Double Bill (Text Only)

Dad may not have achieved his dearest wish and flown in combat, but he and the band were subject to the dangers of travelling around Britain during the war, playing as they did in towns and cities that got a pasting from the German air force. In Plymouth, both the theatre where they were appearing and the hotel where they were staying went up in flames. The band got out just in time and spent the night on the moors overlooking the city. Dad was having supper at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool when it was hit by a bomb. He escaped injury and for the rest of the night travelled backwards and forwards on the Mersey ferry, on the principle that it was harder to hit a moving target.

During the blitz, a bomb dropped in the garden of our Willesden house and blew the front off, so we had to move out. We stayed at Farnham Common for a while with a good friend of my father’s, Jimmy Philips, who was a music publisher. We eventually found a house nearby and we’d frequent the local pub, the Dog and Pot. It was there that my father and Jimmy first heard a German song which was a favourite of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert. The Eighth Army lads had adopted and adapted it, adding some pretty ribald words. Both Jimmy and my father were struck by the tune and got a song writer called Tommy Connor to put some lyrics to it. It was called ‘Lili Marlene’ and became immortal.

At about this time Leslie Grade, who had become my father’s agent, went into the RAF. His brother Lew took over the agency and with his other brother, Bernard Delfont, created one of the greatest show-business dynasties of the century. The Grade organisation represented Dad until he died. There were plenty of heated discussions between client and agent over the years. Leslie used to tell the story of my dad pitching up in his office and demanding more work in London. When he was told that there weren’t any more theatres left, that they were either booked up or bombed out, Dad hit the roof and shouted that he’d had enough, their partnership was forthwith dissolved. As Dad stormed out of the door Leslie shouted, ‘You’ll be back!’ – and sure enough, he was. He’d left his hat behind.

In spite of having in Leslie Grade one of the best agents in the business, my father’s career took a dip in the immediate postwar period and he seriously considered giving up the entertainment business and buying a garage. The problem was that the Billy Cotton Band seemed to have been around for ever; there was a dated feel to their music compared with that of orchestras such as the Ted Heath Band and the Squadronaires who had first formed ad hoc as groups of musicians serving together in the forces, then decided to stick together when they were demobbed. To the millions who had served in the forces these were the exciting and evocative sounds of the hectic war years, whereas Dad’s band, having been playing since the twenties, seemed to belong to a sedate era that had vanished for ever.

I remember going with him to the Streatham Empire where he was playing to a half-empty theatre and worrying whether his share of the box-office takings would pay the musicians’ wages. The truth was that live variety was dying – though ironically television was responsible for its resurrection and my father, having suffered through its declining years, was one of the chief beneficiaries when a bright new age dawned.

To add to the family’s problems, my brother while in the RAF had been posted to Burma where he contracted first malaria and then TB. After a long convalescence at the famous Baragwanath Hospital in South Africa, Ted came home, was demobbed and got a job in the film industry. Then TB broke out in his other lung, at which point my father flew him out to Switzerland, which as a result of its crystal-clear and unpolluted mountain air had become a leading centre for the treatment of the disease. Following intensive care, Ted went back to work again, but the family always had some anxiety about his health – as it turned out, with good reason.

In desperate need of work, Dad went to the BBC to see an Australian called Jim Davidson who was at that time Assistant Head of Light Entertainment. Jim proposed some radio work on different days of each week. This was no good to Dad because he played all round the country, often in towns a long distance from the nearest radio studio. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to abandon live variety and keep the band in existence just for one broadcast a week. Jim Davidson thought for a moment and then said, ‘How about a show on Sunday mornings?’ This was a startling proposal. The BBC was still shrouded in Reithian gloom on Sundays, the founder of the BBC having decreed that no programmes should be broadcast which might distract churchgoing listeners from holy things. And the Billy Cotton Band with its raucous leader hardly qualified as a suitable religious offering. But Jim Davidson decided to take the risk and booked the band to do half a dozen shows at ten-thirty on Sunday mornings.

