Piano Lessons, 1938-style.

When I was about 9, in about 1938 I suppose it was, my mother decided I should learn to play the piano.

My father had left his job with the water board for a new job as a market gardener and we'd moved from our end-of-terrrace house to a semi-detached house near Westby catholic school in Lancashire. The terraced houe had no electricity, just gas and gas lamps, and no indoor bathroom or toilet. The semi had electricity and a bathroom indoors. I think my mother felt we'd gone up a bit in the world and that may have been what prompted her to decide I should learn the piano. She told me I could become a concert pianist and "have letters" after my name. I had no idea what she meant but I didn't mind having a go at playing the piano.

Since we didn't have a piano, the first thing was to get one. My father bought one from someone locally and a women called Miss Ward agreed to come and give me lessons. Miss Ward was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen. She was short and squat and had hair on her chin and for some reason wore a little woollen cap even in summer. Now I'm older - 82 in September 2011 - I realise it was probably because her hair was very thin but as a child I thought it was very odd.

When she arrived for the first lesson she propped the sheet music up on the piano and told me to pull the seat closer. We sat on the same little bench. Then she asked if I had a ruler. Yes, I did, in my school satchel. She asked me to fetch it and I gave it to her. Then she started putting me through my paces. I didn't know what the ruler was for but at the first mistake I made she picked it up and rapped me hard on the knuckles with it. I tried pretty hard not to make many mistakes after that!

After a number of piano lessons it became obvious to everyone concerned that I was never going to be a concert pianist. I wasn't pianist material. One thing I hadn't grasped, and no-one seemed to have explained it, was that I was meant to practice in between lessons. Since I just ran outside to play after each lesson and forgot all about Miss Ward and the piano till the next lesson, I didn't make a lot of progress.

Eventually my mother decided to stop the lessons and Miss Ward took her sheet music, left the ruler and went. But my musical career didn't end that easily. My mother had decided I would do better with a harmonium and contacted a cousin who had one he wanted to get rid of. I remember the day he arrived at our house with a horse and cart and the harmonium on the cart. The thing was offloaded and brought into the house and then the piano was loaded onto the cart and the horse went off pulling the cart and piano. Before he left, my cousin told my mother he was delighted to get rid of the harmonium. No wonder. It made a horrible noise. You had to work pedals to get any sound out of it and I had to pedal away furiously to make it work.

It wasn't long before my mother and father and I all sort of agreed that keyboards weren't my forté. I never understood why my mother thought that, having failed with the piano, I might be a successful harmonium player.

Years later I won a scholarship to Layton Hill Convent in Blackpool and then worked there as school secretary. The convent had a long corridor with music rooms off to each side where girls had to go and practice piano or violin or other instruments every day. The school didn't do any drama but it had an excellent school orchestra. One of my duties when I worked there was to patrol up and down the corridor just making sure the girls were practising their scales or rehearsing their repertoires rather than sitting around chatting. It was always classical music being played and at the time I didn't find it very interesting. But it stood me in good stead because in later years I grew to appreciate classical music and much of it came back to me from those teenage years, listening to music practice and then attending school concerts.

I never learned to play an instrument despite my mother's ambition for me. But I learned to enjoy classical music and that's not a bad result.