Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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former pupil at Central, Tom Boal – stage name, Big Tom Tyrone, even though he wasn’t actually from Tyrone – had obviously enjoyed and remembered the Reverend Mr McAuley’s deep apprehendings and had somehow ended up on the folk circuit in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, singing about longings of his own. Turning to Country, he had recorded several albums in Nashville in the 1970s and he toured occasionally and had returned one year to town, for his mother’s funeral, and had come in to school as a special favour to an old friend, our history teacher, the notorious motorbike-riding and leather-jacket-wearing Gerry Malone, a man who’d been known to do tapes of the Grateful Dead and the Band for favoured boys in the sixth form. Mr Malone introduced Big Tom Tyrone as a contemporary of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, people we all thought were dead, or hippies, or myths, like the Greeks and the Romans, and certainly it was a surprise for us to meet someone so obviously old and yet so utterly unlike our parents: he might as well have been Odysseus, or Elvis Presley. None of us who were there will ever forget Big Tom Tyrone’s long, thinning hair and his cowboy boots and his acoustic version of Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley’s ‘Fill thou our life, Lord’, which he turned into a sleazy twelve-bar blues with a bottleneck middle section whose effect of longing and moaning came about the closest that most of us had ever heard to the sound of a woman in the act of lovemaking. The school’s headmaster, a Brylcreemed man, a Mr Crawford, the predecessor of the current incumbent, Mr Swallow, was furious and ended assembly early. Girls hung around after the assembly for autographs – some of the better-looking girls too – and Big Tom Tyrone happily signed, in exchange for a kiss, and he must have been in his fifties at the time, I suppose, the age of our own fathers. We couldn’t believe it. Billy and Bob and me had decided by that lunch break that we would form a band. We lasted about six months before we split, suffering from the usual musical differences and the lack of a drummer, and it was then that Billy turned seriously to poetry.
Billy’s book was being published by a firm who had advertised in the Impartial Recorder, which Billy had foolishly taken to be a recommendation. The Impartial Recorder also carries advertisements for psychics, money trees, life coaches, ‘The Truth about Israel – the Key to World History’ booklets, and ‘Hard-To-Believe-But-It’s-True-We’re-Giving-It-Away-Today-And-Today-Only-Its-An-Unbelievable-And-Unrepeatable-Bargain-But-All-Stock-Must-Go!!!’ furniture stores, cut-price supermarkets and wood flooring specialists. Billy had submitted his work by post, enclosing a small fee, and he had received a letter in reply just a week later, much different from the replies he usually received from publishers: it described his work as ‘original’, ‘extraordinary’ and it went on to use the kind of adjectives which Billy had secretly known for many years might properly be applied to his work, but at which he had blushed on reading and rereading. As well as its obvious literary merits the book, he was told, in the opinion of the publishers, could be a major commercial success. The publishers believed that they could guarantee reviews in national newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and prominent displays in all the major bookshops. Because of the extra distribution and publicity costs that this would involve, they wondered if they could possibly ask Billy to contribute about £1000? Out of this sum Billy would receive two free copies and he had an option to buy another 500 at a greatly reduced rate. The publishers said the initial print run was going to be about 1000: an enormous number for a first book by an unknown author.
Billy had inherited some money from the sale of the butcher’s shop and its fittings after Hugh’s death, so he gladly paid up, sat back and waited, and he believed for a long time that he was actually going to see the book.*
But after the humiliation of the bookless book launch, days turned to weeks and then to months, and there were still no books received, and Billy’s letters and telephone calls went unanswered, and in the end Billy decided he was going to have to go and see his publishers personally. He wore a suit and tie, as for a business meeting, asked for a day’s leave from the dump and took the train.
* We were renowned at one time, of course, for our annual Bicycle Polo tournament, held out on the fields that people called the Bleaches, which were used many years ago for bleaching linen, but which have long since been buried under the Frank Gilbey roundabout on the ring road. The tournament had been founded by Field Marshal Sir John Hillock in 1933. Like Tolstoy, the Field Marshal took to cycling in old age and became an enthusiastic advocate of the sport. His bicycle polo team, the Rovers, sponsored by Raleigh, had achieved some small national fame, and the tournament had brought crowds to the town every May Day until 1947, when tragedy struck: a young man, Elvin Thomas, just twenty-one years old, who had survived Tobruk, died from a punctured lung sustained from an injury caused by a loose spoke during the tournament finals. The Field Marshal disbanded the team and bicycle polo has never been played again in town.
The highlight of Frank Gilbey’s inaugural and one-and-only week-long jazz festival, meanwhile, a few years ago, was a performance on the Saturday night by Chris Barber and his band, the keepers of the flame of British trad jazz. No one at all had turned up to hear them play and they went home without even opening their instrument cases. Frank had had to bail out the festival from his own pocket.
† Tiberio Scarpetti and his family lasted here for nearly ten years, which is not a bad innings, actually, for incomers, but unfortunately they were ten years too late for the worldwide craze for espresso bars, which had orginally sent the older Scarpetti brothers out into the world to make their fortunes – Domenico to Australia, Bartolo to Los Angeles – and twenty years too early for the coffee shop revival, which meant that in the end Tiberio, the youngest of three brothers, who had a lot to prove but who had drawn the historical and geographical short straw, returned to his home town of Termoli in Italy with nothing except his Gaggia machine and a lot of unsold stock of fizzy mineral water and canned ravioli. Tiberio had worked like a dog for years, turning what was once Thomas Bell’s dank, dark little hardware shop, ‘Whistle and Bells: All Your Hardware Requirements’, on Market Street into our own local little Italy, all black-and-white tiled floors, indoor plants and mirrored walls, with a state-of-the-art red Formica counter. He held out for a long time against offering chips with everything and all-day frys, but in the end he gave in and lost heart. He’d kept a bowl on the counter for tips and when a decade had passed without a single person ever placing so much as a penny in the bowl he knew it was time to pack up and leave: this was not a place Tiberio intended to grow old. His daughter Francesca remains, of course, married to Tommy Kahan, but Tiberio has never been back to visit, has never even been tempted; he has sworn never to return. The sign above the door of the café still says Scarpetti’s, but apart from the Parmesan and the Nescafé espressos there remains no other indication that this was ever the town’s Italian quarter: Pukka Pies™ have long since replaced the ravioli. Mr Hemon’s only improvement on Tiberio’s original decor has been to put up tourist board posters on the walls showing scenic sights in Bosnia, but all meals come with chips.
* Actually, there was one that he let slip, when he was on a camping holiday with the children in the south of France, many years ago, and he’d got into conversation one evening with an expat at a bar near the campsite, and somewhere into the second shared bottle of the local red he confessed that he was a solicitor and started complaining to the stranger that the worst thing about his job was always being asked to pad people’s insurance claims and become party to petty frauds, and he happened to mention to the expat the name of a client, Trevor Downs, from up there on the Longfields Estate, whom Martin believed to be faking his own whiplash injuries. Some time later the expat happened to mention this story on the telephone to his brother, who happened to be a minicab driver in Glasgow, who then happened to mention it in turn to someone in the back of his cab who turned out to be Trevor Downs’s wife, Tara, in Glasgow on a shopping spree funded by her husband’s considerable personal injury income. It may be a small world, but it’s also a messy one, thank goodness: in the retelling of the story the name Trevor had been translated into Terry and the Downs had disappeared, which is the only thing that kept Martin Phillips from being sued and out of hospital. These days compensation claim