Nobbut a Lad Page 13

  How I longed to get hold of that stick. I had just watched Sir Malcolm Sargent on the Last Night of the Proms and knew exactly what conducting was about. You had to feel the music, transmit its emotion. (What you also had to be able to do was read it, but that seemed relatively unimportant. The main thing was enthusiasm.)

  Then one day Mrs Rishworth gave in to my pleadings (probably in the interests of a quiet life) and let me have a go. I took the baton – a wooden drumstick – and approached the podium, a large atlas. Magisterially I lifted up my arms and checked, with raised eyebrows, that I had their attention. Then I brought my arms down and began conducting with all the passion of a maestro, remembering to close my eyes part of the time, the better to concentrate.

  My moment of glory did not last long. I think it was about five bars.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Mrs Rishworth wailed. ‘That won’t do at all.’ The drumstick was wrested from my grasp and I was sent back to my clappers, saddened that such an injustice could be allowed, that plodding beats were somehow preferable to heart and soul. It was a long walk, from the atlas to the back row of the clapper department. I tried not to look to right or left. Tried to ignore the sniggers. John Brown passed me my little black instrument – three pieces of wood held together by a shoelace – but he didn’t meet my eye.

  Dale Bryce took up the drumstick once more and I noticed that this time her inscrutable expression bore the faintest hint of a smug smile. I did my best to make my clappers keep time, but my heart was no longer in it.

  I don’t know that I particularly wanted to become a choirboy, in the same way that I don’t know if I was religious. I know that I believed in God, because my mum and dad did and if I was theirs, then I must, too.

  Not that they ever talked about it. It was just what you did. Like eating. And we never said grace before meals. Mum thought that people who did that were showing off. Far too ostentatious. Public demonstrations of faith were confined to church, and low church at that. Mum became very uneasy one Sunday when, to demonstrate some point or other, the vicar lit a candle. From my seat in the choir stalls I could see her bridling in the pews, clenching her hands in her lap and raising her shoulders. Her relief when he blew it out at the end of the demonstration was palpable. Quite what she would have made of the ‘peace’ I can’t imagine. She’d have probably become an agnostic.

  But I was taught to say my prayers at night before I went to sleep. In summer I kneeled by the bed, but in winter, when it was cold, and the ice patterns crept up the inside of the windowpane, I was allowed to say them in bed. They were always the same: ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child; pity my simplicity, give me grace to come to thee. Amen.’ Then there would be the ‘God-blesses’ – encompassing the immediate family, as far as grandparents, and pets.

  I attended Sunday school before I joined the choir. It was rather a desultory affair. There were only eight of us; a mixture of children from devout families and from families whose parents just wanted a bit of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon. My own parents were a cross between the two. We were taken to the hall of the junior school by the vicar’s wife – Mrs Cook – a squat lady with bad teeth and grey hair drawn up into a bun from which it always seemed to be escaping in unruly wisps. She would bang out a hymn on the piano at the beginning, then explain a parable – the lost sheep or the sower – and then bang out another hymn at the end. Only half a dozen of them were deemed appropriate – ‘All things bright and beautiful’ and ‘Glad that I live am I, that the sky is blue’ were favourites. There might be a bit of crayoning in a book. Then our motley little band would be shepherded up the road and handed back to our parents. I don’t remember being anything other than bored.

  At least at choir there were other lads, and we did have a bit of a laugh, especially on Mondays, which were ‘boys only’ rehearsals. There must have been about a dozen of us. None of us were what you might call ‘holy’. A few of us did enjoy singing, but the rest were there for the money. Sixpence a week, I think, with a shilling extra for a wedding. We were paid four times a year and in spite of patchy attendance, everybody turned up for rehearsal on pay day.

  We wore purple cassocks and white surplices and ruffs. They were freshly laundered only for Easter and Christmas, and between the two festivals they became progressively greyer until once more the Lakeland Laundry down Leeds Road worked its washday magic.

  The difficulty for me was finding a cassock that was short enough. At four feet nothing, I was swamped by most of them, and if I wasn’t in first on a Sunday morning, I would end up mounting the chancel steps with a train that would not have disgraced the Queen at her coronation. The surplice, too, could be so all-enveloping that I would have difficulty in locating my arms, come the first hymn.

  The ruffs we hated. When they were freshly starched and laundered, they would cut into your neck like a knife, especially if you got one that was too tight. The finishing touch was provided by a medal that dangled round our necks. We’d done nothing to earn them. They were oval and bronze and bore the crest of the Royal School of Church Music, which gave us an air of legitimacy. The two head boys had medals with red ribbon, we lower mortals made do with pale-blue, and the week after week of Trinity, when services seemed to slip into a sort of unremarkable plod, were made up for by the feast days like Easter and Whitsuntide, Palm Sunday and Christmas, when we’d process round the outside of the church and walk in through the Norman arch of the south door, singing a stirring hymn – ‘Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluia!’ or ‘O come, all ye faithful’. At the sight of our white surplices billowing in the wind, the traffic would slow on Leeds Road and Church Street to watch our progress, and we felt ridiculously important, and very holy. Even Peter Earle, his red hair smarmed down for the occasion, could manage to look angelic. Passers-by wouldn’t be able to see the catapult in his right pocket and the bubblegum in his left.

