Chapter One #3
They had arrived at the shop by now. Skins let them in and Dunn helped him lug his drums and traps case through to the back.
With the gear safely stowed, they locked up and leaned the cart against the wall.
They said their goodbyes on St Martin’s Lane and Dunn strolled off towards the bus stop, whistling a tune they’d been trying to learn after hearing it on a gramophone record brought over by some visiting American musicians.
Skins carried on up past Seven Dials and on towards Bloomsbury.
By the time Dunn got to Finsbury Park, the sun was up and people were already making their way to work. He couldn’t face the two-and-a-half-mile walk home, so he opted to wait for a tram to take him to Wood Green.
Barty Dunn made his way round the corner from the tram stop at Wood Green, to the little terraced house on Coburg Road where he rented a room from Mrs Phyllis Cordell.
She had lost her husband and both her sons in the Great War, and had welcomed Dunn into her home.
She was grateful for the much-needed rent, and for the company of the rakish musician who added a bit of glamour to the otherwise perfectly ordinary, working-class street.
Although, by Dunn’s reckoning, she was not much more than ten years his senior, Mrs Cordell doted on him like an indulgent mother, chuckling over his tales from the clubs and clucking over his hangovers and minor ailments.
She didn’t mind the strange hours he kept, nor did she bat an eyelid at the seemingly endless succession of pretty young ladies who emerged from his room just after lunch several times a week.
She made them a cup of tea and offered them a sandwich, chattering away as though she was delighted to have them in her home.
Which she was. But she didn’t expect to see them again.
She knew it would be a different face that came blushing into her parlour next time.
This was the sole source of friction between tenant and landlady.
‘I don’t mind who you spend the night with,’ she had said one afternoon as she handed him yet another cup of tea.
‘And I don’t mind what you get up to when you do.
Lord knows I’d enjoy a bit of that meself if I ever got the chance.
Not that I ever will. Woman of my age.’ She laughed at the very idea of such a thing.
‘But I don’t want to see you ending up lonely.
You need to find a nice young woman. A war widow, maybe.
Settle down. Make a life for yourself. A family.
You need a family around you. Everybody needs that. ’
‘But what would you do then, Mrs C?’ he’d asked with a smile. ‘I can’t leave you on your own.’
‘I’ll have Gallipoli,’ she said, and patted the gormless mongrel’s friendly head.
She had adopted the dopey dog a few years earlier and had named him after the disastrous campaign that had taken both her boys from her. The neighbours had tutted.
‘You don’t want to be calling him that,’ one had said. ‘It’ll be like dwelling on it. You should put it all behind you. No good’ll come from reminding yourself of it every time you call the dog in.’
But she had insisted that it would be a comfort. The name of her new canine companion would take the sting out of it.
‘It might have took my boys,’ she had said, ‘but now I can hear the name and think of this little fella instead. I can remember my boys as the two handsome lads who went off to war, and Gallipoli as the silly little mutt who keeps me company now they’ve gone.’
It didn’t make sense to anyone but her and Dunn.
He let himself into the darkened house with his latchkey.
Mrs C always left him a glass of milk and a tongue sandwich on a shelf in the larder – ‘just in case you’re hungry when you get in’ – and he sat at the kitchen table and ate it while he waited for tiredness to tell him to take himself off to bed.
Gallipoli had heard him come in and stirred himself from his basket by the stove to see if there might be any food on offer.
Dunn peeled a slice of tongue from the generously filled sandwich and shared it with the dog, who ate it greedily.
He lolled sleepily against Dunn’s leg for a few moments more, but when it became evident that there was to be no more to eat, he padded back to his basket and settled down again.
‘Room in there for an old soldier?’ said Dunn, but the dog was already asleep. ‘Better get myself upstairs, then. See you tomorrow, old mate.’
After a quick visit to the toilet in the tiny backyard, Dunn trod lightly up the stairs and into his room. Mrs Cordell had taken the wartime blackout restrictions more seriously than most and had run up thick, heavy curtains to try to stop light from spilling out on to the street.
‘What you doing that for?’ her neighbour had asked. ‘We’ve got the streetlights half covered up.’
‘And when the zeppelins come,’ said Mrs C, ‘they’ll see your house, not mine. You can come and sleep in my parlour when they bomb you out.’
‘What are they going to bomb us for, all the way out here?’
‘The sweet factory. Good for morale – sweets. They want to break us, them Germans.’
‘Liquorice Allsorts,’ laughed her neighbour. ‘Vital war supplies.’
Mrs Cordell had blacked out her windows nevertheless, and her neighbours had nervously followed suit. Now, nearly seven years after the end of the war, the blackout curtains served to supply semi-nocturnal Barty Dunn with the darkness he needed to sleep his way through the morning.
He threw his clothes over the back of the chair and all but fell into his bed. Sleep came almost immediately.
It only took Skins about twenty minutes to walk home from the shop.
He and his wife, Ellie, lived in a Georgian town house on a leafy street not far from the British Museum.
The house was part of a row of similarly impressive dwellings, each fronted with white-painted stone at the ground floor, with dun-coloured bricks on the three upper floors.
A gate in the black-painted railings opened to give access to the ‘area’ below street level – the servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance to the house – while the front door was reached by climbing a flight of six stone steps.
