The barmaid nodded; he could keep his fingers for the time being. ‘Hey Taffy,’ shouted a cockney voice. ‘Enough of that darkie music. Don’t you know any proper tunes?’

  Terry rolled his eyes at me, then broke into White Cliffs of Dover, flattening every third note. The effect was nauseating. A few still attempted to sing but that kind of treatment, the expert destruction of a melody as only a talented player can manage, carried all before it. The shouting quickly drowned him out. He moved into Stardust.

  ‘Terry,’ I said.

  He looked up but didn’t stop playing.

  ‘You play jazz?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How come you never said?’

  ‘You never asked. Why, you got a request?’

  ‘You know I can play the trumpet.’

  ‘No, but if you hum the tune I’ll pick it up.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I groaned.

  ‘Oi,’ said the landlady. ‘Not you and all.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Hey, love, it’s a bit down isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you play something more lively. It’s not a funeral.’ Terry nodded, ran down the octaves and started a roll at the bottom end, building to a crescendo, running up the keys. People were perking up. I knew what was coming. Part of me really wanted to play but I was nervous. A swig of the beer. Fuck it, I thought. Why not? I ran over, grabbed my trumpet. Hot ginger and dynamite, there’s nothing but that at night, Terry sang, his hands bouncing over the keys. The party was back on. A hot wind through the bar, warming hearts and clearing heads. Keeping my back to the bar, no eye contact with anyone, I puckered up, put the trumpet to my lips and blew. They kissy and huggy nice, oh, by jingo, it’s worth the price / Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobbacy / and the women wiggy waggy woo.

  No improv, played it straight, counter-melody, syncopated. ‘Fuck,’ said Joe.

  ‘Well said,’ said Terry.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ said the landlady.

  ‘What?’ Was I that bad?

  ‘That was fucking brilliant,’ said Joe. ‘How come you never said you were so good? Christ, if I could blow like that I’d tell the whole world. I’d walk around with the bloody thing jammed in my mouth.’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ said Terry.

  ‘You know what I think?’ said Joe.

  ‘You think Stalin should be Prime Minister?’ said Terry.

  ‘I do think that, but what I also think is we could have a jam. Drums, piano, t
rumpet. Taffy here can sing. Sounds like a band tae me.’

  ‘Specifically, it sounds like a trio,’ said Terry. ‘But there are a few problems with that idea. One, we haven’t got any instruments. Two, we haven’t got any time. Three, I prefer to play solo.’

  ‘Aye, heard that about you,’ said Joe. ‘Why don’t you see if you can get us a drum kit through one of your “contacts”.’

  ‘A bar of chocolate is one thing,’ said Terry. ‘You think us business men walk around with drum kits under our coats? “Scuse me, sir. Want to buy a hi-hat? Shilling a snare?”’

  ‘Well, thanks for your help,’ said Joe, sarcastic.

  I got another round in. We chatted about music, the latest gossip in the Melody Maker. A fight brewed over who was better, Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman. Obviously it was Dorsey, though his band hadn’t been as good since Zeke Zarchy had taken his trumpet and left for Glenn Miller’s band. Joe was having none of it.

  ‘Hey,’ Terry said. ‘I promised you a surprise.’

  ‘So you did.’

  ‘It’s almost time.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tits,’ said Joe.

  ‘Oi,’ said the landlady.

  ‘No, he’s right,’ said Terry. ‘I heard tell there’s a theatre nearby where for a small charge we can see artistic—’

  ‘Tits.’

  ‘—displays of women in their altogether.’

  ‘The Windmill?’ said Doug.

  ‘Yes, do you know it?’

  ‘My brother got thrown out of there for grabbing some—’

  ‘Tits?’

  ‘Yes, Joe.’

  ‘Your brother sounds like a good man. Is he around?’

  ‘Somewhere. He flies Lancasters.’

  ‘Definitely a good man. Well, let’s follow his example.’

  ‘And fly Lancasters?’

  ‘No, his love of—’