The show was an immediate success, though the strain on Dad and the band was immense. After a hard week on the road, they often had to travel through the night to get to the BBC studio by seven o’clock on Sunday morning for rehearsals. My father was to claim later that his famous catch phrase ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ was born when he arrived at the studio one Sunday morning to find the members of the band nodding with weariness in their chairs. ‘Oi, come on,’ he roared. ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ Noting its tonic effect on everyone in the studio, the producer suggested that that’s how the show should begin. Far from being outraged by The Billy Cotton Band Show, the representatives of the churches on the BBC’s religious advisory committee felt that the programme sent people off to church in an upbeat, cheerful mood. There was, though, the odd Puritan who believed that broadcast dance music on the Sabbath was the work of the devil. One Lancashire vicar was reported in the press as telling his congregation, ‘The choice is yours, Billy Cotton or the Almighty!’ Dad was flattered by the comparison. The Church’s only concern was the programme’s timing, which clashed with most church services which began somewhere between ten and eleven. The BBC then proposed that the programme should be moved to one-thirty, Sunday lunchtime, when families traditionally all gathered round their tables in convivial mood. It was this decision which transformed my father from being a fading band-leader into a national institution. Whole generations grew up and grew old associating the sound of The Billy Cotton Band Show with the smell of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

One unexpected side-effect of the radio show’s success was that Dad’s theatre bookings perked up again. Leslie Grade booked the band for a four-week tour with Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea. The show was called Tess and Bill, and ran for more than two years. Both Dad and Tessie were larger than life personalities – hugely so in Tessie’s case – and they got on well together. They toured all round the country to packed theatres and were at one about everything but money. Tessie had a much shrewder appreciation of Dad’s radio popularity than he had himself, and decided she’d take a percentage of the box office, whereas he preferred a fixed fee. Tessie’s instinct paid off and the tour made her very rich, until she made a fatal miscalculation. They had worked all the London suburban theatres, from Edgware to Hackney and New Cross to Lewisham, then Tessie proposed a final visit to the Victoria Palace – a West End theatre with an enormous coach trade. Dad felt that Londoners who’d paid four and sixpence to see them in the suburbs wouldn’t shell out twelve and sixpence for a repeat performance at the Victoria Palace, and he was right. Tessie lost a lot of money and Tess and Bill eventually split up.

Dad was soon drawing big crowds on the strength of the huge popularity his radio show had given him. Initially he had no interest in television, which began developing into a mass medium once the war was over. With the exception of a couple of Royal galas – celebrating the Coronation, and then the Queen’s return from Australia – he refused invitations to appear. His reasons for doing so were strictly commercial: so long as the BBC had monopoly of television, their fees would remain unrealistically low – too low, Dad decided, to make it worth his while to put together elaborate programmes which could be used on only one occasion. Once the public had seen a show, that was that, he thought. Radio was different: the listeners were curious to see in the flesh the performers they had come to love. It was the arrival of ITV which changed his mind.

Meanwhile I had left school and toured the country with Dad while I waited to be called up for National Service. For Ted’s twenty-first birthday, Dad bought him a brand-new MG Midget, in those days virtually the only mass-produced sports car on the market. A few months later, Dad and I were driving through Coventry and stopped off at a garage for petrol. There in the garage’s showroom was a brand-new fire-engine-red MG. I was gazing at it longingly when Dad came up and said, ‘By the way, that’s your car. Look after it.’

Later he told me that Ted had felt uncomfortable about having a state-of-the-art sports car while I was driving a clapped-out pre-war Fiat Topolino. He lobbied Father to get me one for my eighteenth birthday. What a way to get your first car, and how typical of both Ted and my father’s generosity of spirit! I was a very lucky lad, and knew it.

