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The door to No. 10
My musical sensibility was awakened at the age of four, hearing some undreamed-of piano music on the radio. I was instinctively rivetted. I must have been insistent that I wanted to play a piano, and I must have gone on insisting, because my Mum and Dad, who had nothing for luxuries, managed a couple of years later to obtain one. This in the days when the parlour upright was going out of fashion fast, and Mum worked with someone who had one to get rid of. So for £2, the cost of removing it by van, it arrived. It was a handsome instrument, of lustrous polished mahogany and sweet toned, adorned only with a big gilded cartouche inside the lid pronouncing 'CHURCHILL Park Street, Bristol'. I knew it wasn't truly mine, that an adult had given it and they could take it away, yet I was hugely proud of it, the only thing I owned that no-one else in the family had passed down, that I could make do things no-one else could.
Through some additional unknown sacrifice, extra hours worked and things done without, I went in 1967 to this seemingly huge and important house, No. 10 Vicars' Close, next to Wells Cathedral. Cecil and Cicely Jones were music teachers at the Cathedral School, now retired, and here they taught me piano for the rest of my childhood. They had both graduated from the Guildhall School of Music in 1922, as the pair of proudly framed and gilded degree certificates told. Then in their sixties, they seemed incalculably old, as old as their repertoire. Not for me the jazzy popular music that several of my friends mastered from other teachers. Their front room, packed with slightly faded antique furniture, too many cushions and tapestries and photographs of people long dead, became witness to my struggles with the finger exercises of Czerny and the simplest pieces of Mozart. Strangely for one so beligerent in my wish to learn, I had no appetite for practice at home, so progress was numbingly slow. Tea was usually taken during my lesson (theirs not mine), involving a tray and a bone china cup, and sticky chomping as fruit cake got caught in a dental plate. The Joneses' techniques were as old-fashioned as their repertoire. When I stumbled over the notes Mrs Jones, wrapped in a crocheted shawl and smelling of lavender, would grab the offending finger in her bigger, knotty hand, and stamp it down several times on the correct note. This I found physically painful and emotionally mortifying. Failure to please was its own punishment. Yet I liked them and they me, Mrs Jones particularly referring to me as 'my little one' or 'my little lamb', as though I were a lost pet. I suspect that the name was not reserved only for me but, naively, that didn't occur to me then, and it made me feel special. I slowly progressed towards the music I loved most - the great Romantic figures of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and especially, Chopin. I began to buy my own music, and the ability to play Scott Joplin's Entertainer popularised by the film The Sting won me slight kudos at school, but at thirteen or so, other pursuits more respectable for a 1970s teenager won through and I left No. 10 Vicars Close for the last time, with four Royal College of Music grades to my name. The piano was disposed of, perhaps to the enormous November bonfire indulged in by the neighbouring street; the frequent fate for these unsaleable hulks.
Aged thirty or so, my partner sweetly gave me a much lesser piano obtained for some hundred times the cost of the old Churchill. I quickly regained my old standard and worked past it. At 35, leaving the employ of Messrs Intel after three years of impossible pressure, 14 hour days and constant travel, I was close to a nervous breakdown of some sort, and took two or three months out to regain my sanity. Much of my redundancy pay went on a fine Broadwood piano (Beethoven's favourite maker), with a magical tone that doubled the impact of everything played on it. At the Arcade in Broadmead I purchased the sheet music for all Chopin's waltzes. My convalescence involved long hours walking through tortuous arpeggios and pages of demi-semi-quavers. The most difficult pieces I never mastered, but the easier to middling pieces I gradually pieced together and repeated with increasing proficiency until the whole actually sounded like Chopin. Perhaps it was a form of regression therapy, I don't know, but it worked. A few years later I moved, alone, to a very much smaller house. The Broadwood would not even make it down the narrow hall, and if it had, it would have swamped an entire room. It was sold and I was dispossessed of my dream.
