Slowing Down (8 page)

I no longer doubt Diana. She just rang up from the country to remind me of the time and place of the funeral of a much-loved friend. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I told you last week as soon as I’d heard.’ I drew a blank but didn’t imagine for one moment that she’d crept up from the cellar after interfering with the gas supply.

Names lost. Whole books mentally shredded. And the most irritating aspect is that younger, or at least comparatively younger people, often assert, mainly I imagine out of kindness, that they share the same handicaps. ‘Oh,’ they tell me in that special voice they reserve for toddlers and animals, ‘I forget
everybody’s
name!’ It’s actually quite annoying. If you are unable to feel tied to age and its tricks, to deafness and its quirks, what’s the point of the inconvenience?

My eyesight, on the other hand, while not perfect, is serviceable. The original deficiency was brought about quite a long time ago when the retina in the left eye became detached. The effect of a maverick retina is to make everything waver and sway, producing an effect not unlike the early expressionist German film
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
. Everything became wobbly and invisible from certain angles. I consulted a surgeon, a Mr Schonberg, an almost ridiculously handsome and charming man who works part-time at the Western Eye Hospital, attached to St Mary’s but facing on to Marylebone Road rather than Praed Street, and just opposite the posh hotel where Miss Day had her farewell party.

Mr Schonberg arranged to sew it back on in the operating theatre but gave me a local anaesthetic, which stung for a few seconds like a bee. It was an odd experience because I could see a bit, but as if through semi-transparent gauze, and could watch his hands in their rubber gloves, holding various, to me, unknown surgical instruments, approaching and receding.

When he’d done, he asked me to stay overnight so he could examine me the next day. In the small hours my sleep was interrupted by a grotesque and comic incident. I was woken by a seemingly indignant Filipino nurse. I couldn’t really see her but her rapid Asian voice came from not far above the bed-end and was enough for me to realize that, like many of her compatriots, she was not very tall. What she shouted at me, disgruntled as I was at being woken anyway, was ‘How many fingers I got?’

I knew very well what she meant, but felt mischievous. ‘Ten, I suppose,’ I told her in a measured and reasonable voice.

‘I was woken by a seemingly indignant Filipino nurse’

She was gratifyingly irritated. ‘No!’ she shouted as though to a village idiot. ‘How many fingers I got?’

‘Oh,’ I asked, ‘are you one of those people who think their thumbs don’t count as fingers? In which case,’ I said, ‘eight and two thumbs.’

At this answer I feared I might have driven her close to passing out with rage. She tried once more, so loudly I feared she might wake up other patients.

‘HOW MANY FINGERS I GOT?’ she shrieked.

I decided to relent.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Do you mean how many fingers are you holding up?’ And I held up several so she knew I was finally on the right track. ‘Now, if you’d asked me “How many fingers am I holding up?” I’d have understood at once.’

Finally she relented a little. She felt she’d got through to this dummy. Comparatively calmly she asked me for the final time, ‘How many fingers I got?’

I could honestly say I couldn’t see any. I told her so and she jotted the answer down on a form and left me in peace.

I’m well aware she was doing her job and I was teasing her. When I saw her in a corridor the next time I apologized for my stupidity, but told her that in the future she could avoid such misunderstandings by saying ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ She repeated this several times, but I wasn’t convinced that when once again faced by a recumbent patient she would remember. Some time later, asked to speak from a patient’s point of view at a gathering of eye doctors and surgeons at the Royal Medical Association building, I told this tale. Their laughter was a sign that they too had encountered misunderstanding resulting from the limited English of nurses from the Philippines, a considerable
number, as it happens. Still, without them, without Africans, West Indians and other non-British nursing staff – and doctors, come to that – where would our hospitals be?

