Almost Grown

By Zois Books

Pete Fowler has been a writer, lecturer, university professor, railway enthusiast, question-setter for Johnny Walker’s Radio One quiz, Pop the Question, and very nearly a rock star. 'Almost Grown: Living with a Dansette in the Dining Room' opens with a brush with death and proceeds to explore the author’s awakening to life, in the Fifties and early Sixties, through the medium of music. It ends with an actual death. All in all, the story of a journey of self-discovery to a rock’n’roll soundtrack, by turns funny, moving and insightful. Everyone will benefit from sharing that journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zois Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311386144

Zois Books

Zois Books is a new, independent publisher committed to producing affordable, quality ebooks by new authors. Our first two titles were published to coincide with our launch in September, 2015. We plan to launch two titles every three months—memoir, fiction, short stories, history, and philosophy. We mean to grow our list as quickly as we can.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings and ends

I sometimes find myself screaming about targets.

I got well and truly fed up forever measuring things at work, it was one of the reasons I took early retirement. 'Peter, have you a number, please, of the small and medium enterprises your Department has assisted this last year?'  Well, somewhere, yes—but don't you want to know if that assistance was of any use? Of any value? Or is its only value as a number that justifies some European money we were allocated?  'Oh, here we are—we assisted one hundred and twenty four... very badly, as it turned out, but I guess you're not interested in that....'

Just when did quantity crush quality? When did it suddenly not matter if a thing had been done well, only that it had been 'achieved'? Was it is a consequence of spreadsheets? Or were spreadsheets themselves a consequence, but of something a little more indefinable; of, perhaps, a shift in mood when values and principles were subordinated to efficiency and bureaucracy? Was it Tom Peters and his crowd? Was it when Labour became New Labour? When the major keys of the party's ideals went into the minor keys of ticking boxes? When Michael Foot became Jack Straw? When their vision of Jerusalem, Blake and a green and pleasant land, became Tescoville, loyalty cards and brownfield sites?

Even when I finally left work I could not escape the hegemony of this cultural zeitgeist. I knew, right now, that I was heading for one of those shiny new conveyor belts, that I myself was about to be processed, about to become a statistic that will prove something to somebody. The Health Service this time.

True, I get seen quicker than I used to do when I have my annual check-ups; and true, if I were to need an operation I know that the wheels would turn with a greater sense of urgency than in the past. All the doctors I see, all the cardiologists, the GPs, the surgeons—they've all got some man (it usually is a man) in a suit standing behind them with a clipboard. The Performance Manager. The one whose duty it is, whose sole purpose for being, is to ensure that the Trust, the hospital overseeing body, is meeting its Government targets. The one who determines the schedules for making absolutely sure that this person has been seen within two weeks, and that person has been sent home from hospital within ten days. Keeping the guys with the knives in line.

I sometimes think of ancient days, when the dark nights of the forties were finally giving way to the early morning of the fifties, when I would wander into my GP's surgery—after an hour in a completely-filled waiting room, full of screaming children and old men coughing—and hear my mother describe my symptoms as old Doctor Burns lit up a Benson and Hedges.

He was the one who told my mother that he could hear this 'murmur' in my heart when I was four or so, summoned in for a pre-school medical. He was a kindly old Scot who ran his surgery in Cleethorpes for decades. He painstakingly told my mother of the implications: it might be nothing, Madge, or, on the other hand, it might be a problem with a valve. It might be he's had rheumatic fever and none of us noticed; it might simply vanish when he's a little older. All we can do is keep our eyes and ears open, see if any symptoms develop. No, the young lad should act as if nothing has happened—one of those men who tried to climb Everest, he had a heart murmur: it never seemed to stop him doing anything. We'll just take a listen every year or so; and if I hear any new sound, there are people at the hospital, cardiologists, we can send him there… try not to think about it. Relax. He'll be as right as rain, I'm sure of that….

