VT Coughtrey - The Whistler

NOTES	Toni stayed at Maw's for a while after the unfortunate incident related in the previous chapter. Extraordinary though it seems, I think I must have made another attempt at some time to interest her in me, as I have a hazy memory of posting a love poem through the letterbox of her block of bedsits in the middle of the night. I also seem to remember overhearing her describe the letter to the other women as being "full of long words". This would have been the most contemptuous dismissal imaginable among that company. Anyway, what is certain is that nothing came of it. I was surprised to see that her shape was changing quite radically, and wondered why people were volunteering to hump the heavy boxes of sanitary towels for her. Eventually, with some amazement that I couldn't work it out for myself, they explained that she was pregnant.
	John Stone took up with one of the girls, so that was the end of banjo and clarinet duets and also of travelling around London to jazz clubs in his van. I began to make a habit of going to Ken Colyer's 51 Club (the same that featured in the night out with Toni) in Great Newport Street every Saturday night, staying until about four in the morning (the sessions went on until seven or eight) and then walking the 12 miles back to Barnet, there being no public transport after 1 a.m. in those days. The walk took about 3½ hours. My mother and grandmother never got up very early on Sunday mornings, so I was able to creep in without them ever finding out that I had been out all night. This was only possible after I had with great difficulty persuaded my mother to give me a key. Before that, there were many shouting matches caused by her having to stay up late to let me in, even when I reached 21.
	I used the extensive knowledge of parks, footpaths and open spaces I had acquired in my earlier ramblings (see chapters 16 and 17) to put together a route from the West End to Barnet that involved hardly any roads. Hampstead Heath, West Heath and Heath Extension figured very much in this, of course. It also took in large expanses locked at night such as Regents Park, Primrose Hill and a golf course, but I’ve never been one to let railings, fences and hedges get in my way. The final stretch, which brought me directly to Connaught Road, was across the fields of the Green Belt.
At 70 and with partial dentures, I can hardly whistle at all.	On this wonderfully lonely long trek in the dark and sometimes in the rain (I carried stormproof kit about with me) I developed a rather strange skill. I took to whistling jazz improvisation, somewhat in the style of John Coltrane, but most of the ideas were my own. I always did this for the whole walk and at any other times when I found myself out of earshot of anyone else. I got very, very good at it. In fact I would go as far as to say that I became a virtuoso in technique and certainly believed that I'd discovered in myself something approaching genius in musical creativity of the jazz variety. It’s possible that I was the greatest whistler ever. I was amazing! The odd thing is that it never occurred to me to try to bring this talent to the attention of the world. I think this was because in my mind I wasn’t whistling at all - I was playing the tenor saxophone and I knew that even if I ever acquired such an instrument, I would never be able to perform on it the things I could cook up mentally. As I got older, the work of a succession of dentists on my badly neglected teeth ensured that I lost most of this whistling ability. Some of the the musical creativity is still there (and has become wider than just jazz) but it remains securely locked up in my head, since my skill on various instruments falls far short of what would be required to realise my ideas.
I last saw Ken Colyer at Otley Jazz Club in Yorkshire in 1966. He died in 1988, aged 60. Another purist band often at Colyer's was Keith Smith's Climax Jazz Band. Smith was sometimes too drunk on the bandstand to blow anything more than raspberries on his trumpet.	It was of course very strange, especially against the background of style warfare among jazz fans in those days, that the only live jazz I now listened to was the music of Ken Colyer and a couple of other New Orleans-style purist bands that played in his club. That sort of jazz and my whistling (and most of the music I listened to at home) were worlds apart. Oddly, Colyer was briefly interested in the British rythm ’n’ blues bands that were emerging at that time. In fact one of the first gigs of the Rolling Stones was an all-nighter at his club. I was apalled by the earsplitting racket these frighteningly wild young men were producing. I walked out and went to the nearby Porcupine pub for a few pints instead. Presumably I didn’t walk back to Barnet that night. If I did, I bet I did some pretty mad things on the way.
