Try to Tell the Story Page 12

  After the show came out, a friend and I hung around. We saw people going to a side door. We followed. And that's how we met him. He was in the doorway in a white shirt and black pants. He was sweating immensely, and he carried a large white handkerchief, the size of a hotel towel, to mop himself. You could feel his heat from several steps away. He made sweating feel divine. And he reached out to touch us white kids, like waifs near his fire. “Thank you very much for coming,” he said, and his hands were like leather. Years later, it happened that I researched Louis Armstrong. He was the son of a teenage whore born and raised on earth floors. He had hardly any education. But he would play music as intricate and daring as (and more emotional than) anything in his time. How can such a man be? He ignores and eliminates education. You can use every device of history to describe him, but nothing explains the shock. Some necessary force was delivered. Some demonstration for the world. Did God send him? And I daresay at the very same time there were other cities and other parts of the U.S. where there were dogs and high-power hoses to counter that force.

  Jazz didn't free my speech—it just brought me delight. And while I was pretending to be Sinatra, I was also making myself available for what I called the American rhythms in that conversation I quoted ealier—the girl with the toothache and the newspaper owner. The language was English, yet the attitudes in the talk—the doubts and hopes—were something else. (“We love you madly!”) Equally, the seeping romanticism of Frank's songs, so much at odds with the cynicism of his face, was an American struggle. There were long melodic lines in his songs (where he, indeed, learned breathing), and meandering thoughts in the wisteria sentences in Faulkner, in Thomas Wolfe, and even in Henry James. There was an American sentence tough and loose enough for you to find out how little you knew. Whereas the syntax of English English was often so terse, so definitive, so marked as to be the skeleton of what you knew. So it felt natural to me that America had created this music where a striding beat remained in place as instrumentalists “improvised” for minutes at a time.

  The whole thing was beyond me—the nature of flow and where it came from, the quality and pacing of voice in an instrumental music. And then I heard Annie Ross—the sublime, radiant, nimble Ross—who sang musical lines like Wardell Gray out of Kafka: “My analyst told me, I was right out of head / My analyst told me, I'd be better dead.” And oh, my brethren, this babe had been born in Mitcham! I believed that it was my way out of silence, even if I wasn't there yet, and still reckoned that I would die if I couldn't speak. I found a record (a Norman Granz production of J. J. Johnson and Stan Getz at the Opera House in Chicago). I played it until the grooves wore away. It was two voices—on trombone and tenor sax—talking to each other. I thought Getz was a genius. (I had a live record from 1950 in which he was introduced as “the Montgomery Clift of the tenor sax.”) The time would come, in the 1980s in a club in Oakland, California, when I would see and hear Getz play live. He was not far from his death, and I think he was ill, but he had that quality that musicians can reach, of seeming to stop time for half an hour.

  I think when you write prose you need access to a lot of voices and measures, but I know in my head that I sometimes come to sections of a book that need to be like Getz.

  “Have you got my Sinatra album, then?” asked Sally.

  “It's mine,” I said.

  “Bloody likely,” she told me. “I need it.”

  “What for?”

  “Fellow I know, I want to play it to him.”

  “I bet he doesn't get it.”

  “Oh, I think he does,” she said in that lazy way. “What does that mean?” I wanted to know. “Look at you,” she said. “What do you mean, look at me?” “Have you ever thought about your Frank?” she asked. “How?” I said.

  “How he's so relaxed, so dreamy. What do you call it?” “He listens to the words,” I told her. “He's an actor.” Sally pursed her lips, stole the album, and gave me a grin. “And he gets laid four or five times a day,” she said.

  21

  IPLAYED CRICKET WITH BRYAN, the boy who lived over the road. We did most things together: we went cycling into the Surrey hills; we camped; we hitchhiked once to the Isle of Wight and got there in time for lunch! At six o'clock in the morning, I would cross the street and tap on his bedroom window He'd get up and we'd go to the open-air swimming bath on Tooting Bec Common. It was a hundred yards long, a huge place, with the trains rattling behind the changing rooms. Sometimes that pool was packed with kids, and it was a girl-watching mecca as bathing-suit design and puberty struggled to find confidence after the war.

