Cambridge

In the spring of 1968, I needed to get out of London. Number 104 Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge was a regular weekend destination to see Graham Pechey and Nola Clendinning, and “the house” agreed to let me stay there. It was never meant to be a long-term stay, and I stayed only eight months—through the summer into the onset of winter—when circumstances indicated a return to London.

In our St Patricks Road days, Graham was a frequent visitor to my brother’s outside room, “The Holy Tabernacle of Mainstream Jazz”.¹ It goes without saying that he was also a jazz fan. Apart from knowing him quite well through my brother, I felt in good company musically. In fact, even more so given that another man dwelling in that house was Chris Ballantine, later to become Professor of Music at UNP Durban.

Shelford

I quickly picked up a job in a flour mill in Shelford, ²a hamlet outside Cambridge. It became the strangest of trance-like, déjà vu experiences. The work was arduous, but I was very strong and fit from working in labour jobs in London, and I quickly settled into the rather hectic morning routine, shown the ropes by Roy, a lean, athletic-looking guy perhaps five years my senior.

It was a topsy-turvy arrangement in its way: actual shift duration time was 06:00 through 14:00, but official shift time was 08:00 through 16:00. In fact, we generally loafed around between 14:00 and 18:00. There was not much to do. Once I was okay with the work, I told Roy to go home at 14:00. He had a young family, and it was a delight for him to get back to play with his kid. The bagging rate was so desultory for those two afternoon hours, that I took to reading a book: the hopper made a soft clank when the bags dropped at full load, alerting me to save the page, and pack and stack.

It was a flipped work arrangement, two hours of “under-time” preceding an eight hour shift. The two hours of “under time” at overtime rate was an incentive for the early start. I doubt the bean-counters ever knew. The paymaster did: this is just another example of how working men get things done: “What they suits don’t know won’t hurt them”, or “what happens in the mill, stays in the mill”.

The money was not bad after London, helped by the fact that it was not economical to close the mill down during weekends, meaning that Saturday working was a requirement. In fact, the foreman took some pains to impress on me that closing the mill was a no-no. Not done. “Downtime” was heads-rolling unthinkable.

It also meant that there could be no such thing as the honourable old South African cultural tradition of a ‘babelaas’ on Monday morning. Those silos were groaning by 06:00. There was no earlier train, and there were no buses plying at 05:00. I would have taken them if there were. I will say this: I was never, not even once, let down by a late train in the entire summer I did that job. Also, luckily, though it was a brisk trot from the station, and a dash upstairs to the bagging station, only once did Roy and I have to hit panic stations to loosen a blocked silo outlet.

Moron

“Moron,” said the foreman by way of explanation, with a relaxed grin on his face, so I took this not as an insult, but rather as an in-joke.

I agreed to the work conditions. With them came the pleasant discovery that Saturdays meant ten hours at the usual overtime rate of “time-and-a-half”, with the two hours “overtime” prefixed to the shift calculated based on whatever the normal overtime rate was ³ Not bad for the time, though given what the job entailed, many people considered the rate low for the workload we faced, and ‘regional’ wages were generally lower than in London.

That work turned out to be packing 550 hundredweight bags of wheat bran—something that we did urgently against the clock, because the huge bins we had to empty were nearly full at 06:00, and were constantly being added to while we worked.

This adds up to 27.5 tons of bran packed in four hours. Bran flour is not dense, and one hundredweight bag (which, typically English, is not a hundred pounds weight, but 112 pounds) was nearly chest-high and about the diameter of a fit man’s waistline. 550 bags made a large room full of bags, stacked to the ceiling. Imagine about twice the volume of a double car garage, and you will get a picture of how much we stacked, every day, in four hours.

There was a trick to the stacking, too. Paper bags are slippery, and will slip and collapse if not cross-hatched properly. So, one had to have a mental picture of the pattern. We would start at the back and build layers upon layers, creating steps for us to run up—the only way to pack the bags right up to just under the ceiling.

