We present an extract from Music and Mayhem, the new memoir by Keith Donald, saxophonist with pioneering Irish band Moving Hearts.
Music and Mayhem charts the immersive and explosive life of one of Ireland's most important musicians, and the golden decade of Irish music he was at the very centre of.
When I was ten in 1955, Aunt Biddy told her next-door neighbour about her nephew who played jazz on the recorder. The neighbour was a BBC producer and I was invited to play on a children's programme. Over the phone, someone asked what I wanted to play and I said, 'Lullaby of Birdland’, a jazz tune I had taught myself.
I thought about nothing except playing as well as I could and spent the journey on the trolleybus with my mother into central Belfast and Broadcasting House thinking about the tune and practising some improvisations in my head. I didn’t take in the surroundings – the huge edifice that was the BBC, the corridors, the people, the studio, its equipment.
‘Lullaby of Birdland’ has complex chords but, in my naivety, I thought everyone would know it. Including the BBC pianist who didn’t. I suppose she thought some ten-year-old was coming in to play a nice wee lullaby so she didn’t ask for any rehearsal and I didn’t bring any sheet music because I’d never had it. A recipe for disaster, especially as the show went out live to the province.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen: Keith Donald talks to Ray D'Arcy on RTÉ Radio 1
Someone gave me a hand cue, I launched into the tune and straightaway noticed the look of panic on the pianist’s face as her hands hovered in indecision over the keys for ages. Then she had to either commit or else admit defeat. She began to play. Were we even in the same key? If anyone was listening they would have endured the most horrendous, cacophonous jazz ever broadcast, chords clashing with improvisation, the logical beauty of George Shearing’s tune shattered crotchet by crotchet.
But I’d done something that people appeared to find remarkable. I had made my parents proud. It’s possible nobody had ever heard jazz tackled by recorder and piano so they didn’t know what to expect. Maybe the very fact of it happening made it ok, justified it.
Soon after the BBC, I got some blood disorder that confined me to bed for months, lying in a tunnel that Dad had made of wire so that bedclothes wouldn’t touch my skin that had erupted with boils, all over me, up to ten at a time. They would start tiny and grow into excruciating lumps the size of a big coin. Then they’d pour blood that was almost black. Not nice but I made the best of it, reading book after book and increasing my recorder repertoire exponentially.
Mum was so good to me then. She was good to all of us, always, but my suffering and her caring created something very special between us.
The first of a long series of doomed romances happened in my last year of primary school when I was pre-puberty, ten years old.
She was Josie. Her face was more freckles than skin and she seemed determined to retreat behind her hair. But I liked the freckles so I asked where she lived and could I walk her home. Our walks to the Holywood Arches, near where she lived, became regular, at least once a week. Totally innocent, we’d chat about school and the people in it. Gradually she forgot about hiding her freckles. Then one day she asked me in and I met her parents, down-to-earth, friendly, working-class adults. This went on for months. We never held hands or kissed, probably because I never thought of it.
One afternoon I was walking out the school gates with a boy whose family milk business overlooked the school grounds.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said.
I followed him into the milk yard and we stood behind a line of electric milk floats, peering through a hedge into the school grounds. There was a circle of kids, nine, ten, eleven years old, in a sheltered grassy area. They were all cheering and shouting at something on the ground.
‘They’re here most days after school. What do you think they’re doing?’ asked the milkman’s son.
Then the crowd parted momentarily and we could see two kids on the ground, a boy on top of a girl, fully clothed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, for I had no idea.
This was something I knew nothing about and did not like the look of. Suddenly we could see their faces and I felt pinpricks of shock all over when I recognised Josie’s sweet freckled face laughing, revelling in the attention, having more fun than she’d ever shown with me.
‘Are you OK? You look like you saw a ghost,’ said my schoolmate.
‘Yes I’m fine,’ I lied, for there was too much to tell and I didn’t know how to tell it, so I told nobody. My walks with Josie stopped. My interest in girls curled up and hibernated for years.
Some months later I had my first drink. I was eleven. Mum and Dad had a Christmas party for the neighbours and my aunts and their families. I was given the job of barman and waiter, taking drinks orders and ferrying trays of drinks from kitchen to sitting room. Curious, I added a couple of gins that nobody had asked for and took a detour to my bedroom. I downed them rapidly and carried on. Nothing much happened except I now knew I didn’t like the taste.
Then whoooosh!
A wonderful physical rush followed by the removal of all cares. My customary tension replaced with social confidence. For the first time ever I felt at ease with people, even able to be funny around adults. Of course I took more detours, utterly prepared to tolerate the bad taste if I could get more of this anaesthetic cure-all.
I’d found another escape route.
Being abused as a child means you can never go home again, if home is a secure haven characterised by trust and love. The calmness of a good home is a state of mind that’s now gone. You can’t get home and it makes you edgy and rattled, not good with people, even less good with yourself. Then along comes alcohol, and for a while it masquerades as a new home you can visit, an alternative home with fake warmth and treacherous affection, a new home that the addict mistakes for home home. Then you need more and more alcohol to get to the new home. And the journey home becomes dodgy, full of peril and unpredictable danger, riddled with insidious lies told by others and yourself. I see that now. When I was eleven, all I knew was that it helped.
Music and Mayhem is published by The Lilliput Press
If you have been affected by issues raised in this story, please visit: www.rte.ie/helplines
