Chapter Four

On the Monday we worked together song writing. As we worked it became even more of a collaboration. We thought as one, me now being able to write the music score. We went back to the ones we had written already for guitar and piano and wrote out the scores for the rest of the band. I could hear the tunes in my mind, played by the five of us.

That was not new, just a lot clearer than before. It had always helped, when I busked, if I could imagine a band behind me. I hadn’t realised just how helpful that was. As we wrote, and tried out the songs, I started to realise that about a quarter of our output were likely good enough to get into the charts. I made note of these.

On Wednesday, we rang Dad and went down to pick him up on Thursday. Back at the cottage, Joan said she would show him around and I took his case into her room. I unpacked it and arranged his things in the places we had cleared, taking the empty case to the cupboard under the stairs. I stayed home, while Joan took him off to the hotel for dinner. I think that she wanted to show him off to Jules. I was in bed before they returned and overheard a muffled “What!!” and then it was quiet. Well, if they made any more noise, I was asleep.

I was up, early, and was preparing the breakfast when Dad wandered into the kitchen.

“Harri, sweetheart, last night I was abducted by a wicked witch and transported to heaven. I suppose you knew what she had planned, seeing that my clothes were already hanging in her room.”

“Dad, I’ve called her wicked as well, but, believe me, she has a heart of pure gold. I’m so happy for the two of you. You’ve both been lonely for far too long.”

I went and hugged him, planting a kiss on his stubble.

“Now, get some of this food into you and go and shave. We don’t do rough men here. Stay long enough and we might get you back into shape.”

He was eating when Joan came in, her black nightie showing clearly through her black gown. I gave her a wink as I put her morning cup of tea in front of her. She put her hand on my arm.
“Thank you for this, dear, in fact, thank you for a lot of things. I’ll tidy up, now you go and get yourself dressed and I’ll catch up with you at the piano. We’ve got that latest song to finish.”

Dad stayed with us for the last three weeks of my training. He sat in on some of our writing sessions, pottered about in the garden, and helped with the housework. He confided to me that it was wonderful to have a garden to look after, our own home being three feet of concrete in front and two square yards of weeds in the back. At the end of my designated training period, we had twenty or so new songs that I was happy with, including five that I thought would be hits.

Joan drove us back to my hometown, my bags in the boot, and me in the back seat with my guitar case. At the house, I unlocked the door and Dad carried my things in. I took it up to my room and promised myself that I would put it all away as soon as I could. In the meantime, Dad filled the empty case he had brought in the car and carried it out to put it in the boot. Joan was in the kitchen, making us a pot of tea to go with the scones we had brought with us. Sitting, in the kitchen, with the two of them, was something I would remember to this day. They were more than happy, they were radiant.

I stood at the front door, waving as they left. I was alone, in my house, while my father was going back to the cottage to live. When they were out of sight, I went upstairs to the master bedroom. On my mother’s old vanity, I found a note.

“Dear Harriette, if you’re reading this, I expect that you are thinking about sleeping here. Feel free to dump any of my things that I have left behind into your old room and move all your things here. I can’t describe how happy I am to now have such a wonderful and caring daughter. We didn’t tell you, but Joan and I are planning a quiet registry marriage, sometime over the next couple of months. You’ll be the first to know the where and when. Feel free to make any changes to the décor that you want, I will gift you the house once we get married. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for bringing me and Joan together. By the way, you were right. Joan was on the record player the night you were made. Love you - Dad. PS, there’s a box on the top shelf of the wardrobe you should look at.”

With tears in my eyes, I opened the wardrobe and saw the box immediately. It was too large to be ignored. I pulled it down and put it on the bed. When I opened it, I found a wonderful wedding dress, with all the accessories. There was a jewellery box which took my breath away when I opened it. There, in all their glory, was my mothers’ collection. She had always looked good when she had somewhere to go, and I expect that Dad wasn’t going to hold back when he bought her gifts. After two months of intense girl training, I sat on the bed with the box on my lap and I cried. I cried for my mother in a way I couldn’t when I was Harold and let the bottled-up sorrow finally come to the fore.

As I sat there, sobbing, a lot of things fell into place in my mind. One was that I had my own home, including all the responsibility and costs that go with that. The second was that I would remain Harriette for as long as I could, even if it wasn’t needed for the band. The third was that I was going to have to learn to drive and get a car. The fourth was that I either needed to buy some paint and brushes, or damn well earn enough money to hire a professional.

