Broken Music: A Memoir (3 page)

He was a dashing soldier fresh out of the army and she was a teenage bride, a dazzling beauty who became an emotional shipwreck, and a victim of breast cancer at fifty-three, while he
would succumb a few months later at fifty-seven. I was the bright red apple in her green eye, just as I was a thorn in his side, and we have unfinished business. That is why we are together in this strange echoing hall that is my memory. I am, as I have always been, surrounded by ghosts.

MY MOTHER WAS SLIM and attractive with long fair hair and startling green eyes. She had good legs, wore short skirts and stiletto heels with pointed toes, and I remember with some pride as well as embarrassment that men whistled at her in the street and then pretended that they hadn’t when she turned her glacial stare in their direction. She was proud and difficult to please. She had left school at fifteen and began her working life as a hairdresser, and had developed a convincing hauteur and a heightened sense of her own specialness. People whispered about my mother as she walked by, but she felt she was not like them, nor did she want to be. Her name was Audrey, and when my father met her she’d stepped out with only a few beaux before him. He was her first love.

The earliest memory I have of my mother coincides with my earliest musical memory: sitting at her feet as she played the piano and watching the soles of her shoes on the pedals, rising and falling with their strange rhythmic counterpoint against the swing of the tango music that she was so fond of playing. I was fascinated by how she could translate the marks on the manuscript sheets into coherent music. This skill coupled with her innate style created an intoxicating glamour around her.

I remember too my mother playing the piano in my grandparents’ front room, while my father, who had a fine tenor, sang a plaintive version of Huddie Ledbetter’s waltz “Goodnight Irene.”

My father liked the big bands of the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman, but it was my mother who brought rock and roll into the house on 78 rpm records of black acetate with brightly colored labels from MGM, RCA, Decca. Little Richard caterwauling “Tutti Frutti” like a tomcat, Jerry Lee Lewis preaching “Great Balls of Fire” like a demented evangelist, and Elvis crooning “All Shook Up” with what I would later identify as rampant sexual innuendo. These recordings would send me into innocent paroxysms of joy, rolling and shaking on the floor in a kind of religious ecstasy She also brought home all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein albums from the Broadway shows
Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I
, Lerner and Loewe’s
My Fair Lady
, and Bernstein’s
West Side Story
. I played all of these records to death, falling in love with the meticulous ritual of removing them from their worn sleeves and dust jackets with my fingertips, blowing away the dust that had collected since their last outing, and setting them delicately on the turntable.

I had no prejudices about what kind of music I liked; I listened to everything with the rapt attention of a neophyte. Later, when I was learning to become a musician, I would play 33 rpm records at 45 rpm and hear the bass parts revealed, rescued from the bowels of the arrangement an octave higher, and the fast sections of the upper octaves on forty-fives so that they could be learned at a slower speed. I realized from these experiments that anything, no matter how complex, could be deconstructed and learned if you slowed it down enough to really hear it. The crude mechanics of the turntable allowed
this, and while I listened to the comforting scratch of the needle before the opening notes of the overture to
Oklahoma!
, or the opening chords to Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” I was as much transfixed by the robotic slowness of the mechanical arm as it moved over the surface of the disc as I was by the music itself.

We live in a damp Victorian house without central heating. It is my mother who will teach me how to make up the fire in the living room, which is our only source of heat. Wed start with rolled newspapers, large sheets of the
Evening Chronicle
, folded diagonally into long tapers and then into compacted concertina shapes to ensure a slow burn, along with some egg cartons, a few sticks of kindling wood, and lastly the coal, laid like priceless black treasures atop the pile.

The matches are up on the mantelpiece, next to the chiming clock. I am seven years old now and tall enough to reach them if I stand on my toes.

“Can I light it, Mam? I know how to do it. Please! Can I?” I plead with her, desperate to temper my eagerness with a sense that I am now old enough to be responsible.

“You can light the fire, son, but don’t leave the matches out for your little brother; always leave them up a height, do you understand?”

I love that expression: “Up a height.”

“Now, make sure you light it from the bottom, not from the top.”

“Yes, Mam.”

“It will only work for you if you light it from the bottom, that’s why we’ve built it this way. The coal will only catch if the wood’s alight, and the wood will only catch if the paper’s lit.”

“Yes, Mam,” I say again as I fumble with a box of matches and set last night’s
Evening Chronicle
ablaze.

“Very good,” she says with some pride. “Now help me tidy up, this place looks like a bloody tagarene shop.” Another one of her expressions. I had no idea what a “tagarene shop” was, although it clearly described the disorder and chaos that always threatened to overwhelm the house if we didn’t clear up after my mischievous younger brother.

“I’ll swing for that little so and so,” she would say.

Later she would teach me that even when a fire appears to be dying, a well-placed poker could bring it back to life. She warned me that once a fire is hot, anything that goes near it will be set alight. She taught me how to pack a fire for the night, starving it of oxygen without killing it, and how to revive it in the morning.

As a child I could spend all day gazing at a fire. I still can, lost in visions of crumbling towers, ancient glowing kingdoms, and cavernous cathedrals, indeed whole continents of imagining in its embers. My mother taught me this magic and it is still with me. She also taught me how to iron a shirt, fry an egg, vacuum the floor, all in the spirit of ritual and good order, but it was music and fires that retained an air of secret and arcane knowledge, which bound me to her like a sorcerer’s apprentice. My mother was the first mistress of my imagination.

