The Drummer's Tale - A Novel by Chris Whitfield
I trudge back into the house.
'Dad!' I shout.
'Eh.' The muted response comes from upstairs.
'Are you ready to go?'
'I can't.' His voice seems to be coming from the bathroom.
'Why not?'
'I'm stuck in the toilet. The door's jammed.'
I walk up the stairs, preparing to speak and hold my breath at the same time.
'Bloody hell Dad, how did you manage this?'
'Never mind that son, just give the bloody door a shove.'
The last word trails away, replaced by a grunt and the sound of someone squeezing the last bit of ketchup out of the plastic tomato condiment at the local Wimpy Bar. Reluctantly, I try to budge the door with my shoulder. It fails to move at first, but when I step back about a foot and barge forward, it opens. I immediately wish it hadn't. The old man is on the lavatory, grey slacks crumpled around his ankles, pale-skinned, hairy legs on show, and there is the stench of a Victorian sewer. He is reading the horse racing pages from The Sun, an established ritual.
'Christ Dad... I'll be in the car. Mum says to hurry up.'
I am about to rush back downstairs, when I see the acoustic guitar leaning against the wall of the back bedroom just below the gallery of Typhoo Tea football team photographs collected by me about five years ago. On a whim, I take it with me to the Consul, grateful for the vehicle's roomy bench seats. The band may be no more following the calamitous gig at the Ship Inn, but I have managed to maintain some interest in making music thanks to this Eros six string, loaned to me by Roddy at Strathconas. I picked up a few chords from Ged when the band was practising, and whilst I am no Django Reinhardt, I can get by. The guitar is soon taking pride of place on the back seat of the Consul between me and Stephen.
Five minutes later, we spot the old man's silhouette through the frosted glass of the front door. He is finally leaving the house. Dressed like the poor man’s Alan Whicker, he has applied liberal handfuls of Brylcreem on his hair and has a brushed back quiff with a wave bigger than Bondi Beach. He is effectively the illegitimate offspring of Elvis Presley’s dad and Mrs. Mills after a fight with a block of Echo margarine. He settles into the driver’s seat and lets out a long rippling noise from his backside that sounds like two wet otters rubbing against one another, before retrieving a Rizla and a battered tin of Golden Virginia from his inside blazer pocket.
‘Come on Ted, will you get a move on for God’s sake,’ says Mum.
I really think she ought to have the hang of this ceremony by now.
‘Won’t be a minute love.’
With nicotine-stained fingers, he carefully rolls a cigarette, bereft of tobacco, his tongue caressing the edge of the paper with a tenderness reserved solely for this procedure. He lights it and burns his lips as the Rizla catches fire.
‘Have you packed the tent?’ says Mum. She adjusts her make-up in the small mirror attached to the pull down sun-visor of the car.
‘Of course I’ve packed the bloody tent! Good God Edna, what do you think I am, a bloody idiot?’
‘Did you get it from the Army & Navy in Liscard, like I said?’
‘No, I borrowed it from Billy in work.’
My mum shows her exasperation with a deep exhalation of breath. ‘Oh Ted, I told you to get a new one. I hope it’s decent.’
‘Of course it’s bloody decent. Good God woman, it’s only a tent!’
A few more squabbles and we are at last on our way to Gronant. Stephen is faking a wanking hand movement behind Dad with two marbles for eyes, and I am encouraged by this healthy disrespect. When I move on and leave him as the last sibling at home, he will be fine.
The journey should take about an hour. Unfortunately, the Ford Consul breaks down more than Judy Garland in a bad year. The exhaust falls off near Queensferry; we stop at the Halfway House near Flint so that Dad can refuel with a pint of mild or two; and we eventually arrive at the campsite five hours late. Suffice to say, tensions are running high, and they are about to get worse.
We park by our pitch, and I scan the surrounding scene. The holidaymakers are in a vast field nestling in the shadow of green pastured hills, which climb steeply either side to a point beyond the tree line. I can see a scattering of sheep higher up the inclines, showing no interest in proceedings at the foot of their feeding ground where there are hundreds of tents, green and blue, orange and blue, all with awnings, windows, and a portable toilet. The standard of kit would grace any base camp to an Everest expedition. I cradle my guitar as Dad rummages around the boot to remove a decrepit, oil-stained canvas sheet that he drapes over the ground. It takes a few minutes to realise that this is our tent.
