Dad’s record collection is tempered by what I realize now are some of my mum’s choices. They’re very different to my dad’s. We spend so long on army bases in foreign countries that I wonder if Mum thought of herself as an ‘army wife’ or an ‘officer’s wife’, with its connotations of duty and subservience – someone who suppresses their own desires in order not to rock the boat. Did she do what she was told? Did he ask her to stop playing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ on the piano?
Many years later, after Dad has died, I pick her up from King’s Cross station and she says: ‘Have you noticed anything different?’
I think she’s suggesting she’s had her hair done and fumble for a compliment.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m wearing trousers. Your dad didn’t like me to wear trousers.’
So maybe this slim collection of pop records is her small rebellion. They’re all singles, and I’ve always thought of singles as more ephemeral and throwaway, which makes them a bit more dangerous than albums.
There’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’ by Acker Bilk. I’ve only just learned that Acker’s tune ‘Jenny’ was originally written as a love letter to his newborn daughter but was renamed ‘Stranger on the Shore’ when it was used as the theme tune for a TV programme of the same name. It was subsequently released as a single under this new name and reached number two in the charts. I loved it then but I love it even more now; it sounds very different knowing that it was written out of love for a daughter rather than sadness, which the title ‘Stranger on the Shore’ suggests.
‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark. An absolute banger of a song. Still as alive today as it was in 1964. I have no idea where this mythical downtown is – this throbbing citadel of lights and excitement – it certainly isn’t in Bradford, or Limassol in Cyprus, or Manama in Bahrain, or Jinja in Uganda, or Pocklington. The song has such a yearning quality to it, even Petula sounds like she’s never actually been there, and I wonder if my mum ever hankered for a little more excitement in her life. That’s certainly the meaning it has when Rik, Robbie Coltrane and I sing it in Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door.
If Dad had ever learned that Jimmy Page was one of the session players on Petula’s recording I wonder if he might have banned it. On the one occasion I play Led Zep IV on the family record player whilst they’re out for the evening, I forget to tidy it away and come down the next morning to find Dad has left a note on the album: ‘Yes Adrian, but what does it all MEAN?’
‘Sucu Sucu’ by Nina & Frederik. Long before the UK joins the Common Market, and despite having European accents and being obvious foreigners, Nina & Frederik have their own show on British telly in the early sixties. ‘Sucu Sucu’ is one of their most popular singles – a song written by a Bolivian, performed by a Dutch/Danish singing combo, to a vaguely calypso rhythm, with Frederik affecting a faintly Caribbean accent. This is ‘easy listening’ back in the early sixties. Today’s cancel culture would have a field day and it would probably be reclassified as ‘hard listening’.
‘Distant Drums’ by Jim Reeves. This is number one in the charts for five weeks in 1966, beating off competition from Small Faces, The Who, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, so I’m now wondering if Dad has a hand in buying it. Though its lyrics – about a man wanting to get married before going off to fight in a distant war – are often interpreted as being about Vietnam, so perhaps not. On another note, I love that as Jim sings, ‘I hear the sound of bugles blow’ we then hear a bugle blow – as a child I wait for that moment and mime playing the bugle – and the cheesiness of it still makes me laugh today.
‘Mary’s Boy Child’ by Harry Belafonte. Christmas isn’t Christmas until Harry sings.
Then there’s an EP with a selection of Nat King Cole songs: ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Unforgettable’ and ‘Nature Boy’. I’ve just listened to them all again and they’re simply spellbinding. This may be partly nostalgia – what other art form can transport you to another time and place so effortlessly? But listening as objectively as I can it seems to me they are masterpieces. What a voice – rich, effortless, full of expression.
The biggest surprise is the emotional heft of these songs, which seems at odds with my parents’ diffidence on that front. There’s a line in ‘Nature Boy’ that goes, ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return.’ And I wonder what my parents ever thought about that. Did it connect? Did this mean something in particular to Mum? Or did it just wash over them – a series of sounds that simply rhymed?
My Dad was unapproachable on this front.
At the age of sixteen he catches me as I’m leaving the house. He obviously wants to talk to me about something, and he doesn’t want Mum or the rest of the family to hear him.
