Owning Up: The Trilogy (59 page)

We were travelling back from some job and I woke up as we drove through the outskirts of London. Through prickling red eyeballs I watched a crowd of young cyclists from the East End pedalling past us for a day in the country. They wore shorts and T-shirts and were clean, very young, and full of energy and high spirits, the reverse in fact of the hung and exhausted group of musicians among which I sat. I looked at them with pleasure and speculative interest. I saw them, but when they had passed I suddenly realised that I had only looked at the girls. It was a moment of revelation.

For six years I lived in the top floor front of a house in Margaretta Terrace SW3. It’s a pretty little street with architectural detail slightly too large in scale. It was built in 1851 for prosperous tradesmen, but its elegance and proximity to Westminster made it popular with early Victorian MPs as a suitable place to set up their mistresses.

There are plane trees all the way down one pavement, and the harmony of leaf and peeling plaster, small house and Corinthian pillar is unique and delightful.

My landlord was a man called Bill Meadmore, author and civil servant, expert on the history of the circus, chain-smoker and kind-hearted ogre.

I first met him when I was still in the Navy and used to come up from Chatham to attend the meetings of the Surrealists in the Barcelona Restaurant.

Simon Watson Taylor had first lived in my room and he had made way for Sadi Cherkeshi, a young Turkish poet. When I had neglected to book a bed at the Union Jack Club, he used to let me snooze in a chair until it was time to catch the train back to barracks. In this way I came to meet Bill and his wife, Dumps. If I had a long pass I would sometimes stay there the whole time and eat with the family. I got to know them all well, and when I came to London to work I wrote and asked if they would have me as a PG.

I hung my collection of Surrealist pictures on the walls, discovered what bus would take me to Bond Street, and lay on the bed, a Londoner at last.

There were two beds in my room and one of them had two mattresses on it. In consequence, after the word had spread round the jazz world, my room became a week-end dosshouse for bedless lovers, habitual last-tube-missers, provincial visitors and a hard core of friends.

Sober, I realised the absurdity of the idea, but by the time Humph had played ‘Get Out Of Here And Go On Home’ every Saturday night, I was convinced that between six and eight people, all of them drunk, could climb three flights of stairs in an old house, undress, descend and ascend past Bill’s open door to a lavatory difficult to locate in the dark, and even listen to a gramophone with a sock in the amplifying trumpet, without waking him up.

Bill was a light sleeper and as angry as an old bear if disturbed. On comparatively quiet nights he would wait until breakfast before complaining, but if things were right out of hand he would come up the stairs. He slept in a shirt. His hair was long and white. He would simply fling open the door with dramatic violence and glare. The sight of him standing there was enough to turn us all to stone for most of the night.

One night I heard him coming and we all pretended to be asleep. He came in, switched on the light and went from bed to bed lifting the blankets and examining the bodies feigning unconsciousness beneath. At last he stalked towards the door and turned out the light. ‘George,’ he said, ‘what do these animals eat in the morning? Hay?’

Mick was perhaps my worst risk. In the small room next to mine slept Bill’s middle daughter, Janet. She was engaged and very much in love, but always rejected Mick’s lunges with tact and charm. One night Mick threw open the door of her room and hurled himself in the dark on to the approximate position of her bed. She’d moved it under the window and he landed with all his weight on the floor. I got him to bed and there was no sound of Bill getting up downstairs. Next morning I told Mick what had happened and pointed out that it might be as well if he could leave the house without actually having to meet Bill face to face. He agreed warmly but unfortunately was bursting for a piss. He crept down the stairs and looking apprehensively over his shoulder towards the door of Bill’s room, opened the door of the lavatory. Bill Meadmore, an obsessive non-lavatory-door-locker, was sitting there reading the
Manchester
Guardian.

‘Good morning, Magnolia,’ he said quietly.

