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It was around 1989 and I was between girlfriends.
Before you put two and two together and make 69, no you have not suddenly
picked up the wrong magazine by mistake. By "between girlfriends",
I am not referring to one of the more esoteric and athletically demanding
exercises of the Kama Sutra. I simply mean just what it says: the last
girl was past tense, and the next, still in the future. So, being alone,
I did what thousands of others do: I scoured the personal ads.
And then my eyes fell on to this ad in The Spectator: "American academic
(f.40), shortly visiting Britain, wltm intelligent male with gsoh for
lasting friendship".
Well, if I had anything about me at all, I would not have replied. Had
she said "wanted – male with delusions of grandeur", then
maybe I should have been given pole position in the queue. But she didn’t:
she asked for intelligence and humour. My degree of the former can be
best summed up by the fact that, at 52, I still cannot speak more than
two or three sentences of any foreign language despite years of trying;
and as for the latter, when it comes to humour, I too only see jokes by
appointment ….. and even then, they need to have punch-lines that
are well flagged up!
But since when did "home-truths" ever get given house-room in
one’s OWN home? Needless to say, I replied with alacrity. Several
letters crossed the Atlantic between her home in a university city in
Illinois and my then home in the Welsh Valleys. She clearly had a light
on in her upstairs library. And then came the day when she arrived in
Britain for a "semester" (to use her word) at Oxford University.
She took up residence in a classy apartment right next to Folly Bridge
(no doubt known well to you "Inspector Morse" fans), and invited
me to stay for the weekend.
We met, we clicked, the "weekend" became a weekend (and not
an "arrive Friday for dinner and depart to be home by dawn Saturday")
and did the usual things visitors to Oxford do. Like countless undergraduates
past, we "walked the High"; we lingered on Magdalen Bridge; I took
her down to Iffley Road track to show her the point where Roger Bannister
had famously breasted the tape in that fraction UNDER four minutes; and
best of all, the Headington Shark. She hadn’t heard of Oxford’s
latest arrival. This was (is) a massive fibreglass shark that is cut into
the roof of a terraced house near the Oxford United football stadium.
I thought it then, and think it now (a dozen visits later to introduce
it to different friends) the greatest work of art I have ever seen ANYWHERE.
Nobody can sit on an upstairs toilet anymore after that! (Correction:
maybe that is the only place they CAN sit!).
Then, being the Professor of English she was, I thought I would also throw
in surprise visits to Orwell’s grave and the Adlestrop railway station
sign…..both less-than-serious drives away from Oxford. It all went
swimmingly until we started trading boozy a cappella "favourite songs"
at 2am on the Sunday morning.
No, it wasn’t the fact that she’d never heard of her compatriots
Cisco Houston, Derroll Adams, Hedy West and Utah Phillips. Heck, what
did that matter? No, the real defining moment in our short-lived relationship
came when I committed a howler of Dan Quayle proportions. This is how
it happened.
I had told her that my favourite song was Steve Goodman’s "City
of New Orleans". I’d started singing it for the twelfth time,
and got to the line "Off on a southbound odyssey", and then
stopped. There is a place mentioned in the next line, and you know how
it is when you have never seen it written down, you kinda spell it in
your head. In my HEAD it should have stayed. Alas, I unwisely blurted
out "How do you spell the place in the next line? Does it spell like
RANCOUR?"
She looked at me puzzled. "Does WHAT spell like rancour?"
"Well, CANCOUR QUAY of course!"
She twice asked me to repeat my question, then looked at me as though
I’d developed three heads. Trust me to have never have heard of the
epicentre of her neck of the woods.
"You mean you have never heard of Kankakee? K – A – N……"
She spelled the letters out slowly because now she realised that I was
a paid-up member of the dunces’ club. "It is a very large town
in Illinois, not too far from Chicago. I lived there for five years as
a child. I am astonished you do not know it. CANCOUR QUAY indeed!"
Somehow, the relationship was never the same afterwards. I think there
is a famous Bateman’s cartoon from the Punch of yesteryear, captioned
something like "The Bounder who passed the Port the wrong way".
There are all these shocked old buffers as some poor sod has gone the
wrong way down a one-way Etiquette Street.
Well likewise my American friend. She probably still has her jaw open
even NOW. How not to impress people, eh? If only I could have breathed
the words back in.
Why do I tell you all this? God knows….let’s think. Oh yes,
I know why I went down this particular alley. It was listening to Willie
Nelson’s version of "City of New Orleans" on Nick Barraclough’s
BBC radio programme the other night. Cor blimey! It was a moment of James
Dyson/Bob Dylan proportions: I could not believe my ears.
Goodman has this great line (after the train has picked up speed and is
heading south at a fair old lick) viz. "Passing towns that have no
name". It is a great image because, (a) to a traveller who does not
know the Mid West, these are truly ANONYMOUS towns, and (b) you know how
it is when an express train flashes through a little railway station:
try though you may, you cannot read the name on the station platform.
It is just a blur. So they truly are "towns that have no name".
But what did I distinctly hear Nelson sing? "Passing TRAINS that
have no name". I pinched myself. Fortunately the tape recorder was
operating, and not for the first time it came to my aid. I played the
tape back, and there it was clear as a bell: "passing TRAINS".
Well of course, it does work as an image (on the one hand there is the
famous "City of New Orleans" train, and on the other, there
are a myriad American commuter train equivalents of our Sprinter Trains….none
deemed worthy of a naming ceremony) …. but it only works on ONE level,
and not the two that Goodman surely intended. And to think I had always
thought Willie Nelson to be a smart guy in the grey matter department!
So, this got me feverishly checking on other cover versions of the song
in my possession. Goodman’s great buddy John Prine passes the test
(as I would have expected), but would you believe Arlo bloomin’ Guthrie
comes out with the same howler as Nelson. WHAT a pair of duffers! And
to think I had always rated them. They must have fried their brains on
a lot of bad acid in the Sixties to throw away a line like that.
I had always championed the Oral Tradition: i.e. songs being passed on
orally minus the sheet music, with lines being often inadvertently changed
(or deliberately "improved"!) along the way. But no more. Now
I want corporal punishment brought back for these two scoundrels…….not
to say BARBARIANS!
And suddenly my "Cancour Quay" faux pas paled into insignificance.
And I no more blush at my mistake. Instead I think fondly of the lady
who’d given me a "Beta Minus" that weekend, and wish her
well wherever she is now. And before I end this piece, I would like to
share with you something wonderfully warm and touching: something not
to do with HER per se, but rather with the one letter of hers that I still
have in my possession.
It is a US aerogramme. Especially printed to commemorate an event. My
hunch is that my friend found it so moving that she bought a whole bunch
of them, and was thus still using them some years later (when it came
to me).
The aerogramme commemorates the arrival of Halley’s Comet in 1985;
and that same year also marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the
great Mark Twain. On the cover there’s a fine colour painting of
the Author and a young Huckleberry Finn (or is it Tom Sawyer?) And there
follows this wonderful quotation from Twain: "I came in with Halley’s
Comet in 1835.
It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will
be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with
Halley’s Comet."
And remembering that it takes three quarters of a century for Halley’s
Comet to come around, here is the killer bit. Below the quote, they show
the great man’s dates. "Mark Twain 1835 to …….1910".
Lets just pray that Willie and Arlo are never let loose on words like
those that stir the soul. Mark Twain AND Steve Goodman, RIP.
Dai Woosnam
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