‘I need to have a word with you,’ he says. And then says nothing. We stand awkwardly outside the back door.
‘What about?’ I ask.
His mouth tries to form some words but they won’t come. A minute passes. I catch a glimpse of Mum looking anxiously out of the kitchen window and then disappearing rather quickly, and then I twig: he’s obviously been sent out to give me the birds and bees talk. A bit late. I mean, I’m still a virgin but it’s not for want of trying. Another aeon goes by.
‘Adrian,’ he ventures at last. ‘Adrian . . .’ His face contorts with the effort and the embarrassment of it all. ‘. . . when I was a young lad of your age . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘. . . when I was a young lad of your age . . . I think I spent too much time on my bicycle,’ he says, then abruptly gives up and dives back into the house.
Perhaps if we’d sat down on Sunday mornings and listened to ‘Nature Boy’ whilst playing chess he might have been able to allude casually to the lyrics whilst keeping his eyes fixed firmly on my Sicilian Defence, and start a conversation that way.
Researching ‘Nature Boy’, I discover it was written by eden ahbez, an early Californian hippy with a beard and sandals and white robes, who hated capital letters but incongruously lived rough under one of the capital ‘L’s of the Hollywood sign in LA. What if Dad had known that? It doesn’t seem to matter how clean something is on the surface; there’s always something else underneath. Perhaps the same is true of my parents?
A single in the collection that is definitely Dad’s is ‘If I Was a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof, sung by Topol. Topol was a name Rik and I discussed when we came up with Eddie Monsoon, not as a potential name, we just thought it was brilliant to have a single short name – think how easy signing autographs would be.
Dad sings along with Topol on ‘If I Was a Rich Man’. He knows every word, and joins in with such conviction on the last couplet: ‘Would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man?’ It seems extraordinary to me that Dad should be so attracted to this song full of Yiddish expressions, and the cadences and ornamentation of klezmer music. It’s at such odds with his rather Teutonic classical collection.
I think what grabs him is the subject matter. He relates completely to Tevye’s desire to lift himself out of the struggle of his daily life into one of idleness and luxury.
It’s fair to say that once his adventures to foreign postings come to an end Dad becomes completely disillusioned with teaching. He struggles to find a job when he comes back from Uganda. Perhaps newer candidates have better qualifications – degrees compared to Dad’s simple Certificate in Education. He never seems happy at any of the schools where he teaches, some boy even throws a knife at him from the back of the classroom at Belle Vue, and he eventually ends up at Drummond Middle School, which becomes mired in controversy when the headmaster Ray Honeyford writes articles in the Times Educational Supplement about how difficult it is to assimilate children who don’t speak English.
The anti-immigration lobby take it up as a cause célèbre, the tabloid press get involved, and all nuance goes out of the window. There are protests outside the school, Honeyford gets sacked by the Mayor of Bradford then reinstated by the High Court, and Dad gets an ulcer. And even more pissed off. Blood and stomach pills! Quite literally.
For the last few years of his working life my abiding memory of Dad is of him spreading his paperwork out on the dining room table every evening. This isn’t marking homework or doing lesson plans, or anything to do with school, he’s trying to work out how early he can retire.
He’s worked for so many institutions that he has various bits of pension entitlement from many different sources, and little bits of money squirrelled away, some of it in a bank in Jersey, which sounds dodgy. Some of it is obviously tied to interest rates, and in these days before computer spreadsheets, each evening he looks up the indices in the newspaper, adjusts various predictions, factors in inflation, dreams up possible variables, considers future interest rates, looks at his bank balance, tots it all up, and comes up with an exact date. Every day.
He does eventually succeed in retiring a few years shy of his sixty-fifth birthday, but I’d say he’d already put in the extra shifts by working on his pension schemes every night throughout his fifties. It’s swings and roundabouts.
While he’s working on his pensions he can hear Mum listening to ‘Eye Level’ by the Simon Park Orchestra – the theme music to Van der Valk, a TV detective show with Barry Foster as yet another cynical if brilliantly intuitive detective. I bet the lovely Barry Foster doesn’t spend every night working out his pension.