The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Page B

very latest thing, with a loose, green-granulated surface, not an asphalt red one. (The early hard courts were quite smooth and had a surface like maroon asphalt.) Mary was a kind-hearted, slightly nervous little girl, who never said a cross word and made me feel protective. (‘Am I doing it right, Richard?’) She had a wind-up gramophone, and by its means I became acquainted with ‘Coal Black Mammy’, ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More’, ‘All By Yourself in the Moonlight’ and other hits of the ‘twenties.
    When I was about ten a tremendous thing happened. Uncle Urling was hammered on the Stock Exchange. I didn’t in the least know what this meant, and I was carefully not told, but it was plain enough that the Urlings were in trouble. My father was sympathetic and did all he could to help. Uncle Urling arranged with him that we should, by private arrangement, ‘borrow’ his (Mary’s) beautiful grand piano - a Steinway - to save it from being sequestered (or whatever it’s called). So our good old upright - the pianola - was put away and the Steinway, which seemed to fill half the drawing-room, was installed. My brother, of course, was delighted, and used to play even more. I felt almost in awe of the instrument, which was mostly kept closed and covered with a thick, heavy, brown cloth embroidered in gold braid with elephants and lions. It stayed with us for about five years, I think, before Uncle Urling was in a position to take it back. When, ten years later, I read
Emma
for the first time, I was able to respond exactly as Jane Austen would have wished to the moment when Jane Fairfax receives the mysterious piano.
    It was a bit of a limitation in one way, though. From my earliest days (well, say four or five) I had loved playing the pianola. When I first began to play it I was so small and light that someone had to hold my chair firm; otherwise my feet, pressing the pedals, slid me bodily backwards. The rolls were what you would expect:
Cavalleria Rusticana,
Chopin’s
Valse Brillante, The Russian Church Parade, Pagliacci,
‘Where My Caravan Has Rested’, ‘Lilac Time’ and many more. I realize now how lucky I was to have this sort of introduction to instrumental music.
    I
responded
to music all right; almost over-sensitively, as a matter of fact. My brother, too, had a wind-up gramophone, and I recall that one day, when I was about six, he played me the
Unfinished Symphony.
The quality of the reproduction, of course, would today be beneath contempt, but it was more than enough for me. The opening theme, in the ‘cellos and basses, at once seemed to me to convey menace and dread. It frightened me. Something terrible was going to happen. I think now that this was perfectly valid. It does. The second movement was no better. The pizzicato opening seemed grim and dire. I felt (although, of course, it hadn’t yet been written) like Simon, in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies,
confronted by the pig’s head on a stick. It assured him that life was a bad business. But Schubert seemed not to be trying to frighten me as a bully would. ‘I
know
this is frightening,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I can’t help it. It frightens me, too.’ I have gone on finding a lot of Schubert frightening from that day to this - the
Octet,
the
A minor Quartet,
the big piano sonatas: so frightening that I prefer not to try to think it out further. Let’s drop it.
    Surely a good teacher could have made a player out of a child as sensitive as this? I’ll always maintain that it was as a result of hidebound, insensitive teaching and regime that I never could make a go of learning to play the piano. I think this is worth mentioning here, not in order to excuse me, but because it may possibly help other parents. My first teacher, at my kindergarten, was a decent but distinctly limited woman, who also turned an honest penny by