Parrot in the Pepper Tree (13 page)

As I expected from such eccentric wording, I got eccentric replies. One came from a Glenn Miller Big Band that played in the Hare and Hounds in Brighton on Thursday nights — a ‘rehearsal and drinking band’ they called it. I sat in with them a few times and got very drunk. The other (there were only two) came from Sir Robert Fossett’s Circus, which made its living touring the Midlands and north of Britain.

I was interviewed and given the position by Henry Harris, a rather old and classically sad-looking clown, who lived at a caravan site outside Brighton when he wasn’t on the road. A part of Henry’s act was to galumph around the ring playing “My Blue Heaven” on the trumpet while smoke poured from all those orifices not directly involved with blowing the instrument.

The other member of the circus orchestra was a precise, neatly groomed man called Ken Baker. Half-Polish and rather effeminate, he had the sort of delicate hands I would have liked for my guitar playing, and played that abomination amongst musical instruments, the electric organ. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you, Chris,’ he enthused at our first meeting. ‘I’m sure we’re going to make an absolutely marvellous team.’

We opened the 1972 summer season at Queens Hall in Leeds. Ken and I sat in a box on high wheels, wearing red sequinned jackets and bow-ties. We had run through a couple of rehearsals before the show, with Ken playing the tunes and me thumping away alongside. ‘Just add a few rolls for suspense,’ said Henry the Clown, ‘and you’ll be just fine?

But Henry had neglected to mention that Ken had a problem, and a big one for a circus organist — he couldn’t busk a note and had to read everything he played. Now in a circus you tend not to play a whole song. What you do is play something stirring and lively while the artiste enters the ring; then something atmospheric while they do their stuff; then, as the acts run their course, you mix the songs up, with the odd heart-stopping silence, before a crisp crescendo drum-roll and crash of cymbals as the artiste flops into the safety net or flings the last knife. Then comes a finale as your artiste sashays out of the ring.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, for the organist, at least. There may be snatches of up to a dozen songs in a long act — audiences would get bored with an uninterrupted ‘Nellie the Elephant’ while Nellie ambled disconsolately around the ring, knelt down, got up, stood on a tub, etc — and each snatch has to be synchronised with the actions. Ken couldn’t see the artiste because his head was buried in the music. He had a great sheaf of papers on top of his organ and for each new snatch of song he had to fish out the piece, put it on the music-stand, pull his cuffs up, and strike in. So a crucial part of my role was to relay information to Ken about what was going on in the ring. And with the crashing of the drums, the roaring of the organ, the bellowing of the crowd, and the caterwauling of André the ringmaster, it was often impossible to make him hear.

That first performance, our musical act began to come badly undone during Serena Barontoni’s trapeze extravaganza. Serena was a distant member of the Fossett clan, and with her brother Rocco, she did a rather lack-lustre juggling act which consisted mainly of the two of them padding morosely round the ring tripping over the heaps of dropped skittles, batons and brands. But Serena fared better on her own on the trapeze. Her act was not a thing you’d go a long way to see, but it was halfway competent — and it must take a lot more courage to prance about on the ropes and bars at the apex of a big top if you’re a mediocre acrobat than if you’re a virtuoso.

Serena came on after Zelda, a circus beauty with jet-black hair drawn tightly into a pony-tail, who did ballet-steps standing on the back of one or more horses as they cantered round the ring. All the little girls ooh-ed and aah-ed and formed desperate resolves about their future careers as she sped round and round the ring raising and lowering her perfectly-sculpted legs. She made her exit to “The Magnificent Seven” if I remember right.

‘Okay, Ken,’ I hissed. ‘Zelda’s gone — it’s André. Then Serena next — “Brazil”,’

‘Ladeeez ad Jedderbed’, howled André. ‘De idercweddibawl, luverlee ad glabberuz… Biss Serreeedaaaa BARODTODI!’

‘Here she comes, Ken… KEN’  Brazil”!’

