One Train Later: A Memoir (4 page)

To get to school, I have to trudge for two miles through a shady wood that seems to hold about two hundred homosexual men on a daily basis. In these benighted days in Britain the love that dare not speak its name is still deeply in the closet and regarded as a crime against nature. The term gay still means happy, carefree spirits and crinoline doilies a la Jane Austen, not yet the perfectly greased six-packs, San Francisco bathhouses, Zapata mustaches, and flashing muscle. If you are gay at this time, you are queer or ginger or nancy or a turd burglar, and you had better keep your identity hidden or risk not only being ostracized from "decent" society but also a prison term to boot, and many a day in yonder wood do I see a pink upraised willy twirling at me from behind a stout oak. They are usually pale middle-aged men who look lonely and no doubt will run like a frightened rabbit if challenged. Sometimes they trail behind us in the distance, dodging behind bushes and trying to work up the courage to unleash their spinnakers into the fresh spring air.

Each morning between eight-thirty and nine the entire school joins together in the assembly hall. We hear remarks about the supposed progress of the school, followed by a short Bible reading, and then we sing a couple of hymns before trudging off to our various classes. In the fifth form we stand in a shabby line at the back of the hall. We hate the hymn-singing part of assembly, and just as we did with Mr. Furneaux, deliberately sing as off-key as possible, pissing ourselves while doing so. It's a cacophonous racket and we do it as a matter of habit, thinking that no one can detect where it's coming from. One morning after the headmaster, a miserable old bastard named Mr. Legg, has advised us all to "hitch our wagon to a star," I for some reason get called up to the stage where I stand while the last hymn is sung. With the strains of "Jerusalem" echoing around the hall, I am filled with abject horror as I hear the caterwauling coming from the back row where I normally stand. It is loud, clear, awful, and desperately obvious who the culprits-my mates-are; I cringe and gain a new respect for the teachers who either have an excellent sense of humor or are tone-deaf.

A couple of months after my twelfth birthday, I am at the front of a line of kids waiting to go into class. Everyone is pushing and shoving and being stupid until suddenly the line surges and I get pushed through the door, which is made of glass. I push out my arms to save myself but go straight through the glass, shattering it in all directions. I hit the ground with blood pumping at warp speed from my right hand, all of its fingers now slashed open. I scream and scream, cry out for my mother, and eventually get raced off to the emergency ward, where everything is sewn back together and I live-but for the rest of my life with a right hand full of scarred fingers.

Somewhere in the middle of these chaotic days of inky pages and military-style school thrashings, I get the faint idea that I have a thing for music, an ear for it maybe, but no way in which to express it other than enthusiastic talk and humming the day's idiotic songs-the piano lessons now having faded because of my getting a pair of roller skates. But shortly after my thirteenth birthday things change when I am given a guitar by my uncle Jim.

Jim has recently returned to England after years of living in Africa. Because of his exploits he has a somewhat legendary status in our family, having lived with actual Africans, shot at lions, and been down the diamond mines. When I was six he sent me a present of a book called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, a story of some wild lions that attack a camp in Kenya. Thrilled by the vision of flesh being ripped by wild cats, I love it and wonder if Uncle Jim has ever seen one, a lion.

One day he comes over and says, "Come 'ere a minute, I've got something for you." He stares down at me, his face brown and furrowed by years under the African sun, and from a battered case he pulls out an old and beaten Spanish guitar and says, "What do you think about this-I had it in Africa-would you like it?" My heart almost stops because to me it is complicated and exotic-a fabulous machine. He passes it to me and I feel a rush of blood as I whisper, "Thank you, Uncle," and carry it into my bedroom as if trying not to drop an egg. Scratched and dented with a string missing, it isn't much of an instrument, but I love it instantly and sit on the edge of the bed with it cradled in my arms, holding it in the position that I have seen used by guitarists on TV. I study it and gaze at its dents and scratches, its evidence of a long life, and wonder how many songs have been played on it, where it's been. It is an immediate bond, and possibly in that moment there is a shift in the universe because this is the moment, the point from which my life unfolds. I strike the remaining strings, which make a sound like slack elastic. It's horribly out of tune and I don't know even the simplest chord, but to me it is the sound of love.

