London

Cockney English, I found from the time I stepped off the train from Bristol at Paddington Station, was a vigorous verbal jazz drum language, with “f*ck” as its deep, rosewood snare-drum rimshot.

Percussionists, especially Latin and jazz performers, often praised various drums for “gongs”, “gungs”, and “thunks”, and their praise for the things they routinely whacked felt exactly like ‘yer common and garden London parlance’ to me! I even, though normally too shy for this, engaged people in conversation just to hear it. Most phrases and sentences were replete with these rimshots, many began explosively with a glottal exclamation mark—"‘Ello! WOTcher! Awright?"—and most ended with a short, percussive question: “innit? Don’ I? Wasn’ I? Wonnit? Dincher?”. Perfect for a deafish guy like me.

I made my way from Bristol to London, straight to a family friend, Caroline White. It was a repeat of the Southampton to Bristol trip, with me excited beyond myself over the speed of the train, and the scenery whizzing past. John Lloyd was in touch with her, and when I got there she offered a pair of rooms to me on the top level of their Ellington Street house. It was a fair walk from the nearest tube station, Caledonian Road, and her part of Islington was not well served by buses. It was a fair walk to take a bus too, and they were usually much slower than tubes. I didn’t mind. I loved walking anyway, and walking in London felt grand to me.

In time, Caroline’s husband employed me to help in a launderette in Wallington, Surrey, reached by tube and train, until he turned up one day with a Honda 150cc motorbike, which he said was mine to use for work. He remembered this at Caroline’s recent memorial. I am sad she is no longer with us. She was my London lifesaver, and was part of the family for half a century.

After two dangerous prangs on my Honda Dream 300 while in first year at UNP, I was not too keen to climb onto a motorcycle, but soon found that London drivers were comparatively careful and aware of motorcycles, and it became an easy routine for me.

Well, not at first: facing north in SA, the sun arcs across the sky to the north, climbing over from east on my right to west on my left. Facing north in England, the sun arcs across the sky on the south, behind me, and at first I went reliably in the exact opposite direction to what I needed. I never really got comfortable with the northern hemisphere sun, and found, when I returned home to SA after years, that I had lost the dead reckoning of my youth.

Upside Down

Up until I got on the boat to England, and after I had hitchhiked around most of SA, I prided myself that I would know exactly where I was if I were hypothetically blindfolded and dropped anywhere in the country. I had traversed it from Pietermaritzburg and the Karoo north to then-Rhodesia, and from east in the Transkei to Walvis Bay in Namibia on those trips, and knew almost every biome there was to know. I lost that certainty after four years in England. So, with this confusion, my early trips to Wallington through Elephant and Castle were guesswork, with many stops to consult the copy of the A-Z that nobody was without in London. In time, I tried a few routes, getting through quicker and quicker until I had found an optimal route.

My visitor’s permit expired on the 5th of September, 1967. That evening, I drove a Land Rover borrowed from work in Earls Court (with permission, luckily) with composer and trombonist Mike Gibbs, his partner Priscilla, and Tony Voss, who was in London following completion of his doctorate in Seattle, to Ronnie Scott’s Old Place at 39 Gerrard St, Soho, to hear the Chris McGregor Big Band. Mike was in the trombone section. It was a fantastic evening’s music, with the Blue Notes core of the big band wailing as I had never heard them. I could not avoid immersing myself thoroughly in what felt like my reason for existence, even though I was not a practising musician. We left the show with me in a confused fog of excitement, the evening’s music playing itself over and over again in my mind. I could hardly talk.

On the drive back, probably too excited to think straight, I fancied that Holloway Rd was a three-lane each way road, whereas it was a six-lane one-way. I turned right into the path of a speeding drunk. The collision turned the Landy over two and a half times before it came to rest on its roof. I was trapped upside down, my leg snarled up in the dash and the gear lever, a stream of diesoline trickling down my chest, face, and hair. The others were quickly out of the vehicle, but I took time to untangle myself. Priscilla was the worst banged up. I felt terrible.

Dublin Down

The following morning, hoping to get my passport stamped for a further six months, I took a train to Fishguard in Wales, hopped on a ferry to Dún Laoghaire in Eire, and went onward to Dublin. It was not a mission accomplished: I found no passport control in either port. People moved freely between England and Ireland back then. I hung around in Dublin for about ten days, hoping to find work, but with winter setting in, Ireland was a worse place for work even than England, and everyone I spoke to said, “London, mate. Go to London.” What an irony.

I spent a lot of time hanging around Westland Row Station, hoping to find a railway carriage to sleep in—something I had always found very easy in SA—but soon realised they were too well guarded. Tangling with an Irish guard was not something I wanted to do. They all appeared to be painless six-footers.

Most mornings I found my way down to a pub opposite the station, where I would treat myself to a pint of Guinness. The drinkers were mostly silent, though I witnessed a single fight—a mystery, because one wordless man got up and punched another wordless man, knocking him to the floor. Neither left, but just as wordlessly took up their sullen positions around their table. Who knows what that could have been about? There was not a happy drinker in the place. Most wore Temperance League pendants!

Desolate, I padded the streets of Dublin. My money ran out, and I had no work. I took to sleeping rough, hidden partially behind the columns of the Agricultural Credit Corporation building. It got colder and wetter. No luck. With my last money I wrote a letter to my friend Nola Templeton-Forbes in London. We were friends from the boat voyage. I asked her to lend and send money for a return voyage, and soon found an envelope, poste restante, at the Dublin Post Office, and booked a return journey.

It was an endless journey, stopping a lot and for a long time in some places. I was beyond tired, and did not note the route, unusually for a railway buff and traveller. My carriage was empty, so I curled up as best I could on the seats and slept all the way back.

Gloucester Road

I had left Caroline’s house in Islington meaning to move on and not return. I went straight from the station to the multi-story Victorian house in Gloucester Road, joining Jeff Guy and a few people we had befriended on the voyage: two girls, the Walker sisters from Townsville, Australia; Sally Gilson from Pietermaritzburg; blonde, leggy Liz from Cape Town; all housed in dormitories throughout the house. There was a basement kitchen with lots of gas ranges where we prepared food, and where it was thus warm from all the cooking—a good place to scurry into from outside as it got colder and colder into my first English winter. I must have had money still left from the trip for the rent, and sought work in Earls Court back at the agency I had worked for before.

Wandsworth

The first job on return was in the yards of a bottling company in Wandsworth. The foreman, Bert, waved me toward the back. “You’ll find the lads down ’ere,” he said. As I got near a high stack of packing cases and pallets, I heard loud voices straining:

“Up a bit, Pete. Yer go’ i’? Yeah. No! ‘Ang on! Ok. ‘EAVE, mate.”

Finding my way through the maze, I came across four men sitting around a packing case playing cards. One was saying in a loud voice:

“Ok, put it down. Gently does it.”

Seeing me, they shot to their feet. I stopped. They stood.

“Oo are you?” one asked. Then, “Fuck,” he said, turning to the others. They all looked guilty. “Usually, Bert jus’ shouts for us.”

“I am new. I just arrived. I start here today. Bert sent me down here to join you.”

“Phew,” said one, and they all laughed, took their seats, and resumed the card game.

One winked at me, shouting, “You got it, Fred?”

“Yeah, got it,” bellowed another.

Bro Al arrives

In my second year in London, my brother Al arrived, ahead of his wife, Eileen, who would be coming from South Africa. They had been apart for nearly a year. Eileen had visited SA from Zambia, to see her parents and family, but also to renew their passports, which in turn were confiscated. In Durban, an immigration official handed her a pair of slightly soiled envelopes (making her realise these had been lying around waiting for the event). She found the content of both letters identical. The letters, left them both stateless, Al in Zambia and Eileen in SA. They read something like:

It has come to the attention of the [office - I forget which] that you are residing in a foreign country, viz. The Republic of Zambia.

Since this is not in keeping with the concept of undivided loyalty to the Republic of South Africa, it has been decided to withdraw your passport.

You are reminded at this juncture that tenure of a South Afrcan passport is a privilege and not a right.

In time, Eileen left SA on an “Exit Permit”, a document that included signing away all rights to SA citizenship, another Afrikaner Nationalist “The Brits did it, so now we must do it” strategy. Al had received (the first ever) United Nations travel document, and was admitted to England. I had always expected him to navigate to England somewhere in the near future, but neither of us expected it to be as brutally sudden.

