TRUMPTY DUMPTY’S 51ST KISS MY ASS

Thunder & Rain

How It Got Here

In late 1988 I was working in the UK with people like multi-instrumentalist Sam Harley, harmony singers The Braithwaite Brothers, bassist/singer/songwriter Joe Cang, and engineer (now producer) Robin Evans making demos of the songs I was writing then. These songs were to have been part of an album that unfortunately never got made.

From time to time I would walk from Soho, where I spent my days, down to Canada House on Trafalgar Square to read the Canadian papers. In one of them I found a story about an Irish-Canadian named O’Reilly from up near Georgian Bay who was more or less dragooned into the British Army to fight in the War of 1812-1814 against the invading Americans. If memory serves, I invented the ‘John Paul’ to go with O’Reilly.

When I was a boy, my father, my mother and sometimes my uncles and aunts, would spend a long weekend or two every year, en masse, visiting the old military forts that run up and down the St Lawrence and the lower Great Lakes. These are the forts from which British and Canadian forces fought the invading Americans to a standstill from 1812-1814. Perhaps the most famous of them is in Kingston, where university students work every day of the summer for enthralled tourists giving a creditable imitation of the British army and its supporting Canadian irregulars who together defeated the Americans.

My father, my mother and all my uncles but one – who was medically unfit – were veterans of the whole of World War ll. I’m especially proud that my Mum signed up with the WRENS the day after my Dad signed up with the Royal Canadian Army (as it then was), which was the day after Britain declared war on Germany. My Dad, all my uncles and aunts and all four of my grandparents tried to get my Mum to change her mind, since at that time there was a lot of resistance from all quarters to women in the military. My family lived in Timmins, Ontario, a gold mining town, each side of the family having gone there when they ‘lost it all’ during the Great Depression.

When my Dad told my Mum he’d just enlisted she said: “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. If you think I’m staying up here while you go off to war, you’re wrong.” He let it rest, never for a second suspecting that the next morning she’d be doing exactly what he’d just done. She spent the war in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on HMCS Cornwallis, the preeminent training vessel for the Canadian navy throughout the war.

So the family’s shared years of military service and their intense love for Canada, and for great Britain as well, led them to be robustly proud of their parts in the war. These are the main elements in their wish to have their kids see how early in its history Canada had been forced into war, and why Canadians fought so fiercely.

But just beneath this pride in their own achievements was a somewhat jocular, but not entirely light-hearted, delight in rubbing the noses of the American tourists we inevitably ran into on our tours of the old forts in the fact of our historic victory over them in the distant past. During WW2, the American forces were much better provisioned, much better armed, much better uniformed and a great deal fresher than Allied forces in Europe, who had been fighting for four years before the Americans joined in. As a predictable result, and along with a sense of genuine camaraderie, Canadian military men nursed a certain amount of jealousy and resentment of ‘the Yanks’.

All this was in my mind as I read O’Reilly’s story in Canada House that day in 1988. For a long time, I had been wanting to write a tune with a Canadian theme that matched the rousing spirit of Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans”. My dream was to write such a song and then offer it to Stompin’ Tom Connors, who would of course at once record it and make it into a hit!!! As I walked back to Soho, the tempo of my footsteps on the sidewalk made a rhythm I couldn’t shake.

By the time I reached The Coach & Horses, long the haunt of the celebrated drunkard and writer – in that order – Jeffrey Bernard, and of a hundred lesser literary and artistic lights, I had the chorus. After a quick pint for me and his habitual double vodka and lime for Bernard, downed with his equally habitual Bukowskian insults, the verses started to assert themselves. Borrowing Bernard’s pen, I wrote them with some difficulty on the inside of a pack of Lucky Strike which I ripped apart for the purpose. It was a shit pen.

The Coach was just closing, but The Colony Room, called simply ‘Muriel’s’ by longtime habitués of the place, since the long-dead Muriel Belcher, self-outed lesbian avant la lettre and in some ways Francis Bacon’s closest friend, had founded it. Bernard, the exceedingly weird but great literary publisher Peter Owen, Soho’s own adopted felon Brian The Burglar (Brian Law) and yours truly ambled over to the club. Or, in Bernard’s and Law’s cases, tottered over.

When we entered, Bernard bellowed to Bacon, who was downing champagne at a rate of knots, that ‘this Canadian git’ had just scrawled the worst folk song ever on a fag packet. Bacon demanded that I should at once sing it. In the Colony one did whatever Francis Bacon demanded, in no small measure because he could be as cruel as Lady Macbeth, but without the remorse, if his whims weren’t acted upon with gusto. I made it through a verse and chorus before starting to laugh uncontrollably. Bacon insisted wit leaden irony that every patron in the place applaud. I think they all did, for the same reason I sang!!!

And that was the first public performance of Thunder & Rain.

David Hallam