I
The only thing we had in common was our love of jazz. On Friday nights my father would come home from the pit, coal dust rimming his eyes, take a shellac 78 from the stack, slip it from its faded paper sleeve, and place it on the turntable. He always started with Ella and he always finished with her too. There was something in her optimism, the purity of her tone, her immaculate diction, the phrasing and her choice of material that attracted him. And there we would sit, father and son, tapping our feet and drinking our tea to sounds that had been made at the other side of the Atlantic, in an- other time, another world. We never talked. All we did was listen, exchange knowing nods when Ella reached a particularly sublime note or when she’d launch into one of those wordless, improvised flights – the scatting she was so famous for. A silent complicity passed between us then. The looks we exchanged expressed approval for the favourites he would always play. He’d put his head back, cup his hands around the back of it, close his eyes and hum. The purple coal scar on his wrist throbbed slightly as he sang.
I can never remember where my mother was or what part she played in all of this – in the kitchen cooking supper probably, or doing the ironing upstairs. There were no photos of Ella on the record sleeves. Because I’d never seen her, Ella could be anyone I wanted her to be – and I wanted her to be a slender blonde in a slinky satin dress, leaning against the piano as she sang. We each had songs that held a special significance for us. I liked I Could Write a Book, my father My Heart Stood Still but we both loved Manhattan with its promise of New York, Central Park, the Bronx and Staten Island too, the hydrants spurting jets, heat escaping from the subway. I was never allowed to touch the records. The rest of the time it was indifference, hostility even: a deliberate, calculated avoidance of each other made difficult by the smallness of the terrace house we shared. My father was rarely there. Sometimes, when he was working awkward shifts, we wouldn’t see each other for days on end. Every night, seven nights a week, he’d go out drinking in the working men’s clubs to laugh, and smoke, to place bets on the horses with the other miners and to shine. He was a singer too. A thread connecting him directly to Ella and to Frank.
On Saturday nights I would go out with him. One time it would be the Miner’s Arms, another time the Main Street Club. He’d do it for nothing, or for free beer, or a used fiver. For the love of the music, he would say. Had he not got married and had me, he pointed out, he could have turned professional, done it for a living. Then there was the applause. He had a way with a song – leaning into the microphone, eyes half-closed, his black quiff falling into his eyes, keeping time with a click of his finger and his thumb, a certain intensity. He didn’t sing a song. He embraced it. He knew, as Ella and Frank and Billie and Dean all knew, that if you understood the story you understood the song. A little drama, perfect, self-contained. And if you understood it then the audience would understand it too whether they were the well-heeled crowd at the Sands Hotel or the wives of miners on port and lemon, lager and lime. He was the sort you’d take the wife to see: a crooner, a charmer, a slick as you could ever hope to get in a bleak South Yorkshire mining town. ‘This one’, he would say, ‘is for all you ladies out there’ and he’d nod to the organist who started to play. He’d open with Witchcraft and end with As Time Goes By. Standards. The story and the song. I would sit there with my half of shandy and packet of crisps. I was drawn in too. Everyone remembers the strike in the middle of the Eighties: Orgreave, flying pickets, road blocks, Scargill, scabs, the shame of defeat. But ten years earlier there’d been another strike – the one that’s forgotten about – and the miners had won. They had a bit of money in their pockets. Some of them spent it on a new motorbike or a holiday abroad or taking the wife to see turns. My father spent it on going to see Ella.
The first thing I knew about it was on one of those Friday nights. The coal had just been delivered: a huge mound piled up outside the front door and outside every other front door in the street. It was always my job to ‘get it in’ – to shovel the whole ton of it down the grate and into the cellar before
I had my tea. You were looked down on by the neighbours if you didn’t get the coal in on the day that it arrived. ‘Here’s some spending money’, my mother had said. ‘Your dad’s taking you to London tomorrow. You’re going to see Ella’. There had been an argument. My dad was edgy, silent, volatile, biting his nails, counting the minutes to seven o’clock when he could go out and become someone else. Not long before he’d pulled one of his mates out from under a pile of ‘muck’ – the pitman’s word for rock and rubble – when the props had given way. His mate had shuddered and stared and died. He didn’t talk about it but my mother would silence my questions with a look and a shaking of her head.