The door to No. 10
My musical sensibility was awakened at the age of four, hearing some undreamed-of piano music on the radio. I was instinctively rivetted. I must have been insistent that I wanted to play a piano, and I must have gone on insisting, because my Mum and Dad, who had nothing for luxuries, managed a couple of years later to obtain one. This in the days when the parlour upright was going out of fashion fast, and Mum worked with someone who had one to get rid of. So for £2, the cost of removing it by van, it arrived. It was a handsome instrument, of lustrous polished mahogany and sweet toned, adorned only with a big gilded cartouche inside the lid pronouncing 'CHURCHILL Park Street, Bristol'. I knew it wasn't truly mine, that an adult had given it and they could take it away, yet I was hugely proud of it, the only thing I owned that no-one else in the family had passed down, that I could make do things no-one else could.
Through some additional unknown sacrifice, extra hours worked and things done without, I went in 1967 to this seemingly huge and important house, No. 10 Vicars' Close, next to Wells Cathedral. Cecil and Cicely Jones were music teachers at the Cathedral School, now retired, and here they taught me piano for the rest of my childhood. They had both graduated from the Guildhall School of Music in 1922, as the pair of proudly framed and gilded degree certificates told. Then in their sixties, they seemed incalculably old, as old as their repertoire. Not for me the jazzy popular music that several of my friends mastered from other teachers. Their front room, packed with slightly faded antique furniture, too many cushions and tapestries and photographs of people long dead, became witness to my struggles with the finger exercises of Czerny and the simplest pieces of Mozart. Strangely for one so beligerent in my wish to learn, I had no appetite for practice at home, so progress was numbingly slow. Tea was usually taken during my lesson (theirs not mine), involving a tray and a bone china cup, and sticky chomping as fruit cake got caught in a dental plate. The Joneses' techniques were as old-fashioned as their repertoire. When I stumbled over the notes Mrs Jones, wrapped in a crocheted shawl and smelling of lavender, would grab the offending finger in her bigger, knotty hand, and stamp it down several times on the correct note. This I found physically painful and emotionally mortifying. Failure to please was its own punishment. Yet I liked them and they me, Mrs Jones particularly referring to me as 'my little one' or 'my little lamb', as though I were a lost pet. I suspect that the name was not reserved only for me but, naively, that didn't occur to me then, and it made me feel special. I slowly progressed towards the music I loved most - the great Romantic figures of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and especially, Chopin. I began to buy my own music, and the ability to play Scott Joplin's Entertainer popularised by the film The Sting won me slight kudos at school, but at thirteen or so, other pursuits more respectable for a 1970s teenager won through and I left No. 10 Vicars Close for the last time, with four Royal College of Music grades to my name. The piano was disposed of, perhaps to the enormous November bonfire indulged in by the neighbouring street; the frequent fate for these unsaleable hulks.
Aged thirty or so, my partner sweetly gave me a much lesser piano obtained for some hundred times the cost of the old Churchill. I quickly regained my old standard and worked past it. At 35, leaving the employ of Messrs Intel after three years of impossible pressure, 14 hour days and constant travel, I was close to a nervous breakdown of some sort, and took two or three months out to regain my sanity. Much of my redundancy pay went on a fine Broadwood piano (Beethoven's favourite maker), with a magical tone that doubled the impact of everything played on it. At the Arcade in Broadmead I purchased the sheet music for all Chopin's waltzes. My convalescence involved long hours walking through tortuous arpeggios and pages of demi-semi-quavers. The most difficult pieces I never mastered, but the easier to middling pieces I gradually pieced together and repeated with increasing proficiency until the whole actually sounded like Chopin. Perhaps it was a form of regression therapy, I don't know, but it worked. A few years later I moved, alone, to a very much smaller house. The Broadwood would not even make it down the narrow hall, and if it had, it would have swamped an entire room. It was sold and I was dispossessed of my dream.