Girls at the Piano Read online

  The Taylors’ firstborn, Anne, was named after her mother’s mother, according to Scottish convention. But everyone knew her as Nance and the pretty one. In quick succession Alice gained three brothers—Vincent, Stephen and James—so that five children learned to squeeze into two bedrooms.

  When I imagine how Alice recalled her childhood, I suspect it was the noise that first came to mind. Home was an incessant din of her brothers running after each other and yelling out until their mother’s even louder rebukes quieted them. A constant scraping of chairs against cold stone and threadbare carpet, of knives and forks on chipped dinner plates, the heavy thud of her father’s boots announcing the end of another long day’s work.

  In the year of Alice’s birth, Glasgow was the fourth-largest port in Europe, and so important economically it was known as the second city of the British Empire. Positioned at the head of the Clyde, Glasgow conveniently faced the Americas, and the influence of that invisible shore rippled from the docks into every working-class home. By that time, shipbuilding had replaced the trade in cotton and tobacco, which had fuelled Glasgow’s furnace for almost two hundred years. Shipbuilding companies flourished on the banks of the Clyde, and gradually the industry became the greatest in the world when Britannia ruled the waves. And the heartland of shipbuilding in Glasgow, which reached its peak just before World War I, was Partick. Between the censuses of 1881 and 1891, Partick’s population rose more than 33 per cent from 27,396 to 36,538.24

  On his certificate of marriage to Charlotte Speed on 3 March 1883, James Taylor’s profession is listed as ‘riveter and journeyman’. To be a journeyman meant that James had completed his apprenticeship and was employed by someone else, while riveting was one of those very specific, highly skilled trades that are both crucial and totally invisible. As with so many specialist occupations—air traffic controller, radiation oncologist, concert pianist—riveter didn’t emerge as an apprenticed role until the technology developed that enabled and required it. Necessity may be invention’s mother, but invention in turn can give birth to peculiar children; in the case of James’s profession, the steel industry was the necessary precursor to the rise of specialist riveters.

  The one photograph I have of Alice’s father reveals a heavy-set man with a white handlebar moustache, wearing a grey wool suit with matching waistcoat, a beret and a bemused expression. I imagine James Taylor standing a few feet from the roaring cauldron where he works ten-hour days with his team driving blue-hot metal into pre-prepared holes in a sheet of steel. He’s known these men since he was old enough to form memories. In and out of each other’s houses along the streets they still live in, the same tenements his mother and father expired in when their shifts were through. The men are together at St Mary’s Old Masonic Bar—a short walk along Dumbarton Road to number 165—and at Dowanhill Church, and here at the open mouth of the furnace, where the months have turned into years without their noticing. It’s only sometimes, when he peels off his battered boots at the end of a long day and looks around at those familiar faces who depend on him, at the worn carpet and the tobacco-stained walls that feel sometimes as if they’re closing in, or when one of his children is saying grace, that he’s struck by how many years have floated away with the ships they’ve built.

  Now James waits until the furnace operator determines the rivets are as hot as they can get; then, with one rivet glowing with pure heat on the end of his tongs, the operator throws it to his catcher man, standing by the joints that need riveting. The catcher pops the rivet into the hole and turns back to field the next one out of the oven, while James and his mate work together to set the rivet in place. One of them clasps its domed head in a purpose-built vice while the other hammers the unformed tail of the rivet so it mushrooms against the joint. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the rivet is already beginning to cool, contracting against the joint. The force of pressure causing restriction, tightening; a metallic microcosm of the journeyman’s life. James has inserted thousands of these things over the years to build the ships that float about the empire, but he still can’t help but admire the unyielding perfection of a row of riveted joints.

  The P&O passenger liner SS Berrima, on which Alice would eventually sail to the other side of the world, was one of about 370 Clydebuilt ships completed in 1913. The others were purpose-built for battle. The name Clydebuilt was synonymous not only with quality, but also with travel—whether for leisure or war.