    My maternal grandfather, Ernest, had something of a reputation in Wallsend, the town in which my mother’s family lived, although the gossip about him may have been colored by his appearance. He was tall, unusually handsome, and rather too elegant to escape the attention of the whisperers in a small town. In my memory there was always something dangerous and romantic about him. He was not a local, another reason for suspicion. He hailed from the Isle of Man. In a photograph from my parents’ wedding there is a knowing arrogance about the eyes, a quizzical and amused eyebrow, and the
louche swagger of a ladies’ man. He had little time for me and made a living as an insurance rep for Sun Life of Canada. He drove what people of the time called a “flash” car. I remember it well; it was a Rover and had running boards and bright chromium headlights on stalks. He was, to me, a mysterious and remote creature, but my mother worshiped him.

My only memory of my maternal grandmother is a shocking one. I remember her teeth in a glass by the side of her sickbed, a whole set, grinning at me with a malevolent rictus. I’m told that she adored me. I don’t remember; she died before she was any more than a shadow to me, but her name was Margaret.

My dad was in his twenty-fourth year when he fathered me, the same age I was when I first became a father. He had completed his national service in Germany with the Royal Engineers. Photographs show him as darkly handsome in his olive drab uniform, a smiling Fräulein on his arm and a pint of ale and a cigarette in his hands. I liked to look at those photographs of my dad in his happier time, and wonder if I could see myself in those dark eyes or at least an intimation that one day I would exist, along with the frightening thought that so much of life could have gone on without me. I believe my father had the time of his life in Germany, and he often suggested that this was the case. He would often announce, rather grandly, that he had “occupied” Germany, perhaps to make up for the fact that he’d been too young to have actually fought the Germans, and that carousing with their women was a far better alternative. It wasn’t that my dad was a braggart, he just wanted us to be proud that he’d “done his bit,” seen some of the world, and earned his status as a man.

“Do you see that stripe there on my arm, son? Lance corporal, Royal Engineers, that was me. Build bridges, blow’ em sky high, and put them up again; I should have stayed in the army.”

After a beer or two he would hark back to the promise of those seemingly carefree days like a golden age that the present simply couldn’t live up to. And there was always the veiled accusation that he had been trapped in this life by us all, particularly my mother. But it wasn’t until later, when things went wrong, that my dad would admit how much she had loved him in the early days. How she would wait for him every evening to return from work and throw her arms around his neck as he came through the door. Regret was a constant theme in my father’s life until the end.

Born in the port of Sunderland in September of 1927, my dad was christened Ernest, sharing the name with my maternal grandfather. I imagine this sharing of names was a great topic at my parents’ first meeting. I can see my mother getting home flushed with excitement, gushing to her sister Marion that she’d met a handsome man at the Saturday dance, and “Guess what his name is?”

My father’s family were Catholic and my mother’s were Anglican. So-called mixed marriages were still frowned upon by the church hierarchies, but not as much as they were in the previous generation, where the mixing of the faiths had been the cause of some historical controversy according to the hearsay of the family. Tom, my grandfather, had gone against the wishes of his staunchly Protestant father in marrying Agnes White, my grandmother, a young girl from an Irish family. Agnes had left school at fourteen to go into service in a “big house” and, being the daughter of an Irish stevedore on the docks of Sunderland, was considered beneath my grandfather in social status. She was the second youngest child in a stereotypical Irish family of ten brothers and sisters, fiercely intelligent, pretty, and devout. I can imagine her browbeating my grandfather into giving up his by now beige Protestantism and converting to the Roman church. Old Tom liked the quiet life, and Agnes always got her way.

The family controversy also concerned my grandfather’s having
given up his inheritance to wed the fair Agnes. The Sumners did have something to do with shipping, and there had been at least two master mariners in the family lineage in the nineteenth century, but whether this so-called inheritance was anything to speak of, I do not know. I suspect that the “family fortune” or “the shipping line” that my grandfather gave up for love may have suffered from a bit of grandiosity and romantic inflation. That he loved my grandmother was never in doubt, but the unvoiced motif remained throughout my grandfather’s life, just as it did in my father’s, that what he had given up in his past was not made up for in the present, that he too had been trapped in the institution of marriage and family, and there was no escape.

My grandfather Tom became a shipwright at the yards on the river Wear, fitting out tankers and battleships before they were launched and put out to sea. He and Agnes reared six children, two girls and four boys, of whom my father was the eldest. Her second pregnancy turned out to be twins—this had only become apparent during labor—and only one of them survived. Years later Agnes would tell my sister that she’d prayed God would take one of them away because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to feed them both. Her prayer seemed to have been answered. Gordon, the surviving twin, maintained his lust for life. My father told me he was always in trouble. His favorite pastime was lying between the tracks on the railway as the coal trains passed over his head. He must have imagined he was immortal. My uncle Gordon migrated to Australia before I was born to become a prospector in the desert surrounding the Darling Mountain Range, and I would be named after him.

My grandmother’s Catholicism was a major part not only of her spiritual life but also the outer life of the family. She became the housekeeper to a young priest named Father Thompson, whom I came to know as Father Jim. He was an avuncular and saintly
adoptee who had always seemed to me to be part of the family. Like a character from a P.G. Wodehouse novel, he had an impossibly plummy accent and the distracted air of a disheveled, displaced intellectual, shuffling into the house in his clerical collar, soutane, and biretta, Jesus-sandaled, black-socked, and bespectacled. Agnes seemed to be obsessed with Father Jim. The priesthood, and the good Father’s innocent bookishness, combined with the fluted, stuttering tones of the upper class were a heady cocktail for a chit of an Irish girl from Sunderland. There was never a suggestion of something untoward in their relationship, but it was always “Father Jim did this” or “Father Jim did that,” and poor old Tom rarely got a “look in” or a word edgewise. He’d just sit silently in the corner and pick out old music hall tunes on his mandolin, staring into the middle distance, always humming some wordless song.