Over the next couple of hours, I remade the bed, finding softer linen in a cupboard I hardly knew existed. I vacuumed and dusted and replaced anything of dads with my girl things. I left my old Harry stuff in my old room and loaded the wardrobe and drawers with my new collection, leaving plenty of room for new items, once I got out to shop. Last of all, I stripped off and took a shower. When I was dry, I dressed in the wedding underwear and put the dress on. It was a little loose in the bodice but fitted quite well.

I looked at myself in the big mirror and thought that it would be wonderful to wear at my own wedding. I closed my eyes to imagine the scene, but couldn’t, for the life of me, picture a man by my side. That’s when it struck me that, as Harriette, or even Harri on the cruise ship, I had no thought that dressing as a girl had anything to do with attracting a guy. Such thoughts were a long way from why I was doing this, originally, and still had no place in my future.

I took the dress off and hung it in the wardrobe, with a cover over it, to let the creases out. I then put on one of the kaftans, sat at the vanity and worked on my hair and face. I then called Jerry to let him know that I was home and ready to set to work. That done, it came as no surprise to have my doorbell sound, just after I had washed my tea things. It was the whole crowd.

Nicola exclaimed that I looked good enough to go out dancing, and, after I had told them the short story of why I was here, alone, that’s what we did. Nicola now had a bigger car, and it was easy for the five of us to fit in. We went to a dance hall in the next city, one we had played in, previously. It was odd. We didn’t have to explain ourselves to each other, and we had a good evening, sometimes dancing with guys, sometimes with each other. I found that I danced several times with Anne.

At their flat, I got out with Anne and Megan, my place being only a few minutes away. I said goodnight and Anne came up to me and kissed me, hard.

“Did you keep your bits, Harri, or have you had them removed?”

“All in place and going nowhere, Anne, although I’m not sure whether they’re still fit for purpose."

"Stay there while I get a bag and we can go and find out."

She dashed into the building as Megan gave me a goodnight kiss.

“Who’s going to be a lucky girl, then?” she whispered, and went to the door as Anne came out with a holdall in her hand. I had the distinct feeling that it was one she had “prepared earlier.”

I held her to me as we walked home. I opened the door, and we went up to my new bedroom. Taking our coats off, we kissed, properly. That night we christened my new bedroom in my new house, and soiled the sheets, messing up the new pillows because we hadn’t taken off our make-up. Believe it or not, that was the night I lost my virginity and woke up being able to imagine me in the wedding dress, with Anne beside me in her own.

Next morning, I was up first and was making breakfast when Anne came down and we nearly burned the bacon as we kissed. I put everything out on two plates, and we sat to eat. It wasn’t long before she looked hard at me and asked a question.

“You seem very happy, this morning. You can hardly chew for smiling.”

“Yes, my love, I’m just so happy to be sitting here with you and wondering how long I can keep you here.”

“As long as you keep loving me like you did last night, I’m going nowhere. I thought the smile may have been because you ended up in bed with the drummer.”

“Damn, foiled again. You can see my soul, you sweet girl.”

Over the course of the morning, we changed the bed, showered, and dressed. All the while we talked about what had been going on. I found out that there had been words when Candice had tried to be bossy and had been shouted at by both Anne and Megan. I thought that this may have been a first. The dynamic had shifted while I was away, and Anne thought it was for the better. Candice and Nicola were working harder to improve things, and my return wasn’t too soon. Anne was adamant that I was needed more than ever.

I asked her if Megan would be upset if she moved in with me.

“No way! She would be happy. We never shared cabins on board, and I never knew how much of a lazy sod she is. She would live in a pigsty, given the need, and it wouldn’t be much different to how she lives now. She’s committed to the band, though, hoping it would bring her enough money to employ a servant.”

“If the songs I have in my bag are anything to go by, she’ll be able to have a whole house full of servants.”

“Really, you think they’re that good. Let me see.”

I phoned for take-away and, that afternoon we pored over the songs. I had only given the drums the basic information about timing and beat, leaving the complexity to her. I had also noted some extra percussion that I thought would improve the sound when we record. I pulled my guitar out and played while I sung, Anne slapping her hands on her knees, eyes closed. I went through the whole batch like that, and she threw her arms around my neck, and we kissed once I finished.

“You’re brilliant, darling. I can hear the extra bits as we went through them. I am not just a drummer, I studied percussion and the effects that you aimed for are perfect. I can set up a bunch of stuff around me and do what you’ve written live. Don’t know how I’m going to fit the gong in.”

We went to the pub for our evening meal, me not being sussed as “Hitman Harry” and we had a nice meal. We went back home and spent a lot of the night making love. The next day, Anne gave Megan the news that she was moving in with me and Megan helped put her things together, a little too enthusiastically, or so I thought.

