POSTSCRIPT

The Black Tongue of the North End

The morning bells begin

Schoolchildren chant and spin

A length of rope

Below a hanging tree

Like cruel secrets some of us turn out to be

—“Rope”

The dumb thud of his big dull fist beat against the wall. Each time it arrived, it dragged just behind an ominous but muffled tattoo. The toneless, tuneless lolling and lulling of the tongue in the slack mouth of this adult child could be heard humming, then rising to a moan of sympathy as the song trudged on.

Our neighbors, his grandparents, had placed the gramophone right next to the bedroom wall to soothe their charge when secure from the taunts of local children.

The wall between the dwellings was thin.

“Distant Drums” was played over and over again.

I was in my grandparents’ house, too.

I was twelve years old.

I lay in the dark under a pale and smothering camberwick bedspread, pushing at blisters of paint brushed over lyres and garlands on the texture of the wallpaper. It felt slightly damp to the touch.

The awful noise eventually subsided.

The big child must have fallen asleep, and I followed soon after.

The next night was exactly the same.

My Nana’s house was actually one of four units in the building.

I suppose the walls were thin, but then, some of the panes were also loose in the window frames. I’m not sure that this was just shoddy workmanship. It probably had something to do with the whole town nearly being shaken to bits by high explosives.

Older people still talked about the war as if it had happened last week.

Just one hundred yards had separated Pat and Molly’s old house from the railway goods line that ran along the Birkenhead docks. Falling short of that target, their home had been all but demolished by the Luftwaffe, while the family sheltered nearby.

A parcel of down-the-town families had moved to the North End under cover of night at the advice of a man who might have been a landlord, or might have been an opportunist.

“Take these keys. Here’s the address.”

They asked no further questions. The money came later.

The families were so close that it was unclear to me for a while who was a friend and who was a relation. I walked easily and with welcome through unlocked front doors, just the way they always do in old memories of more trusting times.

This was the place to which I’d been taken as an infant to be christened. My Papa was in his final illness then and the trip south thought too much for him.

I was given the first name of a priest friend of his at the church of the Holy Cross. My second name, Patrick, was for the ailing man.

My memories of him are few and fragmentary.

I’m pushing a toy car among the weeds poking through the pavement, and just to my right, Papa’s tartan carpet slippers are shuffling along, trying not to catch the cracks in the flagstones. He isn’t wearing outdoor clothes, but a robe, and neither of us has the legs for a long march.

Tumbleweeds and tendrils of fiberglass blow past on the wind whipping up from Bidston Moss and along past the factories and warehouses on Valley Road.

A war veteran with a chest full of medals checks vehicles coming and going to the Dunlop Rubber Factory past a checkpoint that is no more than a barber’s pole on a pivot across the road.

Workingmen and -women still pour out into the road in decent numbers when a whistle blows. Others trudge over the Penny Bridge and past the iron turntables and floating metal cranes close to Spiller’s Mills.

Dogs howl for their biscuits.

The funnels of the tall China boats—the Blue Funnel Line, bringing cargo from the Orient—can be glimpsed between chimney stacks and the first television aerials as the docks snake inland from the river and behind the houses.

Their foghorns bellow at midnight in the thick, coal saturated air of New Year’s Eve. Even though I am only a boy, I’m given sweet sherry by a kindly neighbor. No one seems to think it contains much alcohol.

The cream domes of the Bidston Observatory, and the sandstone cylinder and green parasol roof of the Lighthouse appear in my mind in vivid relief against a storm-filled sky.

Along the high spine of the hill lies the disused Bidston Windmill. Human and canine walkers amble and bound by on all but the chilliest, dampest days.

Until 1969, the One O’Clock Gun is fired to mark the accurate time.

While they actually map the stars and mark the tides that pull the very clouds around, this big Victorian structure seems an ideal location for dire ritual and dark imaginings.

A hanged man was carved in the stones close to the observatory wall.

When I’m five, but not quite brave enough, I go with older children to tramp through the ferns and mosses and scoop up slippery frogs in the panic of vanishing dusk.

One bright morning, a bird flew down the chimney of an unused fireplace of the bedroom in which I’d lain, humming to drown out the nightly terrors.

The fireplace lies behind a small wardrobe filled with my Papa’s American suits, still in mothballs, these eight years after his passing.

We struggle the heavy cabinet away from the wall, loosening the board tacked to the chimneybreast against draughts.

The bird is fluttering and tumbling frantically, the terrible press roll of its wings beating in panic against the hardboard, the bricks, and the iron grate.

When the board is pulled away and an escape offered, the black bird flies wildly toward the light: a window at the end of the hallway above a descending flight of hard stairs to which my Papa, not being a practical man, had Sellotaped the runner of carpet when a stair-rod came unfixed.

The bird collides with the pane, plummeting down behind the front door, dead, for certain. I retrieve the shovel from among the backroom fire irons and reluctantly walk down to retrieve the corpse.

Scooping the bird up on the black iron tongue, I open the door only for it to revive and fly off.

There is a drawer in the sideboard that is lined with yellowed newspaper, it contains a small jumble of my Papa’s mementos: embroidered crests unpicked from uniforms, a carved clay pipe, tins that had once contained tobacco or cough sweets but are now used to collect thru’penny bits for children’s treats or shillings for the electric meter.

I pick out his cherished enamel Tranmere Rovers Supporters Club badge and turn it over cold in my hot palm. There is even a program from that famous 13–4 victory over Oldham Athletic on Boxing Day 1935, even though I’m told that in those days he could often only afford to pay the reduced ticket price to enter the Prenton Park at halftime.

