The Tuba Rides Shotgun: Confessions from Manea's Band Van

There's a moment, roughly forty minutes before every Manea gig, when somebody stands in the yard, looks at a white van and a heap of brass, and says: "Right. Where's the drum?"

What follows is not glamorous. Nobody writes about it, nobody claps for it, and it has never once made it onto a concert programme. But it's the reason you hear us at all. So here's the honest account of how a village band actually gets to the job.

The keys live in the biscuit tin

Our van is a long-wheelbase Transit of a certain age. It's white, roughly the shape of a garden shed, and it smells of valve oil with a faint undertow of somebody's Labrador. There is a dent in the rear quarter that nobody will admit to and a sticker on the back window that has faded from red to pink. The keys hang on a length of baler twine and live in a biscuit tin in the hall, because that's where keys live in Manea.

We run it on a rota. Four volunteers, more or less, depending on who's free and whose knee is behaving. Being a band driver is not a musical role, but it's a musical job all the same — you can't play if you can't arrive.

The first rule, learned the hard way: leave ten minutes earlier than you think you need to. Not for the traffic. For the bit where someone has to go home for their lyre.

Loading order is a moral philosophy

The bass drum goes flat on the floor behind the front seats. The tuba goes in the nook by the offside wheel arch, bell upwards, wedged with a folded camping blanket so it doesn't wander. Basses lie alongside like sleeping elephants, which sounds romantic and is actually just heavy. Cornets and horns go in the middle, in cases, stacked no more than three high, because four high is how you get a repair bill.

The stands travel in a long canvas sleeve that looks like a quiver of arrows and weighs about as much as a small child. Then the percussion box, the trolley, the pasting table for the raffle and — always, non-negotiably — the urn.

The urn has its own seat and its own blanket. This is not a joke. Somebody once tried to put the urn in the footwell and we still hear about it.

The front of the van is the kitchen: mutes tins, spare lyres, a first aid kit, a roll of gaffer tape, a sewing kit nobody has ever opened, tea bags, and a tin of Roses that lives there specifically so it can be donated to whatever raffle we're supporting that afternoon. Half of Fenland fundraising runs on a tin of Roses and a decent bottle of something from the back of a cupboard.

The A141 school of driving

Our patch covers a fair bit of ground. Chatteris, Doddington, Wimblington, Benwick, Welney, March, and whichever village hall has a spare Saturday. That means the A141, the Sixteen Foot, and the stretch past the pumping station with the bend that catches out anyone who hasn't driven it a hundred times.

A van full of brass handles differently. You feel the drum shift when you take a roundabout with any enthusiasm, and you learn to take roundabouts without any enthusiasm at all. The rear door rattles at about fifty. There's a point on the way to one particular fête field where the entrance is, in the technical term, soft — meaning the field is a field, and the field has opinions.

Our accumulated wisdom, freely shared:

• Carry two planks. You will need the planks.
• Accept the offer of a tow from a farmer cheerfully and immediately.
• Keep the farmer's number. Actually keep three farmers' numbers.
• Do not, under any circumstances, let the driver be the person who has also agreed to run the tombola.

We've sat in gateways waiting for a tractor. We've reversed out of a lane in the rain with somebody walking behind us saying "left a bit, left a bit, not that much." We've arrived at a village green to find a bouncy castle exactly where the band was meant to be, and negotiated a truce involving a slightly smaller gazebo and a lot of goodwill.

It always works out. It works out because everybody pitches in and nobody stands about being important.

The van is the green room

Here's the part I don't think our audiences ever see. When it's raining — and it does rain, occasionally, in the Fens — the van becomes the warm-up room, the changing room, the larder and the confessional.

You'll find six people sitting on instrument cases in the half-dark doing lip trills, which sounds like a herd of mildly anxious cows. Somebody's doing up somebody else's bow tie. Somebody's eating a sandwich over a trombone slide and being told off for it. Somebody's saying they haven't practised and somebody else is saying nobody has.

That's where the nerves go. Not out on the field, not in front of the crowd — in the back of a van, with the doors open and the rain coming in sideways and the raffle table still being argued about.

A quiet word for the driver's seat

Our drivers don't get a bow. Sometimes they play the gig and hand the keys to somebody else; sometimes they give up their whole afternoon to sit on a folding chair at the edge of a field and keep an eye on the van. They know what's behind their head on a bend. They know which hall has the tight gateway and which one has the caretaker who likes a chat.

When you next see us at a fête, look past the cornets for a moment. There's a person there who got up early, checked the oil, loaded a bass drum in the drizzle and will still be stacking stands at nine o'clock at night. In a band, that's musicianship too.

The bit nobody claps for

We're proud of the playing. But a band isn't just the people with instruments in their hands — it's the rota, the tin of Roses, the two planks, the keys on a bit of twine and the volunteer who says "I'll take the van" before anyone else has to ask.

So if you spot a slightly battered white van on the A141 this summer, loaded to the roof and listing gently to one side, give it a wave. That's the whole day in there: twelve music stands, one tuba, a bass drum, an urn, and a village's worth of goodwill. Getting there, it turns out, is half the performance.

And yes — we did remember the drum.