His worst fears were right: it was a valve, a malformed aorta valve, it had two cusps instead of three. A bicuspid aorta valve. This was decided, definitively, at the Middlesex Hospital, to which I was sent for my medical before grammar school in 1956. We'd moved by then to Hatch End, near Harrow. The school, seeing my medical report had more questions than answers, insisted that I was seen by their heart specialists: they did not want a young boy dropping dead on the rugby field. Even then, the heart guys all smoked; and one of them lit up a Kensitas to prepare himself to tell my mother the news. There were no ultrasounds then, no CT scans, just X-rays and ECGs: but he was ruthlessly clear in his diagnosis. I had 'aorta stenosis', he said, 'the valve was narrowed…'. 'The boy'—I was sitting there but completely ignored as the man in the white coat delivered his verdict—'must be seen, at this hospital, every year. The narrowing could get worse. No, there was nothing we could really do, but advances were taking place, all the time. Hopefully, if the condition deteriorates, those advances might be sufficient to allow us to intervene. No, we do not know when; no, it's unlikely he'll have immediate trouble. But, if he has any shortening or breath, or if he has any chest pain, tell your GP, immediately'.

I've always had that shadow. That ominous realisation that I was not quite the physical full shilling, a cuspid short of a cuspid wonderland. And, true to form, throughout my life the incidents occurred, the trigger moments, what were described, in those white-coated consultations, as 'episodes': the embolism-induced black outs in my twenties, the loss of a tiny portion of my sight through one of these embolisms at thirty; but, forever underpinning the fears, the traumas of those moments, the luck, the sheer luck of the baby boomer—the luckiest generation in history: and so, when the valve finally shrivelled and the stenosis became a recipe for a sudden death, in the early 1990s, the medics were by that time well used to the procedures that became common in the 1970s, the replacement of the offending valve. With, in my case, a mechanical valve made of seemingly indeterminate metal, manufactured, so I was told, in St Paul, Minnesota. I smiled when the surgeon told me this because I had known the name of the town since I was fifteen and avidly collecting American 45s—Johnny Cash had sung about it in Big River. 'I met her accidentally in St Paul, Minnesota'…. No, the surgeon did not know that. Nor will he have known that Johnny, in the same song, was so crestfallen that he could have 'taught the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky'. Seemed about right to me, but it was hardly worth telling this very serious looking Egyptian sitting opposite. I don't think Johnny ever quite made it in the Middle East.

That was 1993. I thought, naively, when I came home and recuperated, that my troubles were over. That the insertion of the wondrous little slab of I-know-not-what would sort my lifelong problem. Yes, they had told me at the hospital that my annual checks would continue just to make sure things were in order, and every couple of years I was sent for an ultrasound on the offending area. But I felt alright, carried on life as normal and was not really expecting trouble.

But here it was on my doorstep. The very letter I did not want to receive. And the very symbol of the National Health Service as we now know it. No phone call, no message from my GP, no kind words, no nice old Scot with a fag in his hand. Nothing but a note written by a computer with the simple and bald instruction

'You have been booked in for a CT Scan on May 6th… this will take approximately 25 minutes… please sign in at the Reception Desk in the Department of Cardiology at 2.30pm….'

I, the recipient of this mean and measly missive, was left to deduce the rest; that something must have been seen on the recent ultrasound at my annual check-up; that the proposed scan could only be to confirm the diagnosis that had clearly been made looking at my ultrasound result—maybe a little extra information would be provided by a more detailed image. But they knew, and I now knew. Something was failing.

Life was obviously not, as I had mistakenly thought, an eternally serendipitous stroll at ease with my tricuspid friends; putting it more appositely—in the dead language used by those responsible for the administrative procedures that had left me stunned in the hallway—at least one of my vital organs was not fit for purpose. The scientists and the engineers back in old St Paul must have screwed up. I should have realised from their company's name—St Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes—that my ride through life would be about as smooth as the Mississippi in their ice-bound winters.