Two days later, we were picked up by Jerry, Megan already in the car, and taken to an industrial area where we stopped at a building with a “Recording Studio” sign on the wall. Candice and Nicole were already there. While I had been away, my guitars and amps had been retrieved from the previous place and was now stored here, joining the other kit.

Jerry insisted that the first thing we would be doing will be getting back to playing, together. I thought that a good idea, and we spent most of the day playing our old playlist, until we were back to being a single entity. At the end of the day, we worked on one of the new songs, one that the other two had heard at the charity show.

I gave everyone the score, and then played the basic tune on Candi’s keyboard and then showed Megan the basic rhythm, then Nicole the basic bass runs. With everyone now able to read music it didn’t take too many run-throughs before we could make a fist of it. That was enough for Jerry, and he ordered us to pack up, coming back tomorrow to work on the others.

On the way home, he chuckled.

“I never thought I’d see the day when Candi would take orders without so much of a comment. She had been thinking that she’s the queen of the group and I had to sit with her, and her dad, to tell them that you are all equals, but with different skills. You, young Harriette, look as if you’re more equal than the others. The four new songs you played at that charity show had hit written all over them, even without a full group sound. Now I’ve heard one today, I’ll book a recording session before Christmas. Then you’ll have a break, and we’ll record the rest of the album in the New year. Then, we pick one, or more, for a video, and that will be released to the TV stations around Easter. You’ll be going on tour at the end of May, just one of the seaside dance hall circuits. By the end of summer, you’ll have either made it big, or you haven’t. I’m not even considering the latter.”

We worked hard, up to Christmas. The only break we gave ourselves was a trip to see Dad marry Joan. It wasn’t a big affair, as the media hadn’t been told, but there was us, Pauline, and her family, and several of friends that Joan had invited. The reception was in the hotel where we had played, and then the happy couple left for a few weeks in a much warmer Spain.

There was, however, a professional photographer. When I saw the pictures, I had to order one that showed Dad looking very happy. Joan looked radiant in all of them. There was one, that Joan had insisted on, with her and the band, all smiling. She did, no doubt, think that it would come in handy when we were famous.

Anne and I spent our Christmas in the South of France, in an out-of-the-way hotel, close to a sandy beach. I needed a one-piece costume, but Anne looked fabulous in a bikini. We tried not to eat too much but did have to exercise when we got home again.

The following year we did as we had planned. We perfected all the new songs, improving them with every play. I was kept busy making notes of the changes on the scores. When we started the recording sessions, we had a big crowd in the control room. Nicola and Candi had their parents, Dad and my new step-mum came along, and Jerry had invited a few contacts from the industry. We recorded two or three tracks each session, so, by the end of the week, we had the original masters for an album.

There were two songs that screamed hit material, so we put on our new outfits and were filmed, miming to the tracks. By that time, videos were getting a lot more complicated, so we ended up, one day, on an empty moor, playing instruments that weren’t plugged in to anything, and these bits were clipped into the final video, at the correct places. I wasn’t sure but was told that it was the way of the future. Thankfully, no-one suggested that we run around, waving our arms, so it could be added on fast forward to look funny.

The video was sent to the media, a week later the album was released, along with the first single. Jerry had seeded the media with enough tips that they wanted to follow up on the story. The first single got into the top one hundred in the second week and into the top ten in the third. We were now invited to be on TV shows and our songs were being played on the radio.

Before we went on tour, we had been on a couple of the TV music shows, miming to the single, had been interviewed a couple of times, had a write-up in our local paper, and, despite all those things, had recorded the second album, and filmed the video for the next single.

The tour wasn’t a huge thing, just a small group of current acts doing four nights at fifteen seaside towns. We started in Skegness and worked down and around the coast, to finish at Blackpool. The plan was for us to open, then introduce Aggie, a girl singer who was in the charts with several hits. Because we were a complete band, we would stay on stage as her backing group, just moving towards the back of the stage to give her room. We spent a week, with her, getting her set right.

By the end of the tour, we were so tight with her set, she wanted us to be on her next record. In our days off, we rehearsed that song, and it became her encore. The second half was a three-piece rock group, followed by a four-piece glam-rock band, with a top ten song in the charts already, this year. With all of these, living alongside each other for fifteen weeks, it was inevitable that we would take some time at sound checks to have fun, jamming.

When we got to the south-east, we stayed six nights at Paulines’ hotel. Joan and dad were already booked in and had tickets to the show. It turned out that Aggie was a fan, having listened to her parents’ records, growing up, and she was taken into our little family group. When she realised that the Joetta that wrote all the songs on our album was sitting at the table with her, she insisted that we write something for her, as well. That was the moment that Joan and I became more than just writing for the Glitterbugs. Aggie had a hit with the song we played at the end of her set, listed as “Aggie and the Glitterbugs”. In the following year we had another two hits with her, writing all the songs on her next album as well.