It was good to be the more London-savvy brother. The year we spent waiting for Eileen had it its fun moments: Al had some spending money, from his Zambia teaching gratuity, and we ‘did’ the record shops and the jazz clubs.

In time, we visited Pete Rodda, (remember the Twiggy’s Pie Cart anecdote from Pietermaritzburg) who often drove down to Martizburg from his teaching job in Glencoe, and spent carousing times with Al in our various drinking haunts there. Pete had left some years before for England, and married in the meantime.

I was apprehensive. Al had told of Pete’s battle with cancer, amongst several challenging issues. By the time we visited him in London in 1968, he had been institutionalised in a mental hospital. I was quiet in his presence, as he and Al had a lot to catch up on. His burning eyes drilled to the depths of my gut. When Al left the room, he turned those wood-ember eyes on me, and indignantly (or sternly?) asked,

“How didn’t they get you? Why are you not in the Funny Farm?”

I dismissed it as luck. Al returned, and they continued their conversation. Rodda, to this day, is the only person to peg me for a nutter. How I have stayed “out” I myself can’t say. One gets very good at hiding!

On our way home, Al wanted to know what was up. He knew me very well. “Did Pete come at you?” He was furious with Pete when I said yes. Al had never seen me this unbalanced. It became a long and difficult discussion, ending with an acceptance that I would not subject myself to that again. Pete was Al’s friend, and Al would visit him. Not me. I took months to get over Pete’s “bullying”, and he was the only person I have known to state, let alone be violently indignant about it, that I should be in the same situation as he was.

I asked Al how he knew that Pete had “come at you”.

“It was your face,” he said. “Pete has never once mentioned you even, and I don’t know what could have got into him, but I knew something had happened. You both looked traumatised. Sometimes, two people in the same room are just bad news.”

It took years to forget that accusing glance and question. I have had to hide from the men in white all my life, something I knew about second hand: the story got about our block in Pietermaritzburg that those men in white had arrived in Boshoff St to fetch Digby, the older of the two McLauren brothers. It became an ugly scuffle, but of course in the end, the men in white prevailed, and I never saw Digby again. I was perhaps seven years old when Digby was taken away, and no one explained to me that certain types of behaviour resulted in this. I thought simply that anyone could fall victim to the men in white at any time, and the fact that it remained a large fear in my life for decades probably proves that I am indeed a nutter, right?

As to Al, when I asked him to just forget it and not raise it with Pete Rodda ever again, he agreed, but said, “You need to understand that I could. I could raise it with Pete, and I would possibly get reasons, and so on, but Pete is very strong, very sound actually. He does not need any kid-glove handling. To him, in his position, you are just out from South Africa, a place that makes him very angry. He probably thinks you are okay about things back home, and it could be that. But for me, it had the force of bullying, and I will not allow that to happen ever again.”

The Ronnnies

London became my musical education. Whatever else I did there, a mainstay was regular attendance at all sorts of musical events—most at Ronnie’s Old Place at 39 Gerrard St, Soho, many at the Festival Hall, and more still at the Bull’s Head at Barnes Bridge.

Most importantly, though, something had happened on the ship on the way to Southampton. The entertainment committee or whatever decided to round up all the talent they could find and showcase it in a variety concert. Anyone could take part, and on the night, there was a lot of talent on display from crew members as well as passengers. The band I was in were decked out in striped sports jackets and straw basher hats. We went on stage, an unusual lineup with more than one guitar, plus a banjo. I was on trumpet, and there was a clarinettist, a Cape Town guy whom I had chatted with some days before the concert. That was when Jeff Guy had embarrassed himself from reading the liner notes of a Beethoven album. He had told me he was returning to the US, where he was studying at the Manhattan School of Music. He counted off “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”, and we were off. It was a lot of fun.

Afterwards, I asked him—unable to really articulate the question properly—about a particular phrase he had played. I wanted to know how he had come by that phrase. Fortunately, I was able to sing the phrase to him.

“Ah,” he said, “that’s a diminished chord right there, and I was just playing down the diminished chord notes.”

I had no idea what he meant, but stored it in the back of my mind for another day. When I finally took an arranging course with Graham Collier, I recounted this to him. He was surprised at how little I knew! To his credit though, he ran through “Bill Bailey” on his piano, pointed out the diminished chord, and dashed off a phrase based on it. This was the very first time I had ever really been shown what it was to “play on the chord changes”. I had heard many people talk about it, but never understood. Sometimes, nothing can replace being actually shown something.

And, now you know why I do not consider myself a jazz player. That is not to say that what I played is not jazz. It was. Our king of jazz, as Zaks Nkosi would say.

Ben Webster

To amplify this (that I am not a jazz player, really), and before my brother reached London, I went one night to Ronnie’s to hear a real jazz player - Ben Webster. After he complete his first set, I joined him at the bar, offered him a drink, and we chatted comfortably, pints in front of us.

I really needed to compliment him on his way of playing ballads, and said so. Or should I say asked:

How is it that you play your ballads so convincingly?

I suppose everyone asked him that, because he answered instantly:

“It’s easy man! First, you learn the tune, on piano. Then, you learn it in all twelve keys, on piano. Then you learn it on the horn. Then you learn it in all twelve keys on the horn. And, last of all, you learn the words. It’s easy, man!”

I have never done that with any number in my life. First, I never found the time, second I could not play piano. I will say that my early Pietermaritzburg dance band experience supplied some of this: each of the band leaders I played with performed tunes that the others also played, but seldom in the same key. This was possibly because sheet music was hard to come by, and most of us learned from remembering the tune on radio, piecing it together from memory, and almost certainly analysing in Roman numerals. That is how most gig pianists operate, consciously or not. As long as one establishes the key, away one goes. To give a quick example, twelve-bar blues structure consists most simply of three chords. Expressed as Roman numerals, these are often call “chords”.

In any simple blues they are !, IV7, V7. So, in the key of C, those will be C, F7, G7. In the key of E, they will be E, A7, B7. In the simplest twelve bar pattern, (think ‘Rock Around the Clock’) they could be:

• I - four bars
• IV7 - two bars
• I - two bars
• V7 - one bar
• IV7 one bar
• 1 two bar

I think you should understand by now what a wonderful discovery harmony was for me. That clarinettist on the ship, Morris Goldberg, was the first to tell me, arming me with at least some understanding of what Ben Webster some months later levelled with me, and also why I don’t class myself as a jazz player. On the other hand, I have seldom been shy about trying to improvise, and that is the stuff of jazz!

I was, many years later, to record with that clarinettist from the voyage with the AJP on a number named “Viva Madiba” on the album Sip and Fly. He remembered the voyage—not me, but did remember playing clarinet in the ship’s concert. His name was Morris Goldberg. Morris was in and out of our recording studio very quickly, as is usual for the “time is money” professionals, and I never got a chance to thank him for explaining about that diminished chord—an important “little but big” milestone for me.

Self-taught guys can grope for years in the dark without such strokes of luck. At that time, for example, without any knowledge of music, of theory, or harmony, or chords, or anything really, I was inhibited enough to think that one should avoid, if possible, playing notes that were not part of the scale of the key the music was written in. Yet, I had a habit of doing it. A lot.

When Morris explained about the diminished, it was a light going on. After that, I understood that my bent for playing notes that were not necessarily part of the scale of the overall key of the piece was because my ear was good, not because my ear was bad. It seemed as though all the musical cares and woes, the uncertainties, the misgivings, and the faltering were a product of my mind, or more particularly, of my untrained ignorance.

It was a wonderful moment, a “light at the end of the tunnel” moment. I may not have wanted to admit it, but what flashed through my mind, back on that voyage on the “Southern Cross” was: “Hey, maybe, even though I never will do it, I have what it takes to be a musician.” It’s great to dream.

Within months after landing, I had run out of money, and was not streetwise enough to have found work in time to prevent that.

My First Pizza

Well, I saw out the week, collected my wage, walked over to Gloucester Road, and paid a week’s rent. I had worked a part-week, and the rent swallowed everything I had. Retrieving my case from the baggage room, I was led to my new bed. It was in the same dormitory-style room I had been in before. The other boarders shifted their beds so that mine was in the exact same place it was before. I wouldn’t have protested at a change, but was touched that they cared.

The bath water was steaming hot. I lay and soaked. No hurry. I had no money for food, and was set for a long evening. Back in my bed, clean and drowsy, I lay and thanked the universe for looking after me. Friday night. Everyone was out. My bed was far from the wall-mounted gas heater, and anyway I had no coins. It got cold—freezing cold. I knew people would be cooking supper on the large gas ranges in the basement kitchen, and was drawn downstairs for the warmth.