‘Surely that's not it Ted?’ says Mum, shaking her beehive in disbelief.
‘There’s nothing up with it.’ His reply is completely free from irony.
My mother's face is a picture and certainly no Mona Lisa. There is nothing enigmatic about her expression as her eyes fix themselves on the material laid out before us, seemingly sewn together from the khaki shorts of an incontinent army troop. I am almost tempted to piss all over it, on the grounds that it could not look any worse.
About half an hour later, and we have erected this small wedge tent that is a social embarrassment on par with a man turning up for work with no trousers or a woman leaving the loo with her dress tucked in her knickers. Apart from the old man, shameless as ever, we feel the eyes of a thousand bewildered tourists boring down upon the real life Beverly Hillbillies. I cling to the guitar with all my might. It feels like the one thing saving me from abject humiliation. A guitar looks cool, even if you are one of the Clampetts.
It is time for a diversion, and so I let go of my musical crutch and join Stephen for a game of headers, in which we try to keep a red Frido ball from touching the ground by heading it to one another. We find a quiet corner in the field, no mean feat here at the peak of the holiday season, and start to play. Our previous best score is fifty-six. We manage about twelve before the game comes to a premature end. In my attempt to retrieve the ball from an adjacent field, I tread in a giant cowpat. My corduroy slip-on shoes are instantly ruined, and as I have not packed any other footwear, it seems I will be walking around for the next week with the lower part of my right leg stinking of shit.
We return to the tent. It looks like a tramp in the company of royalty, and we find Dad cursing and swearing. In my head, I am a visiting social worker. It is my way of coping.
‘This flaming thing is bloody useless,’ he moans.
He is trying to light the oldest, weediest Calor Gas stove I have ever seen in my life. It appears to be straight from a nineteenth century laboratory.
‘What are you cooking?’ I brace myself for the answer.
‘I’ve opened a tin of curried beans and sultanas, but I can’t get any heat out of this bloody thing.’
Perhaps the stove is acting out of compassion, or some kind of stubborn ‘if you think you’re cooking that crap in me, you’ve got another thing coming’. Regardless, I will not be too disappointed to miss out on the beans. To add salt to the wounds, if not the beans, in the next pitch with its aircraft hangar-dimensioned tent, the holidaymakers are cooking steaks the size of paving slabs. It is a bit like Upstairs Downstairs in a field.
‘Ted, did you get that stove off Billy as well?’ says Mum, her apparent decapitated head appearing between the flaps at the entrance to the tent.
‘Bloody thing!’
He finally cracks and in frustration hurls the gas contraption to his right. The stove immediately decides to get its own back by setting light to a checked tablecloth that my dad has laid out and secured with rocks in each of the four corners. I quickly join the old man in dancing like a Red Indian on hot coals to snuff out the fire. We attract a small crowd of puzzled onlookers who waft away the smoke that the gathering wind is gusting in their faces and crinkle their noses in unison as an overpowering smell begins to circulate. There is the stench of roast pork basted in horse manu
Shoeless, I stay behind while the others go for chips from an ice cream van contraption at the other end of the campsite. I have taken refuge from public view by sitting in the tent and gently strumming the guitar. I cannot explain why, but whenever I do this, I have an impulse to write a song. Everyone else I have seen in this situation wants to sing someone else’s material, and maybe I should do the same, because all attempts to date have been on a scale somewhere between grim and dismal.
I gaze around the inside of the tent for inspiration, but songs about sleeping bags, cake boards and clothes in a Co-op carrier bag do not carry much resonance. Then I see that a headline in today’s newspaper is about Sophia Loren, inducing a pang of melancholy at the thought of ‘my’ Sofia. Unexpectedly, I start mumbling some words and playing an improvised chord progression. I am rather startled. Even taking into account the beginner’s tendency to overestimate the worth of something, I know instinctively that this is alright. At the very least, it is my best effort to date by some distance. I further construct the melody line using nonsense words, but the song has clearly been inspired by the angst I feel in relation to Sofia, which at some level is pitiable.