  And we played cricket. One day the bus stopped as usual quite close to where we played and a black man got off. I have to put it that way because for us kids it was far and away the most striking thing about him. He watched us play hard ball, with no pads for a while. He came a little closer and fielded the odd ball and tossed it back to us with the grin that waits to be asked to join in. All fair enough— we'd done it ourselves. But he was adult and he was black and we had been told that you didn't just speak to anyone—not on Tooting Bec Common, a resort of prostitutes and a haven for escaping dictators.

  But Ben would not let us be standoffish. He was thin and wiry. His hair was receding. He was not quite as young as I had thought at first.

  “That looks like a nice bat,” he said to me.

  I was proud of it. It was a Gradidge and I had taken care of it, oiling it with lubricious fondness. Linseed oil is not everyone's taste, but it's a turn-on for some of us, along with the special staleness of old jockstraps.

  I showed Ben the bat. He told us his name. He was from Barbados.

  “Like Everton Weekes,” I said, referring to the batsman who had figured so bravely in the 1950 tour by West Indies.

  “Right you are,” he said. “Mind if I have a knock?”

  We were on the brink of something. I don't know who he was. There wasn't a Ben from Barbados who played seriously. But he was a natural. Bryan and I could both bowl well enough, and he handled us, remarking on a really good delivery and whipping the others about the Common. He was very quick on his feet and in the wrists. And as he got used to us and the pitch he was something to see. Then he bowled to us and I suspect he went easy but you could hear the ball hissing in the air. There was a summer of Ben, getting off the 49 bus at the same time most evenings. Then he never came back. I don't know what he was doing in London, unless God had sent him to give us some lessons. We adored him, and looked out for him for years afterwards, and he was the first black man we ever knew to talk to and be inspired by. Him and Miles Davis, yet this Ben was a prince, and Miles the prince of darkness.

  But Ben taught us strokeplay, short-pitched bowling, and how great the game was. And the years took on a rhythm I can still recall: in 1950, West Indies toured England in the summer and won the Test at Lord's, and on the last day their fans started singing calypso at the game and introduced the world to Weekes, Worrell, and Walcott and “those little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine.” In 1951, it was the South Africans and the first game I ever saw. In 1952, Fred Trueman scattered the Indian team. In ‘53, England won back the Ashes (with Compton and Edrich batting), which Australia had held since 1933. I heard the final overs on a radio on the beach at Freshwater. In 1954 came Pakistan with Hanif Mohammad and Fazal Mahmood. In 1955 it was South Africa again.

  It was in 1953 that I saw my first day of Test cricket-England vs. Australia at Lord's. A friend and I queued for hours outside the ground and then we sat on the grass just beyond the boundary rope. According to Wisden, that 1953 series still holds the British record—more than 500,000—for the most people attending the matches. The day we were there we saw Hutton score a century backed by Graveney against Lindwall and Miller, but by the end of the match, after Australian centuries from Hassett and Miller, Willie Watson and Trevor Bailey had to make a heroic stand for England against defeat.

  I was playing cricket at school and was good enough to play on scho
ol teams sometimes. I watched the Surrey team assemble. From 1952 until 1958, seven times in a row, Surrey won the County Championship. This was the game I watched. Test matches were expensive and sometimes by ticket only, but the county game was within reach in those days, like the league in soccer. It was the heart of the game, and even Test players strove to be available for county games if they could. There were large crowds and strong feeling if rivals like Middlesex or Yorkshire were playing. Alas, that game is in tatters today. I understand that cricket now is Test cricket—international games—or one-day matches in which both sides have a set number of overs. Is it incidental that the parts of Tooting Bec Common where we played every day until it was dark are overgrown now and past caring?

  I doubt a kid in Barbados needed the game more than I did. With the Surrey team I could share in their glory and their suntanned character. As if I were doing Sinatra, I could imitate them all, physically.

