A perfect English sky was invaded by an anvil-headed stormcloud, from which issued the voice of Neville Chamberlain: men and women broke off from pipe-tamping or knitting to present resolute profiles. Then Vera Lynn appeared, sitting in an empty theatre – ‘the girl they left behind.’ ‘The girl we were running away from,’ said my father. She smiled thinly: ‘We are a nation of backbone and spirit, so that when we were forced into war in 1939 there was no fear in our hearts.’ ‘No, we just crapped ourselves,’ said my father. It cut to her singing fifty years earlier – looking older, if anything – her awkward hands rinsing and stacking invisible washing-up, in what looked like the garden set of L’Age D’Or. ‘Johnny will go to sleep in his own little room again…Tomorrow, just you wait and see.’ ‘Well I’ve waited,’ said my father, ‘and I’ve seen.’
A cruiser slid out of Pompey Harbour: most of the crew were waving to the crowd – parents, wives, children – but as the camera jerked away I glimpsed a sizeable number to starboard greeting the open sea. I think that’s the side my father would have chosen: our family holidays were always littoral – he’d sneak out hours before breakfast, as if to meet a lover…Then the whale-like calls of signalling ships segued into the voice of Our Gracie. ‘We’re all together now…’: she approached the audience, transfixed as by the lights of an oncoming lorry, like someone trying to coax out from under the sofa the last puppy to be drowned. ‘Whadda we care?’: she did a little dance, as if shooing chickens, reminding me of Mrs Thatcher.
Forgotten songs, forgotten singers. George Formby, his cod’s head emerging from the best-cut suit I’d ever seen, strummed and gurned in front of a curtain seemingly painted with tantric demons. Flotsam and Jetsam sang how London Could Take It, a majolica vase perched on the piano presumably demonstrating the ineffectiveness of The Blitz. Churchill appeared among bombed ruins, in a romper suit, sucking at his cigar, a behemoth baby. ‘We weren’t fighting for him,’ said my father, ‘we remembered Tonypandy and the British Gazette. We were fighting for the peace – jobs, education’ – he shrugged – ‘a health service. A better society, before Thatcher told us there was no such thing.’ The video had certainly livened him up, though not in the way Stan might have intended.
Flanagan and Allen sang ‘Rabbit Run’ over the celebrated film of a Spitfire tracking a German bomber, while below, on a Cotmanish field, a lurcher chased down a rabbit: for a few dizzying seconds animals and machines moved from left to right in perfect synchronization…Then the anaesthetic washes of ‘String of Pearls’: the Glenn Miller Orchestra was bombing Pearl Harbor. America’s entry into the war involved a great improvement in musical quality – Dinah Shore languorously exploring ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ – and colour film – the Andrews Sisters exploding in their crimson dresses. ‘I always fancied that middle one,’ said my father, ‘the double-jointed one that could scat.’ In comparison with this released New World energy the Home Front looked drab and costive, the stock fading to saffron, the confused crowds at railway termini half-obscured by London particulars or dragon clouds of smoke from their perpetual Woodies and Cappies.
Then a ribald fanfare sounded: into a mob of sailors, milling about below decks, there descended an enormous chin – Tommy Trinder, in uniform, kitbag on shoulder, head cocked, was coming down the rope and chain ladder. Having surveyed the scene with a nod of satisfaction, he began to sing:
Of all the lives a man can lead
There’s none that’s like a sailor’s
It’s very much more exciting
Than a tinker’s or a tailor’s
He leaves his home sweet home
It seems he loves to roam…
He got lost in the bustle, kept approaching the wrong berth and being pushed away. His grin got wider. He approved someone’s pin-up with a raised thumb, then attached himself to a passing close harmony trio, a cerberus of raffish cockney grifters:
…All over the place
Wherever the sea may happen to be
A sailor is found knocking around
He’s all over the place!
Trinder moved in an absurd yet hieratic glide, like something obscurely sinister in a Kenneth Anger movie, his profile like the elongated eye of Horus gripped in the vice of brow and cheekbone:
The North and the South
The East and the West
There’s half of the world
Tattooed on his chest
And all over the place!
Then a scanty-haired dodderer began to intone the signal before Trafalgar – ‘England expects that every man today will do his duty’ – only to reel away from his shipmates’ volleys of pillows, boots and brushes. His crew would have done that to Nelson too if they hadn’t loved him – as my father always said – because he upped their grog ration, fought polar bears, chased beautiful women and was clearly, heroically, off his head.
He’s here for a day
And then he’s away
He’s all over the place!
The music burst into a hornpipe and the sailors danced, wildly stamping on the decks. I imagined the officers up top getting nervous, hearing in that satyr rout their approaching nemesis, the revenge of the subhumans, revolution…only to be confronted at the last not by bloody Jack Cade but by Clem Attlee in his MCC tie.
He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere
He’s all over the place!
Tommy waved a huge baton over the swell of sound but kept delaying the climax: ‘He’s all over the – wait for it! wait for it! – place!!!’ After the last chord someone crashed a folded deckchair over his head but his ecstatic smile didn’t waver.
I pressed the freeze frame. My heart was pounding, I was running with sweat, like the first time I heard ‘Anarchy In The UK’ or ‘Straight to Hell’. My father clapped his hands: ‘That’s just how it was! Everyone went a bit crazy at sea, the best sort of crazy…I’m sounding like Stan! I mean it was fine if you didn’t mind the blood and guts.’
We rewound ‘All Over the Place’ and watched it again. My father recalled that it came from a film, Sailors Three, identifying the old man as Claude Hulbert and the young sailor with a mass of oiled curls as Michael Wilding, who married Liz Taylor. Senescence and youth flanking Trinder, the man: grandfather, father and son united in a magical triangle – all over the place, coffined in steel, with a head height of twenty feet…In the song’s final chorus it was obvious that they were surrounded by real sailors with bad skin, gappy teeth, tufting hair – chums with their arms around each other’s necks; their gaze, bold but shy, followed the camera as it swept by: I felt a jolt of contact as their eyes met mine, as if their souls were living on inside the celluloid.
We saw Trinder once, my father and I: at one of my first Halifax Town matches. When Fulham, led by the great Johnny Haynes, aureoled in brylcreem shine, scored the sixth of their eight we heard the unmistakable voice of chairman Tommy, his catchphrase, ‘O you lucky people!’ booming above our faltering cries of ‘Come on, you Shaymen.’ And my father remembered him guesting on the TV game show, The Golden Shot, rocking with cruel mirth as a sobbing Bob Monkhouse recounted the contestants’ increasingly heartrending and hilarious hard-luck stories, so that, unable to hold the crossbow steady on the prize target, he’d pinged the bolt into the studio ceiling.
‘I saw that!’ said Mr Siddiqui, who’d tacked gingerly across the ward to join us. ‘Bernie, the bolt!…Ann Ashton, the Golden Girl!!’ – he looked heavenwards, as if expecting her to appear.
The sound had drawn the ressies from the other wards. Even the smoking room emptied: a fat grey man covered in ash who I’d never seen before crashed down on to my father’s legs, but he didn’t seem to mind. I rewound it and played it again. And again. They began