The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  Understanding plots is not, in any case, the strong suit of most children watching television. They see but do not always listen, not to the words. While the theme music of my childhood TV favourites is still evocative, I couldn’t describe the plot of a single episode and doubt that I could have done straight after the show. I watched my young daughter watching the television – she’s another dresser-up – and it was exactly the same. If I had asked her to fill me in on the plot of an episode of Charlie and Lola, she would have given me a version of what she had seen on the screen, with her own rationale for the pictures.

  What children do hear, in addition to music, and perhaps because of it, is atmosphere. Sometimes the atmosphere will even focus the child’s attention long enough to take in a few words; a sudden change of tone can achieve it. The announcement of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 falls into this category for me. It was teatime and we were watching television as a family when a news flash cut dramatically into the regular program. I would not normally have paid attention to the news, but the change in mood was arresting. Something about the newsreader’s countenance and sombre tone of voice seized my six-year-old attention. He was talking only to me. I remember urging my parents to listen, and being hushed because they were trying to hear the details of the shooting.

  By the time Kennedy’s death was announced about half an hour later, Mum had left for a Friday night ‘coffee evening’ at our next-door neighbour’s house and I was dispatched to inform her of the news. It was the first time I had been entrusted with a task of any solemnity.

  ‘Don’t make a fuss,’ Dad coached me. ‘Just go up to her and say, very quietly, “He’s gone.”’ And so off I went with my weighty responsibility, rehearsing my two words: out of our front gate, in through the side door of Mrs G’s house, through her kitchen, down the hall, into the front room where I sometimes listened to records with her son, Kevin, through a forest of ladies holding coffee cups, and up to Mum with my whispered intelligence of a presidential assassination.

  Back in those days of coffee evenings, Kevin G was what we called a spastic, his form of cerebral palsy having left him physically quite able, but happy to play knights and cowboys with a boy several years his junior. Indeed, he was sometimes reluctant for the games to end, my grandmother once finding him on our doorstep holding me in a neck lock to prevent me going indoors for my lunch. I saw the panic on her face and decided she was overreacting.

  Kevin provided much of my early musical education. In that front room, we listened to the Applejacks’ ‘Tell Me When’, Peter and Gordon’s ‘Nobody I Know’ and a succession of Beatles records. Kevin always seemed to have their latest single, and we played them over and over – the B sides as well as the A sides. Since it was only ever the A sides we heard on radio, I associate ‘You Can’t Do That’, ‘Things We Said Today’ and ‘She’s a Woman’ with Kevin and his impersonation of Ringo Starr. There was nothing wrong with this boy’s powers of observation. He mimed the basic drum pattern to ‘I Feel Fine’ pretty well, but it was the detail he brought to Ringo’s demeanour and facial expressions that was uncanny: the faraway look, the exaggerated overbite, the nodding head and the occasional flash of a conspiratorial smile. Holding Kevin’s sister’s tennis racket, I was John.

  That the Beatles should have been such a big part of our play was hardly surprising. You didn’t have to live in Liverpool to be taken by the mania, but Liverpool felt an appreciable degree of civic pride about the group’s success. There hadn’t been much to be proud of in those postwar years; Liverpool’s glories were behind it and its grand buildings (paid for by trade in cotton and slaves) looked out of place in a landscape characterised by destruction. After London, Liverpool had been the most heavily bombed English city of World War II, and even in the early 1960s the rubble was still being cleared; from the top of a double-decker bus as I travelled into town with my mum, I could see the bomb-sites – ‘bommies’ to the locals. There were houses with roofs and first floors missing, while the remaining interior walls were distinguished by wallpaper that changed from parlour stripes to bedroom flock where the ceiling would once have been. I was struck by the sight, not I think because of any real sense of the bombings my parents had lived through as children, but by the thought that we were looking inside the remains of people’s homes. I’d seen my dad hang wallpaper, and I imagined the people who had once lived in these ruins hanging theirs: choosing the patterns from a big book, laying the paper on a plank and lathering it with paste, climbing a ladder with the heavy, pasted sheet. The people had long gone – many of them must have died in the blasts that damaged their homes – but the patterned wallpaper remained.

  The fact that, more than fifteen years after the end of the war, the city still had bommies gives some indication of the economic state of postwar Britain and Liverpool in particular. The Beatles, then, were a reason to celebrate, and their popularity was not limited to the young. When they appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, I was allowed to stay up to watch with my parents and grandmother; on Saturday mornings, Dad and I would listen to Saturday Club on the BBC Light Programme, and on Sunday mornings Easy Beat, and often the Beatles would perform. In the early 1960s, listening to the radio in the UK meant listening to the BBC (unless one tuned into pirate radio or searched the static-ridden short wave for European stations), and listening to the BBC meant one of three possibilities – the Home Service, the Light Programme or the enigmatically named Third Programme (later, Radio 3), purveyor of classical music, drama, poetry and discussions about philosophy. In our house, we oscillated between the first two: the Home Service for news and current affairs; the Light Programme for entertainment, which included comedy and sport in addition to that wide range of music from vaudeville and musical theatre via light classics, jazz and country music to rock and roll. It isn’t a coincidence that the Beatles, who had grown up with the BBC and now found themselves on it, had a routine that included nearly all the above, including the comedy. Indeed, one of the defining features of British pop in the 1960s, from the Kinks to the Small Faces, was its vaudevillian roots. Even the Rolling Stones had it. Their music might have come from the blues bands of Chicago, but Mick Jagger’s camp posturing and pouting lips were pure pantomime dame, Howlin’ Wolf meets Frankie Howerd.

