Slaughterhouse 7

Me and Sousaphone, 1973

When I was seven years of age my step father sent me to boarding school. It seemed normal enough, though painful, and I took the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they came; that's what children do. I look back on my decade in English boarding schools and wonder: what were they thinking? The schools grew up in response to the need for colonial administrators in public service around the world, polishing the sun as it refused to set on the British Empire. Their children were herded in institutions of greater or lesser nastiness while their parents suppressed natives and sent home the products of all that far flung administration. Heart of Darkness wasn't in it.

Aerial View, Downside School, Stratton-on-the-Fosse

What these schools are doing in the 21st century I can hardly imagine, in a world where science has convinced me, childless though I am, that a solid close knit family upbringing is the best way to encourage level headed future citizens. Instead these places continue to adapt and create the background for Harry Potter and the benefits of magic. That they serve the scions of the wealthiest just makes their existence even weirder- they're not meant to be prisons they are supposed to release the inner fully rounded man (and woman in these enlightened days). Downside School in southeast England specializes in producing young Christian gentlemen, which it would, as the 600 pupils are attached to the Benedictine Abbey which operates the school.In the summer of 1973 my mother finally succumbed to the cancer that had been eating her brain and I returned to school to find consolation as best I could. My trombone classes were my escape and I would retire to the men's toilet at the school Theater and blat away at the Marine Corps anthem and "Silent Night" in B flat. The music school lacked rehearsal space and we used any and every available room to practice our dismal trade.

L-R Chuff, Simon McCall, Me

And then Kevin Byrne crashed the Music School like a Greenpeace protester at a whaler's convention. He rounded up the first few musicians he encountered and luckily for me he need to pee that morning and found me practicing assiduously in my hidey hole. So I became the second trombonist in a new experiment that was intended to make musicians of us and give us the appreciation of jazz we had so far never been exposed to.

We'd never been exposed to anyone like Chuff either- so called for his love of steam engines. He drank Real Ale, ran toy trains, ran everywhere with a limp ( I may be wrong but I think it was a motorcycle accident that gave him a scar on his shin). He could listen to a piece of music, throw it down on a few pages of handwritten scrawl, transpose it for harmonium and perform it on any musical instrument you'd care to name. He loved music and he loved teaching and he made life worth living for this accidental tuba player. I became a tuba player becuase this boy graduated and left the school, else I probably would never have had the opportunities I did:

As second trombonist I was a fairly obscure sound, in a room full of eager players but when the sainted Bernie left school I was promoted to fill his shoes. Bernie broke his arm (as seen above) and spent his musical season playing the sousaphone left handed, expertly, and I had to fill impossible shoes with my minuscule musical talents. My struggles to learn to support the band playing jazz and religious hymns, not to mention theater work and military music, kept me hard at it, and in a school where nothing much seemed to make sense, music gave me my my place in school and I earned modest renown as the man with the silver coil round his neck.

My role in all that stuff was very modest and just how modest was amply illustrated for me recently when the USPS dropped a package off at my house containing a printed summary of 34 years of musical tradition at Downside School.

It turns out the school is edging Chuff aside after decades of making music and thousands of miles traveled. "Internationally Renowned" is no exaggeration. When I played with the Slaughterhouse 7 we traveled no further afield than Wiltshire, but in the decades since, Chuff's energy has taken the musicians to Malta, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, South Africa, Chicago in 1987:Then there was Fiji and a performance at Sydney's Opera House. And raised millions for charity.

It was always a vague plan to go back to Downside and pay a visit to the Band Room, the place where I can fairly say I got a leg up on the rest of my life, but now it's all gone. Progress has swept away the traditional jazz refuge that Chuff gave us, the breath of clean fresh air is drowned by a stuffy need for test scores and scholarships up the educational ladder, and so Downside goes back to the stultifying world Chuff saved me from so many years ago, in the boys loo at the School Theater. The sounds of the iPod have drowned the squawks of the students' horns and learning ain't what it used to be. And I never did take the time to wander down memory lane. Too late! No matter how hard I try I still manage to miss the bus from time to time in Life's unravelling of Time.Lo! A thought! Now at last, my wife knows exactly how it is that I occasionally manage to surprise her by knowing the words to traditional jazz standards and why New Orleans, pre-Katrina, always appealed so much to me.

Chuff left his mark, and I doubt he has any idea how profound it is.