The Day After The Music Died

Peter McHugh

To the casual onlooker a one tenement looks very much like another; to a ten year old each block is a different country, a different world, each with a different terrain. Some are in friendly territory some are in the hands of the enemy. Some have a shop frontage indicating high back courts, some are entered at ground level, some entered on a lower level still; the basement, the dungeon or dunny. Each unique back court had its walls to be climbed, its chasms to be leaped and its middens to be raked. My own back court at Gorbals Cross was particularly blessed, it had a high back court, overlooked by the gigantic redbrick remains of an abandoned brewery, the backcourt in its turn overlooked a ground entry tenement containing a particularly slimy, leprous but fascinating dunny. A more living proof of social stratification I have yet to come across.

Those in the high back were, in comparative terms, affluent. A mixture of Jews and Irish Catholics, who worked in one of two industries, namely upholstery and the building trade and who, give or take the odd mix up over special holidays and their peculiar dietary requirements, mixed freely and easily with each other. However particular opprobrium was reserved for the underclass that lived in the dunny. Mrs Rosenberg, that unique ethnic creature, an Irish Jew bemoaned that they 'neither worked nor wanted'. My mother on the other hand, who had lived and worked in America, took a more liberal view; 'They were, poor, souls,' she would announce, 'merely feckless.'

Saturday was the highlight of the week. My father worked on Saturday morning and always banked up the coal fire before he left at seven o'clock. The kitchen was always warm and cosy when we were up and about. My first task, on awakening, was to check that he had left my picture money, enough money for a toffee bar and the admission to the local flee pit picture hall. One of these Saturdays stands out clearly and vividly to this day.

It was the Saturday after Buddy Holly died in February 1959. Not that I had any particular interest or affection for Buddy Holly, after all I was only a boy, and far too busy for all that. Read it in the paper, heard it about it on the wireless even seen it briefly on my aunties TV. It was on The News, just after the Lone Ranger and before The Buccaneers. In an age before half crazed pop adulation, his death passed almost without comment.

That Saturday morning was as bright a winter sunlight day as I can remember. The crisp early morning light flooded our back court and lit up the brewery building like a medieval keep, its massive shadow casting the dunny into an even more black melancholy pit. But hey! What did I care! This morning I was free to do anything, go anywhere and the afternoon, even better, the matinee movie in the Palace picture house was 'Earth versus Mars.' After a breakfast of a mug of tea and homemade soda bread covered with fresh rhubarb jam. I trotted happily downstairs to the quiet, chilly but sunny backcourt. It was 10 o'clock and I enjoyed the moment, for I knew within an hour that the back court would be busy as hell with kids playing, women hanging out washing, men reading papers, people hanging out windows, shouting, racket, noise. I had a tennis ball, well what once was a tennis ball, that I could play with alone for a while, until, that is, someone else appeared and demanded a shot or suggested at least more communal game like football or rounders. I was playing catch ball against the brewery wall when I heard a loud scratching noise from the dunny. I turned and walked across the back court, covering my eyes from the bright sunlight, to the iron railings that stopped the unwary from falling to the dark dunny below. I put my face against the railings, a hand on each side and peered across the twenty foot chasm that separated the two tenements. A window was open, and the fluttering, ragged remnants of a curtain pulled to one side. A young man, I had little concept of age at the time, any one older than me or went to big school was a man in my eyes, was standing gazing out the window. Suddenly the loudest noise I thought possible exploded from the window. It was Buddy Holly singing 'That'll be the Day'.

I can still remember that look on the young mans face. He was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at me, but didn't see me; he looked in a state of sad but bewildered ecstasy. The music was blaring from a brand new dansette portable record player. As the music finished there was activity and commotion in the further recesses of the room, I could make out a young woman and two small semi clad children scurrying about. Suddenly the window was closed, the same song put on again this time lower volume but there was more noise, kids wailing, arguing, someone crying,

I was aware of a shout behind me; it was young Dennis my pal from the next close shouting me over for a game of football. Before I left the railings I became suddenly aware of what my mother meant. My mother, or any of her acquaintance, would no sooner buy something as trivial as a record player than they would a grand piano for the back room. Yet this young man had gone out that morning and bought a brand new record player simply to play one song.

I often wonder how he felt in those few moments when he open his widow to play his song to the world - did he feel feckless or did he feel free?