Serena strode into the ring with a look of fierce determination, set above a rictus of a grin. Silence reigned. She swivelled around giving more of the audience the benefit of her simultaneous smile and scowl. The silence continued.

‘Ken, she’s in — “BRAZIL”!!’

‘Alright, Chris, alright!’ Ken was getting tetchy. The music had slipped sideways and he couldn’t read it sideways. At last the opening chords of “Brazil” blasted shakily out from the organ, but it was too late. Serena had arranged the rope about her person and, with a black look at the orchestra box, started to climb up it as gracefully as her muscular frame would allow. “‘Fly Me to the Moon”, Ken — for Pete’s sake, man!’

Ken was still blithely playing “Brazil”, With Serena halfway up the rope, the tune lurched to a halt and Ken started fumbling about. A long silence, then he started into “Fly Me To The Moon”, Again it was too late. Serena, now a small glittering figure high up on the flimsy trapezes, was summoning her nerve for a swing into the void. This called for an eerie silence broken by a long crisp drum-roll to build the tension and the terror.
RrrrrrRRRRRRRR B-BOSH!!!
But the tension was somewhat spoilt by “Fly Me to the Moon” trailing after the drum crescendo.

‘Right Ken, she’s into the swing. Give it all you’ve got, “Sabre Dance”!!’ At this point I would leave the organ and follow the swings and drops and tumbles of Serena’s act:
BRRRR-BOSH, BIDDLER BIDDLER-BIDDLER BOSH, BOSHBOSH, RIDDLERBOSH, BOSH-BOSH-BIDDLER… ting ting titing.
Meanwhile, “Fly Me To The Moon” chundered on, before a silence and then the first hesitant notes of “Sabre Dance” croaked from Ken’s organ, as poor Serena hurtled to and fro amongst the hoops and bars at the top of the tent.

At last the wretched act drew to a close and Serena took the rope to return slowly to the sawdust: “There’s No Business Like Show Business” came limping from the organ.

‘No, Ken, for Chrissakes! She’s still up there — it’s “Fly Me To The Moon”, again?

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Chris — where’s that got to now?’ and he delved again deep into the mass of music that shrouded his organ. Serena slithered on down the rope in silence, with only the scrunching of crisp packets, chattering of small children and the distant grumble of the generator as accompaniment. ‘Mummy, why is that lady so cross?’ rang out a toddler’s voice from the front row. The answer was drowned by Ken bursting into a desperate repetition of “Fly Me To The Moon”, It was too late. Serena flounced from the ring.

‘Forget it Ken, she’s off: But no — Ken had to plod his way regardless all the way through “No Business Like Show Business”, drowning out André’s next ‘Ladeez ad Jedderbed…’

‘I’m so sorry, Chris,’ said Ken afterwards.

I melted. ‘Don’t worry, Ken, it’ll get better with practice..? But of course it didn’t. It happened daily, twice on Saturdays, and as the weeks went by I found myself in constant confrontation with poor Ken. On one occasion I even hurled a drumstick at him during a show, an incident provoked by Ken dropping a whole heap of papers on the floor in the middle of an act by the Flying Manzini Brothers, a troupe of volatile and I thought potentially homicidal Italian acrobats.

The Brothers were whizzing round the ring, about a dozen of them piled four high on a one-wheeled bicycle, when, all of a sudden, the music stopped. A muffled oath from the orchestra box, the silly sound of the drums clattering on alone, then round whizzed the Flying Manzini Brothers in silence. Round they whizzed again, cool as cucumbers but mentally hurling knives at the box. Once more they whizzed round. I’m no clairvoyant but I had this strange sense that both Ken and I should avoid walking in the dark behind the tent, especially in the area behind the generator truck where shouts are rather easily masked.

The Fossett Circus travelled all round the north of England and well into Scotland; Leeds, Halifax, Rochdale, Liverpool, Wallasey, Preston, Carlisle, Glasgow, Kilmarnock. I got to know the public bathhouses with their tiled cubicles, enormous baths and polished brass taps gleaming like the controls of ancient steamships, and was initiated into the particular pubs that circus folk frequent. But what I most remember were the long hauls through the dawn of Sunday mornings, after we had packed up the tent at the end of the second show on Saturday night.

