JAZZ AND BELLS AND EARLY MORNING COFFEE

As teenagers, my mate Dave Sunderland and I were obsessed by jazz and bellringing. We’d meet up at his house on Friday evenings when his mam was out playing the organ at the chapel and listen to jazz on a fading station on his radio; in my memory it’s an obscure Russian station but it may well have been Radio 2. We’d snap our fingers and pretend to be sophisticated as the music came and went. He liked Oscar Peterson and I liked Charlie Parker but we both liked The Peddlers, a Manchester-based jazz-rock trio that Les Dawson described as ‘the last of the cheap bands’ but we honestly didn’t care. They swung like the clappers.

Ah, the clappers. Dave and I were also bellringers, practising each Thursday evening on Darfield’s glorious ring of six bells, ringing those same bells each Sunday as well as ringing at a number of the area’s smaller churches with just three bells. Three-bell ringing was unfashionable because, frankly, there’s not much you can do with them. You can 1-2-3 or 2-1-3 or 3-1-2 or 2-1-3 or 3-2-1 or or 2-3-1 or 3-1-2 or 1-3-2 or or 3-2-1 and that’s about it. It’s like, as I commented to Dave one Friday night, listening to a jazz trio who have never learned to improvise.

Each year the Darfield Bellringers, under the leadership of the tower captain Mike King, went on a weekend junket to try ringing at other towers and one year in the mid-1970s we trekked in various cars and a minibus to the East Coast, to ring the bells in Scarborough and Whitby and one or two of the smaller churches nearby. We stayed in a place at the top of the festival of steepness that is Robin Hood’s Bay and, really, because we were teenagers, the weekend was just an excuse to stay up late and talk bollocks. Dave Sunderland was and is an aficionado of the Yorkshire Coast and Scarborough is his favourite resort and he regaled us with tales of its history and architecture.

Late on the Saturday, as the night turned into the early morning in his room in that Robin Hood’s Bay hotel that smelled of dust and fading summer dreams, we decided, on a whim, to drive to Scarborough to see the dawn. Dave had recently passed his test and was a careful but solid driver and so I had no qualms about entrusting my chubby frame to his gear-changing and emergency-stopping abilities.

Before we went, we charged the forthcoming trip with epic possibilities: the dawn would be the best one ever seen in the history of the world, or the history of Yorkshire, which is more or less the same thing. The Grand Hotel, that cathedral on the cliff, would have a coffee shop that was open to non-residents (see the specificity of our fantasy?) and would serve us espressos. Neither of us had ever had espressos of course; they didn’t arrive in Barnsley until the Aroma Café in The Arcade started selling them in the mid-1990s, but we knew that hep cats drank them. Or rather sipped them. The other branch line of our fantasy was that there would be a jazz band still, miraculously, playing in the ballroom of the hotel. They would be playing to themselves because the guests had trickled to bed but they would see us and invite us in. They would play Oscar Peterson and Charlie Parker and we would order another espresso.

The night was giving up its ghosts as we drove down to Scarborough, Gerry Mulligan on the cassette player in Dave’s car. Dawn was lighting a one-bar electric fire over the sea. We arrived in town like outriders of a conquering army; a cool conquering jazz army, to be precise. I wished I’d had the courage to buy and wear a pork-pie hat. There was nobody around because the last club had rolled the last guests out. The Grand Hotel dominated the skyline, like it always did and it always will. There were no lights on but that didn’t bother us because we knew, thanks to a failed light bulb at Dave’s house one evening, that jazz is best experienced in the dark.

We drove up and down the front, pretending that we were taking in the growing light but actually plucking up courage to go to the imposing doors of The Grand and ask to be admitted. Or jazz-admitted, because we both liked to play the language game of putting the word ‘jazz’ in front of any word to make it sound more sophisticated. After all, decades later, it would work with apples. Well, more or less. More or jazz less.

Eventually we stopped the jazz car, got out and walked towards the jazz door of the The Jazz Grand. I promise I’ll stop doing that now. Stop jazz doing that now. There were lights on in the foyer. There was an imposing bell to ring. A mezzo-soprano gull mocked our hesitation so one of us rang the bell. It echoed somewhere in the hotel’s soul. Nothing happened. Nothing happened again.

The sky blushed and light grew in confidence. A middle-aged man in a white shirt and bow tie shambled to the door. He was the gatekeeper to an early morning of choruses and solos; he was the barista who would make espressos that would keep us awake until the 1980s.

He mouthed the word ‘closed’. He pointed to where a watch would have been on his wrist if he’d had a watch. Maybe he’d forgotten to put it on. Then his face softened a little, as though it was melting. ‘Are you residents?’ he mouthed. We shook our heads.

‘We want jazz!’ I shouted, too loud for the gull, which wheeled away. ‘We want espressos and we want jazz!’ He shook his head although to this day I think there was a twinkle in his eye that told me that he too wanted espressos and jazz in his life.

We walked away and strolled on the beach; the sun came up glowing like bell metal and Dave and I toasted each other with invisible cups. ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that espresso’ Dave said, and we laughed.