I stood in that hall filling with the repressed memories of the 1993 operation, the hallucinogens and the horrors, the angiograms and the slashing of the sternum, the anticoagulation rates and the Heparin drip; the three days rubbed out, never to be remembered; staring at the horrific scars on my chest, and the various bits of tubing hanging out from seemingly random holes made by the surgeon.

Rosalind, my wife, of course, told me, as I read her the order to attend for the scan, that I was overreacting horribly, but I knew the score. I knew what this soulless and dead language meant. It meant I was on that unyielding road that only leads back into those production-line wards in Wythenshawe Hospital. And it meant, in these days of targets and anything-but Human Resources, that the process was in full motion, summoning me to Stage One.

It was, so I eventually learned, an aneurism on my aorta. Naturally, since the appointment was two or three weeks away, and I rather wanted to know exactly what was going on somewhat before that time, I went to see my GP—not a word from the surgery, by the way, to come in and discuss—who took several minutes to find the relevant file on his computer before expressing delight that he had managed to do so ('I'm not really up to speed on this IT stuff… but we all have to use it'). He then simply read out what the cardiologist had written to him:

'… the patient has a dilation of the ascending aorta measuring 6.1. Our measurement in the same ultrasound examination two years ago was 4.4… we have asked him in for a CT scan to give us a more detailed analysis….'

The GP looked at me, told me that this is what it was, and said he'd see me after the CT scan. No, he said, he was not sufficiently skilled to give me any verdict as to whether this would lead to a further operation or, indeed, be treatable at all. No, he said, the figures meant nothing to him: 'It's out of my field, I'm afraid'.

No, I thought as I walked out of the surgery, no, I'm not going on the internet. I knew only too well that were I to start Googling these meaningless figures, the 4.4's and the 6.1's, alongside the words 'aorta' and 'dilation', that I would reach the speedy conclusion that I would be dead within days. After all, the net seems, to the non-medical expert, always full of the very worst scenarios clicking into view whichever symptoms are typed in by the user. Every symptom leads inevitably to a slow and painful death. Even a tickle in the throat becomes an inoperable cancer on the Fools' Net.

It's strange that it wasn't until I was actually sitting in Wythenshawe, the regional hospital here that acts as the focal point of expertise in heart surgery, talking to the guy who would eventually operate on me, that the word 'aneurism' was used. An aneurism is, I discovered, a dilation, a balloon-like bulge, of a blood vessel—and at least when the surgeon used this word it meant something rather more to me than telling me I 'had a 6.1'.  Ah, I thought, that's what Neil Young had—an aneurism. But oh, I then thought within the flash of a second, it nearly killed him.

Once I'd been to Wythenshawe I at least knew the truth. I had an aneurism on my aorta, the section that was attached to the valve that I'd had replaced in 1993; if it were left, it would rupture, dissect and could finish me off with a horrible haste (unless, like Gerard Houllier the ex-Liverpool football manager who had a ruptured aorta as he sat by the Anfield touchline—unless, like him, I happened luckily to be within a couple of miles of a team of surgeons for whom this was not necessarily a routine operation, but certainly one in which they were experienced practitioners). So, an operation was essential, in which the surgeons cut out the offending area of the aorta and replace it with a fabric tube (a graft).

Not so simple. Twelve hours of surgery: sternum smashed to allow access to the relevant sections, heart by-passed using a heart-lung machine, heart stopped, body almost frozen so that the brain is cooled down to near-death—a condition that cannot be left more than half an hour or so, putting enormous pressure on the surgeon to complete the task—and the most delicate of incisions, the most delicate of manoeuvres involving the placing of the new part, heart re-started, chest sewn up….

He looked at me seriously to tell me of the risks. Eight to 9 percent chance of death, a stroke or a heart attack. Four times as dangerous as the most common heart operations, the by-passes and the valve replacements. But, he said, no alternative. I could last another year or two, who knows, but it's hardly advisable to trust to luck.