My father loved cars, every type of car, from Rolls Bentley through Aston Martin to Jaguars and Mercedes and the latest line in runabouts. He had a Morris Minor which we called ‘Leapin Leaner’: it leaned when he got in and it leaped when he got cat! One day I was in his office when he received a phone call from Jack Barclay, the distributor for Rolls Royce and Bentley in Hanover Square. Jack invited him for a sherry. When we arrived at the showroom there was a magnificent Rolls Bentley gleaming in its newness and with the number-plate BC 1. Dad took one look and said, ‘I’ll have it.’ The sherry was swapped for champagne and joy was unconfined – until they produced the invoice. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘It’s the number-plate I want – I’ve got a Bentley and you sold it to me!’ Jack Barclay took it very well and gave the old man the number-plate. BC 1 was on many a car until Dad died.

I was eventually called up, and joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in late 1946 when the world was comparatively peaceful. On the basis that I preferred to ride than walk – especially with full equipment on my back – I was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as a transport officer.

The only truly terrifying thing that happened to me during my military service was my encounter with the legendary Regimental Sergeant-Major Brittain on the parade ground at Mons Barracks, Aldershot. He was a fearsome sight and had a voice that could shatter glass at half a mile. One exchange with him when I was dozy on parade still lingers in my memory.

RSM: ‘Are you a spiritualist, sir?’

Me: ‘No, sir.’

RSM: ‘Well, you’ve got your head on an ethereal plane, your body in the West End, and your feet are just about in Aldershot. Put him in the guard room.’

Long after I left the army, I met the RSM again. I was producing a record show for television and a girl singer known as Billie Anthony had a new record out called ‘Fall in for Love’, on which Brittain, long since retired from the army, appeared at the beginning of the song bellowing the command, ‘Fall in for love!’ So we booked Billie Anthony and also Mr Brittain to perform the song live in the studio. When Britten arrived I went up to him and said, ‘I have waited a long time to say this, sir. Stand there and don’t move till I tell you.’

The only time I fired a shot and hit a live target was not during my army career but shortly afterwards. We were staying at Sandbanks for Christmas, and there was quite a big house party that included the composer and impresario Noel Gay. We used to go sailing every day, and on this occasion I took with me a four-ten shotgun to shoot shag, the voracious green cormorant. Fifty yards off our port bow, a beautiful swan gave us a disdainful glance and then lazily spread its wings to take off. Jokingly, I said, ‘I’ll ginger him up,’ and fired quite casually into the air in the general direction of the bird. To my horror, this freak shot killed the swan outright. My father said, ‘That’s illegal. All swans belong to the Queen. You could go to gaol for that.’ Someone else suggested that ‘we’d better suppress the evidence’, so we pulled the body into the boat and cruised around until dusk fell. Then we went ashore and marched in single file up to the house, the swan over Dad’s back while the rest of us chanted the Seven Dwarfs’ ‘Heigh-ho’ song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

We found Noel Gay dozing on a settee in the sitting-room. ‘Look, Noel,’ someone shouted, ‘a Christmas goose.’ Noel opened one eye. ‘I never eat goose,’ he confided and went back to sleep. Just so he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun, we decided to stow the swan in the boot of his car, until Christmas night, when we all dressed in dinner jackets and boarded a dinghy to bury the swan at sea. The corpse was tied to a trawler drag and heaved overboard. We underestimated its weight: all that happened was the swan’s neck went under and its bottom bobbed up. I doubt whoever found it with an iron bar round its neck would think it had died a natural death.

Dad was at his most exuberant on holiday at Sandbanks, when laughter, joking and frenzied activity surrounded him. Next door to our house was the Royal Motor Yacht Club whose Commodore was an ex-naval officer called Bersey, a splendid man but a stickler for protocol. Every morning at eight o’clock a saluting gun would be fired and a Blue Ensign run to the masthead. It so happened that in the garage of his Sandbanks house Dad kept a whole load of old stage-props, including the Soviet flag, the Hammer and Sickle, which had been used for a stage song called ‘Comrades’. This was in the early days of the Cold War when the former camaraderie between Russia and the West had evaporated.