  In the boring bits – the twenty-five-minute sermon from our long-winded Welsh curate, or the intercessions – we’d chew bubblegum and read the latest War Picture Library with black-and-white illustrations of World War II battles. As the curate spoke of Pharisees and gentiles, we were in the thrall of German commandants who said, ‘Achtung, pig-dog!’ and ‘Gott in Himmel, vas is going on?’ until we heard the magic words ‘And so to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all that is most justly due …’ at which point we would scrabble to put away the magazines, take out the bubblegum and stick it under the book rest of the pew and shuffle the pages of our hymn books to the right place. When we stood up to sing ‘Jesu, good above all other’, the congregation would never have guessed that we weren’t.

  On Thursdays we rehearsed with the men – Dad and Harry Chambers were tenors at around five foot six inches tall; Uncle George Pennock, my godfather, was six foot something, and a bass, so I always assumed that the depth of your voice had something to do with your height. I am now five feet eight and a half and a tenor. I have no reason to disbelieve my earlier theory.

  The presence of the men meant that we had to behave. If we didn’t, we got clouted. Peter Earle’s ear was usually as red as his hair due to Harry Chambers clouting it with his hymn book for some perceived misdemeanour. ‘Aw, gerroff! I’ll tell my dad!’ was Peter’s usual pathetic threat. He never did. He knew he’d get another clout from his dad.

  So if we let off steam, it was on Mondays. That was when Mr Atkinson was on his own. He had little control at the best of times, and the nearest he came to raising his voice was to say, ‘Boys, boys!’ in his rather quavering voice when our high spirits threatened to bring proceedings to a halt.

  His conducting, though marginally more exciting than that of Dale Bryce, was not exactly of symphonic standard, and his vocal coaching was confined to the warning ‘Don’t force it!’ – an exhortation that caused great glee when directed at David Fawcett, who stood next to me. It was fully ten minutes before Mr Atkinson regained control after issuing the instruction ‘
Don’t force it, Fawcett.’ But then we were easily distracted.

  When Mr Atkinson was not there, then the organist, Arthur Pickett, had to master both his instrument and crowd control, and the maintenance of discipline was, if anything, even more shaky. Arthur was a lovely man, but he had a stammer.

  ‘We’re going to sing tha, tha, tha f-f-f-f-first hymn on tha, tha, tha sheet I’ve just ga-ga-ga-given out …’

  It was a disability of which the humour was exploited to the full by Peter Earle, who would stand behind him during a particularly sterterous passage and mime the words to the rest of us. We didn’t want to laugh. We knew we were being unkind. And yet it was impossible not to be buoyed along by Peter’s ridiculous impersonation.

  Eventually Arthur would cotton on to the situation and lose his temper; turning round, catching hold of Peter’s ear and propelling him into the pew in front of him with practised ease.

  On summer evenings, after choir practice, we’d wander round the churchyard before we went home, wading through the long grass, discharging clouds of pollen into the still, warm air and conjuring up stories under the conker trees about who was buried where. With a morbid curiosity we’d look for the graves of babies and infants who had died when they were younger than we were, and try to find the oldest inhabitant – a posh lady from Middleton who’d lived into her nineties.

  One grave had above it a sort of raised triangular tomb, a bit like a house roof, with a stone cross embossed on it. It stood in a particularly shady part of the graveyard out of sight of the vestry door. The air there was always cold, whatever the time of year. Peter Earle said it was because it was the devil’s grave.

  So it was, that whenever a new choirboy was installed, he was initiated on the devil’s grave. We’d warn him of the impending ceremony and take delight in his widening eyes. For several weeks he would be notified of the moment when, after a chosen choir practice, he would be taken to the devil’s grave and held down on it while terrible things were done to him.

  The threat was everything. When the moment arrived, he’d be taken by the arms, kicking and screaming. Someone would bind a hanky round his mouth to gag him. It would probably not be a clean one. It would be tied in a tight knot at the back, and then he’d be hauled across the graveyard, and as the kicking and struggling reached its height, he’d be held down on his back, with the cross of the devil’s grave digging into his spine as the rest of us tickled him. The cries of fear and agony would give way to helpless laughter, and then the gag would be removed and the victim would vent his spleen – ‘Rotten buggers!’ – expletives that were the result of relief as much as anger.

  Then, at the sight of Mr Atkinson coming out of the vestry with his overcoat on, his music case tucked under his arm and his majestic grey trilby in place, we’d run off home, laughing that we’d been able to con yet another unsuspecting choirboy into thinking that a fate worse than death was waiting for him on the devil’s grave.