I know so little about her yet spend much of the day in Strathconas waiting for her to visit the shop again. I do not know where she lives, whether she is at school, university, or working. There is that good-looking guy who is her boyfriend, and she has displayed little interest in me, other than the odd passing comment. Yet I cannot get her out of my mind. Strangely though, writing this song is helping, and I am beginning to understand why so many songs are about love and not sleeping bags.
I want her to be here, even in this shitty tent, and so I close my eyes and let my imagination take over. The moment inspires me, and the lyric starts to write itself in a stream of consciousness. I look for a pen and paper, but all I can find is a betting slip with the words Wee Willie Winkie 7/1 Wolverhampton 5.30 written in pencil, seemingly a horse selected by the old man earlier today in his toilet prison. I find a tiny pen next to The Sun, turn the scrap paper over, and start writing in very small print. The song is called Sofia, and I write a verse, a bridge, and a chorus:
Is love the songbird whose sweet sound I once heard
When walking one beautiful day
Is love the flower that grows by the hour
That's destined to wither away
Is this called romantic, some fool who is frantically
Searching for you everyday
If you know the answers, Sofia tell me please
For I am inexperienced, I have no expertise
In matters of the heart, where I am always ill at ease
Sofia, let me know if I must let you go.
I need to write another verse but that will do for now. I want to find a phone box to let Julian know I have a decent song, but I check myself. It is unsuitable for a band, and more to the point, Junkie’s Fudge are no more. Thoughts of the group always lead to the same place... my unpaid drum kit. I have yet to hear from Rushforths, but it cannot be long before they send a bailiff to our house. I have yet to pay a penny, though I have saved a fair amount of money from my wages and do plan to pluck up the courage to visit them to come clean.
The sound of voices and the smell of salt and vinegar shake me from my reverie. I put the lyric sheet in my back pocket and place the guitar against the side of the tent. The hunters are back with four bags of chips, and I am pleased to see that Mum and Dad are once again on good terms.
‘Goodness me, that wind’s getting up,’ says Mum, struggling to find her own space within the tight confines of our canvas home.
‘There you go son.’ Dad hands me a bag. ‘Get them down you.’
‘Cheers.’
The four sleeping bags are laid out next to each other, and the tent is so small that mine and Stephen’s overlap. As we sit there eating, we do not say anything, my own thoughts pre-occupied with the pending difficulties in getting a decent night’s kip. My dad leans over and switches on his transistor radio, turning the dial and getting a high-pitched whistle as he tunes in to the sports service and the racing results. The announcer gets to the 5.30 at Wolverhampton.
‘First no 7, Wee Willie Winkie, 10/1...’
I do not hear the rest of the race card due to my old man’s exclamation of joy, punching the air with a John Conteh uppercut. He has put a £2 win on the horse, which means he will pick up £22. I suppose his jubilation is a little disproportionate. You would have thought he had won the jackpot on Vernon’s Pools, a night out with Raquel Welch, and free beer for a year. He calms down and starts searching his pockets. His breathing is like an asthmatic.
‘Now where did I put that bloody betting slip,’ he says, unable to hide an edge of nervousness in his voice.
I am torn, not wanting to scupper his euphoria, but my lyric is personal, and I do not want to share it, least of all with the old man. I say nothing, yet watching him toil in anguish; I know I am going to have to come clean, or at least reasonably clean.
‘Here it is, under the paper.’
‘Thank God for that.’ He celebrates with a belch. ‘There she is my little beauty.’ He kisses the slip before reading it, his voice moving up an octave as he speaks. ‘Sofia?’
‘Turn it over Dad.’
‘What the hell’s that meant to be?’
‘A poem from my ‘A’ level.’ I mutter the words like a distracted professor. ‘I was just doodling when you were getting the chips.’
‘You’re wrong there son,’ he says, turning the betting slip over, ‘that’s not poetry.’
‘It’s not?’