  There’s no such thing as a riveter anymore, Rosie. These days steel rivets have been replaced by supremely strong bolts, and only two of those bustling Clydebuilt shipyards remain. The jagged polished chrome of the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport—designed by Zaha Hadid, no less—opened in 2011 on the site of a former shipyard. The shipwrights’ labour has been commodified into a nostalgic tourist spectacle. The latest edition of the industry bible of specifications for steel construction includes no reference to steel rivets at all. In true 21st-century style, both the training and the tradesmen it took to install rivets in a single joint are redundant: instead of four skilled riveters, the new high-strength bolts require just two workers to install them.

  As the shipping industry has gone the way of the British Empire, so Alice’s high-street location has given over to conspicuous consumption. Today the entrance to 370 Dumbarton Road is squeezed between a Boots pharmacy and a Card Factory, one unassuming door in a long line of retail outlets in the tenements stretching along Dumbarton Road from Peel Street to Hamilton Crescent, which was renamed in 1931 as Fortrose Street. Being just across from the Merkland Street entrance to Partick train station, there’s now a post office and a bank in the same block. If this were Monopoly, the Taylors would have hit the jackpot with such a prime location—except that ownership was beyond their means. The Taylors’ landlord was the one sitting on a small fortune. The most valuable object in their house was the family piano.

  The Taylors weren’t the only ones on Dumbarton Road with a piano in their living room, though the instruments were still far from common in Partick parish. Reflecting the instrument’s increasing accessibility to the lower rungs of the social ladder, piano sales grew much faster than the population. Between 1851 and 1910, piano production in Great Britain tripled from 25,000 to 75,000 units, while the population grew 66 per cent.25

  How the Taylors came by their piano is lost to history, but probability suggests that they inherited it from a relative. Neither Charlotte nor James was musical, but they would have welcomed the gift and made room for it in their cramped home for the possibility of one of their children taking it up. Nance, as the older sister, would have had first dibs, though there was no money to pay for lessons. I picture Alice bringing the pale tip of her index finger to the surface of a yellowed key and looking along the keyboard, wondering what paths her fingers might travel once she knew how to play. I’m certain that as soon as she was old enough to know what the piano was, she wanted desperately to be able to play it. But as with everything else—her clothes, her chores, her side of the bed—time alone at the piano was something she would have to wait for until Nance tired of it.

  To sit still and be able to touch the keys must have appealed to Alice on many levels. At the most practical level, playing the piano was the opposite of chores—it was a private world where there were no brothers, no jobs to do, no prettier sister to be compared to, no surveillance by Mother, or God. I like to imagine Alice sitting up as tall as she could make herself, her back straight and her arms relaxed. Did she dream of having lessons? Of playing for the church choir? She would need to wait until she was old enough to get a job so she could pay for a teacher.

  6

  ‘I BELIEVE YOU LIKE TO PLAY Buyeer, young lady,’ said Mrs Wilcox. A few weeks earlier, on my seventh birthday, my parents had asked if I would like to learn to play a real piano. From my obsessive devotion to the toy version, they had concluded that mine was a love that would not burn fast and die.

  Apart from my grandmothe
r, my piano teacher was the oldest woman I had ever seen close up. Mrs Wilcox was tall and thin and walked with a slight stoop. She had a big round face that reminded me of an orange. She spoke with an English accent and looked me straight in the eye. I felt afraid of her, especially after she had suggested at my first lesson that Mum wait outside in the car.

  ‘Buyeer?’ I said, bewildered. I had never heard of him.

  Mrs Wilcox grabbed one of her earlobes and rang it like a bell. ‘By. Ear. Your mother told me you can play on your toy piano what you hear on records and the radio. Not everyone can do that, you know.’