That Bill Meadmore and his wife put up with me for over six years still surprises me. His general attitude, one of affectionate exasperation, is best demonstrated by quoting in full a letter he wrote me after a particularly noisy night. Green as I was I wrote him a hurt reply. This added to his pleasure. Here is what he wrote:

7 Margaretta Terrace,

Chelsea, SW3

9 August 1950

Dear Esq. George Alan Melly,

The last Mick-straw has broken my feeble but patient back. I have endured your drunken and dissolute ways, your wanton waste of light, gas fire, hot bath water, horse radish, beans, lavatory water, your assumption that my library was yours, and that you had a right to read the
New Statesman
and the Obituaries in the
World’s Fair
before me. I never said an unkind word when your thick head broke the witch bowl and Dumps’ heart, nor when you, in your efforts to conquer Everest, pulled down the balcony next door. I tried to grin when you purloined the money from the telephone box and used my bath salts. When the house trembles at its foundations with your coughing, caused by your unchristian way of living, I do not complain, and have comforted myself with the reflection that every cough brings nearer the day of your demise.

This letter is not a grumble. I have tried to be patient and understanding of a character that is a throw-back to the stone age and who would have been a joy to Freud. Alas, I am not Freud. I never reproached you when you made this house a doss for band boys and barrow spivs, nor when you plastered the walls of a lovely room with obscenities and childish scrawls, and notwithstanding that you occasionally paid the moderate rent asked for one room, persistently regarded the whole of the house, including the two telephones and the two lavatories, as exclusively your property. And the top landing. The horde of undesirables whom you have introduced into the house have pissed over the lavatories (not into) and worn threadbare with their hobnailed boots the stair carpet. I even have not been safe from the rest of your family who roost here and make the house smell abominably of Liverpool and gin, and Gibraltar rock.

All these things I have borne with a sickly smile. My simple nature has assumed that it is proper for you to associate with such loose women as the Andys and the Irises, the Beryls, and the other flower girls. I have tried to consider that a certain amount of sexual intercourse was necessary for you, both natural and unnatural intercourse, thinking that otherwise you might find yourself in prison for loitering in public lavatories, or for rape or intercourse with birds, fishes and animals. I gloss over the noises you make, the strange, curious bursts into Zulu war cries, the din of the contrivance which you refer to as a gramophone.

I return to the
LAST STRAW
. Even I, the most wideminded, tolerant, generous and gentle of a fair-play cricket race, cannot . and will not tolerate this house becoming a common bagnio, a sponge house, a place of assignation, a pimp’s brothel, or for Mick the Mulligan to bring his doxies here and perform his strange tribal rites with them in the early hours of the morning. And I strongly object that I have the next morning to straighten every picture in the house. Nor am I interested in his unflowing jabber whilst ‘on the job’ and his evident determination to propel bed, doxie and himself across the floor of the room. But these are things of the past, they will never happen again. The wheel of the wagon is broken and the time has come, my dear Alan, for us to part and you to find a new dump and Dumps.

We have decided that it is better to have the French girl from the Congo, so therefore, my dear Alan, please take this epistle as notice to quit. To give you plenty of time in your hopeless search for some place in Oakley Street with the same amenities as
HAVE
obtained here, you have been granted
ONE MONTH
.

THIS NOTICE IS FINAL AND IRREVOCABLE

W. S. Meadmore

BOSS

Bill’s wife, Dumps, gentle and rushed, took it all in her stride. If, after finishing breakfast, I asked for a cup of tea to take upstairs, she would murmur, ‘Love on a plate?’ On one occasion when, believing the house empty, a girl and I were experimenting in a bath, she knocked gently on the bathroom door and pointed out in her mild way that it was not part of our agreement. Less ferocious than Bill, she was no less original. They gave me something absolutely unique, a room where I could live exactly as I chose, and a home at the same time.

On Sunday mornings in Margaretta Terrace, I made everybody get up and help clean my room. Even Mick was bullied into using a pan and brush. The rag and bone man passed shouting, ‘Old lumber’.

At five to twelve we walked round to ‘The Cross Keys’, a public house which the revivalist jazz world held in reverence because its landlord, Billy Jones, had depped on piano with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band when they were in England in 1920 at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. With a little persuasion he would sit down and play rags until closing time. Sometimes the musicians or aspiring musicians would bring their instruments and jam, and I would sing.

