Life by Keith Richards, James Fox (Contributor) Page A

whenever he talked about the war he always had tears in his eyes. Didn't want to kill anybody. He was wounded in the leg and shoulder either at Passchendaele or the Somme. When he couldn't play the saxophone he took up the violin again and the guitar; his wound aggravated his bowing arm, and a tribunal awarded him ten shillings a week for the wounding. Gus was a close friend of Bobby Howes, who was a famous musical star of the 1930s. They were in the war together and they did a double act in the officers' mess and cooked for them. So they had a better chance to feed themselves than the average soldier. So says Auntie Marjie.
    By the 1950s he had a square dance band, Gus Dupree and His Boys, and used to do well playing the American air bases, playing hoedowns. He'd work in a factory in Islington in the day and play at night, getting up in a white-fronted shirt, a "dickey." He played Jewish weddings and Masonic do's, and he brought cakes back in his violin case; all my aunts remember that. He must have been very hard up--he never, for example, bought new clothes, only secondhand clothes and shoes.
    Why was my grandmother long-suffering? Apart from being in various states of pregnancy for twenty-three years? Gus's great delight was to play violin while Emma played piano. But during the war she caught him bonking an ARP warden in a blackout, caught him up to the usual. On the piano too. Even worse. And she never played piano for him again. That was the price. And she was very stubborn--in fact she was very unlike Gus, not attuned to his artist's temperament. So he roped his daughters in, but it was "never quite the same, Keith," he would tell me. "Never quite the same." With the stories he told me, you'd think Emma was Arthur Rubinstein. "There was nothing like Emma. She could play," he'd say. He turned it into a long-lost love, a yearning. Unfortunately that hadn't been his only infidelity. There were lots of little rumpuses and walkouts. Gus was a ladies' man and Emma just got fed up.
    The fact is that Gus and his family were a very rare thing for those days--they were about as bohemian as you could get. Gus encouraged a kind of irreverence and nonconformity, but it was in the genes too. One of my aunts was in repertory, into amateur dramatics. They were all artistically inclined in one way or another, depending on their circumstances. Given the times we're talking about, this was a very free family--very un-Victorian. Gus was the kind of guy that, when his daughters were growing up and they'd be called on by four or five of their boyfriends and their boyfriends would be sitting down on the sofa opposite the window and the girls would be sitting across from them, would go up to the john and unload a piece of string with a used rubber on it and dangle it in front of the boys, and the girls couldn't see it. That was his sense of humor. And all the boys would be going red and cracking up, and the girls wouldn't know what the hell for. Gus liked to make a little commotion. And Doris said how horrified her mother, Emma, was by the scandal that two of Gus's sisters, Henrietta and Felicia, who lived together in Colebrook Row, were--she would say it in a whisper--"on the game." Not all Doris's sisters were like her--with such a spicy tongue, you might say. Some of them were upright and proper like Emma, but no one denied the fact of Henrietta and Felicia.
    My earliest memories of Gus were the walks we took, the sorties we made, mostly I think for him to get out of the house of women. I was an excuse and so was the dog called Mr. Thompson Wooft. Gus had never had a boy in the house, son or grandchild, until I came along, and I think this was a big moment, a big opportunity to go for walks and disappear. When Emma wanted him to do household chores, he invariably replied, "I'd love to, Em, but I've got a hole in my bum." A nod and a wink and take the dog for a walk. And we'd go for miles and sometimes, it seemed, for days. Once on Primrose