One morning the steward came out of the club house, checked his watch, fired the saluting gun, tied the furled Ensign to the halyard and looked up to see the Hammer and Sickle already flying proudly from the masthead. He dashed inside and brought out the apoplectic Commodore in his dressing-gown. The local constabulary was called in just in case the Russians were planning an invasion of the Bournemouth area and had landed an advance raiding party. About a year later, the Commodore came up to my father who was drinking in the Club verandah. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who put that Russian flag up,’ he spluttered.

I was demobbed in the latter part of 1948. I had a place at Clare College, Cambridge but I didn’t fancy taking it up; the world of academia wasn’t for me. So I became slightly unfocused and, having nothing better to do, went on tour with Dad, protesting all the time that I really must set about getting a career. He couldn’t see the problem. He’d say, ‘You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ and point out that we enjoyed each other’s company; he was doing very well financially and I was very useful to him. That was debatable. I had two main tasks: one was to act as his chauffeur; the other to reconnoitre every town the band was visiting to find out which cinemas might be showing cowboy Western films in the afternoons.

I went to enormous trouble to locate these local flea pits where Dad would sit down assuring me we were in for a treat. Before the opening titles had finished running, his head would drop onto his chest and he’d snore his way through the entire film. Having woken up, he’d take off in search of a cup of tea, murmuring appreciation of a film he’d never seen. That happened again and again.

During this period, my father took a week off which happened to coincide with the British Grand Prix for Formula One racing cars. He suggested we drive up to Silverstone to watch the practice laps for the great event. Since pre-war days, he had been a member of the prestigious British Racing Drivers’ Club, so he knew most of the personalities in the motor racing game. He also displayed proudly on his radiator the Brooklands 120 mph badge commemorating the occasion he clocked a lap at 123.89 mph in an MG and became one of a very select group.

We waved goodbye to my mother who fondly imagined that Dad was going to the Grand Prix as an interested spectator. When we arrived at Silverstone, Dad sought out Wilkie Wilkinson who used to prepare his racing cars before the war and had joined forces with a couple of wealthy up and coming drivers to form an ERA (English Racing Automobile) team. It soon became clear that Dad had arranged beforehand to drive one of Wilkie’s cars.

I was dumbfounded. Dad was forty-nine years of age and suffered from high blood pressure. I watched in amazement as he got his crash hat and visor out of the boot of our car, put them on, and drove off round the circuit. He clocked up a respectable if not spectacular lap time and on returning to the pits said that since there were still four days of practice before the big race he’d plenty of time to sharpen up. On the drive back home he said nonchalantly, ‘Best not to tell your mother about this, she’ll only worry.’

And so this charade went on throughout the rest of the week. Each morning at breakfast he’d spin some yarn about his plans for the day and Mother would nod, apparently understandingly – until Saturday, the day of the race, when she cut short Dad’s fanciful musings. She said, ‘I don’t mind you not telling me you’re driving in a motor race today, it’s the insinuation that I can’t read that upsets me. The story’s in every newspaper, including the fact that I’m not supposed to know about it. So off you go and if you kill yourself I’ll never talk to you again. And don’t come home stinking of petrol as you’ve done every day this week.’

In the actual race he did remarkably well. He was due to take the car over at the halfway point when it stopped to refuel. Just before the car arrived at the pit, the petrol bowser drew up and through some fault starting spewing fuel under pressure all over the place. Dad was crouched on the pit counter ready to jump into the car as soon as it arrived and so got a face-wash of high-octane petrol. His goggles were soaked and he obviously couldn’t see clearly. I begged him not to get into the car, but he said, ‘If you think I’m missing this, you’re out of your mind,’ and off he went. He started slowly but the wind soon blew away the petrol film on his goggles and he finished the race a creditable fourth. Some of the legendary pre-war drivers, George Easton, John Cobb and Earl Howe, came up to congratulate him and they all agreed that he’d taught the youngsters a thing or two and shown there was still life in old dogs. However, the strain had obviously taken its toll on him and on the way home he confided in me regretfully that he was hanging up his helmet and goggles. His part-time career as a racing driver was over.

