#29 Stories from the Edge of Music: Skool Daze
Some personal stuff (for a change): A small boy discovers music — and his first girlfriend
At a boarding school for unwanted children
I was nine in 1943 when I was sent off to St. George’s — a co-educational private boarding school in Harpenden, a town 30 miles north of London. Sometimes, now, I call it a school for unwanted children.
The war was in full swing, but the tide was beginning to turn; with coloured pins and a giant map of Europe in every classroom, we marked the progress of the Allied armies. We thought it was some sort of grown-up game, and the reality of wholesale death and destruction never crossed our minds. For King and Country, our boys were going to win the war; Mr. Churchill told us so on the radio.
Wearing our school uniforms — the girls in green serge, the junior boys in short trousers and white shirts with green-striped ties — we went to chapel each morning at 8:30 and every evening at seven.
Every moment of every day was organized and filled with classes, chapel services, meals, an hour and a half games period (cricket in summer, rugby in the fall and winter), homework and 9:30 lights-out in the dormitories.
There was little chance that soon-to-be teenage boys and girls, however raging their hormones, could do much more than fumble a quick kiss behind the bicycle sheds.
At nine, I knew all about sex. You got babies when you got married; as you walked down the aisle during the wedding ceremony, upward draughts from the heating vents made the woman pregnant. After all, the only people who got babies were married, and everyone got married in church, so that was the only logical explanation. It took only a few weeks, and some discussions after lights-out, to bring me up to speed.
I hated school. I had acne, I bit my nails, I was grubby and a poor student and the food made me gag. (I can still feel ill when I think of school-meal soggy Brussels sprouts, apparently boiled for days and swimming in pale green water.) My mathematical ability was hopeless, and I remember getting two marks out of a hundred on an examination: I had spelled my name correctly, and the date was correct. Forced to choose between science and the arts, I chose science — until I had to dissect a frog at our first lesson.
Senior students — prefects in authority — beat me regularly for many real and imagined misdemeanours: having your tie loose, or your shoelaces undone, or hiding inedible vegetables in your jacket, or not calling them “Sir”…
Pressing trousers correctly for senior boys was important. You did that by folding them along the seams, and laying them under your mattress overnight; if you weren’t careful, you’d press a double crease, and get into serious trouble. “Tramlines!” shouted an 18-year-old prefect, waving a belt. “Bend over! Six of the best!”
Eventually, my father was called in for a meeting with the headmaster. “Your boy is not doing well,” he was told. And my father’s response was that he was paying several thousand pounds a year to send me to this school, and that it was their problem to sort me out, and not his.
And as if all this wasn’t bad enough, I was hopeless at sports. Rugby football, played in mid-winter on a muddy games field, was a miserable experience. If someone threw the ball at you, you were immediately hurled to the ground by larger and more energetic boys; if you dropped the ball, you were shoved into the mud anyway. An hour and a half later, freezing cold and covered in mud and bruises, you were sent off to the showers. And shortly afterwards, there was an hour of class, dinner (oh God, not the boiled beef again!), chapel and a homework period.
A passion for newspapers
At 12 years old, I decided to produce a hand-written school newspaper, with articles about my classmates, my teachers, and the daily routines at St. George’s. Today, I can’t recall how many editions I produced — maybe half a dozen — but I do remember my maternal grandmother looking at a copy and remarking that it looked as disorganized and as grubby as her grandson.
Newspapers fascinated me. After all, my mother read The Times every day, completing the crossword each morning as she occupied the bathroom. (Later, finding The Times’ crosswords too easy, she switched to The Daily Telegraph).
Daily papers then were filled with news, rather than comment. Opinions were limited to the single daily column purportedly written by the editor. Pompous, smug and self-righteous, these pieces set the political agenda and tone of the newspapers’ proprietors.
The Times, still revelling in its Victorian nickname as “The Thunderer,” was the newspaper of record. Its front page consisted of nothing but classified advertisements; there were only one or two black and white pictures in the whole newspaper, with a few single-column maps to illustrate the advances and defeats of armies at war.
A column on the editorial page was called Court Circular, and it listed the daily activities of members of the Royal Family: racing at Ascot, visits to hospitals, to hounds at Sandringham…
At school, newspaper reading was almost mandatory. How else could we follow the war? How else could we realize the magnitude of the far-flung coloured-in-red British Empire, from South Africa to Canada, from Australia to Rhodesia, from India to New Zealand?
Books had already opened me up. As a child, I enjoyed the stories about Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and the rest of them. I can still remember Wind in the Willows, which my mother read to me when I was five and I recall howling with laughter at the misadventures of Mr. Toad and his new automobile.
Books were my escape. I identified with Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories about a child as scruffy as I was and who was always getting to awful ”scrapes.” I loved Billy Bunter, a series of books by Frank Richards about a fat kid who couldn’t do anything right.
And later, when I was 13, I discovered Graham Greene at a school-sanctioned retreat at a Franciscan monastery, and childish books were left behind.
Run fast, and you get to hear good jazz
The one sport I did excel at was long-distance running. I discovered that if you ran faster than everyone else, you would be in and out of the showers before the others turned up. Then you could trot over to the common room, and tune in — every Wednesday at 4:15 for 30 minutes — to the BBC Jazz Club, prefaced by the signature tune, Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local.”
Alone among my peers, I loved this music — the energy, the drive, the simplicity of the tunes, the skill of the players.