  I could be the upright Peter May—Charterhouse and Cambridge and England's captain—stroking a drive through the covers. I could be Alec Bedser—the great, gentle Alec—who sustained England against Australia for so long, with a run-up of just a few strides and the greatest medium-pace bowling there ever was. When the air at the Oval was thick and yeasty from the brewery, Alec could move the ball a foot in the air. A foot? You had to be there.

  Then there was Jim Laker, the Yorkshire-born off-spinner with just a few stuttery steps and then the arm wheeling over. And Tony Lock, the greatest catcher of a ball, the fiercest competitor, with a left-arm delivery that came and went in a blur—and a good thing, too, for some said he threw the ball when he got worked up. And Bernie Constable, a fine middle-order batsman and a swift cover fielder whose every step on the field was taken with pigeon pride and joy, and whose remarks could have all the close fielders laughing as the bowler ran in.

  England was as strong as Surrey in those years, so it felt vital to be at the heart of the game. And the rivalry with Australia was the big brass ring. As I said, we beat them in England in 1953 with Bedser leading the way. But then in 1954-55, we toured Australia, under May's leadership. We had Lock and Laker in their prime. We had Bedser fading away, but with two new bowlers—Brian Statham and a real newcomer, Frank Tyson, who proved to be unplayably fast. Together, they won the series. And Fred Trueman was not even picked for that tour, despite 130-odd wickets in the preceding season. He was “unruly” and “outspoken”—not always an MCC man. Cricket then was a sport ruled by class, and the MCC was a place where the system believed in amateur, university chaps as fit to be skippers. There was even an annual match, the Gentlemen against the Players, where the Players were professionals known by their surnames and the Gentlemen were amateurs, called Mr. Dewes and Mr. Doggart.

  The next visit by Australia was 1956. The Australian team was in transition: it had veteran players like Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller, and Neil Harvey, and some kids, great players for the future, Richie Benaud and Alan Davidson. They were led by Ian Johnson, their off-spin bowler, not a strong captain. Quite early on in the season, the Aussies came to the Oval to play Surrey, and in one innings Jim Laker got all ten of them out: 10 for 88. It was a dry summer. The wickets tended to break up. There were Australian complaints that English groundsmen were catering to Laker's rare ability with pitches that did not last a game. I'm sure there was truth in these comments.

  England was dominant in the series, but by the time of the fourth Test at Old Trafford in Manchester, the summer was a roaster and the ground was cracking. Laker was a great bowler in his prime and the England team was full of greedy close catchers who would snatch the ball right off the maker's name on the bat. In that Test, Laker took nineteen of the twenty wickets to fall. Nineteen for ninety.

  I was in heaven for him, for English cricket, and for my tour de force impersonation of the modest Laker licking his spinning finger and kicking absentmindedly at the dusty pitch. Kids asked me to do Laker.

  Bryan and I had met some other cricketers on the Common. Cycling one Sunday afternoon we found a game in progress, the parents having a picnic as a few boys played. The game belonged to a merry boy named Rupert, handsome and a good bat. We dropped our bikes and watched long enough to get an invitation. Long enough for me to see that one of the boys was a girl, a pale blonde with sharp eyes, grey green, and the beginnings of a figure. I ended that blissful Sunday trying to teach her to bowl like Laker. This meant standing close to her and putting her arms in the correct position. I had never been as close to a girl, and so you begin to see the profound benefits of cricket. She giggled and said she'd never get it. But she seemed prepared to try until dusk set in. Her name was Margaret.

  22

  MY GRANDFATHER, BERT, in Mitcham was seriously ill. He had always had a cough but it grew worse and then it turned out that he had cancer. He had to have an operation that removed his voice box. When he came out of the hospital he had a hole in the front of his neck and a breathing tube. His voice, soft and lulling, was gone. The very best he could do was whisper. This in a story about the difficulty of speaking.

  Try as I might, I could not hear or understand what he was saying. I know that I felt this obstacle between us was a version of my stammer. I saw the two things as being alike and I could hardly be with Bert without breaking into tears. He smiled in his charming way and held my hand, but Mum told me not to let him see me upset. So we played cards together—cribbage—and we chuckled silently at the twists of the game. I felt myself understanding him better. With so many people in my childhood, the best way of getting to know them was to find a shared game.

