15 Land of song

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Bob Marley

I follow my cousin Jack around. I really admire him. He has left school prematurely to be a farmer and he already knows everything about everything. If he had not been a farmer’s son he could have been a great something else. There is a piano in the other parlour at the farm, but he never had to practise. He calls Mama Auntie. If he had to call her Mama he would probably have to practise the piano.

The kinships within my family are complex. Mama is Jack’s father’s cousin. Their mothers are sisters. Dada is Jack’s mother’s brother. So Mama and Dada are also second cousins. It gets even more complicated. Dada’s father married his first cousin, who belonged to the side of the family who emigrated to North America ages and ages ago, but eventually returned to Wales. So I am strictly speaking a quarter American, and if Mama’s mama and Jack’s father’s mama could only have left their unclaimed stake in the Texas oil mine to us, we’d all be rich now. Mama’s mother came from Portsmouth and their name was Norman, so a quarter of me is definitely English. Mama’s father’s ancestors were probably Irish (though she denies this), so a quarter of me is also Irish. The last quarter of me is Welsh. But since you can’t be a quarter of something, and since I was born on the English border, I only got the Welsh label to match my Welsh surname, which I admittedly share with about 10 million others.

I am still very young when I realise that my musical talent belongs to my Welsh bit. Nobody asks me if there is someone inside my (quarter Welsh) head making the music, because it is quite natural for Welsh people to be ‘kissed by the muse’.

The best thing about Mama is that she has been kissed by the muse, too, despite her non-Welsh origins, which she studiously denies. She plays the piano and I have been sitting at her feet moving the pedals up and down, up and down, ever since time began. She sings beautifully. Her voice is dark and melodious and awakens in me the desire to sing. I know all the popular songs from the radio. Mama can pick up a tune on one airing and play it over and over again. She has perfect pitch, and whatever shortcomings there are in her emotional make-up, you forget them all when she sits down and forgets herself in her music.

I bash around on the piano while she is doing the housework. At an age when some little girls are still drawing princesses in crinolines, I discover cadences and play them up and down the piano, not understanding why the second chord is a relief after the first one. Sitting on the wobbly piano stool, I play what to me are symphonies, until one day, probably having at long last recognised the symphonic elements in my musical utterances, Mama and Dada decide it is time for me to have proper lessons.

And who better than Mama’s old teacher?

Mr Huxley is old, ancient, prehistoric, Methuselish. He is oldest person in the world. He has snowy-white, bushy, unkempt hair and eyebrows He looks just like Albert Schweitzer in Mama’s encyclopaedia. Mr Huxley smells of shag, sweat and senility. He lives in a big house with his sister. She doesn’t like music, so she has banned him to a wooden shack in the garden. There he can make as much noise as he likes on his church organ with its shiny pipes and three registers, or on the old upright piano standing against the opposite wall, looking for all the world as if it is trying to escape the ministrations of the countless pupils he still taunts in his waning years.

At sub-topical room temperature generated by a crackling stove spitting and exploding in a sort of witch’s oven, I am introduced to the vagaries of harmony and counterpoint. I am put through my scales and arpeggios under threat of a long, round, shiny, brown wooden ruler that could crush my knuckles if brought down with moderate force onto my childish hands. He shouts in scorn when I make even the most trivial errors and he sends me off home every week with a flea in my ear for not practising long or hard enough.

Mama only nods and expresses pleasure that her money is being so well spent. She has forgotten how much she hated him in her day. I very quickly realise that I can fool him in my lessons if I read off the music at sight. In order to perfect this art, I start playing my way through the heaps of music belonging to Mama and her mother, who was the soprano part of a family quartet in her youth. That skill is to stand me in very good stead. I now look forward to fooling Mr Huxley. But hardly have I mastered the art of keeping his wrath at bay, when everything changes.

Today I am a bit late getting to the ornamental wrought iron gate which leads into the long drive past the house to Mr Huxley’s woodshed because I always have leaded feet when I set out and the blackberries in the hedge have held me up a bit. Now, with fingers and mouth stained purple and panting from the drag up the hill, I stop short. To my surprise, Mr Huxley's sister is standing behind the twirly iron bars with a grim face and bleary, reddened eyes. Her iron grey hair is scraped back into a tight little bun and she is even more sombrely dressed than usual. Her carpet slippers reveal that she is not planning to leave the premises. So why is she standing at the gate?

"Your lesson is cancelled," she announces in brittle tones.

My heart leaps. Cancelled!

“Does that mean I can go home?" I ask.

"And don’t come back!" she commands.

I’m not sure how to take that. Surely she doesn’t decide who comes to play in Mr Huxley’s wooden shack.

"Well, I..." I stutter.

"Tell your mother she’ll have to find you another teacher," Mr Huxley’s sister continues.

Though I am rejoicing inside, I feel bound to ask what I’ve done. Does he know that I didn’t practise on Tuesday or Wednesday?

"He’s dead. That’s why," she replies with a sniff. Turning away, she drags her slippers zigzag back up the drive. She didn’t smell of shag. She smelt of the whisky Dada keeps in the dresser for medicinal purposes.

I watch her for a moment before making off.

Dead.

She doesn’t see my grinning face or hear my scampering feet. She doesn’t hear my happy song as I make my way home, either.

This old man, he played dead,

Stiff and chilly in his bed,

With a nick-knack paddy-whack, give a dog a bone,

Mr Huxley’s dead and gone.

I think of what I’m going to tell Mama and practise the tears I will shed when doing so.

Mama doesn’t believe me. She dons hat and coat and makes for the front door.

“Practise till I get back,” she commands. “No tea until you’ve practised.”

What sort of punishment is that? I ask myself. Starvation. Headlines rush through my head: “Mother starves daughter because she won’t practise the piano.”

I go to the fridge and help myself to a couple of cold, fried sausages, eat them and practise without washing my sticky fingers.

“There were 8 sausages on the plate and now there are only 6,” says Mama when she gets back from Mr Huxley’s. 

She is a bit repentant because she didn’t believe me and has probably had the insufferable, inebriated sister to cope with.

“If you washed your hands before playing the piano, I’ll forget about the punishment,” she says. “And anyway, you’ve had your share of the sausages.”