  At home, hunched over my instrument while nestled in the golden shag pile, sitting cross-legged in front of the turntable as if it were some high-fidelity altar, I played, paused and replayed individual tracks, picking my way across a few of the melodies Frank sang, such as ‘Night and Day’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and ‘All of Me’. Away from the record player, I found that I had not only memorised the melodies but the lyrics too. But just because I could remember the words and copy the melody on my toy piano didn’t mean I understood what Frank or Ella was singing about. What was a ‘lush life’? And how could love be ‘for sale’? It didn’t disturb my parents that I listened to lyrics about adult relationships, no matter how coy the phrasing. In a general sense I knew that Frank sang about how men fall in love with women, but my concept of adult love, like my understanding of how his voice was contained in the grooves of the black vinyl disc I repeatedly spun, remained as remote and vague as the future.

  No one quite knew for sure where Mr Wilcox was, or indeed if he had ever existed, but for decades Mrs Wilcox had taught piano and flute to Hunters Hill’s schoolchildren from her home about halfway along the suburb’s long, narrow peninsula. Her living room contained a sofa and two upholstered chairs, a cabinet full of books and knick-knacks, and her black upright piano. Through a large window one branch of a pale eucalyptus tree creaked in time to the invisible music of the breeze.

  As Mrs Wilcox talked about the importance of listening carefully and sitting up straight and practising every day, I grew impatient. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I understood instinctively that if I remained still and was very polite, I might get to touch the piano in the corner. I couldn’t take my eyes off it: the white keys looked as smooth and delicious as vanilla ice cream. And then there were the shiny surfaces of the black keys, and the piles of books and papers along its top. I had never been so close to a real piano before. The afternoon light skipped across the polished side closest to the window, reflecting the clouds and shadows.

  ‘Would you like to come and sit at the piano?’ Mrs Wilcox said at last, though it could only have been five or ten minutes.

  Despite my eagerness to touch the keys, I approached the instrument with my hands by my sides, as if it were a horse that might flinch and run away. When I hopped up on the black leather piano stool, Mrs Wilcox helped me into what she called the correct playing position. My feet, encased in white socks with frilled edges and black patent Mary Janes, were still a year or so away from touching the floor. I saw my fingers hovering over the white notes as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to do. The position felt slightly uncomfortable—my arms held aloft as they had been in my few dance classes—but somehow I already understood that in time the awkwardness would pass. Mrs Wilcox had the key to all the secrets the notes had to tell me, and one day soon I would know them.

  To practise on a piano between lessons, I had to walk from home around the corner and a short way up the steep incline of De Milhau Road to Mrs Weir’s house. Mrs Weir and my mother were friends. I called her Mrs Weird, but not to her face. The journey, which took all of one minute, would today be considered too dangerous for a seven-year-old, with paedophiles allegedly lurking behind every tree.

  My own fears were neatly internalised even if they were as obvious as daylight to the outside world. I clutched my beginner’s book in front of my sausage-shaped torso and worried that Mrs Weir’s son Andrew, who went to my school, would be home—I didn’t want him to hear me fumbling around, trying to remember which note was which. He was a year older than me but did not play the piano. I couldn’t understand how it was possible to have a piano in your living room and not at least try to play it. If I had a piano at home I knew I would play it every day.

  When I arrived, Mrs Weird would have a biscuit and a glass of milk set on the kitchen table for me as if I were Santa. The more she smiled the more embarrassing it was to make my first attempts to string notes together in front of her. I could hardly hear myself playing for worrying about what she thought. There was so much to take in, and I wanted to understand it all at once. While perfectionists understand that mistakes are inevitable, they prefer to make them in private.

  One of my earliest tasks was to learn which note on the keyboard corresponded to the black circle with the long stalk on each of the first, second, third or fourth lines of the printed music. Mrs Wilcox had taught me the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit as a way to remember E-G-B-D-F, the name and order of the notes on the black lines in the right hand from low to high. The phrase stuck in my head but didn’t help. I believed that good boys deserved chocolate or a new toy, but C’s home wasn’t on one of the lines. And there was no T for toy, in any case. The piano’s alphabet was quite limited really, going only from A to G. With so few notes to learn, I suspected I’d have the instrument sorted out pretty quickly. The notes that sat in the white spaces between the black lines were easy to remember: F-A-C-E.