  Grandma was always telling me what a problem Bert had been in her life. Sometimes she said this in front of him, and he nodded in his wise way and smiled patiently, as if he'd learned long ago (two world wars ago) to let her temper run on. But I noticed that they liked to sit together in the same simple silence, sipping tea perhaps or doing nothing except be together. They got a television, one of the first I ever saw, and liked to watch the horse racing in the afternoon, as they had gone to the races together for most of their life. Sometimes Grandma would phone the local bookie and they'd put two shillings on a horse they liked the look of, and I think they were always a little ahead of the game, which suggests that horses do photograph as well as people.

  On Sunday mornings, Dad and I would go to Mitcham to see Grandma and Bert. Then the bus back and we were in the kitchen. Dad would shout, “Serve the meal!” He became agitated as he grew older if he could smell food but not eat immediately And my mum would be cooking and listening to the radio—the swooning theme song of Two-Way Family Favourites, “With a Song in My Heart,” broadcast from London and Hamburg, because even in the 1950s Britain had thousands of troops stationed in Germany.

  Often at lunch, there'd be an argument. Dad would lay down the law about something and I would explain to him that he was wrong—I must have been learning something at school. And he would think that there was an edge of hostility creeping into my voice. And he may have been right. So the mood shifted. We were all right together until I began to oppose him, and the more I could command evidence and logic in the case the more surely he seemed betrayed.

  And then one Sunday, it started to get dark.

  “There's a storm coming,” said Mum.

  “It's the end of the world,” said Dad.

  We waited for thunder and lightning, but none came. In about a half an hour, it had gone from bright day to night, except it wasn't even regular night with moonlight. It was thick black fog, and you could smell it.

  “They've let off one of those bombs,” guessed Dad. “Where's my gas mask?”

  There was plenty of talk of bombs at the time. We had hydrogen bombs being tested in the atmosphere and if you read the papers it seemed likely that it was more than the atmosphere could take. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a kind of duffle-coat hiking club. In a couple of hours, the darkness receded and it went back to being an ordinary, dismal afternoon. The next day in the p
apers came the report: apparently there had been a very unusual weather system. A great cloud of smog had gathered over London. A breeze took it off, but then the breeze dropped and a freak vacuum had sucked the sooty air back into London at ground level. I was never persuaded. But it led to new laws about smokeless fuels and the attempt to free London from industrial grime.

  “It couldn't happen like that,” I said.

  “Oh, Mr. Know-all says it couldn't have been. That's what we send him to school for, to know more than the experts.”

  “Did you ever see smog that black?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “And how did it get sucked back into the city?”

  No answer.

  “Ooh, Mother,” said Dad, “I'm frightened. Mr. Know-all says it's the end of the world.”

  “No, you said that,” said Mum.

  “Well,” he said, “if I'm going to be contradicted in my own home, I'm off.”

  “It's not your home,” I said, and he swung a blow at me, a smack with an open hand. It missed, and it suddenly seemed that he might be drunk. “I am going to my room,” he said. “I know when I'm not wanted.”

  But did he? Did he have any idea? Downstairs in the house, Grannie's health was faltering. I don't know what it was, or whether it was really anything to die from. But most of my life I had gone downstairs in the morning, to get her newspaper and ours off the front step. And I had always called out, “Good morning, Grannie,” as I passed her bedroom, dropping her paper at her door, and there had been some response. Until it stopped. She wasn't dead, but maybe she was sleeping differently. “Too sorry for herself,” Mum said.

  Some mornings, when I had her paper, Grannie neither stirred nor responded. I have a dream still of creeping past her door, wondering if she is dead. I was fast and nimble then and I could do the stairs and the hall without a sound. I still get the paper, but it's the New York Times now, not the Daily Mail, and I am not nearly as nimble. I could fall on the steps where the paper deliverer tosses the Times, and I wonder whether I'll go before newspapers stop such things as deliveries and newsprint.