It was all done at a run: we had 25 seconds to drop the bag, fold its neck, stitch, hoist⁴ run, stack, and return. Try it one day in the gym. Load yourself up with a 22kg dumbbell in each hand, run 10 metres, and 10 metres back in 25 seconds. That’s around 63 round trips in half an hour. To approximate our workload, you would need to also ascend and descend up to eight steps in those 20-metre round trips. Our thighs grew massive.

The two of us emptied the silos earlier than 11:00 daily, after which work was a doddle, needing only the occasional bag to be packed until knock-off time at 16:00. Usually the foreman would drop by around shift end to ensure that the silos were empty. They had to be, to avoid a shutdown before 06:00, and he could not risk even partially filled silos.

That happening was “Moron my job is worth,” quipped the foreman, with a toothy grin. Aha! The in-joke.

Trance, dance, and music are never far apart ⁵ . This may seem obvious for nineties youngsters who spent their night life trance-dancing to “house” music, but it was far from obvious in the very different energy of flower-power England. The flour packing job was arduous enough that one approached trance as exhaustion and pressure stepped in, and my mind never stopped echoing the powerful phrases of Dudu Pukwana, replaying themselves from many nights spent soaking up that glorious tone in Ronnie Scott’s Old Place at 39 Gerrard Street, Soho.

The Shelford time was a dreamy conflation of milling déjà vu, with the clanks and sighs of the dropper calling up Dudu wailing with Bob Stuckey, the Chris McGregor Big Band playing unmistakable South African jazz—all rounded off in a swound of muscle-fatigued trance, a memory blend of lives, generations, souls, and a rhythm track pried from the earth of the Karoo, my imagination, and the calm in the storm that was Abdullah Ibrahim, dragging more sound out of a piano than seemed humanly possible.

“Tintinyana” ⁶ was the song that energised and sustained me more than any other in my milling hours. It was not my favourite ever Abdullah Ebrahim composition. That honour goes to “Cherry” a cracker of a number, unusally structured, recorded with Bra Victor Ntoni on double bass, and Bra Nelson Magwaza on drums. Abdullah had a left hand that the US boogie giants would have dreamed of, and it is nowhere more apparent than in “Tintinyana” and “Cherry”, and to me, Bra Vic and Bra Nelson were his best rhythm section ever. Homies!

This déjà vu “other-lifeness” was overpowering. It wasn’t unlike improvising when a band is really cooking. A kind of alpha brain-wave state takes over, and while you mentally hear the melody, you are at the same time overlaying your own improvised notes onto it, pushed and pulled by the harmony—usually from piano chords, but sometimes from other surprise stimuli, like a bass line or a drum lick triggering a trip down a mental improvising tunnel. The breathlessness of “how to come back” to the song was sometimes the steeliest of challenges. I knew that even from the solos I took in the dance band, but I had never been faced with the depth of stimuli handed to front-line soloists in a band like the Blue Notes, their big band, or the Brotherhood of Breath. My memory of the McGregor glory was stoked largely by a vivid memory of the night they came to play at my brother’s house at 100 Topham Road in Pietermaritzburg, after already finishing their “main” gig.

All this was to prove even more sustaining in later months at the mill. Roy had left for another job. His position was filled by a Jamaican named Ben—easygoing and hugely built, a bodybuilder. I found myself the teacher in a job I had barely come to terms with myself, and it was a constant puzzle to me that Ben could not get into any kind of rhythm in the task. Having grown up alongside South African workers, I expected at least something of the call-and-response spirit of “work-songs” in Ben, but he proved to be, in my dad’s words, a “musical desert”. Or at least, a rhythmic desert. With all of his muscles and bulk, he was forever uncomfortable and unhappy, especially with the flour dust clogging his nostrils, ears, and hair. He didn’t last long. He bade me farewell one Saturday without returning on Monday, leaving me to empty those huge bins alone. A religious man, the only joke he ever cracked at the mill was, “Give us our daily bran.”