Finding a place at a table, I was in luck. Many people were cooking, lots of gas rings were burning merry blue flames, and the kitchen was as warm as toast. I knew everyone in the kitchen but for one. She was a blonde with lovely dimples, and turned out to be Canadian—from Waterloo, Ontario. Her name was Judi. She prepared her meal, sat with me while eating it, washed up, and left with a friendly “good night”.

I stayed in the basement kitchen well beyond the time Judi had left. With all of those multi-ring gas ranges merrily flaming blue and pots and pans boiling and sizzling, it got very warm down there. I stayed until I was actually uncomfortably hot. Each night, I did the same. It was difficult being in the company of people who were all happily cooking and eating, while for those next few days I would have to wait for the longed-for brown envelope with my wage in it before I would be able to afford to buy something to cook.

Each night, too, for the remainder of that week, I was joined at my table by the very cute, gentle, dimpled, special, beautiful Judi. She suffered visibly from the cold, rubbing her hands a lot. All the Canadians commented on how jacked-up Canada was in terms of heating and insulation of houses and buildings, compared to how dismally backward these features were in English buildings.

I had warmed up, but strangely, back then I never suffered from cold hands—ever. The few people I had shared beds with always complained how hot my body burned away in bed. While she had something in the oven, Judi, sitting next to me, reached over, saying:

“My fingers are frozen. Feel my hands,” and grabbed my hands in hers. Immediately, her eyes lit up. She gazed intently at me and said “You are on fire.”

I told her it was not fever, that was just how I always was, and she was agog about that. Many times in between tending the meal, she grasped my hands, warming her frozen fingers up. She will never know what a beautiful thing this was for a guy like me who had not enjoyed either touching nor closeness in three long years. It was that long since I had stopped seeing Carolyn Seawright.

Anybody who knew Carolyn Seawright will understand that I was not going to easily find someone again who would interest or attract me. Half a century after we had parted, I met Carolyn again in Cape Town, and it was as if the half century had never passed. She was as hypnotically beautiful as ever, and I still love the memory of her voice. She was a determined loner, and I am not much different, so this is no happy-ending love story.

One night, after more happy time with Judi, I bolted upstairs to my dorm, hurrying to keep the heat I had absorbed in the kitchen. I dived as quickly into bed as possible after shedding some clothes. You don’t sleep naked in a boarding house. I was tired, more than usual, from a few days of labour on an empty stomach and the increasingly colder winter trips on the homeward tube. I should say too, that living on water in London was not the greatest: London water will never go in my “World Good Water” guide. The underground and its trains themselves were heated, but the platforms gusted with cold blasts, especially from approaching trains, and emerging from the tunnels onto ground level was a challenge. The secret to avoiding colds was learned nowhere more pointedly than in London: keep your body temperature constant, but if you do allow a drop in temperature, keep it gentle. A hasty drop in body temperature is just asking for a cold.

I lay in the dark. No one else was in the dorm. There was a timer on the light switch at the entrance door—a money-saving measure so one didn’t need to get out of bed to switch the light off. Just as I was falling asleep, the blankets were quickly lifted and a body slid in beside me. It was Judi.

“Please. I am so cold.”

I took it at face value: about body warmth, not romance. She was, indeed, very cold, and I wrapped myself around her. In time she relaxed and fell asleep. Sometime in the small hours, I was aware of a whispered “Thank you. Sleep sweetly” in my ear, and slept on alone in my usual bodily inferno.

That night in the kitchen, Judi prepared a pizza. She said she was going to share it with me—it was too much for her. I spread my hands in acceptance, not wanting to look too desperately hungry or thankful, though inwardly stars were exploding with gratitude for my luck. She asked me if I minded if she made the base from suet pastry. I did not know what a pizza was, nor did I know what suet pastry was, and told her so. There were no pizza outlets in SA when I left. She duly shared the pizza with me. It was, of course, utterly delicious.

Heater

Judi, being a little more affluent as Canadians tend to be, had a room to herself. After turned in, she came and sat on my bed. She did not get into bed with me that night. Instead, cased the room first, then asked:

“Please will you come and keep me warm in my bed? I got cold when I left you last night. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I am just so cold.”

So it was, for a couple of happy weeks, I was welcomed into the bed of a beautiful Canadian girl in my new role as “heater”. As an arrangement it did not last long. She soon left to live with an American guy named Mel, who was her romantic interest. He had taken my place in her bed, and was a man she was more specially interested in than she was in me.

The good thing for me was, for the short few weeks I knew her there, she shared food with me every night. She was a great cook, and what she made was way more tasty than anything I bought—or cooked. Plus, it meant that I could reliably survive on lunch each day, knowing that I would probably eat with her at night. What a pleasure!

When Judi left the boarding house to go and live with Mel in Pimlico, I had enough savings and work ahead to continue paying rent and keep myself off the streets and off park benches. In time, the weather warmed, and the bad times were in the past, for a while.

The Return of the Stoker: Cranny, Denmark Hill

SE 5. I have happy memories of a pleasant uphill walk to the grand house I had the good luck to live in for some months through 1968. I was given a room in exchange for firing a hot-water contraption—a stove I suppose was the most apt description—in the basement. I visited the girls I had met on my first night in Bristol. Well, two of them were from that first night: Barbara Schumacher and Sandra Kelsall. There was a third in the house, Carolyn White. Rachel MacGavan, the third girl I met in Bristol, was back in her home town. Carolyn lived in Bletchingley, but needed a place in London. She and Barbara were friends, and that was how she came to be in the house.

I was to become fiercely glad to be a stoker after spending a freezing night in this vast house. I had slept fine, but at breakfast, the girls were all shivering and complaining that they could not get the hot-water system to work properly. I was curious. I also found no hot water flowing in the bathroom, and asked why. Barbara led me downstairs into what they called “The Dungeons” and pointed at a squat black mass in the gloom.

“This is Cranny.”

I peered closer in the gloom. The name came from that of the manufacturer, something like Thomas Crane. There was plenty of wood and coal in the basement, so I asked Barbara:

“Shall I have at it, right now?”

“Go for it.”

All combustion stoves are dead simple, but there are some rules. They will belch smoke if they can’t breathe, and if you don’t first warm the chimney flue. After brushing all the ash and sweeping out the fly ash, I cleaned the stove to its bare metal as thoroughly as possible. I set a good base of wood and a light topping of coal in the firebox, and then burnt a whole newspaper on top of those, right under the opening to the flue, to warm it. A tap of a wet index finger confirmed the flue was really hot, so I lit the fire. Within minutes, it made a pleasing mutter that turned into a low rumble. Sitting around and transfixed with primal wonder at the flames, I built it up with nuggets, carefully placed to catch a good draught of air, but to also seal the fire. It transformed the basement. Turning to enjoy the vermilion glow, I went upstairs and joined the girls.

“Give it forty-five minutes. There will be hot water for us all tonight.”

They were skeptical: I could clearly read the “guys can’t make fires” expressions. I descended a couple of times to tend the fire, and on arriving after the last of those missions, was greeted by a wide-eyed Carolyn.

“How did you do that? The water,” she said with a look of ecstasy, “is piping hot!”

“Well, it’s coming from the pipes innit?” I smirked, but I at last understood the expression.

Everyone had hot baths. Seated at supper, they asked if I would like to move into one of the rooms and stay for free, in exchange for stoking “Cranny”. How lucky can a guy get? And that is how I came to live in Denmark Hill for some months, rent-free.

Worker

Having arrived on March 6, 1967, my six-month visitor permit was set to expire on September 6, 1967. My savings ran out before that. Quite a lot of money had gone to classical concerts, a play or two, and many jazz evenings. It was fantastic to see what London had to offer, but none of these were cheap. I still had my return ticket. My thought was: “I will find work, save some money, and find something to do or somewhere to go.”

I found labouring work very quickly packing for a cosmetics warehouse in Kingston-upon-Thames, followed by another one nearby in Roehampton. What I didn’t know was that jobs disappeared in winter. Things got more and more desperate, and I finally decided “I am not leaving”—I hated the idea of returning to SA—cashed in my return ticket, and used that money to job hunt for weeks, though with little success at first.

