Alma Cogan (23 page)

‘But I’ve got all sorts in to cook a meal.’

‘I’d be quite happy just to go and have a drink and perhaps another sandwich later, something like that.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Don’t bother cooking for me.’

‘Because we were going to have soup and hunter’s stew. I’ve got the stewing meat and the garlic and I’d just started to do the potatoes and all sorts of things … I’ve got this horror of having a visitor who sort of goes to bed ravenous.’

‘Well I won’t,’ I say, ‘because I would speak up if I was hungry. If I am, we can always stop at a fish-and-chip shop after the pub.’

‘Oh there’s fish-and-chip shops. Any number. There’s fish-and-chip shops all
over
. But I wouldn’t have insulted a guest by saying I was going to buy fish and chips for them … If we went to a place where they do bar meals, then if …’

There’s only one way to end this: by leaving the room. (I doubt anyway whether it was much more than the excuse for another photo opportunity and the food simply props.)

There are hollows in the floor that haven’t been plugged with underlay, so the carpet both sinks and clings to your shoes when you step on it. Something brushes against my hair going upstairs.

I look into the room where I’m going to be spending the night. It is cabin-sized, low and narrow, and dominated by a head and shoulders of Alma Cogan that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It has been blown up to perhaps three-times life-size and shows me wearing a fur coat with a stand-away collar and a Cossack fur hat cocked at a gamy angle.

Dangling from a beam at the turn in the stairs, presumably as
a reminder to McLaren himself (who else comes here?), is a small rubber duck.

The pub he chooses isn’t a homey, end-of-terrace local with worn leather and scrubbed lino and goitered old timers and mangy dogs and the glasses arranged upside-down on the shelves on brewery napkins folded to points. (
Coronation
Street
c. 1965).

We drive past several of those to the kind of place popular with business reps and cricket teams and couples still working out how to let go of the other’s hand in a way that feels natural and not rejecting. And also, at this time of year of course, with parties of office workers having their annual bash.

‘Don’t drink and drive – you might spill some’ it says on the door into the Public, whose molten-look panes are infused with the red of a real fire. We take the other door into a room full of people in paper party hats eating steakwiches and basket meals and Christmas turkey with all the trimmings.

The only seats we can find are next to a cold-cabinet containing an industrial cheesecake and – hiding in a corner – a half-drunk bottle of milk. McLaren holds his half-pint mug by the handle like a tea-cup and immediately seems crowded by the back of a girl who has thrown herself into what could easily be her boss’s lap.

She has a skinny plait growing out of the shingled back of her hair which sweeps against McLaren’s neck when she moves. He tugs at the collar of the ‘leisure’ jacket he is wearing in place of the coat he had on when he collected me at the station (it has semi-fluorescent green and turquoise panels like the modern office block where he works) and irritatedly scrapes his chair forward.

I should probably ask him questions about his own background, but I don’t think I really want to know. (I think I already do: elderly parents almost certainly; father who confined his existence to a shed in the garden; mother who kept him in girls’ clothes until he started school.)

The noise-level is kept up by a tape of Christmas songs: that one by Slade that comes round every year; ‘War Is Over’ by John and Yoko; the Phil Spector girl groups …

An indisputable fact is that you don’t choose your fans. You have no way of knowing what sparks them off.

Joy Prest was a blonde I did the rounds with in the dying days of variety. Her speciality was bending nails with her teeth and tearing up telephone directories. She did this wearing off-the-shoulder leotards, towering stilettos and strawberry fishnet tights.

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 Light 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 …’)