Alone again, naturally

The foreman was concerned: he could not find me a workmate. People came, looked, and left. They saw me—an off-white monochrome, sprinting ghost with muddy apertures at the eyes, nostrils, and mouth, breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows. It was enough: they never returned. The dole was a much easier life (I was a bit jealous of that). The foreman, when I rattled my spears a little, telling him I didn’t know how long I could continue alone, made a second time-sheet out to someone named (something like) “A.B. Loke” every week. Fair enough: double pay for double work, but it was a tough challenge to get done each day. Without two men sharing the work, there was no easy loping and stacking as before. It was now a constant sprint to keep up. This was the second job I found myself “doubling up"on, after the arduous cable-loading at West Kensington Tube Depot. What can I say? Illegal immigrants don’t have the choices other people have. My grandfather Every’s words came to mind”

“You can cry. It’s alright to cry. But, it won’t help.

Double Time

Imagining I was on stage, performing with the Blue Notes or the McGregor Big Band, kept me going, as did the ringing spruce soundboard of “Tintinyana”. I sometimes did not finish by 14:00, but the foreman was good enough to humour me with an extra hour on those days. Talking of such dreaming, I had an important epiphany on that job that was to serve me well when I took up serious trombone practice at age thirty-nine: my code for the notion was “double-trouble”. I realised, soon after I was left alone on the job, that there is a secret to “doubling up”: it takes less energy that an incremental speed up. To explain:

The standard way to practice is to repeat a scale of phrase enough times at a slow metronome tempo, to get it right six faultless times in sequence. Then, you “own it” and the metronome is increased in tempo, for example, from 60 beats per minute to 66bpm. Then, repeat until we get that speed right. That’s the norm. But, I found that doing an exercise at exactly doub;e the tempo takes very little extra skill or energy. I don’t know why. I just found it true.

Naturally, a point is reached where it is not possible to speed up any more, but until that is reached, I found that keeping the metronome at 60bpm, but playing a passage at double speed is almost is easy as doing it normally.

So, on the job in Shelford, learning that stacking a bag every 25 seconds and resting 25 seconds was not all that different from just doing a bag every 25 seconds, became the foundation for a new way of practising many years later when I took up trombone. I was thirty-nine, and needed to catch up with the youngsters, and that was the key.

Practising alone in the 1980s, that “double-trouble” sifted through from memory while I was hacking scales, and it changed things overnight! There were many times as I hammered away at scales against a metronome in Yeoville, that the milling job was ever-present in the back of my mind, continuing the strange, old déjà vu. Part of the reason for why it works, is the excitement at how much one gets done alone, whether it is bags stacked or scales licked off at break-neck tempos!

Give me my daily bran

On the afternoon train returning to Cambridge station each day, putting my daily 27.5 tons of “daily bran” behind me and flopping back into the train seat was the most blessed release, especially during the months I did the job alone. The pressure to get 30 tons of bran packed into 550 bags daily without help was intense. Years later, I realise how much easier it was in the company of Roy when I started the job, and how much harder it was with Ben, who was both poor company and a poor worker. That’s life. The better bands I have performed with didn’t always add up to more talent than some of the other bands; the lesson was that a harmonious group of people tends to produce a better result. It is not just talent that counts. ⁷.

It was like my firing days: I was sore in every muscle, and my feet were sore. Walking home from the station was via a large, estate-like park where in the mornings I was thrilled to watch golden pheasants in the dawn mist. They were seldom to be seen in the mid-afternoon. Once home, I washed my hair (shoulder-length in those days) from its pale, off-white bran-flour colour back to its near-black hue. It usually took three washes and three rinses.

Looking back, I should say, despite the agony of my yearning, those dreams of performing with Chris McGregor’s band felt far from possible. Apart from an intense three months of practice at age twelve, during which I gained a fairly adequate technique on trumpet, I seldom picked up the horn and certainly never practiced. I didn’t really know about creating the habit, but found that I could pick up the horn and do a four-set dance gig adequately—sometimes even well. The dream would remain a secret and unattainable fantasy, because I did not seriously ever aim to become a musician. I could not see myself in it, partly because I liked all the jobs I did, and gigging for extra pocket money was all I could see ahead of me. I could never fill Mongezi Feza’s shoes on trumpet in any of the McGregor bands, free jazz especially. I simply did not have the chops, besides which free jazz was never “in my ken”.