TWO (#ulink_bcd0484d-ab2f-52b6-ac15-903e340ac44a)

When I came out of the army, the Cotton family had a house on the Thames, at Old Windsor. There was a whole colony of showbiz people living on Ham Island, and one of them, Reginald Armitage, better known as Noel Gay, was a great friend of my father and mother. He was a successful music publisher who also wrote best-selling songs: ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Round the Marble Arch’, ‘There’s Something about a Soldier’, ‘The Fleet’s in Port Again’, ‘Hey! Little Hen’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’ – just the kind of music my father’s band played best. One day Noel Gay invited me for a trip up river on his launch. I set out unemployed and I came back with a job as a song-plugger for the Noel Gay Music Company based in Denmark Street, better known as Tin Pan Alley.

In these jargon-ridden days, song-pluggers would be known as exploitation men. This was a time when many people still had pianos in their front-rooms and made their own music. They’d go along to a Littlewoods store and there in the music department would be a song-plugger sitting at a piano inviting them to buy the song he was playing. If you strolled down Denmark Street in the summer when office windows were open, you’d hear a piano in every room bashing out the publisher’s latest song for the benefit of singers, band-leaders and anyone else who might perform or broadcast it. The song-plugger spent his life trying to bribe, cajole and persuade performers to include his songs in their programmes, which in turn created a market for the sheet music.

We paid special attention to bands and artists who had spots on radio. Record programmes were becoming a big thing in the broadcasting schedules – there was Jack Jackson’s Record Round-up on a Saturday night, for example, which played many records and helped to create some hits. The ultimate goal was to get your song played in programmes like his or Two-Way Family Favourites, Housewives’ Choice or The Billy Cotton Band Show. We’d even shell out a fiver, which was a lot of money in those days, to get hold of an advance copy of the Radio Times to find out which stars and bands were scheduled to appear on air a couple of weeks later. Then we could badger them to play our music. The band-leader Geraldo was a very big star at that time; he was always on the air, so if you could get him to add one of your songs to his repertoire you were quids in. Another target of the song-pluggers was a vocal group called the Keynotes who had a weekly spot on a radio show called Take it from Here. And at that time every self-respecting cinema had a resident organist. There was a regular spot on the BBC’s Light Programme at around ten o’clock two or three times a week, which was dedicated to cinema organ music, so organists like Reginald Dixon and Robinson Cleaver were among the song-pluggers’ favourite prey.

The seamy side of the industry was the payment of ‘plug-money’ to bribe artists to sing or play particular songs. A popular singer called Issy Bonn used to start at the top of Denmark Street and call on the music publishers one by one, telling them he had a number of radio engagements coming up and asking if they would they like him to sing one of their songs. He invited them to put their responses in a plain brown envelope. Eventually the BBC, which was still the only domestic broadcaster around, put a stop to plug-money by warning performers they would be banned from the airwaves if they were caught taking bribes. But there was an atmosphere of desperation about the whole business as records became more and more popular and the sales of sheet music plummeted.

When I first joined Noel Gay, I had business cards printed with my name, William F. Cotton, inscribed on them. One day I tried to get to see the band-leader Oscar Rabin to sell him a song. I gave my card to his secretary who returned it to me smartish saying that Mr Rabin was far too busy to see me. Oscar was a good friend of my father’s but I took his refusal philosophically and was just leaving when he came out of his office.

‘Hello, Bill,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘I’m a song-plugger for Noel and I popped in on the off chance you might be interested in our latest number, but you were too busy to see me,’ I said.