  By way of a sop, more than anything else, we were taken on a choir trip once a year in summer. It would always be to the same place – Morecambe, where it usually rained – with lunch in the Winter Gardens and a trip to the menagerie at Heysham Head as the high spot. There was nothing much there – just a few flea-bitten monkeys and some slot machines and seedy shops that sold cheap souvenirs. You could guarantee that Peter Earle would manage to find something that would astonish the rest of us. One year it was a Biro that you could tilt so that a girl in a swimsuit became naked before your very eyes. Apart from seeing my mother breastfeeding my sister when I was five, it was my very first glimpse of tits; I remember feeling rather excited. It was almost confiscated by Arthur Pickett, but somehow Peter Earle managed to get round him and he let him off, so that we all tumbled happily off the train back at Ilkley in the late evening, smelling of chips and wet gaberdine, and hiding any evidence of schoolboy lasciviousness.

  These were times of happiness and uneventfulness in the main. Church attendance at matins and evensong on a Sunday brought a kind of calming routine to the end of the week. Though we were always told that Sunday was the first day of the week, it seemed more like a sedate finale. Despite often being possessed of a kind of dull unpredictability, it did make the prospect of school on Monday seem less daunting. At least there something would happen, and you wouldn’t have to go home after church and play quietly while your parents slept in their easy chairs after lunch, waiting for the moment when you could go out for a walk on the moors or by the river and actually make use of the day off.

  There were, in spite of the routine monotony of it all, a handful of memorable days in church: the day Arthur Pickett got married and we sang for him. We were all stunned that the lady who said yes was actually quite dishy; somehow we’d never seen him as the marrying type – he was married to the church organ, and the glass factory he ran during the week. To our surprise, and maybe even disappointment, he managed to get through the service with hardly a stammer – even in the vows.

  The saddest day of all came when we sang at the funeral of Mr Atkinson’s wife. She had come to choir practices occasionally and played the organ for her husband when Arthur Pickett was away. She was quietly spoken and well dressed – the precise female equivalent of her husband. She usually wore a hat. I can see her at the organ, dressed in peach silk, serenely playing some tricky passage while her husband coached the handful of average junior-school children in an attempt to turn them into something worth hearing of a Sunday.

  Their two grandsons – David and Jonathan – proved by their names alone that this was a family of some piety, though as head boys of the choir (by virtue of their height as much as nepotism – they would have looked ridiculous in rank and file), they could be every bit as mischievous as the rest of us.

  The news of her death was told to us in hushed tones by one of the men – I can’t remember which. But we all left choir practice feeling saddened and slightly ashamed that we had not been nicer to Mr Atkinson. He never came back.

  We discovered later the true tragedy of the situation. Mrs Atkinson had collapsed in the drive of their house in Menston. Mr Atkinson had not seen her go down. He’d been backing the car out of the garage. As a result, he drove the car over her body. She would most likely have been dead already, they said, but it did not take much imagination to understand how he must have felt.

  There was a poignancy to choir practices after that. Peter Earle was well behaved; unwilling to cause a fuss even in Arthur Pickett’s most hesitant speeches.

  Mrs Atkinson should have passed away quietly and without drama. She was a gentle lady. She had a gentle husband. They both went to church on a Sunday. Somehow it didn’t seem fair. But at least she was old. Old people died regularly; young people did not. At least, not usually.

  My dad worked for a plumber called Billy Lawson. He was older than Dad; a quiet, self-contained sort of man with a flat cap and a hooked nose. He lived on the edge of town with his sister, Maggie, and their niece, Kathleen. I am not sure what happened to Kathleen’s parents, or whether Billy and Maggie had officially adopted her. In any event, they treated her as their own child, and as they were a good deal older than most parents and a good deal better off, they spoiled her rotten.

  It didn’t seem to affect her. She was a nice girl – friendly, if a bit quiet – and Maggie seemed keen that Kathleen and I should be friends. We did not see a lot of each other, but I remember vividly a visit to Bradford Alhambra on her birthday, when Charlie Cairoli, the clown, wished her a happy birthday from the stage halfway through the performance. I was hugely impressed, and Kathleen wore a pink mohair cardigan and looked suitably embarrassed.

  My mother did not encourage the friendship. Whether it was because she didn’t want me making friends with the boss’s daughter or because Kathleen was a Catholic I don’t know. Mum was not a religious fanatic; she would have argued that she was not at all prejudiced against other religions. She just thought that people who were C. of E. didn’t marry Catholics – simpl
e as that – so as far as she was concerned, it was better if potential relationships were nipped in the bud before things became too complicated.

  I can’t have been overly concerned. I didn’t see Kathleen again until we were in our early teens. Then I caught sight of her sitting in the passenger seat of Billy Lawson’s car when I went to meet my dad from work. My dad was inside talking to her dad, and she was waiting patiently to be driven home.

  I could hardly believe my eyes. She was stunning. The tiny little girl in the pink cardigan was now a shapely young woman with a crisp white blouse and olive skin – her dark-brown eyes flashing in the afternoon sun.

  ‘Hello, Alan,’ she said softly. ‘How are you?’

  My legs turned to jelly and I tried to stop my mouth from falling open. I failed.

  Kathleen laughed gently. ‘Remember me?’

  I nodded. ‘At the theatre.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ She got out of the car and leaned against the roof, and in those few moments I fell in love. At least, I thought I did. It wasn’t just that she was stunningly attractive; there was a warmth about her, a sort of serenity.