Our band began to appear in public, inevitably as a supporting group and usually in South London. Chas Wigley, a small and dapper man who wore a bow tie and worked in Covent Garden in the night, was continuously opening clubs. There was one in a garden behind a pub which, on fine summer evenings, worked a little magic, but most of them were in the upper rooms of those huge, characterless boozers in the high streets of the South London boroughs. The opening night was usually quite full, but followed by a rapid decline until the only audience was Chas’s own family and our friends.

After the club shut there was a party at Chas’s house in Clapham: brown ale, cheese sandwiches and jazz records late into the small hours.

Mick and I would sometimes call on Chas in the Garden, and drink among the porters until the grey dawn broke over the Endell Street clap hospital.

3

An Entrée in the Provinces

Although we had a small public, and although we knew most of the musicians, Mick had not achieved any musical impact. Our first success was in Acton where we played the interval spot at the opening of a new club. The promoter and band leader, Doug Whitton, had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it an important opening in the convention of the day. He had persuaded those jazz critics who had kept the flame alight in the dark days to come and drink at the club’s expense, and more importantly, the Marquis of Donegal to come and open it. This ensured that the opening would be covered in the musical press.

Not that the Marquis was a fluent speaker. In fact he usually managed to get the names of the bands wrong and frequently lost his way towards the end of a sentence. It was his presence that counted. The critics were a varied lot with only their interest in jazz in common: Max Jones who wore a beret and dark glasses; the enthusiastic Derrick Stewart Baxter who lived in Brighton and whose passion for the blues could turn his great face red; Rex Harris, saturnine, soft-spoken, elegantly bearded, by profession an optician, by conviction a strict New Orleans man; Jimmy Asman who had come to London from the Midlands full of jovial bonhomie and bluntness; Ernest Borneman, a German-born anthropologist and novelist – and lastly and in a way most memorably, Sinclair Traill with his protruding blue eyes, Air Force moustache, casual throw-away manner and legendary reluctance to stand a round. Sinclair was an early pet of Mick and mine. His seedy but real charm and remarkable way of getting through life in the face of every obstacle reminded us of Waugh’s Captain Grimes. He was constantly in Lord Donegal’s company at that time.

Later Sinclair became a friend of Gerald Lascelles, first cousin to the Queen. ‘Gerald’ took the place of ‘Don’ in Sinclair’s anecdotes, and they were always together at jazz functions.

These jazz critics, most of whom hated each other, were treated with enormous respect in the jazz world at that time. No jazz concert was complete without one of them as compere. What they wrote was studied with reverent attention.

I don’t remember which of them were at Acton that night, but the band’s performance was described in several papers, and a photograph of me singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’ appeared in a magazine called
Jazz News.

The editor of
Jazz News
was actually Jim Godbolt, but the comment underneath the photograph was warm and even enthusiastic. Mick was decidedly impressed and even suggested changing the name of the band to ‘George Melly’s Magnolia Jazz Band’.

‘Frankie and Johnny’ has always been my most successful number, principally because of its dramatic story line and, as I realise now but would have denied then, what talent I have is dramatic rather than vocal. At this period my version was comparatively uncluttered with special effects. Falling down, simulating two people making love, opening a kimono, standing on tip-toe to look over an imaginary transom, firing the little forty-four, etc.; all these have gradually attached themselves to the song like barnacles to the bottom of an old ship. Even so it was always comparatively elaborate and theatrical.

Because of Acton, Mick felt ready to accept rather ambitious jobs: not Humph’s club – this he thought might kill our chances – but Cook’s Ferry Inn for example.

Cook’s Ferry Inn was one of London’s earliest jazz clubs, and was the base of the Freddy Randall band. Freddy played a fiery trumpet, much influenced by Muggsy Spanier, and his band was decidedly ‘white’. In consequence the New Orleans purists had little time for him, but he had a large following, especially in North London. He was also one of the first Dixieland bandleaders to turn professional and go ‘on the road’.