3. Piano Lessons at Last
Time to get on to my first piano lesson, but a couple more digressions are necessary.
Firstly, my musical inclinations had been at least partly noticed before I came to Caldecott. I had proved able to pick tunes out of a toy piano – just one tinkly octave and only white notes. On being given a toy carillon, I horrified my mother by taking it to pieces all over the living room floor, then amazed her by putting it together again to play a different tune. This was reported to my father who, though divorced from my mother, took as much interest as his “reasonable access” would allow and bought me a piano.
Though my father was a lifelong enthusiast of classical music, the musical side of my family was my mother’s. Her father was a piano tuner who “could get a tune out of practically any instrument”. His father had a piano shop in Gloucestershire and published a couple of pieces at the beginning of the 20th century – marches in the fashionable Victorian style but with a catchy tune or two. Other members of his family emigrated to the USA during the Second World War and allegedly include musicians of at least a good amateur level, but all contact has been lost with the years. The upshot was that “Grandad”, on a visit, tuned the piano, heard me picking out tunes and showed me how to read the notes. So by the time I arrived at Caldecott, I could read tunes from the treble clef and play them with single fingers, but only the notes, not the rhythms.
For my first two terms at Caldecott, I kept this hidden. Partly, I think I was very much in awe of Betty Rayment, maybe for the very reason that she was the key to something I longed to do. But also, I think, because the normal route to piano lessons was via the descant recorder, which did not appeal to me at all. Betty Rayment was quite a proficient player of the recorder – it was far more than a mere educational tool for her. She, like most class music teachers, handed out plastic descant recorders as a sort of primary screening for any latent musical ability. Some children blow them fit to bust, some learn the notes under duress (notes by themselves do not make music), some reveal possible talent. I do not remember if I had a recorder put into my hands but if so, the results cannot have been promising. I tell later, though, how we made bamboo pipes under the supervision of Miss Joan Watson, and I did enjoy playing those.
Fast forward now to an afternoon in the Junior Study playroom, alone with Miss Murdin, one of the variegated major-minor figures who helped to make Caldecott what it was in the 1960s.
If asked for a single memory of many, one that sums up the person, it is not something Joyce Murdin said or even specifically did. I remember her nearing the top of the great staircase (the Junior Study was on the top floor) quietly singing to herself. No actual words, just something like “nò, nò, nò” as the last steps were accomplished. On a physical level, I recall that she kept her head permanently tilted towards the right. On a personal level, she always seemed to be singing to herself. It is a strange phenomenon. Where most people fill their dead moments with silent thoughts, there are those who, like Miss Murdin, fill them with song. This does not mean they were meant to be musicians, nor do they necessarily achieve that if they try, since other factors are needed as well. In practical terms, Miss Murdin had a piano in the Junior Study playroom which she could play well enough to have us singing around it on wet Saturday afternoons. She was cajoled by Betty Rayment into learning the violin, with limited results. She also took us for long walks, sometimes to the Downs and back (four miles each way), during which she whiled away the boredom of the beautiful Kentish countryside by leading us in our (or her) favourite songs, interspersed by such educational games as “Towns and Countries” and “The Parson’s Cat”. She had the appearance of a sweet middle-aged lady – the sort whose greatest achievement in life might have been arranging the flowers in the parish church for half a century – but there was an iron will beneath it. Her system of punishments, based on stars, fixed-term fines, sitting in the corridor and the occasional short sharp slap, is a study in itself. In an environment dominated by such colourful, outsize characters as Miss Elizabeth, Miss Travers, Miss Ruhl, Major Clark and Miss Hill, Miss Murdin tended to slip under the radar. I can imagine situations where she would have been a powerful figure in her own right – perhaps in her native Northampton where, after leaving the Community, she reinvented herself as a Jehovah’s Witness. Her natural tenacity doubtless proved effective on unwilling passers-by.
So there I was one afternoon, alone with Miss Murdin in the Junior Study playroom. I do not remember why. Perhaps I had been denied outdoor activities as a punishment for some wrongdoing. Perhaps I had been discharged from the sickroom and Miss E. had ordered that I was not to go outside yet. For whatever reason, I remember sitting at the piano with Joyce Murdin beside me, increasingly amazed at what I could do. “I shall have to have a word with Miss Rayment about this”, she said. I implored her not to. I did not want to take that plunge yet. I suspect she told Betty Rayment anyway, so when the next episode took place, Betty had been biding her time.
Fast forward again to a day near the beginning of the summer term of 1962, and a singing lesson for the junior class. Betty Rayment’s punishment for anybody who was obstreperous was to have them stand by the piano where she could keep watch on them. So there I was, standing beside the piano as penance for some misdemeanour, but Betty Rayment was not at the piano. She was at the back of the room dealing with another miscreant. I went to the piano and played the song we had just been singing. Forgetful of all else, Betty Rayment dashed back to the piano. She did not quite say, “Play it again, Sam”, but she had me play the song again, then asked me to play one or two of our other songs. I suppose she wanted to be sure there was no fluke. My first lesson was fixed. By March 1963 I had passed my Grade I and Betty Rayment saw me through to Grade VIII in July 1968. By 1965, I was also playing the violin. I see I passed my Grade I in November of that year and had reached Grade VI by the time I left. I never felt the same affinity with the violin, though I did find a good teacher in Edinburgh and dropped it finally only when I moved to Italy in 1975.