It may be the sound of love, but with no idea of how to tune it and even less idea of how to play it, I don't know how to put one foot or finger in front of another. But Providence is at hand in the shape of a six-foot-seven ex-RAF serviceman by the name of David Ellis, a lodger my parents have recently taken into the house. We call him Cloudy because he literally towers over the rest of us, and we like to ask him how the weather is up there, but he's a genial personality and luckily for me a musician: a pianist. He immediately sees my plight and remedies the situation by returning one day with a new set of strings and a chord book with instructions on how to tune the guitar.

I watch, fascinated, as he wrestles the strings onto the guitar and proceeds to tune it to the Family piano. He then hands me the guitar and asks me to try out a D7 chord as shown on page one of the book, a simple triangle shape. With the guitar now in tune, the chord comes out sounding like heaven and I laugh in amazement as if I have received a surprise kiss at a party. I try some of the other shapes, like E, A, and B7. At first it's slow and painful-this being the last moment in my life when my fingers will be without calluses-hut I become obsessed and manfully struggle on into the night as the guitar gradually detunes itself and slides from the sound of an angel's harp to the moan of hell. Cloudy comes to the rescue and brings the strings up to pitch again. We go on like this for a couple of weeks until I slowly get my fingers around the open-position chords and learn to tune to the piano. I'm shaky and nervous but, taking a deep breath, decide to make an appearance at school with my guitar.

A few years earlier you would never have seen something as exotic as a guitar, but now it's beginning to establish its iconic presence as the trenchant symbol of youth. I notice a few other kids in the playground showing off to small groups during the morning or afternoon break and I start by joining these little throngs and looking over shoulders at the hands of the other boys as they form strange little triangles and parallelograms on the necks of their guitars. After school as I stumble home through the woods past the familiar trees, rotting logs, and spirals of pussy willow, I try to memorize these con figurations, holding my left hand in the air, fingers clustered in three points against the dark wet greenness.

At first I am shy because I now have a new identity and have to grow into it like a new skin. I expect a certain amount of snideness from the playground yobs, but because I have given myself time to get at least the first few chords down, it goes smoothly, with a minimum of jeering, and I become one of the kids with a guitar. The instrument is a badge of power: it makes me different and also helps me overcome feelings of physical inadequacy that I have in comparison to some of the tall blond superathletes who seem to abound in my form. I pick up more chords from other kids who have been playing longer than me, for at this time there is no other way to learn-no videos, no DVDs, no CD-ROMs, few books. You get information-chord by chord-only if another kid takes pity on you, so I get it wherever I can and practice into the night.

I begin taking the guitar to school almost every day, slogging through the woods weighed down by the satchel on my back and the guitar in my hand. I am a fanatic now, and if I don't have it with me at school, I race home at night to get back on it. One of the first side effects I notice is that it attracts girls. The guitar, like the gun, sticks out from the body phallic and hard; even in the pubescent stage of consciousness, the boy with the guitarunless he is impossibly ugly-becomes a more sexually desirable being, has the aura of a gunslinger.

Those of us who play the guitar in school tend to group together, and it's not long before we are strumming away in the front rooms of various mums' and dads' houses. Five of us decide to call ourselves the Midnighters, although none of us has ever been allowed to stay up past eleven. We fancy ourselves a skiffle group. Skiffle is a new movement and a new word that has recently entered the English vocabulary with the emergence of Lonnie Donegan, a former singer with the Chris Barber Jazz Band. Lonnie is very popular with his guitar and vocal style. He sings songs like "Rock Island Line" and "John Henry," and skiffle seems like a music that even we lowly schoolboys might achieve.

Mostly we just have guitars, but one day Graham White, our number three guitarist, brings along a tea chest bass. A primitive musical device made out of a box with a broom handle sticking out of it, a string is attached be tween the box and the handle so that when plucked, it gives a thudding atonal boom. Graham's homemade bass is bigger than he is, and after various sarcastic suggestions that maybe he should stand on it rather than play it, he gives up and uses it as a hutch for his pet rabbit, Sneaky. Another poor sod suggests that he play piano along with our strumming guitars, but that idea is greeted with hoots of derision: we are men with guitars, skifflers, and we stare with a steely-eyed gaze down railroad tracks that disappear into infinity.