Taking down, travelling and setting up the circus was like a battle. As soon as the public started filing out on a Saturday night, you could feel a sudden slackness in the tent as the guy-ropes all around were loosened off and the tent-boys started knocking the six-foot iron pegs out of the ground. The tent-boys, a motley crowd of desperados and runaways, were the lowest of the low in the circus hierarchy — but everyone, even the top artistes, lent a hand to strike the tent and pack up.

It took a couple of hours to drop the big top, which was then folded into impossibly heavy and unwieldy rolls of canvas and loaded with its massive poles onto the trailers. The circus beasts — which back then featured lions and tigers, elephants, a poor old camel, a llama and a pair of ostriches — were stuffed into their trailers ready for the road. All the seats and the booths and the duck-boards and the poles and guy ropes and flags, the fencing and cables, the lights, the ring, the ropes and bars and hoops and trapezes, the ladders and winches had to be loaded up and lashed down in their appropriate trailers. This was all done in the middle of the night, more often than not in driving rain.

By three or four in the morning everything would be packed and stowed, the trailers hitched to the tugs and the convoy ready to leave. Now was an hour to drink tea and soup, all quiet but for the thundering of the huge generator that ran the lights. Then at last the generator would stop and the remains of the camp sink into a blessed silence. We would climb into the cabs of whatever vehicle we were allotted — I drove the meat-van — and rumble out through the park gates.

We were circus-folk, and this was one of the bits of it that I liked best, crawling in sheeting mists of rain through the few hours that remained of the night, listening to the thunder and whine of the huge road-machines, the ceaseless slapping of the wipers. The headlights picked out the roadsign through the rain:

Kilmarnock 50. At our rate of progress that was four hours and more. Drunk with sleeplessness, slumped in the cabs, we were the circus coming to town.

And thus a happy summer passed. I suppose if I’d stuck with it and done a lot of practice on those rolls, then I could have made a pretty good circus drummer, made a career out of it. But it was time to move on and try something else. In Carlisle we set up in a park between the castle and the river and the sun shone all week. One morning I went into town to go shopping, my £20-a-week musician’s wage weighing heavy in my pocket, and wandered into a record shop to browse along the shelves. Eventually I decided on a flamenco album.

I can’t remember what it was that nudged my destiny in this curious way; I had never heard flamenco and I knew nothing about Spain. But that afternoon, back in my cubbyhole in the accommodation trailer, I got out my little battery-operated record player, stretched out on my foam mattress and played my new record. The guitar was just dazzling. I had no idea you could do things like that with a guitar, or indeed that fingers could ever get so fast. I wasn’t altogether sure about the music, but the technique — those fast tripping runs, the deep dark chords and the machine-gun-like percussive effects — sent me reeling.

Suddenly my little repertoire of Dylan and Donovan songs seemed pathetic. I would have to go to Seville and become a real guitarist.

I KNEW ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT SPAIN BEYOND THAT FLAMENCO record. I certainly spoke no Spanish. But the idea of learning Spanish guitar became an obsession, almost as much as my first schoolboy affair with the instrument, and, bidding farewell to the circus folk, I set off for France to work on the grape harvest and gather money for a stay in Andalucia. From Bordeaux I made my way down to pick oranges in Valencia, where I finally took the Seville bus, which in those days took twelve hours.

I stacked my guitar in the overhead rack and settled back with a shoulderbag stuffed full of oranges. As the bus turned to the west, the last rays of sun shone red and low, making silhouettes of the driver and passengers. I looked in wonder at the palm trees and ranges of dry hills. I had never been this far south before. But as darkness fell, and there was more of me than the view in the glass, I sank into that hazy stupor that a long bus journey induces, dreaming of what might await in Seville.