‘No.’ He holds up the slip in the air. ‘This is what you call poetry, Wee Willie Winkie, 10/1!’
We finish our chips and wash them down with a drink of cream soda before the hazardous journey from the tent to the washrooms for a pee. The weather is now terrible, and heavy driving rain has joined the high winds. It has been a long day and even my dad, reluctantly abstaining from his nightly dose of Whitbread Mild, agrees to an early night. There is another dash back to the relative shelter of the old tent to get into our sleeping bags for an attempt at a good night’s rest.
*
I expected it to be uncomfortable, but this is far more unpleasant than I thought possible. I am sleeping right up against one edge of the canvas. It is billowing in and out because of the strong winds and smacking the side of my face at regular intervals. Sleeping next to Stephen is adding to my discomfort, because he is still prone to bed wetting, even at the age of twelve. The fact we share a bedroom at home has conditioned me to the stench of juvenile piss, but that is from the safety of the other corner of the room. I cannot shake off the vulnerability of being adjacent to him with the worn material of my sleeping bag the only protection from my brother’s antisocial version of Niagara Falls.
I tilt my arm to read the luminous hands of my diver’s watch and despair when I see it is only 2.00am. Stephen angles his body menacingly towards me, while my mum sleeps silently on her back next to him. On the other side of the tent, I can hear the heavy breathing of my dad, together with the odd grunt and fart. The rain is now bucketing down. We appear to be at the centre of a tropical storm. I hear the sound of a thousand raindrops pummelling the fragile canvas over our heads, and it feels that I am personally taking the strain of the guy ropes and tent pegs as they attempt to survive the battering. This, unfortunately, is not to be.
Something approaching a 90mph gust of wind suddenly strikes, and the tent launches itself towards the storm clouds of the night sky with all the propulsion of a Saturn Rocket powering another Apollo trip to the moon. There is instant panic and pandemonium. Dad is dressed in just his y-fronts and instinctively chases the flying tent as it dips an
It is not long before the occupants of other tents, guy ropes securely fastened in all cases, are peering out of their clear plastic windows to view the commotion. Our immediate next-door neighbours in the aircraft hangar take pity on Mum and Stephen and offer them refuge in their tent. I store what I can in the boot of our car and climb into the back seat. Dad, who has given up any attempt to rescue the soaring canvas, soon joins me, his soaking wet underpants now obscenely see-through. And so it is that I spend the first and only night of this ill-fated holiday asleep on the back seat of an old Ford Consul, with my dad virtually naked in the front, snoring like a foghorn, and farting like a man who has had a late night supper of sprouts, baked beans and prune delight. I somehow manage to get two or three hour’s fitful slumber.
*
I wake at seven with my young bones aching like an eighty year old who has just ran a marathon with Ron Hill. I sit up straight and wind down the car window to see that all outside is peaceful. Grateful that I am still wearing the jeans and tee shirt from last night, I get out and stretch my legs, walking towards our pitch ravaged by the storm. The area looks like it has housed a mini-Woodstock festival; such is the residue of litter and debris. I see a snatch of material snagged on one of the guy ropes and notice a small piece of paper hanging out of one end. It is the winning betting slip rescued from what is left of my dad’s trousers. He will be a happy man when he realises that his idea of poetry is still intact, but I am also experiencing a modicum of relief. I have a few early morning minutes to read and memorise my first meaningful lyric.
My expectation that this holiday would end after the first night proves correct. By 9.00am, we have packed the Ford ready for our journey home, though not before Mum and Stephen have shared a breakfast of bacon, egg, sausage, beans, black pudding, tomatoes, and fried bread with our hospitable neighbours. I have had the remnants of the Smith's crisps from yesterday’s stop at the Halfway House. We drive out past the entrance to the holiday park that promises 'Sun, Fun, & Tranquillity.' We have had 'Rain, Pain & Hurricanes', so I might write to the proprietors to suggest a change to their slogan for the 1973 season. I am hoping beyond hope that the car behaves itself on the way home, because the old man is still only wearing y-fronts, all his other clothes lost in the melee of Barry. This most disastrous of holidays may be over but at least some good has come of it.