At no time did I even consider the possibility of working in any position such as admin or clerical work, because I had no papers permitting any kind of work, and labour jobs were far more casual and off the radar than office jobs, where the admin gnomes were sticklers for paperwork. Also, having worked as a footplate-man, rattling and lurching along the “steel highway” suited my restless spirit. I say “lurching”, but that really doesn’t show anyone what it is like shovelling coal on a locomotive on Cape Gauge hurrying through tight corners. It is more like riding a horse. A single lurch of a locomotive could hurl us, shovel and all, clean out of the cabin door. I needed sometimes to drop a shovel and grab on to avoid being slung out. I never tried it, but, believe me, being drunk on a locomotive is up there with the sincerest of cunning death wishes.

Four office walls around me would have felt claustrophobic even back home in SA, and in England it would have felt threatening, with everything so much smaller and more crowded. There was something else. I loved walking, and it gave me a chance to whistle or hum the solo licks I was constantly putting together in my mind. Sitting in an office would have stifled that ability, and me with it. I needed my mind, my free spirit, for my own walking “jazz blow”. Breaking into song, especially if I were to be scatting “Scrapple From the Apple” or “Au Privave”, would have resulted in dismissal, and quite possibly, further down the line, the arrival of the ceaselessly feared “men in white coats”. Worse than death.

Talking about those two Charlie Parker tunes, a co-worker asked me about them when I was working in the Canada Dry depot in Wandsworth. With a look of careful disgust on his face, he asked:

“Wot was yer singin’ dere jus’ a while back?”

I told him, saying they were by Charlie Parker. He spat and slowly shook his head. Did he even think of them, or my renditions of them, as tunes? I hadn’t realised he was working closely enough to me in the yard to hear me.

Bebop tunes aren’t

It did solve something—a small argument I had been having with myself ever since listening to the first bebop that arrived in the Holy Tabernacle of Mainstream Jazz. The question was: would a twelve-year-old walk down the street humming “Scrapple From the Apple”?

Much as I enjoy listening to it, bebop was and is not tuneful in the simple way that ballads and ditties are. To put words to a bebop tune is clever and perhaps even satisfying, especially for Manhattan Transfer and their fans, but it feels neither natural nor easy. This thought came to colour my approach to music for the rest of my life. Learning bebop is learning music material, not music in the old, tuneful way. Much as I admire the technique that goes into playing bop, it is sounds like one student “étude” after another, like “giving them something to do”. We all want to be able to play be-bop, but not TO actually play it. Once, after too many Fullers Ales in the Bull Head, I asked a tenor sax player there:

“Listen, man. This is serious. Would you marry a girl who played bebop?”

I wish I could remember his reply.

Working in manual labour sorted out some of my musical issues. The great thing about manual labour is you own your mind. While working, I was free to whistle (bebop or whatever), to sing, and to dance, though I have to say that dancing solo in factories and their yards got me some strange glances in England. I don’t think it was a common whitey distraction back then, and even Caribbean people do not as readily break into dance as my country-people do.

I found office workers comparatively blinkered to the colours and vigour of life. It also felt good to join throngs of workers on the tube, way earlier than the city gents in the bowler hats. I realised I would not happily be a manual labourer for the rest of my life, and maybe that was what sat so well with me. I liked to think of myself as a “worker”, and that was to stay with me to this day.

This is not to say that I do not (like my dad) think that music is work. For me, there is no more exalted thing to do than bring about music from thin air. As much as I was proud of using my brains and my strength as a labourer, music is the next best thing to magic. The thing about music is twofold:

It is a model for how to create good habits whatever one does in life, whether it is academia or, for that matter, office work. Getting good at music is a blend of intelligence and repetition, mixed with healthy self-examination, and that makes it a blueprint for any work one needs to face in life. In much the same way as the San person in the Breakwater Prison explained:

There is a dream, dreaming us

music is essentially us teaching ourselves to teach ourselves.

The whole point about music is getting together and doing it. If you don’t “get up there”, you aren’t a musician. It is that endeavour—getting together and doing it, every day or every time—that makes it what it is. I have randomly joined musicians from other parts of the world on stage, without being introduced to them, and produced something wonderful, whether they were from Zimbabwe, France, Brazil, or Cuba.

London Musician

Full disclosure, I was not a musician in London. Not at all. It does not mean I did not try to be one. I plucked up courage enough to respond to a few ads in Melody Maker for “musicians wanted”." These attempts resulted in two auditions. I had no self-esteem at all about my performing, and these came to nothing, but, I really tried. The first try-out was for a dixieland band. They had me play a few numbers along with them, and then they called a well-known number. I played it fine, and then took the trumpet solo.

The band leader was stone-faced with disapproval.

“Look, I’ll give you this. You really swing. But, that solo - why did you do it like that? I mean, the original solo was by ‘Enery “Red” Allen’, woznit? So, why didn’t you do it proper? I mean, in this band, we don’t insult the greats. We play their solos note for note, right?

I did not reply. I didn’t see the point. I packed my horn and left. They watched me leave, in silence.

Some weeks later, I auditioned for a band working out of Notting Hill Gate. The Caribbean guys were really warm: we had a discussion about the uncomfortable fact (to some of them) that I was white and from South Africa, but the vote was they were not going to be like South Africans, and would forget race, and hire me if they liked my playing. They did. I rehearsed once more a few days later, and there was great excitement, because there was a well paid gig coming up. I solved the transport problem by saying I could borrow a van from work to cart the band and equipment.

While rehearsing, i could never quite put a name to our genre: whether it was High Life, Ska or Reggae or all of those. It was very enjoyable to be part of a multi-horn band, and they had great feel and groove while in rehearsal.

On the day of the gig, I entered the dingy rehearsal basement. The guys were seated on the floor all around the room, smoking ganja. I was offered, but it was never “my drug” and I declined. Well, these guys got bluer and bluer. Energy got lower and lower in supply. I spent all day, trying to get an idea of what to load, so I could get us to the gig, but, not one even stood up. Eventually, the leader waved a dismmissive hand, traling blue smoke from a cigar sized reefer, and said:

Fock de gig, mon. Dey explaayteen os, mon.”

The entire band murmured agreement. I tried many more times. Then, once again, I packed my horn. I don’t think they even watched me leave, drove the band back to my workplace in Earls Court, and went home. There are few let-downs worse in life than getting keyed up to perform, but then it does not happen.

Drayman

In 1968, and every year thereafter following the usual uptick of jobs available in summer, I worked as a drayman at a brewery in Victoria. Of all the jobs I worked in, this was the nuttiest one for laughs. I even felt sick with laughter at times. It had nothing to do with landlords giving us a pint or three—that was actually rare. This was in the days before CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale). The beer that I usually delivered was one of many so-called “chemical beers” seen off by this very successful campaign. It was arguably the first and maybe still the greatest instance of the small guys taking on the big guys and winning.

West Kensington Tube Depot

As winter deepened, jobs became scarce. I went in on the first tube every morning and waited for the doors of IPS to open in Earls Court. After more than a week of waiting, that tailed off. Phil, in the office, said:

“I’ve got something for you.”

He could not say what it was exactly:

“Just says loading.”

I took my blank time-sheet and started toward the door. Phil called me back.

“I don’t know why, but nobody sticks at this job. They all do a day or two, or a week, then they hurl it in. I think if you can stick it, it’ll be yours until the job ends. Have a bite before you get there. I think it may be heavy work.”

Exactly what I wanted to hear. I was out of pocket, and hungry. With my last money, I bought tea and a cheese and pickle roll from my usual “transport café”, and reported to a small office in the centre of a large carriage yard.

The foreman, yet another Bert, asked if I was alone. I was, but soon after, another guy from the labour office arrived. We were shown three large brick skits with sawn-off cables. Bert said the three-foot ones weighed a hundred pounds, the six-footers were two hundred pounds, and the nine-footers three hundred. Then he pointed to a line of waiting lorries. There were nine of them.

“Once you have loaded those, you can knock off. The sooner you finish, the sooner you can go.”

The first two days left me aching as I piled into bed each night, and my hands quickly developed callouses. The cables were those that one sees whizzing by the windows on the underground trains. They were threaded with a lot of copper wire shrouded in lead, and the whole inner was encased in a thick, hard rubber outer shroud. No wonder they were so heavy. The first day, the two of us took from 7:30 am to 2:30 pm to load all the lorries, and that was the pattern, more or less, throughout the time I was there—about six weeks.

As Phil predicted, nobody lasted at this job. I had a new partner every couple of days, until word got around and the position was not filled. I was alone. Bert asked me if I would be okay.