The operation was successful, only the two eyes didn’t quite work together. Especially when tired, I can see double, not unpleasant in the case of beautiful twins but on balance inconvenient. I therefore tend to sport an eye-patch, especially on stage or TV. This is not entirely necessary but looks, I believe, rather piratical, and as I now sing sitting down, allows me to introduce a joke about a retired pirate king. He had a wooden leg, a hook instead of a hand, and one eye. He spent every night drinking rum at a bar on the Bristol docks. A young seaman approached him one evening and said how much he admired what he had heard of his piratical past, but how, he asked, did he come to lose a hand, a leg and an eye?

‘Ar!’ said the old salt. ‘It were this way, lad. I were boarding a Spanish merchant ship loaded with gold in the Caribbean, when one of they Spaniards brought ’is cutlass down, cuts off my ’and and I falls backwards into the sea.’ He took a deep gulp of rum and allowed his young admirer to replenish it. ‘Yes, I falls in the sea and a shark ’as me leg.’

‘And the eye?’ asked his young interrogator.

‘Aarr,’ said the old man, ‘that were different. Some weeks later I were on the poop practising with me wooden leg. I looked up at the sky, a beautiful blue wi’out a cloud in it.’ He took another mouthful of rum. ‘When a bloody great shite-hawk [naval slang for seagull] did a squit in me eye.’ He paused for dramatic effect and then added, ‘And I forgets I ’ad a hook!’

Freud thought jokes were to conceal anxieties, and dreams
likewise – he may well have been right. It’s odd though that most men like to tell jokes, whereas most women detest them and often don’t get them.

Other current failings: going to look for something and forgetting in crossing the room what it was, or, even if I remember it, not seeing it right under my nose. Here, though, there is an odd compensation. Looking for something else I later find, under a chair or on a shelf, glasses, a pen, a book I need that I’d mislaid some time before. I grin with happy relief.

Otherwise I’ve become clumsy and drop things, breaking them (my mother, who in old age did the same, called it ‘the drops’). Like her too, I fart involuntarily. (‘Scentless’, she’d cry, not always accurately.) Getting out of taxis is especially hazardous. I find it hard, although just possible, to thread a cast or leader through the eye of a fly and to tie the subsequent quite elaborate knot that secures it. And much more.

To return to my eyes, I didn’t let drop that my other retina had broken loose some time earlier and been sewn on with immediate success. The second rogue retina came some time later. It was complicated by Mr Schonberg’s discovery that I had a ‘maculate hole’ in the back of the eyeball. Strangely enough my sister Andrée had one of these earlier and came over from France to have it dealt with. I suggested therefore it could be genetic. Impossible, they told me: the chances of developing a maculate hole at all, they said, were very slight. That my sister and I had both contracted them was as likely as winning the lottery. Millions to one!

Mr Schonberg cured mine by replacing the eye’s water with oil and draining it off later. It worked but during the
treatment the other retina followed the example of its fellow and that needed sewing on again, but why and how had this happened?

I have a possible explanation. Some time earlier I had taken to fainting without warning. I had several things wrong with me; in fact, I was perhaps at my lowest ebb healthwise and had been hospitalized for a chest infection. In falling to the ground, at least twice I had cut my face on sharp corners and on getting up and looking in my shaving mirror, discovered that I had a mask of blood. I stopped bleeding eventually and I cleaned up, but was it possible these knocks and cuts were responsible for the revolt of first one and then the other retina?

Diana keeps her own perfect eyes on me and ensures that I take my pills. Like my hero Luis Buñuel, I have learnt the importance of establishing a strict routine and of not feeling guilty about sleeping, if possible and especially when at Ronnie Scott’s, at least twelve hours a day. The medical specialists probe, prod, X-ray and scan me an enormous amount. I walk with great care, especially in stepping over curbs, and if there are no banisters I seek a helping arm. Still, all in all, I think I’m in quite good nick.

7. ‘George Melly – God Help Us!’

