Royal Corps of Signals

Dud's Army.
Chapter 15
Music

Through the early fifties, to listen to jazz or popular music I would not expect to get much of a serving from the BBC, for whom, in those days, the song “Ivory Tower“ might have been written. So I attended dances, concerts, festivals, clubs, the back rooms of record shops or tuned in to the uncertain, distortion-plagued, late-night transmissions of Radio Luxembourg. American bands were banned by the Musicians Union from performing in the UK but British bands toured the country and all came to Bath. As a result I got to see Lonnie Donnegan.

At that time he was playing banjo for the Chris Barber Jazz Band, in town for a Sunday afternoon concert at the Bath Pavilion. His introduction by Chris Barber to perform solo at the end of the concert was greeted by enormous applause; we sensed what was coming. Lonnie set aside his banjo, stepped to the front of the stage, took up a guitar and sang “Rock Island Line.” He sang with the clean, hard tones of an Irish tenor, and he brought an excitement to the song, and to the room, that made me hot. He brought the house down. With that number he popularised skiffle.

But music of all sorts was everywhere in Britain and I loved it. In the factory I sang at my work, my mother sang at her work, and my Welsh grandmother whistled in a delightfully, absent-minded sort of way. My Auntie Audrey from Pentyrch went nuts over Spike Jones and his City Slickers and Auntie Joyce from Whitchurch went to the opera in Cardiff. Many parks had bandstands for light orchestras and deck chairs for their audiences. The Salvation Army’s Silver Band, delight of small boys and stray dogs, played in the poorer city streets and village squares. School never started without a hymn and Sunday night chapel in Wales was on a par with the conservatoire. Music was everywhere, but rarely played on the guitar.

Inexplicably, the contagion of guitar-playing let loose in the UK by the likes of Lonnie Donnegan, centred on young men. Even the young-man community of 280 SU, surrounded by barbed wire, isolated from the world by desert and sea, was touched by the virus, if lightly, a mere three out of two hundred of us getting infected. But we got it bad. To this point in time I’d taken the inevitable pre-school piano lessons, the in-school violin lessons and the post-school drumming lessons, all with no visible effect other than provoking the mockery of my sisters. But along came this fourth opportunity at playing an instrument. And it looked so easy. As soon as the Emergency was lifted, like the proverbial dirty shirts, all three of us were in Limassol checking out the instruments.

Besides myself there were Gil and Glenn, who to this point shared the one guitar in camp. We had each attempted some chord practice, not able to stick at it for very long due to the pain in one’s fingers. Happily, Gil could sing, and with the right sound for skiffle too, which was just as well as neither Glenn nor I could boast of any vocal talent. I could hold a tune and stay on key in a throaty sort of way and that was it. But skiffle was a forgiving medium. A mark of nine out of ten for singing in class and two years in the school choir was all I could bring to the table.

In a high-ceiling’d, novelty shop in Limassol, Gil, Glenn and I shyly twanged away at tuning the various models on offer, the merchant there wringing his hands and smiling at us through his clenched, gold-patched teeth, very anxious for his stock going the rounds through our clammy clutches. He brought chairs and Gil sang a song, all of us enjoying the novelty of a faint echo the lofty, plaster-walled room offered. We were sold. Along with a teach-yourself-in-ten-easy-lessons instruction book we made our purchases.

We practiced and practiced. And if it had not been for the notion of not letting the side down my guitar would have joined company with the long-abandoned piano, violin and drums. But once begun I simply had to continue playing the game, so to speak. Singly and together we strummed and thrummed. The tips of our fingers grew calluses, chord shapes and sounds were compared and discussed, the barre got roundly and universally cursed. Tempos were considered, keys experimented with, and painfully a repertoire of songs took shape. Augmenting our efforts the British Forces Radio Network supplied a steady stream of inspiration to which we listened in rapt concentration. And through the struggle of it all an occasional stab of wonder would arise from chord progressions such as one finds in Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on my Mind,” and I would be chastened into further practice, a servant to such beauty.

Jack wanted in as the bass player. Albert found us a second tea chest - in high demand around camp as tent furniture, and all that then was needed to make an instrument out of it was the addition of a shortened broom handle and some plastic-covered, braided-steel wire. I envied Jack who never was lumbered with all that private practice but could show up for group rehearsals as prepared as any of us. A drummer came aboard, beating his wire brushes on a Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin lid - washboard and thimbles evading discovery. We became a skiffle group, calling ourselves “The Hermits,” in deference to our isolation. And we all became fast friends. Blissfully, the summer passed, with the intriguing business of learning how to make music added to the list of camp activities.

Of course we were horrible. But since we played only for our own enjoyment it didn’t really matter. And enjoy it we did. Just like a pick-up game of soccer or a game of cards, one played for the pure enjoyment of it and for being with others doing and feeling the same. We were our own audience and supported each other with enthusiasm. To be fair about the quality of our music, Gil could sing very well. He was, as they say, a natural, and in a way the rest of us sheltered under his umbrella. He took the solos. I set myself the task of learning to read music.

It was not difficult to grasp the basic theory. The fact that each sound was a transmitted-through-air oscillation at a given frequency generated by the vibration of the string, the frequency being proportional to string length was entirely reasonable, as was the fact that the harmonious blending together of separate notes was a mathematical function of their frequencies. But the hieroglyphic symbols denoting these frequencies and their time values defied easy ingestion. Then too, when it came to recognising a sequence of notes, whole, halved, quartered, held over, arrested or speeded up, along with instantaneously moving certain finger-ends to the appropriate frets while others plucked or swiped the proper strings proved murderously difficult. One could not read and make music happen with any degree of fluency. One commanded one’s brain but one’s brain, like a stubborn National Service recruit, either baulked at the order or made a mess of it. One could neither read nor obey musical orders in the time allowed, the process seeming akin to recognising the individualities of a gaggle of bees. Spirit and flesh were both willing but the link between them was weak. The degree of difficulty proved astonishing. Was music yet another lady nondesirous of one’s company?

Chapter 16

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