I said, “Yes, I will cope, but I want double pay when I work alone.”

He said, “If you think you can get it done, I’m ok with that. Bring a pair of time-sheets from the office.”

So for the remaining month or so, I loaded all the lorries alone. It was simple, but not easy. The equivalent in the gym would be to do forty clean and jerks per hour from early morning until early afternoon, with either one, two, or three-hundred-pound barbells. The cables were three or four inches thick and filthy, covered with the grime of up to half a century in the underground tunnels. Even my nostrils were blackened with grime each day.

I was so used to labour work, I had no real yardstick, but, wanting to help, I brought my brother Al to the job one day. He was wiry and strong, but did not last half an hour. I felt really bad for him. His hands were torn to shreds, and he eventually found a place in the wan sunlight, and dozed with his head over his knees. People could not stick that work, and I didn’t blame them. I met my Moses there too. The last day I pitched for work at that depot, there were twenty-one lorries, waiting in a line to be loaded. I wonder as I write this, if anyone reading it has ever known anyone, anywhere, who loaded twenty-one lorries of any capacity, alone. I steadily loaded them all, but the very last length of tubing, a 300 pounder, nearly had the better of me, it resisted me. I thought I felt my heart stop, but eventually with my last big gulp of breath for the day, edged it over the rim into the lorry. It nearly finished me, but it always feels good when a thing is done.

Time to quit! As it turned out,there was no need to. That was the last of the cables to load until a year later. I never went back.

Char

We hit another patch, when there wasn’t much work. Phil called me to the counter.

“I know you like to go for the bigger money and the harder, heavier jobs, but all I have—once again, something nobody else wants to do—is cleaning houses. You up for that?”

I was. My savings were depleted, and anyway, I liked working.

As it turned out, the only houses I ever cleaned were all around the Holland Park area. I was met at the door by an attractive woman in her thirties. It was a little disconcerting to see that she was in a nightie, and (when I stole a proper glance after my initial embarrassment) a fairly revealing one. It was not see-through, but she had pretty breasts that were very obviously discernible and bobbing about under the fabric.

She looked very pleased to see me, saying, “Thanks be you are here. The place is in such a mess. Here are your cleaning things.”

She had them at her feet and bent towards me, showing me: cleaning fluid, broom, mop & pail, and some dusters. As she bent forward, her nightie gaped low in front, and I got a ringside view of her cleavage and a very desirable pair of breasts. She lifted her head, caught me staring at them, and fixed her eyes on me.

“I had better get started, then.”

Tucking the cleaning materials under my armpits, I stepped toward her. She made no attempt to move out of my way.

“Well, yes, I suppose you could, couldn’t you? You get only four hours, right? Do you want to start upstairs, then?”

She led the way upstairs. Very attractive legs—lovely, well-turned calf muscles. I began with an upstairs toilet.

“Anything you need, I’ll be downstairs.”

She patted my bum as I went into the toilet. That was a surprise.

I was used to cleaning my own places in England—something never needed back in SA—so I was well versed in the practice: start by piling chairs onto one another, then dust up high for cobwebs on the ceiling and window frames, letting the dust fall on the surfaces. Wipe window frames clean. Then clean the surfaces, polish any wood, and use cleaning fluid for plastic. Lastly, the floors—mop and polish if wood. The house was carpeted, wall-to-wall, throughout.

The lady of the house appeared several times and stood watching.

“Alright, then?” she asked several times, in a sing-song tone to my ears. Still in the nightdress. She found excuses to bend over. A lot.

It felt very hot—must have been all the hurried cleaning. When I was busy backing out of a closet, vacuuming it, I felt something on my back and started. It was her hand, lightly in the small of my back. She didn’t take it away for a moment.

“Going alright, I see.”

The hand slid gently down. Another bum pat as I started downstairs. Two hours, on target. Downstairs, I started with the bathrooms, then the kitchen, moving from there to the dining room. That opened onto the lounge, where I found the lady of the house lying on a couch, knees up, her nightdress ridden up to her hips.

Avert glance. But was that a flash of black panty, or…? I struggled not to look. Every time I did, her gaze slid around from her book or magazine and locked with mine. I know I was hurrying, time was tight, but hell, it felt hot. Bare thighs. Why was my damn chest so tight suddenly? Why was my breath coming in stag snorts?

“Tea now, or when you finish? Milk and sugar?” she asked.

“When I finish, thank you. Weak black, no sugar.”

I was on a schedule. My next house was not far away, also in the Holland Park area, toward Bayswater. Four hours each for the morning house and the afternoon house. I finished and declined the tea.

“Have to go. Another house.”

I had worked solidly from 8:00 am to noon, and was due at the next house at 1:00 pm.

A short walk, and another lady met me at the door. Not in a nightdress, but in a disturbingly short miniskirt, and even more disturbingly pretty, long, athletic legs. Why do I have to be a leg man? Banish the thought. Work to do. She brought the cleaning things, and it was a replay now of house number one. She bent low, and the room heated up again. A drop of perspiration ran down my nose and dripped on the tiles.

“Damn. More to clean up,” panted my fantasy-traumatised mind.

The char work continued for a few weeks, until the third Friday, Phil called me into the office again.

“Got a big one. Huge. Round the clock, teams, driving, more. Start Monday.”

It was good to know there was other work to go on to. Cleaning houses was beginning to feel very weird. Sprawled in the corner of the office waiting room was a guy I had worked with, named Malcolm. He, I knew, was also cleaning houses. He looked deathly pale, and was battling to stay awake. I sat near him and said, conversationally “I know how you feel. Long string of double stories? Upstairs, downstairs, kind of thing?” He did not answer, but stared at me strangely, closed his eyes, and his head rocked back. After a while he asked: “So, you clean those houses, then?” “Yes, that’s the job, innit?” His face puckered into laughter, and he dozed again. A few minutes later, he said “Tell me something: those ladies, those housewives, at the houses you clean. When you get there, what are they wearing when the open the door to you?” I said “Funny, even in the afternoons, they wear nighties or pyjamas. They don’t ever seem to change out of their sleep-wear. It’s quite hard on one, if you know what I mean”.

Malcolm roared with laughter. “You stupid bugger!” and the guffaws continued. “When they give you the cleaning materials, how do they do it?”. I said “It’s quite embarrassing: wearing only nighties they bend down to pick up the cleaning materials, and I get quite the eyeful as the nighties gape. I see all the way to their panties, when they are wearing them.” “Cor! You imbecile!” he roared with laughter again. “Look at me! Do you think I am this knackered from cleaning houses?”. He collapsed, into chortles as Phil entered the waiting room, pointed at me, and said to Phil “He ACTUALLY cleans the houses. He ACTUALLY, REALLY thinks that’s what they want”. He collected his paypacket from Phil, who also bust up laughing, and left the room. I could hear his near hysterical laughter echoing all the way down the stairs.

We learn something every day, don’t we, and not always in time!. I never went back to char work, so I never had the chance to put my new knowledge to the test!

Mars Bars, Slough

I worked at Mars Bars in Slough, just off the M4, for most of 1970. For all of the time that I worked there, I was both a team leader and a driver. I drove workers out there in an old 72-seat Bristol bus.

My time at Mars Bars came to an end when I left to return to SA, but it would have ended about then anyway, because I was busted. A foreman, Foster, came to me one morning.

“Mr Cook, we have you on yesterday morning’s shift, 6:00 am until 2:00 pm, is that right?”

“Right.”

“Ok, we have you also on the afternoon shift, 2:00 pm until 10:00 pm, right?”

“Correct.”

“Now, here’s the thing: we also have you on the night shift, 10:00 pm until 6:00 am this morning. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Ok. Now, here’s another thing: we have on record that you have been doing this—working around the clock—for the last three months. You have?”

Busted. I had been working all three eight-hour shifts daily for three months, and now HR had caught up with me. I had thought they wouldn’t bother, because I was a temp. Also, it was one of those things that just crept up in its way.

Mars was a very lucrative contract for the agency I worked for, and they were finding it hard to find enough workers. I worked there for a couple of weeks at a very hard job, carrying densely packed cacao powder in sacks up a ladder. We—a Japanese guy and me—would stack the bags ready for a worker to empty into a vat. The Japanese guy was a martial artist and loved the job, saying it toughened his legs for his sport. I liked it for much the same reason, having always been a little addicted (since the Pietermaritzburg days of haring to school on a bicycle, or running marathon distances on Sundays) to “feeling the burn” in my thigh and calf muscles.

