‘He’s an intelligent child,’ says the childminder, with a clear implication in her tone that this is a compensatory trait—an entry on the plus side of an otherwise lacklustre personality profile. ‘… He just doesn’t seem to want to play with the other children …’
She runs a playschool in her house near to us in South London, and I can tell even at this young age that my mother is intimidated by her posh voice and fancy ways. The house is very similar to ours in layout: we play mostly in a back room with French windows onto the garden. Children trot in and out as we are talking; the boys with guns, the girls with dolls.
‘He does seem to like the piano though, I see him drawn to it, picking out little tunes and so on … Are you a musical family?’
Mum’s face lights up. ‘Yes.’ Mum loves music. She’s always singing at the stove. Her forefathers, so she says, were Hungarian Gypsies who made their way to Britain via various parts of Europe, playing music in the street for a living.
‘Aha! Do you play?’
‘No.’ The lights abruptly dim. Whatever the past, nobody in my immediate family plays an instrument (although my Great-Grandfather tuned pianos at a piano factory).
The children behave much better at picking-up time, I notice. If my mother had been here just a half-hour earlier she would have witnessed a scene of unbelievable carnage; kiddies running full pelt in and out from the garden, hitting each other with sticks, trampolining on the sofas, hair-pulling, biting, rolling around on the floor in tearful jags … seemingly it is only my mum that the childminder can intimidate with the BBC vowels: her charges run riot.
Perhaps it’s fear of this chaos that has moved me towards the piano. I like the variety of sounds you can get from it—the twinkly-twonkly top end, the gong-like middle and the rumbling bass. And so pleased am I that the childminder has noted my interest in the instrument that on my next visit to her playgroup it’s my first destination.
I get more adventurous this time. I investigate the pedals, one of which makes the sound go on forever, while the other mutes it down so low you can hardly hear it beneath the battle-roar of infant hyperactivity. I explore dynamics. I notice that when you hit the keys harder, you can really move the mood around: the high notes become more plangent, the bass booms and crashes. Piano, I realise, is a percussion instrument. Which is not to downplay the impact of creative harmony. While playing two notes that sit sweetly together might give you the idea you are producing actual music, nerve-shredding discords, I find, get best cut-through in this environment—especially if given some attack. Excitement grows as I fire off volleys of explosive dissonance, raining storm-fronts of sound on my warring playmates; laying into the keys with a raging passion. It gets attention. I have to fight off potential joiners-in who would pollute the pure stream of my expression with their sticky-fisted hammerings. Dominance asserted I reign supreme; a vengeful god defiant in my broadwood thunder-chariot.
And then two hands pull my shoulders roughly back, and the lid of the piano slams shut.
‘That will be quite enough of that, little Beethoven’.