	The weekly 3½-hour trek back from Colyer's was not the only all-night activity of late 1963 and early 1964. I was now seeing a bit more of Walter again. He had become a keen cyclist and was now an expert at repairing bikes. He built a very good one for me out of spare parts and maintained it in tip-top condition. I found to my surprise that I could still ride a bike, despite not having been on one since the days when I used to ride my Fairy Cycle up and down the pavements of Normandy Avenue, between the ages of about seven and ten. So when duetting and jazz clubbing with John Stone came to an end, instead of going back to listening to records in my bedroom or visiting clubs unaccompanied (except for Colyer's at weekends), I took to cycling around the country lanes to the north of Barnet. During the winter, I obviously had to do this in the dark. This gave me a taste for cycling at night. I also was able to adapt my storm wear for cycling. It was an exciting challenge to ride around remote areas in atrocious weather in the dark yet remain dry and warm. I loved the experience of racing through the raging elements on a flimsy frame without being touched by them.
	Doing this during the evenings was soon not good enough. I wanted to do it all night, so I began on some nights to creep out of the house after my mother and grandmother had gone to bed, and ride for three or four hours before creeping back in. For these all-night rides I turned my attention to London. In those days, the streets of the suburbs were almost completely empty of both traffic and pedestrians after midnight. On all but the major roads, the street lamps went out at midnight and any lone walkers were soon pounced on by the beat bobby unless, like me, they kept a good lookout. It was a great thrill to be able to break the law by going through red lights (something that today's terrible breed of cyclists do all the time in broad daylight with impunity, together with riding on pavements and footpaths and not having lamps at night).
	In the course of many night rides I learned even more about suburban north London than I already knew. I was fond of resting on narrow foot bridges over railway lines and waiting for a steam train to come through. If the fireman happened to have the fire door open to shovel coal in, the flames and sparks were very dramatic as the otherwise invisible monster roared beneath me in the pitch dark. I certainly shared Walter's love of prowling about the suburbs during those times when the lights were out and the only others on the loose were cats, rats, foxes and the occasional lone policeman, always advertising his approach with a torch.
	Of course, I'd arrive home from these adventures tired out, yet after cleaning my bike I could only have a couple of hours in bed before having to get up for work. As a result I was quite often late for work, something that had never happened before. This meant that the women lost money and were duly furious, and the foreman got angrier each time it happened. This added to my growing exasperation with the job. American ideas were just beginning to be introduced into industry, such as time and motion study officers who followed you around analysing and timing every movement for no sane reason whatsoever. But worse was the new idea of appointing university graduates with no experience of the shop floor at all as production managers. Maws suddenly acquired one called Bowden, who was a pompous twit not much older than myself, with a Cambridge degree. He was clearly totally contemptuous of the workers. The foreman hated him passionately, no doubt partly because it was clear that promotion from foreman to production manager was no longer on the cards. Foreman was suddenly as high as you could get without a university education, and as a man with 30 years of experience in the production processes you had to obey a clueless young fool.
Derek Scudder has contacted me about Maw's. Apparently, he was working there at the same time (in the lab). He remembers Bowden and describes him as 'barking'. He has also reminded me of Laurie Few, the quality controller, who was there for an astonishing 51 years, from age 14 - 65. He also mentions Dick Williams, Joe Passey, Ted Garlick and Barbara Sunderland. I can't say I remember them, but other readers may.	Bowden's arrival coincided with a slack period when I was required to run only 3 or 4 machines. This, in a sane world, would have meant a certain amount of standing around, but to Bowden the worker was paid to work, so this supercilious idiot ordered me to be sweeping the floor all the time that I wasn't loading machines. There was soon nothing at all left to sweep up, but still I had to sweep and sweep and was even told off for not sweeping fast enough! The slack period dragged on for weeks. This shining example of the best that the British educational system had to offer then decided that I would be free for more sweeping if an overhead circular railway system were to be installed, with metal 'chairs' dangling from it. The chairs would travel slowly round the track carrying laps from the scutching room. This would end the necessity for me to run in and out of the scutching room. I would simply stand by a machine needing reloading, wait for a lap to come past and grab it. The thing was duly installed. Apart from the fact that I was now unable to move around with my broom without constantly clouting my head on the hanging chairs, the ridiculous arrangement was inevitably out of sync with the length of time the laps lasted on the machines (this varied widely, as there was no fixed length for the laps). However, whenever I was caught by Bowden running after a lap in orbit instead of waiting by the machine for it to come round, he became very angry. Eventually I did exactly as he told me with the result that the machines often ran out. I simply ignored the rantings and ravings of the women and the foreman, who kept threatening to sack me.