The world’s jazz-crazy, Lord, and so am I –

Old jazz vaudeville song

It was in the sixties, after I’d officially retired from the jazz world, that Wally ‘Trog’ Fawkes, for whose famous strip cartoon
Flook
I had been contributing the words for almost fifteen years in the
Daily Mail
, let drop that every Sunday morning in a big shabby pub near King’s Cross, the mysteriously named Merlin’s New Cave, a band made up in the main of retired jazz musicians gathered for a blow.

So, the following week, my TV column safely ‘put to bed’ in the
Observer
, I cruised down the hill from Camden Town on my moped to suss it out.

They blew in a large room off the bar. You could drink there, but there was no alcohol actually on sale, and this meant you could bring your children with you to tumble about, and the family atmosphere was very sympathetic. The musicwas not ‘trad’ but a less rigid form of jazz which, with the recent triumph of rock ’n’ roll, I hadn’t heard for almost a decade, a music fulfilling the great Jelly Roll Morton’s definition many years before, ‘hot, sweet, plenty rhythm’.

The house band, as it were, were called The Chilton– Fawkes Feetwarmers. (The Feetwarmers was the name of a band from the past led by Sidney Bechet, a favourite of
both the leaders.) Wally played mostly clarinet. Indeed, Bechet had once declared him the best on that instrument not only in Europe, but in the world, and had asked Wally to join him. Wally, however, weighed things up. He was beginning to establish himself as a cartoonist; he had great talent there and opportunities too. A life on the road with the notoriously moody Bechet, and the conceivably transient popularity of jazz itself, were both factors; he returned to Fleet Street, but has continued to play when and where he chooses to this day.

There was Bruce Turner, a fine saxophonist and famous eccentric, who was still a professional; a non-drinker or smoker, but with a passion for chocolates and cream cakes, a gentle man but a convinced Stalinist, a public-school boy (Dulwich) and yet devoid of snobbery, totally committed to the pursuit of young women or ‘mice’, the jazz term for them at that time. ‘Must have that mouse, Dad!’ was one of his many catch-phrases.

He had created a limited yet unique language of his own. When pleased, ‘This is the life I tell ’e’; when miserable, ‘Wish I was dead, Dad.’ While his use of the word ‘Dad’ was universally applied to men and women, children and dogs, he himself realized this could present difficulties: ‘Went to see my father last week, Dad,’ he told Wally. ‘Didn’t know what to call him.’

This performance, while seductive, seemed a little contrived to me, and his extremely fluent playing, as an American muso didn’t hesitate to point out, was at times prone to imitation of American masters, often several within the same chorus. ‘What’s Bruce Turner sound like?’ asked his critic. The answer was in fact very good.

Yet despite all this affectation he was extremely lovable, while his ‘little boy lost’ appeal and wistful good looks were a triumphant success with the ‘mice’.

The third member of the more or less permanent front line was John Chilton, not only a fine trumpet-player, but a much admired author of jazz biographies, histories and reference books notable for their impeccable research. His own taste was for the small Harlem swing bands, but he had both knowledge and enthusiasm for every style from early New Orleans to late swing, and enjoyed, while he didn’t play, bebop and even had some sympathy for ‘Free Form’ or ‘the New Thing’ (however it was then categorized), although I don’t think he enjoyed it all that much. It was he who was to turn my life around.

He had played in and led many bands, but lacked showbiz charisma, that exhibitionism which is essential (
vide
Armstrong or Max Miller) to ‘lay it on the people’, as Pops Armstrong put it. John, bald, pale and with glasses, often seemed almost invisible against a white background, and especially in photographs; yet he had (and has) a wonderful sense of humour, is very well read and knows exactly what works on stage. This, I always felt in our years together, led to a certain Svengali-like tendency, a somewhat commanding officer approach to leading a band. ‘Move as one,’ he would order us if we had to cross a road.

An independent-minded piano-player once gave in his notice. I asked him why. ‘Because,’ he replied in his sardonic Scottish accent, ‘I can no longer abide yon martinet, baby.’