A Review of Teardrops on My Drum by Jack Robinson

Jack   Friday, 22 December 2017

I thought this book was a ripper. The prose style so beautifully expressed the essence of Jackie, the ever-smiling headlong rush of his homoerotically-charged boyhood. One mystery I kept pondering as I read it, though, was why the hell did he call it Teardrops on My Drum? It seemed plain wrong. This plodding, self-indulgent sentiment had no place in Jackie's brisk, upbeat adventures. The answer doesn't come until the very end or, even more concretely, until the beginning of the second installment, Jack and Jamie Go to War.

Jackie's life in Teardrops was a work of self-willed magic. Like a lark ascending, he fled his outcast state, his barren, worthless home, and took flight upon the homoerotic thermals of the masculine world around him. Peter Pan's advice on achieving flight is, "You just think wonderful lovely thoughts, and they lift you up in the air." Jackie, an earthy, real-world scouse, achieves the same effect through smelling nice smells. One of Jackie's earliest memories is of the stink of the middens, "ten foot brick wells for the throwing of muck into." Soon after, his mother, after betraying him by selling his precious books, is cursed as a "Dirty old smelly cow! Fuckin' stinkin' bastard!" Later he explains why he never kisses his mother: "She stinks! I mean she really smells!" Mother, traditionally hearth and home, is here a midden, a pit of refuse to be escaped at any cost. Set alongside this is Jackie's first childhood friend, Tommy Lawless, who is described as a beautiful boy who "always smelled as if he'd just stepped from the bath-tub...how nice and fragrant he smelled." And over the next dozen years, Jack's entire wildly adventurous life becomes a case of following his nose, with obsessively repeated references to the fresh, sweet, sexy fragrance of beautiful boys. When he first meets some American lads, his first impression is, "A smell of masculine deodorants and fresh linen, the clean scent of Americans, fragrant bodies, a new bouquet for the English nose to savour."

Throwing himself into the wide, sexy blue yonder, movement, constant frenetic fly-away movement is Jackie's most basic survival skill. Home would have killed him otherwise, both bodily and spiritually. I think it explains why he so abruptly left Eddie. Not once, but twice. At eleven, Eddie provided Jackie with the adult protection and loving home he'd never had. But at a moment of crisis for the boy, he leaves. After his mother pawns the fine clothes Eddie had given him, he says he felt too ashamed to see Eddie again. It makes no sense. Eddie would have been fully understanding and sympathetic -- and Jackie knew that. He had to leave because at that moment he needed Eddie too much. This was the beating heart of the home that Jackie had necessarily rejected. So he left, built himself up by his own bootstraps, and only then could return and become Eddie's boy. Until the need for movement again whirled him away. On to the boy-barracks where the homoerotic thermals surged into veritable thunderstorms of purple passion.

Then, at the conclusion of Teardrops, the unstoppable lark came a cropper -- right at the very gates of heaven. At fourteen, Jackie's relationship with the sixteen-year-old Chesty was ideal. In the boy-army world, dedicated to athletic and martial excellence, Chesty was both comrade-in-arms and protector and mentor. Sex, love, honour, courage: all were perfectly synchronised in a relationship worthy of the title Greek Love. So when Chesty was suddenly shipped off to a new posting, Jackie plummeted into the muckiestmidden of them all, the midden of the broken heart, with all the emotional squalor that entails.

But this was no place to end the story. This was a dramatic mid-point, not a climax. Ending it here, however, allowed the author to remove the big black emotional blob, to petrify it and place it on the front cover, let it glare out at the public like a riddling sphinx, brooding on its nasty secret but leaving the story proper unsullied.

This is confirmed in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Jack & Jamie. Announcing that he's left the army, fifteen-year-old Jack says that there are "No regrets. No teardrops on my drum. I could cry another day." Brilliant! Jack is an inspiration in his open-hearted ability to love and be loved, so his sure-handed use of emotional suppression, of knowing when to hold 'em -- today a much disparaged tool in a man's arsenal -- is something to be admired. Early in life, Jackie had every right to drown an orchestra in tears, but the music he created in their stead will, I'm sure, give his eternity a much sweeter fragrance.