He suggested an operation, within weeks—and an immediate run of tests to make sure I was fit enough for such a large operation. I left there with Rosalind, who had accompanied me, and headed straight for the car to drive the fifteen miles home. Facing a life on hold; facing the children; facing a series of hospital appointments.

Waiting for the end

At least the surgeon had spoken to me as if I were human. But, once the diagnosis had sunk in, and I was back home, the feeling of isolation kicked in. I only felt safe when he was on the other side of the table. I wanted to hear him say, 'Come in now, we've got an unexpected vacancy this very afternoon, poor chap didn't make it, died just the day before he was due for the knife.…'

But instead I was back on the treadmill of tests. Seeing if my lungs were up to the needed operation; checking out all of my coronary arteries with an angiogram. Angiograms, I can't bear them: it's one of those procedures where you remain awake and conscious, in which—after an incision is made in your femoral artery, in the groin, allowing an inspection tube to be inserted—the cardiologists ignore your face and your eyes, simply transfixed by the images on their monitor, desperately trying to get their guide wires and the catheter up and through the aorta as the whole procedure is constantly being filmed using some rather modern X-ray procedure. I had one in 1993 as well and I find them a nightmare; not at all helped by being parked beforehand, waiting my turn in line, on a hospital bed outside the theatre being asked to sign the consent form. Like a fool, I read it—and what exactly are you meant to say when you read, on the form:

'I have explained the procedure (of the coronary angiogram) to the patient, in particular I have explained:

… the serious or frequently occurring risks:

Bleeding, death, stroke, myocardial infarction, heart rhythm problems, kidney problems….'

I did, I have to say, hesitate. Though I did realise, glimmeringly, that this was part and parcel of that insidious compensation culture which had wrapped itself around the heart of organisations such as the NHS like a tentacled monster in a Twilight Zone nightmare, choking the last vestiges of its humanity. I signed, of course, and noted to a man who did not respond with a smile that maybe I could catch cancer as well; had he thought of adding that to the list? I managed to congratulate him on spelling 'rhythm' correctly, but that didn't make him smile either. There's not much smiling in the angiogram theatre.

I was, to be honest, waiting for the end. I was expecting that this was going to be an operation too far. Everything looked wrong. I was overweight; my blood pressure was too high. I wasn't even middle aged, as I had been for my first major operation, I was retired. I thought I could see nurses pitying me; I thought I heard 'tut-tutting' when my stomach was exposed to the view of those who spent their leisure time running endless marathons. I expected every single test to be negative. I assumed that all of the fags I had smoked over all of those years would have done my lungs in, even though I had finally managed to stop a couple of years before. Even then I always missed the comradeship of standing outside the office block in the pouring rain dragging intensely on a roll-up; the only group of people who by the turn of the century brought back memories of standing apart from the crowd, the last outsiders in the Millennium World.

I expected to be told that I had blockages in my arteries; that it was hardly surprising given my cholesterol levels; and entirely predictable, given my propensities for croissants, cakes and butter—real butter, that is, solid and golden, the enduring echoes of childhood. The only complement, when plastered on toast, to the eggs and bacon that had given this country the best world-wide start to the day. None of that bird food nonsense, stuff that should have realised its destiny in the garden feeders; none of that fat-free yoghurt that so resonated with a taste-free world. A world in which people ran marathons but would never dream of eating one; me, I would rather have eaten twenty six of them than even think of running twenty six miles. Get a train, for goodness sake.

I came home feeling utterly defeated. I assumed, soon, that I would be called in by the surgeon and told the obvious. I'm sorry, Peter, but at present the risks are too high… let's see if, in a few months, you can turn yourself round, get a couple of stone off, take statins, take these beta blockers, get your blood pressure to an acceptable level... then we'll re-consider….