  The excitement that greeted each new release from the Beatles was keenly felt, even by a child. I have strong memories of hearing individual songs for the first time and of where I was when I heard them. I was taken to see the films A Hard Day’s Night and Help! at a local cinema, but quite separately recall hearing the songs on radio and the thrill they created (‘thrill’ is the word). I also recall the first time ‘Yellow Submarine’ came on. In some ways, this was an equally important moment in my childhood, for as I listened, it dawned on me the Beatles might have feet of clay. Patently, the song was not up to their usual standard of harmonic invention, though of course I couldn’t have told you that in so many words, and having ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for a B side didn’t quite redeem it. If I had gone through the first nine years of my life uncritically liking everything, I suddenly realised that with music – even with the Beatles – some things were better than others. I saved up my pocket money and bought the single of ‘Yellow Submarine’ anyway, but even today when I hear the song, I can’t shrug off that sense of disappointment.

  It was around this time that an upright piano was delivered to our front room. Front rooms had pianos in those days. There was the instrument at Auntie Edna’s – the cut-down modern upright, played by my cousins – and, more mysteriously, the piano at my paternal grandparents’ home. The mystery surrounded their parlour more than the piano, for in my grandparents’ tiny terraced house the front room was never used. I can only guess that they were saving on heating bills, because the door to the parlour was kept shut, the darkened room always cold in a tactile sort of way. I only went in there on my own and to play the piano. The instrument was an imposing old thing, its casing a mo
ttled, tortoiseshell brown, its ivories a slightly lighter brown. It was resonant in that special way that out-of-tune pianos generally are, and I don’t know why it was there at all, because as far as I knew nobody in the house had ever played the piano. But as a small child I was fascinated by its capacity to come roaring to life, and it was on this instrument I composed my first piece, an assortment of repeated tone clusters – it can’t have been anything more – entitled ‘The Animals in the Jungle’, which I announced and then performed to my parents and grandparents listening from the back room. I guess I was about five.

  I must have banged on this piano many times, so why I remember this performance I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I gave it a title, and perhaps that, in turn, means that I thought I had found something – some structure, some musical scenario – that was worth naming. It could be that the moment is memorable because of something someone said, some response I have now forgotten but which cheered my five-year-old ego, or maybe wounded it. It’s all gone. I just recall ‘the boom of the tingling strings’ (to quote D.H. Lawrence), the dark, cold, damp of the room, and the title. And now, aged eight or nine, I was to put away childish things and learn how to play the piano properly – at least that was the plan. For hard on the heels of our new piano came Miss Halliday, a gentle soul in a felt hat for whom the term ‘spinsterish’ might have been coined. She had a look of Margaret Rutherford – pale blue, twinkling eyes and pink cheeks a tangle of cross-hatched capillaries – and she arrived at our front door each week to give piano lessons to me and my sister.

  I’ve often wondered what went wrong. I am, after all, a professional musician. For many years I taught music at a university; I’ve written operas and concertos and string quartets, and my music’s been sung and played by famous people. In 2008, the Sydney International Piano Competition commissioned me to write a test piece for their quarter-finalists. Yet I still can’t play. My wife, who once overheard me tell someone ‘I can’t really play the piano’, pointed out that in that sentence the word ‘really’ is redundant.

  It is true that I was and still am to some extent uncoordinated, but while hamfistedness might have explained why I disappointed my sports-mad father when it came to throwing and catching a ball, and certainly accounts for why I am not a brilliant pianist, I am, as my wife will testify, far less than that. When our daughter was about three she rushed to our piano after my wife had been playing and placed her own fingers on the keys. Her face fell.

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ she said. I knew how she felt.

  I don’t think any of this was Miss Halliday’s fault. At nine, I liked the idea of playing the piano, and had a teacher who was full of encouragement. But wanting to be a pianist was like wanting to be a knight, or at least an actor playing a knight, the piano itself the equivalent of knitted chain mail. I was a fantasist – not in itself, perhaps, a bad thing in a child (or a composer) – but I was also lazy and found it hard to apply myself to practising the pieces Miss Halliday brought. My only mitigating plea is that the music in question was Scenes at a Farm by Walter Carroll, an album of pieces with titles such as ‘On the Lake’ and ‘Going to the Hayfield’. Each consisted of a few bars of blandness prefaced by an impossibly twee poetic quatrain. I was interested in most music, but could work up no enthusiasm for this, even though the pieces were easy enough to play. Without consciously rebelling, I began to alter and ‘improve’ Dr Carroll’s works, syncopating their rhythms and adding notes to their dull chords. Miss Halliday was more bemused than anything.