The tall windows on the first floor gave on to narrow balconies which none of the street’s residents ever used.
It was rather more house than anyone expected a jazz drummer to live in, and they were right to think so – it was Ellie who had bought it for them using money from her inheritance.
Under the terms of her father’s will, the entire – quite substantial – family fortune should have become hers when she married.
When the trustees in America had learned that her husband-to-be was a musician, however, they had invoked ‘the gold-digger clause’.
It had been inserted by her father’s lawyers to protect her from such undesirable ne’er-do-wells and had frozen the bulk of the money until the tenth anniversary of their marriage.
Under pressure from her Aunt Adelia, they had grudgingly released enough to enable her to buy a property in London suitable for a member of the Wilson family of Annapolis.
There was an annual allowance, too, sufficient to keep her comfortable.
But the trustees handled the household bills and servants’ wages themselves and were unwilling to allow her control of the full amount until they knew that this Maloney fella meant business.
Skins let himself in. It was half past four in the morning so there was no one about.
Even the housemaid – who, it seemed to Skins, was always working – was still fast asleep.
He knew he should be, too, and that if he got his head down as quickly as possible, he’d be able to spend some time with Ellie and the children before he had to go out to work again.
Like Dunn, though, he found himself too wide awake to go straight up and instead went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of cocoa. He took it through to the drawing room, where he planned to sit in his favourite armchair and read yesterday’s paper.
When he arrived he found Ellie lightly snoring in her own favourite chair, her dark hair strewn across the winged back and the paper resting on her delicate nose. He gently touched her arm and she stirred.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘What are you doing down here?’
She folded the paper and sat up. ‘Catherine had a nightmare so I went to try to comfort her. By the time she was settled I was so wide awake I thought I might as well come down here and wait for you.’
‘Poor kid. Is she all right?’
‘She’s fine. But how are you? You must be done in.’
‘I’m fine, too. And all the better for seeing you. I wish I’d known you were down here, though – I’d have made you some cocoa.’
She smiled. ‘I was hoping to be able to welcome you home, but I nodded off. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Anything good in the paper?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘There never is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why we bother with it. We hardly get time to read it, and when we do, we just complain it wasn’t worth reading.’
‘We need to keep up with current affairs,’ she said.
‘And why’s that?’
‘I come from a very political family. We like to keep our fingers on the pulse.’
‘Which is why you used to be a nurse, obviously. It all makes sense now.’
‘The metaphorical pulse, goofus.’
They had met in Weston-super-Mare in 1910 when Ellie was touring Europe with her aunt.
That trip got ‘a little out of hand’ and the two women were spirited home by the American embassy after a series of unpleasant incidents at their hotel.
But the encounter at the Arundel Hotel where Skins and Dunn had been playing with Robinson’s Ragtime Roisterers had changed their lives forever.
Skins had managed to hand her his calling card before she was whisked away, and the two youngsters struck up a transatlantic correspondence that carried on uninterrupted until the war.
Their letters became more sporadic as the mail ships began to face attacks in 1915.
The last letter Ellie received from him told her that Skins and Dunn had volunteered together for the Middlesex Regiment and were certain to be in France by the end of the year.
Ellie had no intention of leaving it at that.
She had a plan, and it only took three years of working her way round the local aid stations in France to get it to work perfectly.
Skins had thought himself lucky to get all the way to the summer of 1918 with only minor scratches and a bruised ankle to show for it.
Then, one bright, sunny day in August 1918, a stray shell landed directly in front of his company’s trench.
Skins was leaning against the wall telling a joke about a talking dog when the shell exploded.
The sturdy construction of the trench had protected him and all his friends from the blast, but the signpost on the trench’s lip, pointing westwards and indicating that Tipperary was ‘a long, long way’, did not fare so well.
It was knocked over by the force of the explosion and landed on Skins’s unprotected head, knocking him unconscious.
The official record showed simply that he had been wounded in combat, but the unofficial record kept by one of the junior officers said that he had been ‘rendered unconscious by a sign of dubious comic value while telling a joke of equally dubious comic value and being, in direct contravention of Standing Orders, sans tin hat’.
He regained consciousness quickly, but the sign had opened a gash in his head that required stitches.
He was taken to the local aid station where he was seen by an excitingly familiar American nurse.
She stitched his head wound and demanded that he spend at least two hours of his next leave taking her to dinner.
They married as soon as he was demobbed in 1919.
And now, to the intense irritation of her extended family, she was a musician’s wife and living in London.
Her uncles and cousins were completely unable to understand why she didn’t want to marry a member of the Maryland senate and settle down where she belonged.
Only her Aunt Adelia supported her decision to lead an independent, modern life.
‘You probably ought to get back up to bed,’ said Skins. ‘I’ll not be long.’
‘I probably should,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow.’
‘Today.’
‘Today, then, pedant. Can I have a sip of your cocoa?’
‘Always.’
Ellie stood and took the cup from him, kissing the top of his head as she did so. She took an enormous gulp of the hot chocolate and set off upstairs.
Skins looked at the tiny dribble of cocoa she’d left him and settled down to read. In spite of his fervent belief that he wasn’t anywhere near tired enough to go to bed, it wasn’t long before he found his eyes swimming out of focus. It was time for bed after all.