Every Wednesday, the BBC Jazz Club was gave me a weekly lesson in American music. I was introduced to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Clarence Williams, Bessie Smith, and the aristocracy of King Oliver and Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Douglas Dawn, the school’s music teacher, attempted to enthuse us about Beethoven and Bach (none of that Stravinsky, though). Jazz, however, was “cannibal music played by black people with no skill except to bang drums and shout.”
Obviously, this was the music for me.
But it was Tamara Salaman who really saved my life. My first “girlfriend,” she was one of the few Jewish girls at the school and she was — notwithstanding the green serge school uniform and the sensible shoes — a surprisingly beautiful young woman. She was also a fine classical pianist, and all these years later I wish I could remember which particular Bach toccata and fugue she played so flawlessly.
In turn, I would try to convince her of the energy and musicality of Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band’s version of “Skid-Dat-De-Dat.” This was difficult, because, in hindsight, it was a pretty poor record — an energetic, if out of tune, version of a classic Armstrong Hot Five piece recorded some 25 years earlier.
Tamara saw some good in me; maybe she recognized another outsider, another square peg resisting being jammed into a round hole. In what few spare moments we were allowed, we would walk between classes holding hands. Sometimes, in the long grass behind the playing fields, we’d lie down, kissing and fumbling; I remember my last summer at St. George’s as if it were yesterday. I was 16, and I was determined to leave school at the very first opportunity.
Tamara gave me confidence, a wry sense of humour and the ability to resist the strictures of a private school environment. I tidied myself up. I learned to be assertive, and how to hold my own in conversation; I learned how to tell a joke. I was bullied less frequently by senior boys and teachers. I even became a passably adequate cricket player, and I earned good marks in English classes.
Thanks to jazz, books, newspapers and the support of a young girl who believed in me, I felt liberated for the first time — free, if uncertain, to choose a direction for my life.
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JEFF HEALEY: A POSTSCRIPT (OR TWO)
Because some blind people are, in fact, sensitive to light, I remember asking Jeff, early in our working relationship, whether flash photography affected him when he was performing.
He took out one of his prosthetic eyes and put it on my desk. He faced me and added, simply: “Look, I don’t have eyes.”
His keyboard skills were astonishing. As he was sitting in my office, typing on my spare computer, I interrupted him. “No, don’t talk to me,” he said. He finished the sentence he was writing and said, “I can’t stop when I’m typing because I can’t see the screen so I can’t know where to start again — I just have to keep going.”
There was one small typo in the 500-word piece he was writing, a sleeve note for an upcoming recording project. (I wish I could type a fraction as well as Jeff could.)
Department of corrections
Colin Bray, who played bass with the Jeff Healey Jazz Wizards, dropped me a note clearing up a couple of mistakes I made in the piece I wrote about Jeff last week:
Colin wrote: “Jeff didn’t have 27,000 78s; he had around 28,000. I know, because I moved them six times in house moves! I was responsible for selling (many) of his 78s. About 7,000 were sold off on eBay, in VJM Magazine and then by three well-known jazz 78 auction specialists in the U.S. It was only the remaining 21,000 dance band 78s that went to the University of Toronto music archives.
“Harry Roy made ‘Piccadilly Rag’ for Decca, not Parlophone and it was in the F. series. Fairly sure this was in the mid-’40s.”
I may have given the impression that the unissued country material Jeff recorded was done late in his career; Colin told me it was actually done much earlier; Jeff was a huge Johnny Cash fan. I do know, however, that guitarist Albert Lee was added to the tracks, relatively recently. Of the two tracks I’ve heard, Jeff’s vocals reminded me of the late Don Williams.
In addition to his corrections, Colin was also gracious enough to add: “As an aside, I’d like to thank you for acting as Jeff’s publicist towards the end of his career and not just for that Chris Barber mini visit. There are a lot of untrustworthy people involved with the industry and you are one of the good guys; Jeff told me how much he appreciated your assistance.
“Holger Petersen (of Stony Plain Records) too was a gem. Like yourself, completely trustworthy and much appreciated by Jeff. A shame both of you weren’t involved with his career earlier.”
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VIDEOS FOR YOUR WEEKEND
A couple of weeks ago, I included a video of the British band Skinny Lister, adding that I didn’t think they’d played in Toronto. My pal Steve McLean corrected me: they’ve apparently played here twice before, and are due back in the fall. I’ll be the first to buy tickets!
They call this music “shanty punk” — I’ll go along with that, and so will you!
I’ve shared videos by Jonathan Pie before, in his role as a TV news reporter — nobody does invective-laden rants like this man. Here, he savages the former British Minister of Health, who was forced to resign in yet another U.K. Tory scandal. WARNING: Most definitely NSFW, but you may learn some new swear words!
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LAST WORDS
Unless my readers (and there are more than 500 of you now) really hate the personal stuff, I’ll come back to it in three or four weeks. All and any comments are so much appreciated.
Next week, though I’ll introduce you to Shakura S’Aida, Canada’s unheralded Ambassador of the Blues.
One more thing. If you do like the stories I tell here every week or 10 days, please think about taking out a PAID subscription. It sure helps put the icing on my old age pension cake!
Such a wonderful story Richard. Thank you for sharing. This Pakistani-Canadian girl is a fan :)
Absolutely brilliant, intimate look at your early days. So fascinating to identify with someone who's childhood was very different, but so similar. I look forward to more and hope you are considering an actual chapbook or novel.