Read Online Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting - Free Book Online
Authors: Sting
Tags: General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, England, music, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Genres & Styles, Musicians, Rock Musicians, Composers & Musicians, Singers, Rock
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go to school. I’m bored there, and I find it easy to coerce my mother into letting me stay home. I think she is glad of my company, and after a statutory lying-in she’ll allow me to get up and help her with the housework, or to just sit and watch the fire. Sometimes I’ll close the curtains to a chink and watch the motes of dust floating like galaxies in the beams of the sun.
The Victorian building where we live is large and convoluted enough to find hiding places. A cupboard under the stairs becomes apriest hole, the space behind the dresser a hermit’s cave. I sit on the slate roof of the dairy like a sentinel and imagine the house under siege. I’m a dreamer and my mother recognizes this, and she also recognizes herself in the faraway stare of the traveler lost in the world beyond the window. I return to school the next day with one of my mother’s sick notes in my jacket pocket.
Sometimes a bank of fog rolls off the Tyne and you can’t see a yard in front of your face. I love walking to school on mornings like this, when the world has disappeared and the ruined sides of houses loom like the ghosts of ships, or on bright spring mornings when the moon is still visible, hanging palely in the blue sky like a pared fingernail. But also along my route is a bomb site from the war, street after street of burnt-out houses that the Luftwaffe mistook for the shipyard a decade and a half earlier. There are shattered wooden staircases leading nowhere, bedrooms cruelly exposed to the sky, sad hangings of old buckled wallpaper and the musty smell of decay, broken floors and cross beams, redolent of a crucifixion.
I love the romance and mystery of the ruined streets, but there is always an uncomfortable spooky undercurrent, a dread that such impermanence and desolation can easily tumble over the perimeter of the bomb site and engulf everything around it like a poisoned cloud.
There is a general election coming up and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and his Tory Party have a new poster campaign.
YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD , it says in the confident guise of graffiti.
The local Labour Party have created their own posters using the same Tory slogan but crossing out the last two words.
It reads, YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT .
My father has gone to work. It is a school day and I have woken early. I get dressed and make my way downstairs to build a fire in theback room. As I turn the corner on the first landing, I hear a noise at the end of the passage that leads to a small porch and the front door. Crouching down, I see the shadows of two people behind the opaque glass of the porch. I move very quietly down the stairs, careful not to make any sound, supporting my weight on the wooden banister. I can hear soft moans and the quickening of breath from behind the glass door and see the shapes of two heads pressed together against the wall. I move slowly and silently down the long passage, not daring to breathe. The moaning is louder now, it sounds like pain, and as my hand reaches to open the door, I am terrified and fearless at the same time. I am driven by compulsion and curiosity and perhaps, although I haven’t entirely thought this through, the need to rescue my mother from some terrible danger. As I turn the handle on the door there is a sudden panic on the other side of the glass. I manage to open the door only a crack before it is violently shut again.
“It’s all right, it’s all right.” I hear my mother’s voice trying to soothe me with the unconvincing tones of normality. Suddenly we are like a doomed family in a falling airplane, my mother desperate to hide the danger from me and desperate to hide her own fear.
I have seen nothing, but I run, and behind me I hear the front door slam. My mother doesn’t find me when she comes up to my room. I am hidden, deep in my cave under the stairs, entrusted with a secret I don’t understand.
I have no idea whether my father has somehow found out about
The Victorian building where we live is large and convoluted enough to find hiding places. A cupboard under the stairs becomes apriest hole, the space behind the dresser a hermit’s cave. I sit on the slate roof of the dairy like a sentinel and imagine the house under siege. I’m a dreamer and my mother recognizes this, and she also recognizes herself in the faraway stare of the traveler lost in the world beyond the window. I return to school the next day with one of my mother’s sick notes in my jacket pocket.
Sometimes a bank of fog rolls off the Tyne and you can’t see a yard in front of your face. I love walking to school on mornings like this, when the world has disappeared and the ruined sides of houses loom like the ghosts of ships, or on bright spring mornings when the moon is still visible, hanging palely in the blue sky like a pared fingernail. But also along my route is a bomb site from the war, street after street of burnt-out houses that the Luftwaffe mistook for the shipyard a decade and a half earlier. There are shattered wooden staircases leading nowhere, bedrooms cruelly exposed to the sky, sad hangings of old buckled wallpaper and the musty smell of decay, broken floors and cross beams, redolent of a crucifixion.
I love the romance and mystery of the ruined streets, but there is always an uncomfortable spooky undercurrent, a dread that such impermanence and desolation can easily tumble over the perimeter of the bomb site and engulf everything around it like a poisoned cloud.
There is a general election coming up and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and his Tory Party have a new poster campaign.
YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD , it says in the confident guise of graffiti.
The local Labour Party have created their own posters using the same Tory slogan but crossing out the last two words.
It reads, YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT .
My father has gone to work. It is a school day and I have woken early. I get dressed and make my way downstairs to build a fire in theback room. As I turn the corner on the first landing, I hear a noise at the end of the passage that leads to a small porch and the front door. Crouching down, I see the shadows of two people behind the opaque glass of the porch. I move very quietly down the stairs, careful not to make any sound, supporting my weight on the wooden banister. I can hear soft moans and the quickening of breath from behind the glass door and see the shapes of two heads pressed together against the wall. I move slowly and silently down the long passage, not daring to breathe. The moaning is louder now, it sounds like pain, and as my hand reaches to open the door, I am terrified and fearless at the same time. I am driven by compulsion and curiosity and perhaps, although I haven’t entirely thought this through, the need to rescue my mother from some terrible danger. As I turn the handle on the door there is a sudden panic on the other side of the glass. I manage to open the door only a crack before it is violently shut again.
“It’s all right, it’s all right.” I hear my mother’s voice trying to soothe me with the unconvincing tones of normality. Suddenly we are like a doomed family in a falling airplane, my mother desperate to hide the danger from me and desperate to hide her own fear.
I have seen nothing, but I run, and behind me I hear the front door slam. My mother doesn’t find me when she comes up to my room. I am hidden, deep in my cave under the stairs, entrusted with a secret I don’t understand.
I have no idea whether my father has somehow found out about
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