In those days, I was incapable of much more than tossing out a few licks in a dance band. I lacked the range, speed, technique, and stamina to texture the air with haunting, powerful tones from “the other side” as did Mongezi and Dudu, all night, every night. I had the notes in me, in my mind, but I could never produce such remarkable moments as they did, gig after gig. That was really my final perception, or my predicament, if you like. Still, unattainable fantasy or call it what one likes, it was an ever-present, ongoing tug on my being.

Déjà vu

I said earlier this job had the character of a “living déjà vu” experience.

Years later, while on a road trip visiting family in the Karoo and Eastern Cape, I struggled a little to convey this constant déjà vu sensation to my mother. It was a struggle to get it out, to articulate it, and when done, I waited, fully expecting a lack of response or an indifferent reaction. Yet, she wasn’t in the slightest surprised, and was actually positive about it.

“You come from a long line of millers,” she explained, telling me that my grandfather, Clarence Every, had a mill on the farm he managed in the Kat River valley, and that his father, in Cradock, milled all the wheat that was grown in that town and the surrounding towns that did not have mills. It was the first time that I had consciously heard that I come from a line of millers! Weird. I was living a time-within-a-time déjà vu. How was that knowledge carried with me enough to immerse me in my daily milling, decades, or even nearly a century later?

This was pretty much the story of my time in Cambridge. A lot of work, not much play, no performing in bands, but a pleasant shared time with friends Graham and Nola Pechey, Chris Ballantine, and Peter Knight in the house, with memorable visits by Jeff Guy and Tony Voss. Before closing off on this fairly inactive musical time, I should say there was one episode that was intensely musical, a great surprise, and enlarged my musical library. This was the Cambridge University College May Ball. That should be plural: each college held its own dance.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

I walked down to the campus that evening. It was amazing to see the fashions, both male and female, with men in whites and bashers punting gorgeous girls down the river. As the evening faded toward night, the students disappeared—girls in gorgeous party gowns and men in suits. I wandered from college to college. It is a blur now, so I can’t these days remember which band I heard at which college. However, they were all astonishing: famous bands constantly in the hit parades and on TV. Among them were definitely Marmalade and The Alan Price Set. Others may have been The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Procol Harum. I hovered outside doorways to the various halls, drinking the sights and sounds in.

I am no particular fan of British pop now, nor was I then, but the bands were obviously good at what they were doing. The immediate difference I noted, compared with my own experience back home, was how loud they all were. None of the bands I had performed with back home even had a PA. We opened our cases, grabbed our horns, started blowing, tuned up while on the go, and that was it. We just had to keep it a little down for the double bassist, who would typically complain about not hearing himself ⁸

Well, I could see that technology here in England had moved things on, a lot. Part of the difference in the musical character was to do with the (by now ubiquitous) electric bass (double bassists’ revenge)⁹. Moving from one venue to another, I ended up quite overwhelmed with excitement, and stayed in the area all night, heading home only at first light.

By the time I reached Grantchester Meadows, it was so beautiful in the slightly misty dawn that I decided to carry on past the house out to the meadows. The path followed the River Cam. It was such a beautiful morning. Meandering along the banks, fancying I was Rupert Brooke walking from Grantchester and conceiving the germ of his poem “Heaven”, I eventually turned back homeward, “fish, replete”, now subsumed by “Skip a light fandango”¹⁰ , witnessing an epic night of music. I suppose I should not have been surprised that song gatecrashed my mind. Why was it more memorable than the others I had heard through the night? Because the theme came from a Bach fugue?

Just before leaving the meadows, I saw the most amazing sight: a beautiful nude woman floating through the reeds down by the river. She glided past and out of sight, leaving me gasping. What a beautiful girl, and what an amazing sight! As she slid out of sight, I saw she was in fact standing on the flat prow of a punt, poled by a young man still dressed for the dance. The girl stood arms outstretched, embracing the sun, head tilted back, long legs planted. I saw then that she was not nude, but in a diaphanous dress of such fine material that it was completely transparent backlit by the dawn sun.