	I found one good use for Bowden’s dangling chairs however. The General Election of 1964 was the first in which I was able to vote. It seemed that a Labour government was on the cards after thirteen years of the Tories. You might not think that this could have been of much interest to a revolutionary such as myself, but the Labour Party of ’64 bore no resemblance whatever to that of today. It had some pretty radical left-wing policies and a lot of Conservative voters were distinctly nervous of it. In addition, I believed that the Shadow Cabinet, headed by Harold Wilson, had a hidden far-left agenda. After all, they had all had Communist or extreme left links in their youth. I suppose I expected Bowden and his like to be carted off to rehabilitation camps for ’treatment’ should Labour win. I therefore decided to vote Labour. On Election Day I hung strips of red cloth from those wretched overhead chairs. When Bowden saw this he went purple and ordered me to remove them immediately. He was especially unpleasant after that. Labour won. Nothing changed, but at the time I put this down to their tiny majority in Parliament.
	Another major irritation was the compulsory music (inevitably the BBC Light Programme). I became sick and tired to the point of dementia with the same wretched Beatles records being plugged over and over again. Of course, the pollution of compulsory trash music has since become an all-pervasive menace. I've always hated it and these days would certainly refuse to work anywhere that had it. Likewise I try to avoid going into shops that are thus polluted, but that's becoming increasingly difficult.
	One day a fire broke out in one of my machines. This was not an infrequent occurrence. The rule was that whoever was nearest to an extinguisher or fire hose at the time should try to put it out and not run away. This was because fire in that environment, with cotton wool and cotton dust everywhere would have got out of hand long before the Fire Brigade arrived, if left. Indeed, fires were always out by the time the Brigade arrived. This time it fell to me to grab the fire hose, but it only piddled. I next grabbed an extinguisher and a handy iron bar that was lying around, by which time the fire was getting a good hold, but was still contained within the machine. Desperate to impress the women, I wrenched the hot covers off the machine with the iron bar. This released the fire from its prison and the flames leapt up alarmingly. Despite the heat and smoke I managed to stay near enough to direct the carbon dioxide from the puny extinguisher into the flames until suddenly (and to my great surprise) the fire was out! The Fire Brigade arrived shortly after. As feats of daring go, it may not sound very impressive, but I'm afraid it's about the best I can come up with from the whole tale of my life so far.
	Imagine my astonishment when Bowden, far from praising me for saving the factory, got worked up about the damage caused by my wrenching off the covers! It had been totally unnecessary, in his view. The foreman, for his part, seemed to think I could have got the fire out sooner with the dribbling hose. I grumbled bitterly to the women of this ingratitude and tried to leave them in no doubt as to the great courage and efficiency with which I had saved their livelihoods. The only response was that one of them said "What do you want, a bleedin' medal?"
	It was the last straw. Bowden and his stupid dangling chairs, the hours of pointless sweeping, the compulsory Beatles, and now this general refusal to allow me my moment of glory! I walked out, and this time I never went back.
	Maw's factory together with its extensive playing-fields backing onto Hadley Wood (a favourite resort of mine at lunch times) has long since been replaced by a housing estate.