After those couple of weeks up and down the ladder, Phil in the office came to me and asked if I would be prepared to take on the job of driving people to and from the factory in Slough. The issue was that Mars Bars conducted its own recruitment and vetting, so many people were driven to the factory daily for the vetting process. I would be paid for the driving on top of what I earned hefting sacks up a ladder. So I was now in a job for one shift of eight hours per day, plus driving people through every morning.

Some weeks of that continued, then Phil asked if I would take the Transit van to drive actual recruited people to and from the factory to start and end their shifts. That’s how I came to be driving a 72-seat Bristol bus daily, plus a Transit van full of people to and from Slough at shift changes: 6:00 am, 2:00 pm, and 10:00 pm.

So how it worked was that I would get to work by 5:30 am to drive people to Slough to start their shift, and return people who had finished their shifts back to Earls Court. I would do the same for the 2:00 pm shift, and then repeat for the 10:00 pm shift. So: one bus trip, and three van return trips daily.

One day, one of the factory foremen asked me to work a shift between the drives. Phil agreed to that. Somehow the word got around the factory that I could work as well as ferry people, and I found myself on the afternoon shift as well as the morning shift. It was only a matter of time before I joined the night shift as well.

It meant that I would catch a nap in the toilet, but I had learned to nap seated up on the steam locomotives, and it came naturally that I caught up on some sleep—and the toilet was the only place I could do that. In the end, the foreman on the night shift found me sitting idle around 2:00 am. He explained that as long as we had caught up with the production line, usually by 1:30 am, there wasn’t much to do for a couple of hours. He suggested I go home:

“Not much to do here until the morning shift arrives.”

That’s how I started driving home in the small hours, where I would catch a couple of hours of deep sleep in my own bed between 2:30 am and 4:30 am, when I needed to rise and head to Earls Court for the first shift of workers. I would return with shift-enders around 7:30 am, then drive the recruits on the bus, return the bus with the recruits after lunch, park it, get the van and take more workers for the 2:00 pm shift, and repeat at 10:00 pm. In the end, it was actually easier just to slot in and work what I could of a shift rather than go home to Chiswick, and that’s how I fell into working round the clock for three months. Life is very simple working 25/7, but it gets difficult to do one’s laundry!

Computer Programming

Near the end of my time in London, during one of my stints as a drayman, I asked to be let off in Oxford Street. I probably wanted to stroll down through Soho to Dobell’s record shop. Foyle’s bookshop was nearby, so I could browse vinyl albums in Dobell’s or browse books in Foyle’s. Both carried vast quantities of titles. With summer nights staying light until 11:00 pm, there was plenty of time after work to shop for both, and they were a short stroll to the Piccadilly Line—the one I took to return home to Kingscote Road in Chiswick.

Making my way along a crowded street, I passed a sandwich board on the pavement advertising free aptitude tests for computer programming. Don’t think I had any idea of what that was about—I did not have the foggiest idea. There was, though, such a lot of talk about computers in the papers that I was interested, just as I was always interested in anything new and technical. I enjoyed labouring, but did not see myself doing it for the rest of my days, so, with half a mind on a possible future, there was no harm in having a go at a test. You could not get much for free in London, so that was also a pull.

Upstairs, after a short wait and feeling a little uncomfortable in my worker’s garb, I filled in the application, and a pretty mini-skirted girl showed me straight into a booth. There, I completed the tests well in time. I was asked to wait a few minutes for the results.

Maybe twenty minutes later, through a glass pane and after I had seen a man in lengthy discussions with the pretty girl over what I thought must have been my papers (because they both looked up at me several times), the man came through to me.

“Do you have ten minutes or so, Mister, er, Cook?”

He led the way to a desk. When I was seated, he asked, utterly devoid of expression:

“Have you any idea of how you did in the tests, Mr Cook?”

He was inscrutable. I said no, I didn’t.

“Have you done any tests like this before?”

I thought.

“There were some questions that reminded me of some IQ tests that I did in my school years.”

He shook his head very slightly, then looked at me steadily for what felt like more than a minute before speaking.

“There are two tests. One is intended as a check against the other. You got everything correct in both.”

I must have thanked him, but he did not appear happy with that.

“Most people would be thrilled. Or surprised. Or something like that. Did you expect this result?”

“Well, I used to get full marks for most tests throughout my school years. I am sort of used to it.”

He smiled faintly at that. He seemed a very empathetic, kindly guy, but I got a very businesslike and efficient vibe from him, too. He went on to explain that his company, CDC (Control Data Corporation, I think—they were big on mainframe computers back in the day), wanted to train me for free. It would lead to employment with them as a computer programmer.

Now, that was a surprise.

He had forms ready, and followed with some background on data processing. I had no idea what it was all about. My head was still so stuck in the cursive handwriting, postal, pen-and-ink world—computers were utterly foreign to me. He went on to say these tests were by way of a talent search, that I was a “find”, and chatted for a while, but something in my expression made him ask:

“Is there a problem?”

There was. A big one:

“Yes. I have no papers.” (Sharp inhaled breath.) “I am an illegal immigrant.”

“Well, that is a setback.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe we could assist, get you a work permit, that sort of thing?”

We talked about it. When he discovered that I had been living beyond my visitor permit expiry date for three years, we both fell silent. We knew it was hopeless.

“Pity,” he said as he shook my hand. “I know you would do very well at this.”

I thought I was out of there, but, the pretty girl came through. Brit girls, I found, kept different space compared to the girls back in SA. This girl sat next to me, shoulder rubbing shoulder, passed some papers to me, explaining how important it was for me to contact them immediately “if anything should change”. She dropped her pen on the papers. It fell on the other side of my legs from where she was sitting. She stooped to pick the pen, leaning over my thighs to get at it, and steadied herself with a hand probably meant for my thigh, but landing … well, you can guess. Breathing a little hard, the end was still not in sight: she leant in to me, explaining everything again, her curly hair a centimeter from my nose. It smelt wonderful. As she leant in to me, her blouse gaped forward, and I may as well have been back at the char job again. Cleavage, a lovely flat tummy. I didn’t want her straighten up again, and she did not hurry to. “Brit girls” I thought. “Fearless, un-shy Brit girls”.

I went down the stairs very slowly, maybe a little unsteadily! Maybe I was trying to clutch at something that would solve it all. Walking to the Underground, and all the way back to Chiswick, I thought about it. What if I were good at that? It would not necessarily mean more money: I had ways of increasing my income to levels not every office clerk could match, but at a cost.

Firstly, labour was tough and dirty. Secondly, we got up very early or did night shift—things like that. Thirdly, as winter came around, the jobs disappeared with the warm weather, and I generally battled to find work. I had already starved for short periods in the dead of two winters. Programming in a heated office began to feel very attractive.

Fourthly, I had become used to doing the work of—and collecting the pay-packets of—two men. Double the pay is nice, and double the work… as an American might say, “Not so much.”

Down and Out

In the two winters when I found myself without work, I could not pay rent. Both times I arranged a place to leave my suitcase in a baggage room and took to the streets. I did not leave my trumpet in the baggage room, carrying it with me wherever I went. I had a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, a spare pair of socks, and spare underpants inside the case.

Sometimes I curled up on the pavement next to the parapet above the Thames, in sight of Battersea Bridge. Other times I slept in a park somewhere. In all places, I was moved on by police every couple of hours, day and night. There is nothing to say about being down and out in London that has not already been better written in “Down and Out in Paris and London”—I dragged myself through that identical existence.

A good thing I found was that hunger ceases after 48 hours. At first, one lapses into quite a pleasant, dreamy state. Then, after four or five days, the weakness sets in. My posture was affected, I felt arthritic, and I noticed with a shock in my reflection in glass shop windows that I had developed a stoop and was shambling rather than walking. Each week gets harder.

My first London winter was at the end of 1967. I was lucky enough to get work for most of the winter, so it was only toward the end that I ran out of luck for six weeks. The guys at the Gloucester Road rooming house where I stashed my luggage said that since there were fewer tourists in winter, they would most likely have a room for me when I returned. I had stayed with a family friend, Caroline White, in Ellington Street, N7, during the summer months, moving from her place only because I found work in Earls Court. Since Jeff Guy and many of the friends from the MV Southern Cross were living in the Gloucester Road house, I moved in there for the company and was relieved to be spared the very early rising in the morning that was necessary in Ellington Street, which was a long walk to both buses and tubes.