Listening to the stories we could tell

I've always loved the Everly Brothers. I'm not sure why, but in the late 1950s they sounded, to me, a teenager in Harrow, as if they were the very personification of a new and deviant life to come. Don had an arrogant slur in his voice, singing his words in an accent so far removed from mine—the country boy from the Blue Ridge Mountains and the English boy living in a Home Counties suburb—that the very difficulty I had in deciphering his words suggested another world, another country, a life far removed from the one I lived with my Lincolnshire parents. Even now, listening to I Wonder if I Care as Much, I'm not quite sure what Don is singing. It was like that in 1958: if you couldn't make the words out, it was because there was a whole other way of living; a way of living that seemed to hold the very key to life. Just how many times had I had placed my ears to the speaker when a record like the Olympics Western Movies was being played? Just how many times had I slowed the record down by placing my fingers on the rotating vinyl, so that the record player was circling at 40 rpm, or even 30 rpm?

And just how long had it taken me to decipher words like:

I call my baby on the telephone

To tell her half my head was gone

I just got hit by a great big brick

She says thanks for reminding me about Maverick

The Olympics, Western Movies, 1958

The Everlys, though, unlike these one hit wonders, stayed with me forever. I grew up, I grew older; but their Appalachian harmonies, as I kept on listening through the decades, began to suggest not the teenage angst that they'd so wonderfully portrayed in Bird Dog and Wake up, Little Susie, but a deeper narrative, an altogether richer landscape, a sense of continuity, a feel for family: their exquisitely sweet harmonies were as bells ringing out for a worldwide evensong. They were not from my land; but they were of my land. Boys whose roots went back to the Irish-Scots, but had been re-routed in the States by the calls of the blues singers in the fields and the electric guitars that their urbanised kinfolk were playing in Chicago. Boys who grew up with the songs their father played on his guitar, steeped in the Blue Sky Boys and the Louvin Brothers—but who caught, on a car radio, the sounds of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, and heard what Elvis was doing over in Memphis. By the time they were in their late teens, they could no longer sing those spirituals that the Louvins had liked; but they could do a wonderful country version of Ray Charles's This Little Girl of Mine, itself a re-working of an old black gospel song. Wheels coming full circle.

And, in the rolling of the wheels lay the perpetual unfolding of the stories.

I saw them a couple of times. The first was a frenetically insane evening at the Granada Cinema in Harrow. I'm not sure, now, where they featured on the bill, I think they finished the first half. They were on what was called a package show, with Bo Diddley, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones. I went there, in 1963, mainly to see Little Richard and Bo Diddley; and, true to form, Little Richard, the last act (who could follow him?), brought the house down, urging his audience in an orgy of sheer provocation to lay the cinema to waste. The Stones were in their infancy and disappeared somewhere in the first half, quite unable before they had discovered their own voice to match the magic of Bo Diddley who performed before them: after all, in 1963, who wanted to hear a group that copied Chuck and Bo songs when one of their mentors was actually on the stage? The Everly Brothers must have followed them closing the half; and—clearly fazed by the rock'n'roll razzle dazzle—stormed into their faster numbers at such a speed that their very raison d'être was destroyed. The songs sounded awful; Bye Bye Love and Claudette by the Chipmunks. But then as if to grasp the moment and state the obvious—that they were the world's best harmony duo, the very template for Lennon, McCartney and Simon and Garfunkel—they performed a ravishing version of All I Have to Do Is Dream, forcing those harmonies into areas that seemed in 1963 to be from a world apart from the rest of that evening. The sounds of old Connemara and modern Nashville, touches of green, touches of blues, braided in the new synthesis that had emerged in their father's generation.

The stories they could tell.

When I next saw them they'd fallen out, not talked to each other for years and—probably for financial reasons—had decided to re-form and tour the world. 1983. Twenty years since the Harrow gig.

It was at the Apollo in Ardwick, Manchester. I was supposed to interview them for a local radio station, Piccadilly, but somehow—and typically—managed to take the tape deck to the venue but completely failed in my central mission to force my way into the theatre and actually get something on tape. I did, though, see the show. It's all I'd wanted to do, really.