I spend hours poring over an old world atlas.

The world is predominantly pink, but painted green for German East Africa and purple for the Portuguese colonies with all other pre-1913 allegiances, principalities, and grand duchies still in place.

I memorize all the little countries that are now in West Germany.

In the cupboard next to the atlas is a fancy souvenir picture book of the Silver Jubilee of George V, the king on the FOR KING AND COUNTRY poster.

I hear my Nana busying herself in the kitchen, preparing a plate of tongue for my tea, followed by a bowl of tinned tangerines that curdles the Carnation milk poured over them. It’s a miracle that I lived to tell this tale.

In the corner of the front sitting room is a windup gramophone in a walnut cabinet with small brass dumbbell handles on veneered doors like the ones that admitted Alice.

“The Laughing Policeman” sits on the turntable next to a tin of needles. You can let the air go out of his maniacal guffaws if you let the contraption wind down before the run-out groove.

There is also a Rushworth and Dreaper piano left over from my Papa’s teaching days. The lid of the stool lifts to reveal a secret compartment containing trumpet studies, pamphlets on theory, and his handwritten scales and exercises.

I’m shown where middle C is on the keyboard by my Dad, and I learn how to form the simple, first position triads that I still mostly use for accompaniment, playing the same chords with both hands.

Later, I work out Richie Furay’s “Kind Woman,” with its Floyd Cramer ornaments, gospel walkdowns, and odd bars; “Down River” by David Ackles; and “Border Song” by Elton John.

I pick a book of sheet music called A Folio of Bob Dylan Songs from Rushworth’s racks. The only songs I know in it are “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “The Mighty Quinn,” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” I can only read chord symbols for guitar, so I try to imagine the melody for “Too Much of Nothing.”

I listen to the radio late into the night, waiting for my Dad to arrive from any workingmen’s club engagement within driving distance of Birkenhead. My Nana prepares sandwiches and a bottle of Guinness on a side table. I might get to share the beer with him at this hour.

It is 1971.

Radio Luxembourg is playing an entire side of After the Gold Rush. The signal fades in and out of the opening verse of “Tell Me Why”; vanishes and reemerges during “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The guitar solo of “Southern Man” falters and crackles back as the coda of “Till the Morning Comes.”

No wonder I never learned to play any of those songs accurately.

There is a key in the door and a kettle on the stove.

Now we are the only people awake, and we sit by the dying embers of a fire.

I tell my Dad about the earnest song I was trying to sing earlier that evening in a folk club, but our worlds are very different.

He talks in little sketches and odd jargon; the modest theatrical boardinghouses in which he spends most nights are his “digs.” “Doubles” are two shows in a single evening at different locations. “Triples” are tougher still, but thankfully rare.

He recounts the fates of failed acts or “turns,” faced with the indignity of being “paid off”—that is, sent on their way without completing their engagement rather than left at the mercy of a disapproving or hostile crowd.

It’s no easy life.

He tells tales of the odd, desperate characters clinging to the edges of fame: eager girl singers, eccentric ventriloquists, and sullen comics, some of whom conform to the sad-clown cliché, others who turn into belligerent drunks.

He does battle with agents and bookers, who wield their petty authority with malice and jealousy.

I’ve been along for the ride on a couple of dates to see for myself.

It doesn’t seem that glamorous.

The sound systems of most clubs are basic and harsh.

They make little distinction between singers of nuance and the belly laughs of comedians.

My Dad only carries a folding tray of colored floor lamps, a stroboscopic light for a special effects number, his trumpet case, and sheet music.

The accompaniment is a lottery.

Some of the players are capable and willing, but there are drummers who beat along with the rhythm of a melody, rather than keeping time against it, and organists for whom the distinction between a major and minor chord is something of a mystery.

It is now a summer evening in Blackpool up on the brisk Lancashire coast.

There’s a telescope at the end of the pier through which you may occasionally see . . .

The sea.

Bingo is yet the only gambling allowed, and the coach parties still drive up to see “The Illuminations,” dating from the time when electric light was a real novelty.

Most of the children are in bed, full of salt water, cream soda, candy floss, and chips, but tonight I’m not just carrying my father’s trumpet case. I’m sitting in with the band.

I may not be able to read music, but I can follow chord symbols, so my Dad hands me a pile of sheet music that I dutifully place on the music stand, as I’ve seen musicians do since childhood.

I’m huddled with a skeptical band behind a lowered curtain, struggling to get my guitar in tune. Even muffled by the drape, the patrons sound thirsty and irritable, having had a hard day, pulling their sunburnt, fractious kids off the sands and out of the arcades.

I take a note from the organist, who has a face the color of wallpaper paste. He surely knows that his organ will take a minute or two to reach full power and pitch.

The compere finishes reading out a list of bingo numbers and coming attractions and begins our introduction.

My Dad gives me a final look of encouragement and checks that I have the right opening number. I know he is happy to have me there with him, but his urgency also says, This isn’t a game, this is my work.

Just as the spotlight hits us, I hear the seasick sound of a keyboard sliding up a semitone in pitch, leaving me stranded like a stranger on the shore.

I’m staring at a page of chord changes and trying to adjust them in my head while moving my fingers just a fraction of an inch above the fretboard.

I roll off my volume and mime the entire show with a smile fixed on my face.

It is a perfect introduction to my life in show business.

Almost everything since has been a similar trick of the light.