My first jobs in London were in fact as a worker in her husband’s launderette business in Wallington, Surrey, not far from Croydon. Her then husband, Michael Windsor-Richards, went out of his way to help, and eventually even bought me a little Honda 150cc motorbike to use to work and back. It was a saving in time and money compared to London Transport and British Rail. That arrangement did not last long, because we failed to get me a work permit. Washing machine mechanic was not on the list of skills that Britain had a shortage of, so I had to find something else.

Sadler’s Wells

“I dunno. Cleaning, I think.”

That was Phil at the agency when I asked him what work we would be doing there. He had given me the Transit van keys, signaled four fingers, and handed me an address and a timesheet. So, I had to find and take four guys with me. They could just as well have been girls, I had said, but he said no:

“Dirty and arduous, the guy said. Request is for men.”

I ended up taking more after another phone call. It was indeed dirty and hard work. I didn’t mind—I was working in Sadler’s Wells! It felt fabulous. I never clapped eyes on a single ballet dancer, nor anyone else, much. We had to clean out the entire place, underfloor basements, the lot.

I did get a few moments to fantasize when taking a breather about all the famous people - I confess I did want to clap eyes on Dame Margot Fonteyn - who had been through the building, performers and audience alike. Dirty as it was, and hard as the work was, we were all used to that, and it was a great change from down-and-dirty industrial-scale labor and dirt. I forget how long it took—a day or two. We left the place spic and span. I took a last look and drove away. Everyone was tired. We’d had to keep very busy to do the job in the time allowed. I am not a ballet fan, but I would have liked to go to the ballet just once in my life. It never happened. Still, it is a good memory to have worked in such a famous place.

Albert Hall

The Albert Hall was not that different from Sadler’s Wells: a cleaning job. We removed all the auditorium seats first, then the entire auditorium floor. There was said to be a pro tennis match coming up, and the floor had to be cleared and replaced with whatever they had designed to put the tennis courts on. I was not part of the assembly of the tennis courts. My crew got under the auditorium floor after moving the seats and, piece by piece, dismantled the floor, carried it, and stacked it.

The floor we moved was standing on quite ornate, Victorian-style cast-iron columns, each with a flat slab on top to which the large boards were bolted. There were the usual problems of some bolts being difficult or impossible to remove, but for the most part, it was quick work. It was a huge, filthy job. The grime was at least a century’s worth of black, powdery, cobwebby gunk. We were blacker than coal miners within an hour of starting under the huge floor. I had to throw my jeans away after that job. There was no way I could find to get rid of that black, sooty dirt—it would not wash out. In those days, we were not supplied with overalls as is done today.

So, you can see my exposure to these famous buildings was not that of the typical tourist. In a way, I got to know them much better than most tourists would ever do, but it still doesn’t mean much without seeing the buildings at their best, hosting performances.

I am lucky to have seen Count Basie in the Albert Hall before working there. It was not the greatest concert I could wish for—it was Basie with Georgie Fame. I had no interest in Georgie Fame; if you, too, have not heard of him, then you can understand why. Georgie Fame turned out to be a very able organist and singer, so it was not bad. It was just that if I wanted to hear Basie with a vocalist, that would have been someone else, like Joe Williams, Joe Turner, or Jimmy Rushing (if we are talking about blues singers), or perhaps Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra (if we are talking about big band vocalists). But promotors will be promotors, and they are forever looking for something gimmicky enough to put more bums on seats.

What saved things for me was the first half of the concert: that was the band only, no vocalists. The big moment for me was hearing Harry “Sweets” Edison playing “Willow Weep for Me”. Mr. Edison left his seat in the trumpet section, strode out some metres in front of the band, took a relaxed position—feet a little apart, squared his shoulders—and filled the entire Albert Hall with a beautiful trumpet tone. I was spellbound, and I remember it as vividly as though it were yesterday.

Hearing a performer live is always a surprise compared to my memories of them on record. For example, Roy Eldridge came across as very loud and brash on record, but was surprisingly measured in volume when I heard him live. That is not to say he was tame; his tone was fiercely piercing. It was simply that next to Buck Clayton—who I always thought of as mellow and gentle on record—it turned out that Buck Clayton had a bigger, more shouting sound than Eldridge when heard live on stage together. This is why it is so precious to hear them live. It gives one an idea of how they actually project their sound. It is not a matter only of how to play within your own body; it is also a matter of how to use room acoustics.

Before the days of powerful public address systems, one could see the trumpet section pointing their horns at the ceiling to bounce their sound off the ceiling so as to be heard in the far back reaches of a venue. Trombones have more authority than trumpets. I have seen a video of a shockwave projected by a trombone. So, trombones don’t need special projection techniques. Saxophones do. They used to huddle in a semicircle, setting up a vibrant acoustic block of sound, with sound from each saxophone bell colliding and blending at a focal point about two meters in front of the section, where it would set up a large dynamic that could be heard anywhere in the venue. Playing directionally like this was especially useful in dance venues, where the shuffling and chatting of a couple hundred dancing partners had to be overcome. Looking for Humph

One weekend, a coworker asked what I planned to do over the weekend. I had read that Humphrey Lyttelton’s band was playing at a Sloane Street venue, and told him that was what I wanted to catch. Humph had a swinging band of good musicians, somewhat reminiscent of Buck Clayton’s small groups. The coworker had never heard of him.

“Oo the ’ell is ’e? Never ’eard of ‘im, mate.”

He clearly thought this Humph guy was a no-hoper. I didn’t care. I set off in the evening to look for the place: District Line to Sloane Square and walk down King’s Road. I had not heard of the venue, and it turned out tricky to find—or it didn’t exist.

After pacing up and down Sloane Street, I gave up. At that point, I was next to a place that looked sort of like a tent. It was time for a beer. I went in and began to slake my thirst. Depressed about not finding Humph, I thought, well, the beer was nice, and I didn’t know what to do next. The place was filling up with hippies in trendy gear. They were everywhere to be found from Sloane Square to Knightsbridge anyway, but why not sit and look? I was a worker and an illegal immigrant by this time, and as you probably know, illegals have to watch their behavior. They can’t risk even a genteel spit in the gutter (don’t think that genteel people don’t spit—I saw a lot of toffs at it).

After a while, three guys arrived on stage: drums, bass, guitar. The guitarist sported an afro, lots of feathers, and some leather by way of gear. They were very loud. The guitarist started doing weird things on his guitar. I had never heard anything like it. It has to be said my critical faculties (such as they were) were loosened by an overdose of beer, but the guitarist was charismatic and sure-footed about what he got out of his guitar. On another date, I would have thought he had set out to murder his amplifier, but I was enjoying it too much to care. They were just plain good, and very different from anything I had ever heard. I stayed to the end (I think) and reeled out of the place.

I woke full of the music in my head. Unforgettable.

On Monday, the coworker asked:

“So, did you ’ear the trumpet geezer?”

“Nah. Couldn’t find the venue.”

“So you went home?”

“No. Heard someone else.”

As we worked, I described the band, the music, their clothes, and the lead guitarist especially as best I could. He got more and more incredulous as I narrated. Then, he rushed over to his pack, brought out a newspaper from some weeks before, opened it up, and asked:

“Woz it dis band?”

I nodded. Those were the guys. He exploded.

“Fuckin’ ’ell, mate, you ’eard the Jimi Hendrix Experience. At the Marquee!”

He appeared very envious. It was not such a big deal to me—though I had really enjoyed them—because I had got so drunk it was difficult to recall much detail. Plus, I was still disappointed to have missed Humph.

“Fuck ‘Umph,” my colleague said. “Fuck ‘Umph.”

I Never Done it

I am lucky to have been a worker in England. All of the homies I was with in England were academics. None of them were thus exposed to how I came to see things there.

The biggest discovery for me, naive as I was, turned out to be how common theft was, and why it was. The insight began to filter through to the front of my mind when I chose to attend a session in a magistrates’ court in the East End—I think it was Canning Town. A prisoner was brought into the dock. When asked to plead, this man, in deep Cockney, said:

“I never done it.”

The response was ill-disguised contempt from the beak himself and from the other court personnel—well, those who were working for Her Majesty. The rest of the trial was over nearly before it began. The prisoner was on trial for theft. His answer to each and every question was the same. For example, when asked where he was on the night and at the precise time of the alleged crime, he said:

“I never done it.”

When asked if he understood the charge against him, he said:

“I never done it.”