Our repertoire is limited but we learn American folk songs like "Midnight Special," "John Henry," "Worried Man Blues," and "Tom Dooley," all of which we play with a grim enthusiasm as if battling our way out of hell. There is no concept of parts or dynamics other than just banging away like maniacs at E, A, and B7, and we probably resemble a bad Salvation Army band or an outtake of the Shaggs. The song lyrics are all about trains driving across the Deep South on errant time schedules and men who drive steel into the Missouri dirt or "wimin who dun me wrong," and the lace curtains and overstuffed couches of Graham White's mum are assaulted with the gutbucket feeling of black poverty squawked out by spotty-faced boys whose balls haven't dropped yet.

My guitarist profile takes a sharp turn upward when I not only get the leading role in the school Christmas play but then reappear afterward onstage to sing "Tom Dooley" and "Worried Man Blues" with our skiffle group. When I finish there's an audible gasp from the audience, but whether it's in disbelief at the gross ineptitude of the performance or the ghastly Americanized row that has sullied the assembly hall, one will never know. But the result is that my status at school goes up several notches, and from this moment on I often have a small group of girls trailing behind me through the woods as I walk home. This is followed in the evenings by anonymous giggling phone calls. My career as a rock star has begun.

My friends are now mostly other boys who have guitars, and I start to spend a lot of time with a kid named Eddie Evans because, older than I, he knows about players like Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, and Buddy Holly and he has records I have never seen or heard before. He plays me "Saturday Night Shuffle" by Merle Travis, and it knocks me to the floor. I have never heard playing like this before, with two parts going at once, and I am fascinated. Eddie has some EPs and we sit on the linoleum floor of his bedroom, leaning against his bed, guitars in position with a couple of Woodbines dangling from our lips, the windows open so his mum won't notice the smell. Eddie has a slight clue about how it's done, something about playing on the bass string at the same time as you play the melody on the treble strings. It's bloody difficult, and as we listen to the record above the din of the trolley buses that go droning by his mum's upstairs flat, Merle's fingerpicking pierces the blue smoke of our Woodies like a shamanistic spell.

"Peggy Sue" is a lot easier. I get it quickly and we strum through it a couple of hundred times with great enthusiasm until Eddie's mum starts banging on the wall with a broom and yells out that it's setting the parrot off and she can't hear the telly. Chastened, because we think we sound so great, we turn to another Buddy Holly item: the opening lick to "That'll Be the Day." A thing of beauty, this lick in the key of E major starts on an A on the third string, immediately slurs to a b flat note, which is then played as a triplet across the open B natural and E strings and then descends on down and into the open E major chord. This is pure rock-and-roll genius, a stunning piece of guitar devised by someone who is probably only seven or eight years older than we are.

To our thirteen-year-old minds almost everything about the guitar seems to come from or be over there, in America, at least everything we are interested in. All the best guitars are American, all the great players and the styles: rock and roll, jazz, and country music. We don't have a Buddy Holly, an Eddie Cochran, a Gene Vincent; we live in rural England, and the USA might as well be another planet, to go there would be like trying to book a flight to the moon.

The guitar and its players appear to us as if shrouded in a heavenly mist; we are utterly seduced by the glamour of the photographs on the sleeves of LPs that we stare at in the racks of the local record stores. The faces in these black-and-white photographs stare back at us from under greased and coiffed hair and turned-up collars as if to say, "Hey, baby, wanna little rock and roll?" We do, and it never occurs to us for an instant that they are human beings struggling with drugs, broken marriages, and lousy managers-for to us they are gods. We gaze at their glossy images, the glint in their eye as if they know something we don't, and hear them call with the scream of the blues, rock and roll, bent strings, and a yeah baby yeah that is about a million miles from a tea dance at the Bournemouth Pavilion.