In my first years of study, I had a strong rival in Jane Pooler-Williams, a somewhat over-sensitive girl who started lessons the same term. Jane was a nice girl, but she rose to every bait (we were rivals in this too, I have to admit) and having a name like Pooler-Williams did not help. It could be twisted in so many ways. When the time came to exhibit our talents at Musical Evenings, we each had backers who claimed that one or other had played the “most difficult” piece (difficulty was apparently the only criterion that mattered). I am not sure how Jane’s music developed post-Caldecott, but she contacted Betty Rayment from time to time and she certainly had talent.
It may seem odd, but if you ask me what Betty Rayment taught me and how, I do not really remember. The necessary attention was certainly paid to matters like fingering and phrasing and she instilled in me the idea that the ultimate test of any performance is whether it sounds musical or not. I think that, when she was convinced that a pupil was gifted, her idea was to encourage them to find their own way. Playing to an audience was held to be a lesson in itself, and towards the end of each term a “Musical Evening” took place – she disliked the image of the “school concert”. Even those who were little more than beginners were sent on to play their elementary pieces. I have a programme from 12 December 1965 showing that I played a Mendelssohn Song Without Words (op. 19/1) but I am sure I had played at Musical Evenings before that. December 1965 may mark the introduction of duplicated programme sheets, so it is probably useless to search the archives for previous concerts.
At one of these early events, I played the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Among the more generalized plaudits, a remark from Miss Allinson, a lady who cycled in daily from the village to work in the pantry, left me reeling. “I feel very sorry for you”, she said. “I played the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ at my first concert and my teacher told me not to hurry at the end, but I did, so I know how you must feel”. I smiled politely, but I felt hard done by, because my teacher had never said anything about not hurrying at the end. On reflection, I had to admit that she had frequently said, as I started the movement, “keep it going”. Which is another way of looking at the same problem. Miss Allinson was an interesting fringe figure in Caldecott life. As a baby, she had been carried across the Andes in her cot. I have no idea what musical ambitions she had once harboured. If she still played, she kept it to herself, but she followed musical events at Caldecott with great interest even after she retired.
The “Moonlight” episode probably illustrates Betty Rayment’s preference for encouraging students to find out things for themselves. I recall playing something to her that obviously did not impress her much. “Now criticise that for yourself”, she said. Some of my scores still bear, in her inimitable handwriting, indecipherable phrases in secretarial shorthand. When I had a piece memorized and “ready” (or so I believed) she would sit at the back of the room with the score, as if among the audience, scribbling things she wanted to say afterwards. Her secretarial days must have been brief and long distant, but she still remembered her shorthand. One of these squiggles, I believe, means “Did you think before you start?” This was one point she insisted very much on, and I still try to bear it in mind. Before starting to play a piece, you should not just think of how it starts, but also what happens further in. Otherwise you risk starting at a random tempo and then adjusting it as other themes and episodes come along. If I had thought before I started, I would not have launched the “Moonlight” at a tempo so slow it could never hold attention to the end. Nor, as happened at another Musical Evening, would I have pitched into the last movement of Mozart’s A minor sonata so fast that I had to slow down romantically for the secondary themes and try to look as if I meant it. No doubt I had been warned, but I had to learn the hard way. Many of Betty Rayment’s comments were prefaced with the phrase “You ought to know …” Another favourite phrase was “Let me give you a tip”, usually followed by advice of a very practical nature. For example, if you bought something new to wear for a concert, her first words would be “Can you play in it?” If there was tightness or stiffness in the material, it was better to get used to it the afternoon before. Another of her practicalities was to keep an old pair of shoes in the cupboard beside the organ. Playing the pedals, she explained, ruined the shape of your shoes. Her organ playing was something of a mystery to me. If she ever had actual lessons, she never said anything about it, nor did she practice the organ, she just played it at the chapel services. Yet she had some skill with the pedals, and she played it like an organ, whereas pianists try to treat it like a piano and get frustrated when it does not respond. She came from a strong Methodist background, so perhaps a local organist had given her a few “tips”.
When Betty was young, the old habit, deemed to be expressive, of playing with the hands not quite together was fading into the past. She detested it and passed her dislike on to me. Now that the habit has partly returned, there are certain celebrated pianists of today that I find impossible to listen to for this reason. I know there is evidence that the romantic composers played that way themselves, but I cannot hear it as anything but messy.
Other pupils may well report that she applied stricter methods. The mark of a fine teacher is that they do not deliver pre-packaged lessons, but try to find the right approach for each student. By this metre, I think we may say that Betty was a fine teacher.