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Gilding the tousled strands

Luke turned his head round on its flexible neck, and when he saw me supporting him by the seat he smiled. At that moment the serving hatch was yanked open and light streamed around his head, gilding the tousled strands of his yellow hair. I was overwhelmed with sensory riches. The chakra in my groin was singing and dancing, and I was dazzled by the way light seemed to be streaming right through that beautiful head, not just round it.

Luke murmured, ‘That’s very helpful — my legs get tired so quickly. Do you mind just staying there for a moment while I adjust my balance?’ I took this for licence to extend the radiant moment of groping. Not only did the sunlight seem to be streaming through Luke’s head, it seemed to be streaming through mine. Eventually Luke signalled that he needed to sit down. I edged the Wrigley backwards, and Roger helped him back to his own chair. I established myself at a table to recover from the excitement. Roger brought over my coffee a few minutes later, but I hardly needed to drink it with the way my body was humming to itself. Roger nipped smartly back to the hatch, since as a helper he was entitled to any milk and coffee left over in the kitchenette. Luke, of course, had disappeared. I seemed to have exactly half of the wherewithal to establish magical control of him. I had the spell to make him vanish. That was infallible. All I needed was the spell to make him appear — out of the wood-work. I began to get an idea about that piece of conjuring.

There had always been gaps in the curriculum at Vulcan, it seemed to me. I was always top at languages, and very full of myself until Trevor Burbage mentioned that his sister studied the hardest language in the world. It was called Sanskrit. I was incensed, and persuaded him to accompany me on the long trek out to the school sand-pit. Then I scratched marks in it with a stick. ‘That’s sand-script,’ I said grimly. ‘It’s not so hard.’ Trevor said rather patronisingly, ‘There’s a bit more to it than that, you know, John.’

‘Please can I have a Sanskrit teacher?’ I asked Miss Willis, Mr Raeburn and even Ben Nevin, who was still there at the time. No I couldn’t. The school was in desperate straits. It was no time for extravagant spending. Mr Nevin had done his best for me. He ordered A Sanskrit Grammar for Students, by A. A. MacDonell (Third Edition, 1927), for the library, and told me I could keep it as long as I liked. But that wasn’t at all what I wanted.

Even when there were teachers and facilities my rage for learning was denied. One of my grudges against the school had always been that I wasn’t allowed to have piano lessons. My musical grounding as a listener had begun early and was reasonably good. It went back to Bathford days and the Deadwood Stage a-riding all over the hills, and the couple of swells who had to get away from the City Smells (always made me laugh like mad!), not to mention Ten Tiny Fingers.

On the serious side there was Mozart’s Clarinet Con-chair-toe and also Puccini’s La Bohème, which I found difficult at first. It was in a language I didn’t understand, but I knew when a good bit was coming. A lone lady cried out about half-way through, ‘Fo-do kala fa-za-mee,’ (as I heard it) and I said to Mum I must learn those few words properly and what did they mean? Mum said she didn’t know so we made some up which went ‘I’ve got a pain in my tummy’. At the end they all joined in and sang thickly, and by the time it got to that bit, I was flying. (All this thanks to Jim Shaeffer’s gramophone).

CRX had built on this modest foundation, but Vulcan seemed to do its best to quash my enthusiasm, despite such a promising background. When I said I wanted to play the piano, I was offered a choice between the tambourine or the triangle. Then a lady came and played a marimba for us once. It was so beautiful. It had a lovely golden-brown resonance. The sound just hung there glowing. Deciding that this was nearly as good as a piano, I said could I have one to play, and they said yes. Yes! But when it arrived it was only a rotten little xylophone, with no resonators. It wasn’t even a true xylophone since the bars were metal. It was just a horrible little thing with a tinny sound. I felt stupid just being near it. When I mentioned the piano again, explaining I knew the names of the notes already, they said it simply wasn’t on. My hands didn’t have sufficient span. I would be wasting a teacher’s time.

My love for the piano was unkillable, and I played it whenever I had a spare moment. No one gave me a lesson, no one showed me how, but I worked out a few things for myself. There was a music room in the new classroom block, so I could get access to the piano there relatively easily.

Joan Baez the guilty party

It was true that the only comfortable span I had on the keyboard was C— G, a fifth (with the left hand), but if I did ten minutes of exercises or ran the hot tap in the toilet and soaked my hand in it, I could manage a sixth (C— A). On a really good summer’s day I could reach a seventh on the white keys, although it meant that my right hand had to take a break from picking out the melody to force the reluctant fingers apart. At that extremity of my stretch the fingers in the middle, the ones between my thumb and little finger, froze and refused to bend, so I couldn’t play any notes in between. At the furthest limit of its working, the whole hand threatened to close down, and once again I had to despatch the right hand to assist, this time with unlocking.

Mind you, of my two hands it was the left that had the talent. The right hand was far more restricted, and could only manage two notes at the same time if it played them with the index and little fingers. I’d have been much better off with the capabilities of my hands reversed, or else with a piano re-strung for my convenience, the bass on the right-hand side, where I could pick out single low notes, and the treble at the disposal of my more agile left hand.

Even so, I learned some chords and worked out for myself some passable arrangements of simple pieces and a few popular songs. The great thing about a good tune is that the whole thing can be present even in the barest bones. It struck me, though, that something was still not right. Every time I took my fingers off the keys the music died as though it had never been.

Then I discovered the sustaining pedal. With that discovery came a new world of sound and resonance, and I revelled in it. There was a draw-back, naturally: with the sustaining pedal down I could only play the bass notes, the ones for the left hand. If I tried to get my right hand into play to carry the tune, my foot slipped off the pedal and the sound died again.

I’m fond of my toes. Sneakily they’ve held on to quite a bit of movement. They can manage quite a vigorous wiggle at short notice, but since they’re the only moving parts of my legs I can hardly expect them to make up for the deficiencies of the rest. I could usually manage to hold the pedal down, but there was no question of pumping it up and down, not with the toes alone. I could use my leg as a wedge but not as a working lever. I used the sustaining pedal like the Shift Lock key on the typewriter when I wanted to treat myself to a binge of capital letters.

Although the staff kept snootily silent about my efforts, I wasn’t actively barred from playing. Sometimes I might find another boy by my side, listening in. If it was faithful Roger Stott then I’d ask him to keep an eye on my right foot, and when he saw it waggling, to work the sustaining pedal for me. Once again he acted as my personal remote control. It was amazing what a difference it made to the wholeness of the music.