He looked puzzled and then said, ‘So you’re William F. Cotton! For heaven’s sake, don’t embarrass your dad’s friends by not letting on who you are. You’re not William F. Cotton, you’re Billy Cotton Junior. That’s what your card should say.’

Thus was my identity in show business fixed by my relationship to my father, and though he’s been dead for more than thirty years, I’m still conscious of being the junior member of a wonderful though sometimes stormy partnership.

I didn’t work for Noel Gay for very long. Noel had brought his son Richard Armitage into the firm at the same time as I joined, and although Richard and I got on very well – indeed, he was among my dearest friends to the day he died – there wasn’t really room for two apprentices in the business and I wasn’t learning much, so I moved over to Chappell’s in Bond Street, which was run by two American brothers, Max and Louis Dreyfus. They were probably the biggest music publishers in the world at that time, so song-plugging was a serious part of their operation. A chap called Teddy Holmes was the boss of a whole army of song-pluggers and he kept us on the hop; we must have made three or four visits every night to theatres and broadcasting and television studios.

One of the great things about working for Chappell’s was that they controlled the music for most of the big American musicals around at that time. Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel … name any Broadway show, Chappell’s would probably have the rights to it. I put some of these American songs my father’s way. The very first, I recall, was ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. Played by a pianist called Bill Snyder, it had gone to the top of the Hit Parade in the States and the Billy Cotton Band was among the first to play it in Britain. At that time Chappell’s had an office in St George’s Street above which there was a flat where a very young and gorgeous Joan Collins lived with her lover at the time. It was a volatile relationship; they clearly didn’t always see eye to eye. We in Chappell’s office could tell this was the case because it wasn’t only sparks that used to fly above our heads – I remember hearing plenty of furniture and crockery being smashed. That’s perhaps how the delectable Joan trained for some of her later roles.

It wasn’t all hard grinding labour – we started a show-business football team. One of our numbers was a big strong Scots lad who was in the chorus of South Pacific. He wasn’t all that good a footballer but he made a super special agent. His name was Sean Connery. Eventually the showbiz football team became famous and had a star-studded line-up: Tommy Steele, Kenny Lynch, Glen Mason and Ronnie Carroll all played for us regularly. Ronnie had been in the Northern Ireland youth team but by the time he joined us his footballing brain was having ideas his body couldn’t cope with.

I was sharing a flat in London with Gerry Kunz, a childhood friend whom I’d met again in the Army. Gerry’s father Charlie was the famous pianist, and he was a great friend of my father’s. We lived in London during the week and spent the weekends at our respective parents’ homes. One day Gerry said to me, ‘Can you lend me a fiver?’ I asked him why he needed it. Solemnly, he replied, ‘Because I want to take out the girl I’d love to marry.’ Until that moment I didn’t know of her existence. I hadn’t a spare fiver but I did offer to get him a couple of free tickets to my father’s show at the Victoria Palace. I was off to play football but I said casually that I’d pop round to the theatre after the game and perhaps we could persuade my father to take us all out to supper. My offer may have sounded offhand but I was consumed with curiosity about this girl. Unfortunately, during the game someone kicked me in the ribs and afterwards I was in too much pain to pay much attention to her.

That Christmas, Gerry spent Christmas with the Cottons and then in my red MG we drove down together to his family in Middleton for New Year. On New Year’s Day we were invited to a party at the home of Gerry’s girlfriend. Her name was Bernadine Maud Sinclair but she was universally known as Boo – a nursery pet name derived from her Norfolk nanny’s insistence she was a ‘booty’. This party was the climax of a highly alcoholic festive season – I vaguely recall at some point drinking gin from a tea pot. I was already fairly merry when I got to the party. I was chatting to the girl I had taken there, looked up and saw Boo standing on the other side of the room in a grey dress with a rope belt round it. It was a moment of revelation; it was as though I was seeing her for the first time, and I was bowled over. I went over to her and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to marry me?’ She grinned and said, ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’ ‘All right,’ I replied, ‘I’ll ask you again when I’m sober.’

