Oh that piano! I had started piano lessons with an old lady at a very young age in London. She was not beautiful, as musicians often aren’t, and so, with a small child’s ruthlessness, I disliked her. And I never practised unless made to and did not like the piano. Nor did I ever practice or enjoy it, through ten years of piano lessons. But then at boarding school, my piano teacher was a pretty, freckled, auburn woman of around thirty, whom I did like. This did not make me practice any harder — by then my views on the piano were formed — but it meant that for one hour a week, I could talk to someone who was nice to me and even listened to me. And who, uniquely, was female. Of course, I fancied her; many years later, talking to someone else who had taken piano with Miss X, we found out that we both shared this crush. I suppose all her pupils did. We weren’t stupid. Anyway, as I was clearly not bothering to practice, I was eventually allowed to give up the piano.
I must have been a very passive child. Why did I let myself be made to spend an hour a week doing something I wasn’t remotely interested in? Perhaps I had given up early trying to fight. In the same position today, I would just have said — obviously! — I’m not going to practice, and I won’t bother turning up to lessons. What could they have done? But perhaps my toughness now is an inheritance from my Mum’s toughness when she was my current age and I was a kid. There is a type of life history that starts off submissive and yielding, and waits its turn to be imperious and dominant…. Anyway, the piano was something she had never had as a child, and she wanted me to have the chance, and now I can read music and sing in a choir, so I suppose it worked out well.
The upright piano stayed in my room. When I came home for weekends as an adult, it was still there next to my bed, its dark wood quietly reproachful. The piano stool had a lid and in it were mysterious and interesting things, but I’ve forgotten what.
I wish I had been compelled to have piano lessons. My music reading is very poor indeed as a result. That's probably why I became a drummer.