I realised he effectively spoke a different language from the Queen’s English, and he was never going to be either listened to or understood. A rap of the gavel, and he was led back to the cells with a choice of spending a month at Her Majesty’s Pleasure or coughing up a few pounds. I never heard what he chose, but my point is really that the trial at no point really felt fair. This guy’s fate was sealed the moment he opened his mouth.

In the same way, feeling the full force of the surviving class system, I was working in a warehouse near Victoria Station for a while doing fire reclamation. We could not recover much, such was the damage wreaked by the fire, but the job was slow going enough that there was a lot of chatter. I never gave up asking older workers who had fought in WWII what it was like, what they had done, and where they had fought—all those questions.

One day, an elderly guy said with a moue:

“Well, durin’ the blackouts, you was busy, wasn’ yer?”

He related how they saw the blackouts as a time to “get working”. A few of them rolled a cart out, took it to a bombed-out house, entered, and fetched everything of value they could lay their hands on, loading things into the cart. They had to be quick. They had only a few minutes while people were returning from bomb shelters, usually the underground railway stations.

I said to him, “You must have made a good haul with toffs’ houses, then?”

“Nah. I never saw a toff’s ‘ouse bombed, did I?”

There were still vacant lots, some even uncleared of bombed-out houses, in Whitechapel when I stayed there. I realised the docklands were the bombers’ targets, and toffs lived elsewhere—south, north, or west from the docklands.

It was a surprise when this worker opened up to me. I was a typical colonial, brought up in a middle-class world. All our growing lives, my father—walking home from work, as he preferred to do even when we got a car in his 46th year of age—used to bring home the B.O.P. (Boys Own Paper) from the stationers after work once a month, along with comics like Dandy and Beano. My dad himself got Wide World, and we would get to read that once he was finished with it. Only when he died mid-way through my matric year did we cease to get these periodicals and comics. My mom was sorry, but all of a sudden there was no money. These publications gave very little idea of working-class life in Britain. Even today, I struggle to think of a working-class author with a bestseller.

My worker companion must have picked up my surprise. He said, hardly defensively:

“Well, we had to look after ourselves, didn’t we?”

From time to time throughout my four years in England, I heard stories of hardship growing up, of poverty, cold, and even from other small details, like the way certain sweets were spoken about. There were often sweets about when I was growing up, but these seemed a relative rarity and a huge treat to working-class boys growing up, and I could deduce from this that there was just no money about. The class system was cold and heartless.

Naturally, I never got around to thinking thieving was alright, nor did I ever get around to doing it myself. I just can’t—my upbringing. But I did understand them, especially as more stories of the two wars unfolded. In the end, it was hearing of the SADs that shocked me into a different view of “Good old England” from the one I’d grown up with. Many years after I had returned to SA, the story of the SADs—the Shot At Dawn soldiers—was exposed, and there was a move to change their service records to clear their names. Most of those soldiers were shot by their own side—by officers, meaning the privileged, educated, ruling class.

How can you shoot your own people, especially for piffling offences? No person would want to fall asleep on guard duty. My Uncle Alby had a blemish (for insubordination), on his war record. I think he was docked some pay. Many good men, exhausted after weeks of bombardment and lack of sleep from that, were executed in cold blood by their so-called “superior” officers for dozing off—sometimes at the end of their watch, and for minutes only. Unbelievable.

London was all about the “Swinging Sixties” when I arrived there. Under the Labour Party, there was a massive cultural flowering. People on the dole became expert jugglers, musicians, artists, and so on, because they had the time to hone their craft or art. Under the Tories, everything is down to the balance sheet. They are a mass of talentless drones. You may say “there is nothing wrong with business” or “business makes the world go around”. As clear as those two sayings are, they miss so much.

After hearing of the wartime “business” of my worker friend in the warehouse in Victoria, I began to despise “upper crusts”, and that has not changed in more than half a century since. Even now, I can’t bring myself to soften my attitude to their inhumanity. To me, they are lucky to be alive. The French would have offed their heads.

Harold Wilson was Prime Minister while I was in England. I thought that would be the end of upper-crust, bowler-hatted platitude rule, but I was wrong. I can’t believe that the Brit public continues to fall for the Tories.

I had been a worker—on steam, a footplate man—for most of a year before going to England, and I continued working in manual labour for my entire four years in England. Despite moving on to IT, music, and farming (not by choice; I took up music after being kicked out of a really great job in Durban for political reasons—their political reasons, not mine—as I was not an activist nor a communist, though I would never deny being liberal; I just am) in my ensuing working life, I am a worker through and through. I walk like one, talk like one, and I am one. Very few things surprise me as a result, because workers get to learn the real world in a special way.

I would, however, have been as puzzled as many people I met throughout my life, without the benefit of an intensive half-decade as a manual worker. I know how most things work, and how most people work. With all that experience, life is a lot easier to understand, accept, and enjoy.

Adam and Sally Rumball

It is fitting, to close out this London chapter, to mention Adam and Sally, because they are back in London, and happy there.

Sally and I were friends from Rockey St days, and then, as the wanderlust catches the young, so it caught her, and she was off overseas. The dream may have included bringing back a Scot as a consenting adult, or better still as a spouse. The Scot did not materialise, but she did much better. She returned to SA promising to reveal a lovely Brit. Months later, he arrived, and did not disappoint. I immediately forgave England for being like it is: for Blighty to produce a human being like this, I can forgive anything.

When they met, the deal was to spend some years in each of both SA and England: both are family people. They stuck to that deal, and are in England at the time of writing. I love them both so much. There was always a lot of common ground with Sally: like me with the Karoo, Sally has the Eastern Free State to long for as “ekaya”, her ‘heart’ home. Everyone in SA has “ekaya”, usually rural and far away. Sally visited the family farms around Fouriesburg before she went to England, to inhale a massive dose of healing Free State. Family time in khakhi-walled stone masonry houses, stoeps, the veld, the vlaktes, the sandstone strata with pastel orange and coral hues. There is nothing like that area elsewhere. It is unmistakable. No person dropped in blindfolded would think for one minute s/he were in KZ, one of the Cape provinces, or anywhere but those blue Maluti Mountains.

When Adam arrived in Johburg, it was not long before I shared some tales of my time in London, and we discovered we had something in common: de facto membership of a gang. Well, it is not actually true. We weren’t, but these things creep up on you. Sitting in a pub in Shepherds Bush with Vic one night, he asked me for a favour.

Vic had very few “teef” left, and I knew he loved fighting. What I didn’t know was that he used that skill, as a paid gig, sort of, for an infamous English gang. The favour he asked of me, in that Shepherds Bush pub, was to take a half pint of bitter over to a man he pointed out across the pub, and ask him, in exact words “How’s your sister?”. I did so. Presented with the half pint, the man looked receptive until the verbatim question was popped. Wildly, his eyes searched the room. He spotted Vic, and fled.

“What was that all about” I asked Vic. He just guffawed with laughter. “Boy, ’e dint ‘alf scarper, did he?”. I did not press the point.

Some weeks later, his acquaintance, Ginger, who was a bus driver for the firm I was temping at, used the phrase “coz you is one of us now, incher?”. I was alarmed. “How am I one of who?”. He related how I had done that favour for Vic in the pub, and asserted that it indicated that I was indeed “one of us now”. Believe me, that is what I didn’t want to hear. It was hard enough being an illegal immigrant. I did not relish the idea of “doing porridge at The Scrubs”, something that appeared to be a normal rite of passage to Vic and Ginger. It turned out something similar had happened to Adam.

One of the lesser reasons I returned home from self-exile in England was that inadvertent membership issue. Adam and I heaved a sigh of relief to be out of the ambit of “Reggie and Ronnie”, but Adam was not totally re-assuring: “Are you SURE you have not been approached by ‘one a da boyz’ here in SA”? I thought. “Well, now that you SAY that … " and we guffawed and shared more stories of the boys who “wouldn’t ‘urt a flea”, as their mother put it.

Adam, Sally and I invested far too much of our hard-earned in riotously happy times all over Johburg. Various Rockey St haunts, plus Cool Runnings and the Jolly Rodger knew us too well! Sometimes, we just did not want those happy nights to end. When they did, it would most likely be at the Doll House roadhouse in Louis Botha Avenue, around dawn. I mean, what else, right? Isn’t that what we all do?

I am glad they are in London for what is turning out to be an embarrassing patch in SA history.

“Well done” Sally’s father would say. “Well done”.