As these parties do, we moved on to someone else’s house and eventually staggered home to bed, but at eight-thirty a.m. sharp I was up and in my right mind and presented myself at Boo’s house again. Her mother’s housekeeper opened the door, obviously not amused that I was disturbing the family at such an hour. She closed the door in my face and left me standing on the doorstep while she went to fetch Boo, who said, ‘Hello, what do you want?’ I replied, ‘Well, I’ve just come to say that I’m now stone-cold sober and will you marry me?’ She laughed and said, ‘No, but I’ll give you a cup of tea.’ The family was at breakfast, and her stepfather, who harboured the deepest suspicions about the motives of any young man courting his stepdaughter, was less than cordial. But I’d learned a thing or two as a song-plugger about the art of ingratiating myself with people I needed a favour from, so I behaved towards Boo’s parents in a most deferential manner, calling her stepfather ‘sir’ and charming her mother with my sunny smile.

Boo had a pied-à-terre in London, a flat over the family’s undertaking business in Kentish Town, and every day I contrived somehow to propose to her either by letter or phone or face to face in the romantic setting of stacked coffins and blank tombstones. First I had to establish that my pal Gerry was not a contender for her affections. She quickly reassured me: she’d grown up with Gerry and it was one of those relationships that could never move beyond the stage of close friendship. A year or two older than me, Boo had served in the WRNS during the war and been engaged to an RAF officer, but the relationship didn’t survive the anti-climax of peacetime and they split up. She insisted she wasn’t looking to marry anyone at the moment, but that didn’t put me off my daily proposal ritual, and after my laying siege to her for about six months she finally surrendered.

I was ecstatic but slightly apprehensive about telling my parents. I knew my mother would be a pushover – Boo’s genuine charm was bound to win her over – but my father was a different matter. He had a very curious attitude to his sons’ girlfriends; it was almost as though he resented them for taking our attention away from him. So I summoned up my courage, picked up the phone and told him that I had got engaged and I’d like him to meet the girl. ‘Engaged?’ he growled. ‘What do you want to do that for?’ I’d no intention of getting into a pointless argument with him so I asked him if I could bring her along to the Brixton Empress where he was performing. ‘Fine,’ he said casually. I persisted. ‘Is there any chance you might take us out for a meal afterwards?’ No, he already had an arrangement. ‘Fine,’ I said casually, put the phone down and waited. Sure enough, he phoned back and said, ‘Your mother says I should take you out.’

I introduced Boo to Dad in his dressing-room. He was barely polite, though in mitigation it should be said he was always extremely nervous before a show, pacing the floor, clicking his fingers and wiping the sweat from his brow. Boo was quite unfazed by his cold manner. When we left him and went for a quick drink in the bar, she didn’t ask anxiously, ‘Do you think he liked me, and if not, why not?’ She was one of those poised, self-possessed personalities who are at peace with themselves. If Dad took against her, that was his problem, not hers.

After the show, we waited in a corridor while he changed. Then my mother turned up, obviously anxious things should go well. Dad decided to impress Boo with his importance by taking us to the exclusive Albany Club in Savile Row, which was run by a man called Bill Little who knew everyone who was anyone. As Billy Cotton, Britain’s most famous band-leader, friend of the stars, confidant of royalty, strutted in, Bill Little came hurrying up, but then to Dad’s astonishment and chagrin he swept right past him and greeted Boo like a long-lost friend, kissing her on both cheeks and enquiring how she and the family were. Dad couldn’t believe he was being upstaged by my girlfriend whose name he could barely remember. Later, in a heavy attempt at humour, he surveyed the menu and said gruffly, ‘Make the most of it, it’s the last time we’re coming here.’ Quick as a flash, Boo said sweetly, ‘If you can’t afford it, I’ll pay.’ It took time, but in the end they became close friends because Dad had to admire her independence of spirit and honesty.