  The quite ordinary Mrs Weird who had the piano was related to the Weirds who lived next door to us. But they really were strange, having an ant farm in their kitchen and driving to church every Sunday. The only ant my mother would tolerate in her kitchen was a dead ant; she depressed the bug-spray trigger on hapless insects with the zeal of a mass murderer. On Sundays, Dad was often gardening when the next-door Weirds drove past on their way to church; he’d stand up in his tattered white singlet and khaki work shorts and yell, ‘Say one for me, Stella!’ waving them off with his wood-handled garden shears.

  My own experience of Sunday school had been short-lived. The photographic record suggests that I wore some great outfits to those Bible lessons. In remedial-sized handwriting we wrote down key points in the life of Jesus and recreated His most significant moments using coloured pencils in soft-cover booklets. Sunday school was where I’d heard stories about God switching on the lights on the first day, an old man who killed his son, a woman who ate an apple. But one day, when I’d answered the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ with a triumphant ‘A superstar!’, the Sunday school teacher had seen fit to call my mother. At this rate, it would take more than a pair of polished shoes and a purple dress to get me into heaven.

  Ironically my debut performance at one of Mrs Wilcox’s regular student concerts, after just three weeks of lessons, occurred in the church hall where I had incorrectly identified Jesus. As I strutted towards the piano, I did not imagine that ‘Indian Dance’ was a racial profile of indigenous Americans set to music or a simple tune requiring almost no dexterity. ‘You should be able to keep a twenty-cent piece on the back of your hand without it falling off,’ Mrs Wilcox had said at one of my first lessons. On stage, my left hand stayed in place for the one-minute duration, hopping up and down on two notes played by two fingers. While this was going on, the right hand pretty much stayed where it was, too, hovering over a five-note span and depressing the keys in a repeated pattern. The other thing that didn’t move was my hair, which my mother had pulled back so tightly from my seven-year-old face that it made me look as though I was still only six.

  Like Czerny’s teaching method 137 years earlier, Mrs Wilson’s assumed from her student’s first lesson that the goal of playing the piano was performance. In this respect she also emulated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who despaired of practising without the prospect of an audience: ‘Why should she play? Who would hear her? Since she could
never sit on a concert stage in a short-sleeved velvet gown, running her light, graceful fingers over the ivory keys of an Erard piano and feeling the ecstatic murmur of the audience flow around her like a warm breeze, there was no point in going through the boredom of practising.’

  I wore cotton rather than velvet and sat at a Yamaha upright in a church hall rather than at a grand Erard on a concert stage, but the silent attention of an audience was intoxicating. There was no radio blaring out the news every half-hour, and my brother had no choice but to sit still and listen to me. He and Dad would catch up with the footy in the car on the way home. The piece was so simple that I felt confident performing it, and to play solo made me feel special, no matter how fledgling my talent. I smiled throughout my minute on stage, delighted at the way my hands worked accurately in the public spotlight, relieved to discover that I genuinely enjoyed playing for others, and excited about my next lesson and having new pieces to learn. There was no ‘ecstatic murmur’ among the audience as in Madame Bovary’s fantasy, but the applause was genuine. Afterwards, over tea and biscuits up the back of the hall, I smiled at compliments from familiar faces.

  Soon after the concert, Mrs Wilcox suggested to my mother that I would improve more quickly if I had my own instrument. Mum promptly informed my father that the time had come to buy me a real piano.

  Her clairvoyant had been right.

  With my father I roamed a piano display room, thrilled at the thought of my practice sessions at Mrs Weird’s house coming to an end. Surrounding me were black pianos, brown pianos, and a vast gleaming piano the colour of white chocolate. Until that moment I hadn’t realised that grand pianos came in different sizes, or that anyone other than Liberace had access to a white one. We proceeded past the Steinways and the Bösendorfers, the Kawais and the Beales, to the display of modest uprights that occupied the far corner of the room. A salesman began to pay us attention using his peripheral vision.