THE BAND LEADER

Oh dear ... how embarrassing moments can live on and on.

Amy Todright had one huge secret, one that she had nurtured all her life until her thirties, because she didn’t want it to go away, and that was, years ago, when she’d been no more than a slip of a girl, she’d been changing for PE in her classroom and had caught an unexpected glimpse of Ginger Beaumont minus his underpants. It was the kind of thing that might happen any day. The class slipped their day clothes off and pulled on PE shorts for the boys or PE knickers for the girls and nobody thought anything of it. It never took long and everyone was used to it, so there was very little in the way of silly giggling.

They did it every time their class was due to use the hall for PE, or be taken by their teacher out on to the playground if the weather was tolerable. There were far more interesting things to talk about than getting changed for PE.

And for the tiniest of moments she had just about seen what Ginger kept in his pristine white underpants. Her brain did a biological snap like a camera might have, and it was there for good. They had been eight or nine years old, so it didn’t matter what anyone saw or didn’t see, and nobody else seemed at all bothered, but it had happened and it lived on in Amy’s memory as a forbidden glimpse into a world she’d never understand.

Because Amy, pretty as she was, never got a beau or a boyfriend on account of that alien glimpse in childhood. She was pretty enough, everyone said that, but there was something that held her back socially. The image was there, captured for ever, in the photo album of her memory, and when the other girls laughed and joked about this or that (usually this) she found she couldn’t enter the mirth but retired to whatever sidelines she could find.

And became a musician.

It started at secondary school with a recorder that she and she alone managed to create melodies minus the squeaks with, and went on to other wind instruments until she could play just about anything that demanded a puff of breath.

She even won competitions. She was serious about her music. She’d have loved to play in a band, but the only bands in her neck of the woods had no call for trumpets or trombones (both of which she could play masterfully) and were merely guitar-based combos of youths imitating the greats of yesteryear. They were good, yes, but had no time for a girl who blew horns.

Until, that is, she heard about the existence of village brass bands whilst researching the past of her village. Wouldn’t it, she thought, be wonderful if her village had one again? Might she suggest one be formed so that all men and women (she was quite clearly a woman by then and certainly not a child) who shared her enthusiasms could join together, could march down the street on Sundays, could fill the air with glorious musci, proud and melodic.

So she pinned a hand-drawn advertisement on the village hall notice board. She listed a few wind instruments and begged that anyone, boy or girkl, man or woman, who could play any one of them contacted her with the view to creating future fame and fortune.

There was a trickle of replies. Some from children who liked the idea of being on Britain’s got Talent blowing their toy trumpets but half a dozen fully grown men and women with dusty cases containing a wonderful array of instruments that might have been past their use-by dates, but weren’t because they were loved. Apparently there had been a works brass band many years earlier before the works had moved on to pastures new taking such enthusiasms with it, and the handful were men and women who had been juniors in it and still hankered for what it had almost promised.

There had even been a uniform, a smart affair with pleated skirts for the women and smart trousers complete with fancy stripes for the men, and almost military hats with feathers for everyone, and garment by garment they were sought out and washed and ironed.

And so the time came for the trumpeters and cornet players, the trombonists and saxophonists, to meet in the village hall. And in first to arrive was Amy Todright, and she was in her element. After all, this was going to be her band. She was its leader.

It was when the bass drummer carried his decorated drum before him, and found himself a corner where he could prepare himself, and gently took his elderly uniform from a carrier bag bearing a faded M & S logo, that something inside Amy searched back through the years.

He was a full grown man, but he had red hair and she knew he was the main figure in many a dream she had lived through during dark nights.

Because when he slid his trousers off and went to put one leg inside his bandsman trousers it was clear he had accidentally pulled down more than his trousers in his enthusiasm to be prepared.

And Amy screamed. Piercing, it was, and she pointed.

“Oh dear,” he said, blushing, “I’m always doing that!”

“I know,” she replied, also blushing, “I remember.”

© Peter Rogerson, 31.08.22

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