By that time, however, we had been into the top ten a few more times, the second single hitting number one. We had included it in our set, and with all the people who saw us that summer buying it, we had almost enough sales to be in the top twenty on debut. The following summer saw us with Aggie, touring the major cities from March, through to September. It was tiring and exciting. We opened for the first half, the second half being as Aggies’ backing band, finishing with our two latest hits with her joining in, followed by her two latest hits. It was quite a show.

I had time, with Joan, to write most of our third and fourth album, plus most of Aggies next one. We were being asked to write for other singers, but the work was already more than Joan could handle. She finally retired and went, with dad, to a villa in the sun. Anne and I stayed with them quite often.

By the later seventies, we were a recognised and respected – but fading - band. Candice had her fame and fortune and was ready to do her own thing by then. Nicola had met a guy who put her in the family way, which led to us having a replacement bass player for several months. The father, however, didn’t stay around. She then took up with a bass player in another band and they ended up getting married. Megan had been forced, by living with the rest of us on tour, to become neater. She, also, found a guy and married.

By the beginning of the eighties, we had disbanded after eight years in the charts. We were being pushed out by new acts, with new sounds and new looks. Candice had a short career as a solo singer, but then found her own husband. By this time, she had lost her bossiness and had gained a lot of maturity.

Anne and I finally married near where Joan and dad lived. Dad escorted Anne down the aisle, with her in my mothers’ wedding dress. I, surprisingly, looked dapper in a morning suit. We had a full church, with a lot of other band members there. Our reception was with a DJ but that didn’t stop some established stars grabbing the microphone to sing along with the records. Our honeymoon had been kept secret from all but Joan and dad.

In fact, Anne and I had fallen in love with the area and had bought a villa a few miles along the coast. It was there that we went, after the ceremony, to take our three-year-old twins back from the nanny, and settle down, now as a married couple. We had planned the babies, making sure that Annes’ pregnancy fell in the period between tours.

As I had got into my late twenties, using my male tackle regularly, I had been overtaken by the puberty I had missed in my teens. It had been getting harder to maintain the look on stage. Drugs and full transition had never been my thing, so the disbanding had been a bit of a relief. Anne didn’t mind and it made things a lot easier when I reverted to being Harry.

Strangely, I had not sold the old home, but had rented it out, so I still had somewhere back home I could go to. I had, finally, got a driving licence in France, and we had a car to get around in. The other thing we had spent money on was a small recording studio in the villa grounds. After Joan had retired, Anne had been helping me writing songs. We were now able to make a proper recording, me laying down piano, guitar, bass, and rhythm tracks, with Anne adding percussion. The new writing duo was called Annetta, and we did very well out of it for another ten years.

When the twins graduated from the secondary school, we had a family conference, and the decision was made to move back to England so they could attend good universities. I went to talk to our tenants and found that the timing couldn’t be more perfect. By the time the next term started, we were living in the old family home. The writing was discontinued, and we had enough to live, very comfortably, on our savings and regular income from ongoing record sales.

Unfortunately, the mid-nineties were sad years. Joan passed away at a ripe old age and Dad was put into care. We visited him as often as we could. We sold his villa to an upcoming singer who was big in France. He had a pal who was looking for what we had, so our villa was sold as well. We had taken a month to get the old home modernised, with three good bedrooms, all ensuite. It gave James and Julia, our twins, somewhere to stay when the universities were closed.

That’s how they were in the house that New Year’s Eve, getting ready to go out partying. I had only put the TV on while I waited for Anne to get ready to go out. James came in as I was turning the set off.

“All right, Dad, Jules and I are heading out. See you next year.”

“Look after yourselves, son. I’m sure your mother and me will be home and asleep before you get in. Call if you need picking up and don’t drink too much!”

Anne came in, dressed for a night out, and we hugged the kids as they went out for their party, leaving in James’ car. Anne and I locked the house and we walked to the local hotel, where we were going to have a meal.

I carried my old guitar in a new case, the old one having given up some years ago. Tonight, I was going to go on the stage again, by popular demand. Once again, nearly thirty years on, “Hitman Harry” was going to be the entertainment, singing a new set of songs, all well known by the clientele. It was an hour of hits from the seventies and eighties, as the warm-up for the main band.
I could play them all with my eyes shut. It’s easy when you’ve written them all.

Marianne Gregory © 2023