Oh, Gene Vincent by Maggie Graham
Did I tell you I once sat on Gene Vincent’s knee?
It was the summer of 1960 and it all started with a bath in the afternoon. That would’ve been exciting enough. Baths were for Sunday nights along with freshly pressed school clothes and five wee pink and white cotton hankies, ironed and folded in a pile on the sideboard. During the week I usually got washed in the scullery, mother and a hot soapy face cloth scrubbing away the stoor of school and muck of the public park.
But this was the school holidays and I was going somewhere with my Auntie Rosa. She was one of my mother’s half dozen younger sisters. Only twenty; too young to be called Auntie. She was oors, oor Rosa and she was taking me on a big trip. I got all dressed up. Cotton dress with cherries printed round the hem, white angora bolero, knitted by my mother, white ankle socks and sandals, with one of my hankies tucked up my sleeve. Oor Rosa, when she arrived, was dressed up too. She’d on a suit, a two piece, in dark green light wool. It set off her auburn hair and green eyes. The tight skirt and her high heels made her bum stick out. I thought she looked even lovelier than she had on her wedding day, a few months before. I’d been her flower girl, presented her with a horseshoe. Her man, oor Jim was away to be a soldier on national service. Years later I heard him say that it was the best time of his life. I was glad, for it was certainly the best of hers.
Rosa was special, she was beautiful, wore coral lipstick and Evening in Paris perfume. She had a good job. Personal secretary, my Nana told everyone. She spoke properly and she’d been the first ever bride in Kilbirnie to wear a ballerina length dress. She made me special too: ‘Keep your head up and your shoulders back, darling. It’s not your maw, it’s your mother.’ And ‘You are wonderful, darling. Don’t ever forget it.’ And Rosa had secrets, glamorous secrets, she shared with me.
We caught the train at Kilbirnie station. Must’ve been just before Beecham shut it down. All the way to Glasgow Rosa smoked and I ate Polo mints. Every time I turned from gazing out the window to look at her, she smiled. ‘Okay, darling?’ Oh, yes.
I don’t know how I knew that the man who met us at Central station was Rosa’s lover. His name was Don-something funny-sounding I couldn’t pronounce-and he was a concert promoter. Imagine that, a concert promoter! He had black curly hair and wore a black tee shirt, even though he wasn’t riding a motor bike. We went into a dressing room where everyone was drinking and no one was dressing. After a while Rosa and Don disappeared and left me with the best babysitters I ever had, Cleo Lane and John Dankworth; he became Johnny later. She gave me a sandwich and a glass of what she called pop and I called ginger. She let me touch her hair; not the Afro she would have later but still a million miles away from a Kilbirnie perm. He just smiled and drank his drinks; Mr Smooth with a silk tie.
And then Gene Vincent came offstage, a skinny young man, kinda goofy but handsome at the same, with laughing eyes and a great smile. An American. I’d never met an American, never mind a famous pop star. He sat me up on his knee, told me I’d beautiful blue eyes, let me try on his medallion and dueted with me on Be Bop a Lula. ‘My baby now, my baby now, my baby now.’ He laughed at me knowing all the words. It would’ve been not long before the car crash that left him with a lifelong limp and killed his friend Eddie Cochran. I’m glad I met him while he was still whole.
I don’t remember the journey home or where we told my mother we’d been. I think we said we’d seen the show but nothing about being backstage or Don with the funny other name.
Eventually, Rosa let me down. Jim came home from the army and she gave up Don and backstage passes and became a housewife, a mother and eventually an agoraphobic alcoholic or alcoholic agoraphobic; the timeline isn’t important. When my first book was published Rosa slurred down the phone, ‘But what’s your real job, darling?’ Never mind. Rosa gave me something so precious that day at the beginning of the sixties, the beginning of everything bright and beautiful. She showed me there were places other than our wee steelwork town with its narrow streets and ever narrower minds, where a snob or posh were the very worst things you could be, and if you were middle-class you were worse than a mass murderer. Even if she never took it herself, Rosa showed me the road out of there.
And oh, Gene Vincent.
Did I tell you I sat on his knee?