  But our lessons were short-lived. This was not because I gave up – that came later – but because our family was about to move to the other end of England.

  Dad had worked at the Liverpool factory of British American Tobacco since he’d completed his national service (he’d been just too young to be called up in the war). I never knew exactly what he did there – he certainly wasn’t making cigarettes; whenever I asked him what I should put on a form that required ‘Father’s Occupation’, he’d say: ‘Just put “clerk”.’ So clerking was taking us south, where Dad would work at BAT’s head office in London.

  2.

  ‘Libera Me’

  In the 1960s, as now, there was a cultural chasm between the north and south of England, indeed between the south-east of England and everywhere else in the British Isles. Moving to Kent from Liverpool, then, was not a straightforward matter. Suddenly, turnips were swedes and swedes were turnips, and it wasn’t just that there were different names for things. There were also different customs.

  For example, in Liverpool people ate ‘salt fish’ for breakfast on Good Friday and sometimes on Sundays. This was cod that had been salted and dried, in the process hardening into an unattractive yellowish-grey that resembled an ancient piece of chamois leather. The fish could be reconstituted by soaking it in water for a day or two, then simmered in milk on the morning of its consumption and made palatable with the addition of a knob of butter, white pepper and possibly a poached egg. The flavour was salty, of course, and very slightly rotten. It was sailors’ food, originally from Scandinavia, cheap and basic, almost a symbol of frugality, which I imagine is why it was eaten on Good Friday. The first time my mother attempted to buy it in Kent, she was looked at askance and informed she might possibly find something of this nature in a specialist delicatessen in London. Harrods’ food hall was mentioned.

  Even for a nine-year-old, things were different in lots of small ways. In Liverpool, our house had been on a suburban street; now we lived in a long, winding lane with hedgerows and old cottages. At the top of the lane was a T-junction where, according to legend, a gibbet had once stood. Our house was modern, but it was next to a sixteenth-century farm, which in itself seemed exotic after suburbia. Where once we had looked out at a back garden with a back fence and, beyond it, another back garden and another house, now we saw fields and horses. Because my father took the train to London each day, we all ate our evening meal later. And it had a new name: dinner instead of tea, a subtle form of embourgeoisement that made me feel we’d gone up in the world. But perhaps the most consistent difference in our new surroundings was the way people talked.

  The Liverpool accent comes in many forms, partly because it is itself a hybrid. There is a lot of Lancashire in it, but also a lot of Irish, and depending upon the speaker, one or other of these influences will often be quite prominent. Also, it seems to me that the sing-song lilt evident in some versions of the accent probably comes from across the border in North Wales. Beyond that, though, there is a wide range of what might best be called intensity. It’s the same with the Australian accent, and while the level of intensity is certainly related to class, it is also something one may choose to modify.

  So the Liverpool accent stretches all the way from the relatively posh tones of the conductor Simon Rattle to the impenetrable Scouse of any number of Liverpool or Everton footballers. Neither of my parents had a particularly thick accent, but after fewer than five years at a Liverpool primary school, I did, and I was determined to hang on to it in my new surroundings, in spite of the fact that people in Kent (especially people’s mothers) found it cute. This was partly a Beatles thing, of course.

  As far as I was concerned, southerners were soft and I was not going to sound like one of them. I stubbornly continued to pronounce words such as ‘bath’, ‘path’ and ‘grass’ with a short, flat a – as opposed to ‘bahth’, ‘pahth’ and ‘grahss’ – until I went to university. This was back up north, but nearly all my friends were from southern England and gradually my accent was acculturated into something rather nondescript. Even so, if today I find myself speaking to someone from Liverpool, the accent can come back quite quickly and strongly, tiny vestiges of Scouse remaining in my everyday speech.

  Most noticeable to others is the hard g in the sound ‘ng’; in the phrase ‘singing a song’, I tend to pronounce all the gs, where someone from the south of England or Australia would swallow them. But the element of Scouse I am most aw
are of is the fluctuating ‘er’ sound, particularly when several similar words come in a row. ‘Her hair is fair’ would be an example. As far as I can tell, everywhere in the English-speaking world, the word ‘hair’ is pronounced with a more open palette than the word ‘her’. Everywhere except Liverpool, where for reasons that elude me, it is the other way round. A Liverpudlian is more likely to say ‘Hair her is fur’ and ‘I went to the fun fur’ and ‘She’s whirring a fair coat’. Small children tell their mothers: ‘But it’s not fur!’ I am still occasionally tripped up by ‘er’ sounds, especially if I am obliged to read a sequence of them off the page.

  I mentioned football. In the mid 1960s, both Merseyside teams were riding high in the English Football League, and it followed that to hail from Liverpool was almost as glamorous in terms of sport as pop music. I am no good at games. With a cricket bat, I have – or had – a reasonably convincing forward defence, but I was never able to score runs, and that was the full extent of any sporting prowess. Even that skill was never put seriously to the test. When it came to football, I was as much a fan as the next boy – a Liverpudlian, in contrast to my father, who was an Evertonian – and I can still name the players in the Liverpool team that won the League Championship in 1966. As for kicking a ball, I was useless.