12. Unusual instruments
Though the instruments taught were recorder, piano and violin, a few oddities appeared from time to time. Fairly short-lived were a pair of battered timpani, which took up a disproportionate amount of space in the Music Room. We had no idea what to do with them! It looks very easy when you go to a professional concert and see the timpanist put his ear to the instrument, quietly adjusting the tuning while the rest of the orchestra is playing. We found that, when we got one side of the thing in tune, the other side had gone out. We never managed to get it in tune all the way round. I rather think they disappeared without making a single concert appearance.
Somewhere along the line, too, a trumpet appeared. I could not get a note out of it, even though I knew in theory that you had to blow a raspberry into it to get it sounding. Perhaps my mouth was not a suitable shape. There was a senior girl who could get a few notes from it and I thought she played in at least one of our orchestral items, but none of the programmes I have mentions either her or the trumpet.
I am not sure when the glockenspiel appeared but it is regularly listed in the Musical Evenings programmes. Sometimes one person played it, more often the tunes were pieced together with one player for each note. On 18 December 1966, for example, a group of eight girls played “The First Noël”. An invariable feature of these performances was that most of the children showed impeccable timing, but there was always one who came in a little late.
I have an idea Caldecott acquired a set of tubular bells after my time. For my one experience with this instrument, I have to recall Mr. and Mrs. Vinson’s strawberry teas and Joy Blackaby. Miss Joy looked after the Senior Study girls in the big room at the bottom of the stairs that later turned into a storeroom. Mr. and Mrs. Vinson were friends of hers who had a farm out Faversham way. If the word farmer evokes pictures of rude old yokels, this was a plush establishment with a big drawing room containing a grand piano, painted white, and a set of tubular bells. The strawberry teas were a reward for good behaviour, so I did not have many. Miss Joy was a very kind lady, but there was something about both her and Mr. Marshall, who had just taken over the Senior Study from Mr. Christie, that aroused all my worst tendencies to be cheeky when not damn rude. On just a precious few occasions I amassed enough good stars to go on the trip – Mr. Marshall had a system by which you got stars of various colours for your conduct. The favoured few were piled into the Vinsons’ two cars. If you were lucky, you got into Mr. Vinson’s Jag. The road to Faversham included the one stretch of motorway – the M2 – then existing in Kent and the Jag could usually be relied on to touch 100 mph. This was quite legal, since the 70 mph limit had not yet been brought in. Mrs. Vinson gave me the run of her grand piano and tubular bells and we hit it off famously. This caused Miss Joy some embarrassment. I once overheard her and Mr. Marshall discussing me. “Of course, she [Mrs. Vinson] thinks he’s absolutely marvellous”, said Miss Joy in horrified tones. “So now I have to explain to her why he’s not coming again this week”. I suppose she broke it to her gently that I was not the golden boy of any adult’s dreams, but the cheekiest little sod in the whole of the Senior Study.