I'm not sure how many times in my life I've been as moved as I was that night. It was not, for certain, a sense of pure nostalgia; though it was a sense of history, of time passing. Don had put on significant weight and was hardly the broody adolescent of Problems and 'Til I Kissed You; but his physical weight was entirely matched by the sheer emotional weight of his vocal delivery, with a quite staggering intensity on songs like Devoted to You and Maybe Tomorrow. Backed by a wonderful array of British musicians whose memory of the Everly Brothers was the same as mine—but was coupled, unlike mine, with a musical skills set absolutely appropriate to need—Don and Phil gave the performance of their lives on that tour. And if Phil's eyes were filling with tears as he watched his brother sing his solo lines on Let It Be Me, so were mine, sitting there in the audience. Both of our pasts, even though he was on a stage and I was a mere onlooker, were being simultaneously illuminated; mine with the memories of London singles and teenage girlfriends, his, so much closer, to churches and radio stations in Shenandoah and to the memory of their father who had taught the boys their harmonies, taught Don how to pick bluegrass and who had died just a short time before.

They played a few acoustic numbers in the middle of their set, just Don playing the guitar with, maybe, Phil pretending to play, just as he had done on Cathy's Clown and some of their other hits. They were songs from a 1958 album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. Put My Little Shoes Away dated back to the 1870s. It would have arrived in the States with immigrants on their way to Ellis Island on a boat from Liverpool. Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet was even older, traced back to Scotland in the 1790s.

The Everlys had history scorched into their psyches. In 1958, when I began having a quiff because of those like Don and Phil, I suppose I saw them as fashion icons, as boys of that teenage moment. They might have been that, but they were as rooted in the past as the isolated homesteads that still stood on the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their Virginia Skyline Drive, taking the trippers into the lush landscape of the Shenandoah Valley, memories of trappers and moonlighters at every turn was, in the musical world of Don and Phil, a road that seamlessly led to the Sky Road outside Clifden, with the Bens of Galway towering up above on one side, the Atlantic Ocean pounding the shores on the other.

I had known none of this in the 1950s. We lived then, as the young always do, in an ever present. It was a theme Van Morrison explored in the 1980s when he reminisced, for a couple of albums or so, on his Belfast youth:

And it's always being now,

and it's always being now

It's always now

Can you feel the silence?

Van Morrison, On Hyndford Street

But, of course, the irony of the Van Morrison song was that it was when he composed it knee-deep in his own past, almost a wallowing in a cascade of images from his childhood: the moth catcher, stopping at Fuscos for ice cream, Sunday six-bells, reading Mezz Mezzrow and Kerouac.

I remember thinking, driving home from the Ardwick gig, of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. The way in which he revisited a place where he had been and had loved when young; and realising that his emotions on re-seeing the Abbey from a hill above could never again be the same as before. But in many real ways, the emotions he felt straddling his still, sad music of humanity were at an altogether more profound level. His past was over but his present had been defined by it. And, because of this he was able to define his past. He could give the narrative. He could not feel as he felt then but he could remember it. In context.

Exactly as Van Morrison had revisited Hyndford Street in East Belfast. The narrative was in the past, but the manner in which he approached it was indelibly coloured by the ensuing years. He sang the song in a 1980s present. He could not sing it as the young and wild lead singer of Gloria. But the emotional charge of the reconnection to his past brought about new perspectives, new angles, new syntheses. His past, given the ensuing years of his life, became not just a story—it was clarified. He could look back and see in a manner he could never have as the young lad cleaning windows and blowing his sax in a Down hall,

Reviews for Almost Grown

[Ga · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's a really excellent read, there's comedy, tragedy and rock'n'roll. For anyone reaching adolescence in the late fifties or early sixties, this book is not to be missed. Includes some really important insights into how rock music was born in England and how it grew. I can't wait for Pete Fowler to write the next volume of his memoirs. Student life and the Summer of Love. Should be hot.