II
There was the warm whoosh of the underground, my father confused as I was in an unfamiliar world. We were staying in a cheap bed and breakfast in Holloway, a stone’s throw from the women’s prison which you could see from the window of the attic room we shared. I kept thinking of Ruth Ellis, shivering, waiting to be hung. ‘They ought to build a lot more of them’, my dad had said, laughing at his own joke. My mum and dad had been in Lon- don before – on their honeymoon – but this was my first time. I knew all the stories of course: how they’d danced into the early hours to Victor Sil- vester and how my dad was taken in for questioning by two plain-clothes policemen as they came out of the tube at Russell Square because he fitted the description of someone who’d killed a woman in her Kensington flat and because he was wearing the same sort of overcoat. The murderer had a Yorkshire accent too. I lay on the bed while my father shaved. ‘Watch me’, he said, ‘you might learn something’. Steam rising from the chipped basin, a thick creamy lather, his face distorted in the oval mirror as the razor slid over his cheeks, the patting dry, the stringent tang of aftershave. Afterwards he rummaged in his bag. ‘You’ll be needing this’, he said, and handed me a tie already tied, a loop to put over my head.
III
The tie is uncomfortable and doesn’t go with my shirt. Purple and yellow don’t match. The club is crowded and smaller than I’d expected. Intimate, as I’d later learn to say. Instead of seats in rows there are small round tables and on the tables tablecloths with candles in bottles and green glass ash- trays. My dad is disappointed because they don’t serve beer. The walls are lined with signed photographs of all the greats who’d played here before. I don’t know most of them. My dad is wearing his best suit but looks uneasy, out of place, conspicuous among the black polo necks, the tweed jackets and goatees. For them jazz is something to be discussed and understood; not something to love, respond to instinctively. Our table is right at the front. ‘Good seats’, my dad says loudly. I’m the youngest person in the room. The smoke encloses me and closes in. there’s a murmur, a ripple, then a hush. Even my dad’s cigarettes stand out: he smokes Capstain’s Full Strength while the others are puffing on Camels, making a gesture out of every draw and blow. Nothing passes between my dad and me although I feel him there more powerfully than ever before, an acute awareness of his otherness as he plays with his wedding ring and taps the table top.
There’s no fuss, no announcement. The lights go down and a black man in a tuxedo comes on stage and sits at the piano as if it’s him we’ve come to see; another takes up a double bass. They run through a couple of notes then sidle into a number I try hard to place but can’t. Then Ella makes her appearance. Her dress, as my dad would later say, ‘fits where it touches’, she wears her wig as nonchalantly as she’d wear a hat. It looks as if she’d grabbed it at the last minute as an afterthought, placing it on her head be- tween the dressing room and the stage, never checked it in the mirror. Her glasses – ‘thick as jam-jar bottoms’ as my dad would also later say – mag- nify her half-closed eyes, her lashes quivering. She surveys the audience for a few seconds. She senses my attention. She looks at me and smiles. And as she smiles she sings.
Someday he’ll come along, the man I love
Everyone who was looking at Ella is now looking at me. I’m trying to smile back and find I’m smiling at my shoes. She’s squinting in the spot- light. Ella’s words are slipping through. Intently, deliberately, in a soft-and-measured, inexplicable way the lyrics reach for and touch a deep uncertain part of me.
And he’ll be big and strong, the man I love
I’m neither big nor strong. I’m skinny fourteen. I don’t want to follow my father down the pit. He doesn’t know this yet and I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. All I know are the drawn-out syllables, the modulation, the casual slide from one note to another, the secret of the story and the song. And now the bass is throbbing gently too, climbing and descending as she sings.
He’ll build a little home, just meant for two
I’m thinking of my mother thinking of me. How she would have loved to have been there and how the story of it would soon enter the story of her life which was, in itself, a series of songs; my embarrassment, Ella’s refusal to break the gaze, the audience loving it, wanting more. ‘Your father loves you’, she would say when he was out. ‘but he doesn’t know how to show it’. Perhaps he was showing it now.
From which he’d never roam, who would, would you?
How, I’m wondering, could Ella and my father exist in the same world? And how could it be that they are just a few feet apart with only me be- tween them, breathing in the same swirling, smoke-filled air? How could those disparate lives meet and mesh in this enclosed space, this point in time, in this particular song? she squints again and her squint is endearing. The softness draws me to her. The singer and the story and the song.
And so all else above, I’m looking for the man I love
The song ends and everyone applauds. I find myself applauding too. But it’s not the sort of applause I’m used to – the raucous spontaneous applause my father gets on a Saturday night – but an appreciative, restrained and knowing ripple starting at the stage and spreading out to the edges. The watch on my wrist stops ticking and will never go again. Ella’s earrings catch the yellow light. She’s hardly started and her forehead glistens and glows. She mops it with a pink silk handkerchief, takes a stiff and awkward bow and then launches into something else. Ellington. Although I try to catch her eye all night she never looks at me again.
IV
The rain came against the window. London rain. It blurred the amber street- lights. We lay there in the darkness on our narrow, springless beds. I could hear my father humming, humming, humming. ‘We won’t forget this, will we?’, he said, ‘whatever else happens, we won’t forget.’ I pretended to be asleep. He turned over on his side and from under the covers I could hear the sound of weeping.