This induced the rest of the band, who weren’t known for their serious outlook on life, to laugh, too. They liked Ivor the Errand Boy and were inclined to indulge him. Even the percussionist’s frustrated embarrassment at his own mistake evaporated once he realized who had been mocking him.
‘You reckon you can do any better, you little chimp?’ he said. ‘Get down here and try it. Go on. Shilling says you can’t.’
Never one to pass up the possibility of extra cash, Ivor clambered into the orchestra pit and wormed his way into the percussionist’s corner. He watched carefully as the tall drummer demonstrated the figure but then stood unmoving as the man handed him the sticks.
‘Go on then, little man. Show us what you’ve got.’
‘I can’t,’ said Ivor with uncharacteristic meekness.
‘You seemed a good deal more cocky up there on the stage,’ said the drummer. ‘Not so easy now you’re down here, is it?’
He reached out for the sticks but Ivor held on to them.
‘No, I mean I can’t reach the drum,’ he said. ‘You must be about nine bleedin’ foot tall. How am I supposed to reach the drum from down here where the normal people live?’
The band laughed again, and a few moments later they had found an old beer crate for the boy to stand on. He held out the sticks.
‘Like this?’ he said.
The drummer adjusted his grip slightly and Ivor smiled. That felt right.
He tentatively tapped the snare drum. It was loud. Much louder than he had expected. He tapped it again. He had the feel of it now.
‘Want me to show you again?’ said the drummer.
‘No, I’ve got it.’
He tried the figure slowly. The sticks bounced off the taut drum skin faster than he could control them, and the little flourish ended in a chaotic, rattling jumble.
To Ivor’s surprise – and immense relief – no one laughed.
‘Give it another go,’ said the drummer.
Ivor tried another four times, each time getting a little better but each time ending in a clattering mess.
He took a deep breath. Steadied himself. And had one last try.
He rattled through the little drum figure at full pace and finally got it dead on. The band applauded.
‘You want to watch out, mate,’ said one of them. ‘The sweeper-upper’s after your job.’
From then on, Ivor spent all his spare time in the orchestra pit, watching, learning, and asking endless questions. The percussionist gave him an old pair of sticks to practise with, and he drove his family mad, tapping out rhythms on any available surface. But it paid off. Later that year when the percussionist was ill, Ivor stood in. His proficiency earned him the nickname ‘Skins’. The name also suited his skinny – though he preferred ‘wiry’ – frame, but people seldom commented on that, nor his short stature. What struck almost everyone who saw him was the smile. Few had ever said he was handsome, but the warm, cheeky smile, so freely offered to almost everyone he met, guaranteed that a fair proportion of them would later declare him ‘oddly attractive’ or ‘weirdly good-looking’. His personal favourite had been a girl from Tottenham who had said, ‘I don’t know what it is . . . there’s something about you . . . is it your hair?’ He was very proud of his hair. By the time he was eighteen, he had left the theatre and was working as the drummer in a ragtime band with his old mate Barty.
Barty Dunn had known Ivor since they had played together on the streets of Hornsey, where they grew up. Unlike his diminutive pal, no one was ever in any doubt as to why they found Dunn attractive – he was most definitely the good-looking one of the pair. Tall, athletic, and with the darkest blue eyes anyone had ever seen (or so he had been told, many, many times), he was everyone’s idea of handsome. He was generally genial and charming, but was given to bouts of melancholy brooding which, to Skins’s perpetual bafflement, seemed to make him even more attractive. While Skins was bouncing around, larking and joking, trying to charm the girls, Dunn just had to, as Skins put it, ‘stand there looking sullen’ and the girls would ‘throw themselves at him’.
Although Dunn’s family had been no better off than their neighbours, they had aspirations for their children (more often characterized as ‘ideas above their station’) and the young Dunns were all encouraged to learn musical instruments. Barty was given piano and violin lessons and worked hard at both, but the first time he saw a double bass he knew that was the instrument for him.
His parents couldn’t properly afford the battered second-hand violin they’d bought him from the pawn shop, and they certainly couldn’t stretch to something as exotic – and inconveniently huge – as a double bass, so he admired the instrument from afar. But he put a few pennies away each week from his job at the Barratt’s sweet factory in Wood Green, and by the time Skins was ready to join a ragtime band, Barty had his own double bass and nothing could stop him following his old pal on the path to fame and fortune.
Black American soldiers had introduced the boys to the new ‘jazz’ music while they were serving in France, and as soon as they were demobbed, they had set about assembling a group of like-minded musicians to take London by storm.
It had taken them four years and many changes of personnel to get what they were after, but eventually they had the band they wanted. Gigs were hard to come by at first – clubs were still a little suspicious of the new music – but slowly the doors started to open to them as the ‘bright young things’ demanded the music they were listening to on their gramophones. The Dizzy Heights had arrived.
When the party had finally wound down and the last of the guests had tottered tipsily on to the streets, the band retrieved their instruments and cleared the makeshift stage. Eustace Taylor packed up his trumpet, Benny Charles his trombone. Blanche and Puddle had a saxophone and a clarinet each. Elk Elkington put away his banjo and Mickey Kent tied a length of string to his speaking trumpet and slung it over his shoulder.
It was getting on towards dawn and the buses and trams were already running, taking the early starters to work, but they served just as well to take the late finishers in the band home. All except Skins and Dunn.
Skins and his drum set had been turned away from more buses and trams than he could count (‘You can’t bring all that tat on here, mate – what do you think this is, a bleedin’ totter’s cart?’), and the one time he’d tried to get it down the escalator at a tube station had ended in disaster. Dunn and his double bass had fewer problems by comparison, but it was still like travelling with a drunk friend, and he, too, had been turned away from many a bus with a weary ‘Only room for one more, mate, sorry.’
They had the use of a storeroom at Tipsy Harry’s if they wanted it, but it wasn’t always convenient and they often needed somewhere else to store their bulky instruments. Fortunately, Barty Dunn ‘knew a bloke’ who ran a shop on New Row, near Covent Garden. In return for free admission to any club the boys happened to be playing, and the occasional complimentary drink, he let them store their instruments in the shop’s stockroom. The only problem that remained was how to get them there.
To this end, they had invested in a large handcart which would carry Skins’s drums and Dunn’s double bass and still leave room for any extras – their best suits if they’d been playing somewhere posh, or a crate of beer left over from the show, perhaps. Most often the space was occupied by Dunn’s romantic conquest of the evening, who would giggle her way round town before he whisked her back to his digs in Wood Green.