The Piano house at Skinos beach is a luxury many musicians including my own father would enjoy. Allegedly it is owned (along with much of the land surrounding the beach) by wealthy Greek people. Keeping a piano requires the right conditions and of course, space.
During their lives my parents moved home excessively. The siting of Basil’s grand piano was always an issue. In Norfolk Basil’s piano dominated our living room. Grand though it was, representing high-brow culture in the Fens, Basil’s big instrument hogged much of the space.
Sat round it on blisteringly cold nights, with an icy wind howling off the Urals, his piano was a curious back-drop during the darkness of power cuts, as the mineworker’s dispute lingered on.
At that point our school music teacher was John Last. People liked and respected him. Mr. Last’s form did an assembly presentation about striking mineworkers to the theme of Lee Dorsey’s 1966 hit: ‘Working in the coal mine’. Steve, or ‘Bernie’ Roper as he was known, gave a reading.
Steve Roper (no longer with us) used to sell bread from a van alongside his father. With his dusky complexion and big eyes, he’d stand in our kitchen vending bakery products from a large wicker basket. Always joking about his ‘granny from Bradford’.
In the remoteness of the Fens that style of trading was the norm, there was a grocery van, a butchers, a mobile chip-shop on Fridays and a mobile library.
Post-war poverty was a continuing reality. Though rationing ended in 1954, sugar, butter, meat and sweets were still ‘luxuries’. The Cold War was happening. The country needed a common enemy (the USSR) to justify taxes for defence spending, plus America’s continuing use of Britain as a static aircraft carrier.
In spite of an occasionally virulent undertow of Socialism which petered out during the Winter of Discontent in ’78/’79; things did not seem to get better.
Having a grand piano was a big deal, quite rare. We ate Spam and soya mince, but on Sunday mornings were suffused with Chopin, Liszt and composers like Debussy, Beethoven et al. So that was alright then!
Mr. Last knew we had a grand piano and did his best to encourage me. But Basil didn’t like it. He reserved the transference of power, favour and filial rites to his daughter Claire, who took on the mantle of a poncy twerp doing high-brow things in the middle of nowhere.
My sister learned to play – shuffling sheet music with a look of superior aplomb, just like her father. In retaliation I herded cats up and down the keyboard, which made an inchoate noise (Shostakovich, Borodin, generally atonal) not to Basil’s tastes.
A piano teacher I know (who has two grand pianos in her living room) says it was criminal of Basil to have been so jealous about his big instrument – and it was.
When someone explained the small, neat building at Skinos housed a piano I exclaimed: ‘A piano! The damned things seem to follow me about’ – which they do. A far cry from cold Winter nights in Norfolk, the peaceful beauty of Greece in Spring is a stunning back-drop for culture. I swam in those waters where sharks are seen. But there was no physical impossibility of death.
Back in the Fens during the 1970s our music teacher was replaced by a paedophile who’d been sacked for kiddie-fiddling at a neighbouring school. So we got him instead. He continued to nurture pupils in his own unique way.
One young person (possessed of a significant contumely), had extra music lessons during lunch breaks. Poor girl, we all knew what was going on.
She was sometimes given the difficult job of a solo performance (at a grand piano) in front of the whole school. I’d watch her face, knowing what lay beneath. Playing that big instrument, as the rest of us gazed on respectfully – a display of talent and culture. But at what price?
‘Talent’ and the often vain enterprise of nurturing it, can cover a multitude of sins, especially under the auspices of ‘education’. For some people the grand piano, emblem of class and intellectual superiority, is an instrument of torture.
During the bleak years of Thatcherism, when poverty was (and still is) an issue in ‘Jurusalem’, on a council estate in Wisbech, ordinary people allegedly burned their doors (and pianos) to keep warm.
They say Art mimics life or something like that. In this case, the townsfolk of Wisbech surpassed the likes of Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, Nam june Paik et al, but in the process of doing so, probably gave little thought to ‘High Art’.
Bridge Street by Guy Pearson courtesy of the Wisbech and Fenland Museum
Image of ‘Piano activities’ and Piano assemblage, courtesy ‘Art of the 20th Century’ Ruhrberg, Schneckenburger, Fricke, Honnef.
All other photos by Alan Dedman
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