![]() ![]() My father was in Clatterbridge Hospital, sick with tuberculosis, and on Saturdays my mother would take me to see him and then, as a treat, we’d go to the big Liverpool music shop so I could play the big pianos. I, on the other hand, was swallowing the piano whole. I practised incessantly and had a small repertoire of children’s pieces, but she was a local piano teacher, used to dealing with reluctant kids and pushy parents. Miss Riley came to teach me for about six months. My mother knew I enjoyed tinkering around on the piano (“It’ll come in useful at parties, you can play all the old songs”), but the idea that it was more than that had never occurred to her. Although my lessons with Miss Riley were short lived and we found a better teacher – and, later, a better piano – it was from those fluorescent lips à l’orange that I first learned that Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. But the engine was always fired up and she always sputtered off, to the top of All Saints Drive, turning left into Stockport Road. ![]() After the 30-minute lesson she was paid and left, but as I watched her from the front window walking down the driveway, I would beg my mother: “Please can I have another lesson?” I’d already memorised the pieces Miss Riley had left me for a whole week’s worth of work, and I wanted her to retrace her steps from the car back to the front door. “A glass of water please.” My mother would oblige and Miss Riley would plop in two fizzing aspirins (stomach trouble, perhaps?). I don’t remember much about the lessons but I do remember her Fiat 500 and especially its colour – powder blue. The car door opens and slams and a grey tweed skirt is propelled by the spindly legs of this wiry, powdery, elderly lady up the one-and-a-half-car drive, and through the 1960s glass front doors. Bright lips that Emil Nolde would have been delighted to have been able to create from one of his more intensely vibrant tubes of paint. She is applying a smear of lipstick to her lips in the rear-view mirror. Miss Riley drives up to our house, parks, and I stand at the window with feverish anticipation, eyes glued on the stationary vehicle. Photograph: Courtesy: Stephen Hough/Faber Stephen Hough aged eight, with a trophy won in a local music competition. ![]() Miss Felicity Riley seemed to live closest, one village away in Lymm, so she was booked and I began lessons. My mother opened up the Yellow Pages to “P” and on the same page as “plumbers” were “piano teachers”. They got the message and one day a van turned into All Saints Drive and delivered a German rosewood upright piano with 85 yellowing ivory keys and brass candlestick holders. “Please, please can I learn the piano! Please can we buy a proper piano!’ I fiddled with a screwdriver, poked around with my fingers, pulled and prised until it fell apart. Dismantled is perhaps a better way to describe the process. ![]() It was a teabag to a real piano’s mountain plantation. This box of tinkles and jangles was definitely not what I had in mind. You can’t tuck a proper piano under your arm, or pick it up like a tin of biscuits. You’ll get bored with it and then we’ll be stuck with a useless piece of furniture in the house.” I must have mentioned it constantly (I can be persistent) and in the end my parents bought me a toy piano, smaller than Auntie Ethel’s tea tray. Nothing would satisfy me now but to have a piano of my own and to learn to play it. Hammers hit strings, strings vibrated inside the box and the most amazing sounds entered my ears. My father said that I would play chords, not individual notes. A little boy aged four stood eye to eye with the teeth of those keys and gently, tentatively, pressed down some of the ivory tabs. I was bored by these visits but on the right wall, in that back sitting room, stood a brown piano with yellow keys. It was tea that brought us together, as we used to go to their house to drink it in their back sitting room. Or stewed perhaps, like tea steeped too long. He was kind and modest and back-slappingly cheerful, unlike his wife who always seemed to me rather sour. His right forefinger was flat too, deformed into a spatula by an accident at work. Alfred Smith had a Lancashire accent as flat in vowels as the cap on his head lacked a crown. It was at the home of Uncle Alf and Auntie Ethel. ![]()
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