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Why does life have to be so complicated? Metia, Felix and myself attended church with our parents most Sundays; in a truly old-fashioned sense it was quite a social outing for us too. We enjoyed singing. We loved talking to the nice old ladies with their fur hats and watching the suspicious ones who wouldn't sit in the front pew, with their sideways glances and foregone conclusions. We even liked the vicar's sermons, especially the bits about dropping his glasses in the fire and leaving for home early because there was something good on TV! And pretty soon we were getting a little more involved with village life.
Our parents were disappointed at the way the graveyard in Longnor had become overgrown and tangled, and volunteered one day to cut the grass, if there were not a sexton to do the job. There was indeed a sexton, we learned, but he was 89 and had just been told to stop digging graves and take a bit of rest. He was finding it rather a struggle doing the grass too, nowadays. There was both a large upper and lower graveyard, so as you can imagine, quite an acreage of grass to keep short.
Ike Thompson, the sexton, lived with his wife Alice in a bungalow behind the upper graveyard. He was quite a character, all told. He was a confirmed and determined smoker, and not a bit abashed about this, although he did admit that he never inhaled the smoke. Ike kept a secret store of whisky in his grandfather clock, that the vicar kept on bringing him when he came to visit, and he had a shed across the road full of spitfire propellers from the 2nd World War. Ike was very nimble despite his advancing years, and would go climbing anywhere, including all the way up the church tower, on a most precarious arrangement of ladders and wooden floors. He was great company, and we spent many sunny hours sitting in the long grass of the churchyard while Daddy was using the petrol strimmer, smelling the blue smoke and the new cut grass and listening to Ike's stories of Longnor when he was a young man.
In the meantime we had all joined the local brass band, except for Max and Fergus, who were really too young to do anything but sit in pushchairs and toddle up and down. We had heard they were desperately short of members, and our mother got in touch with the conductor, John Roper, a small man with a worried expression and a beard, who came out to see us one day at our home, with three brass instruments for us to have a go at, to see if we liked the idea. I had a Euphonium, Metia a Tenor Horn, and Felix a Cornet. We were thrilled. John Roper showed us the basics of how to blow a scale, and said to us, "If you can come to next week's practice and blow a scale of C, we'll be right proud of you!"
Did we try hard with those brass instruments? We practiced all day some days, and when we weren't practicing, we were polishing our instruments until we could see our faces in them, and until Ma complained that she was running out of silver polish!
But we didn't just learn the scale of C, as John Roper asked us. By the end of the week we had reached the end of our hymn books, and were playing hymns together in three part harmony, albeit with plenty mistakes.
On Tuesday, we went up to Longnor to the practice room, which was a grey chicken shed on the corner of the Hollinsclough turn. It was very hot, and loads of people we had not met before were making a great row with their brass instruments. I sat down next to the solo euphonium player and he requested we play a very fast march (Colonel Bogey), which totally lost me. He then told me that I could call myself a euphonium player when I could master that.
I was quite annoyed and so I asked them to play one of the hymns from the book to give us a chance. As no-one had been expecting us to do anything this first week, they were all quite surprised, and I felt pleased that we had got off on a good footing with the band, through showing so willing. Nothing is ever that simple!
We were also involved in the passion play at Longnor church that year. It was fun. Metia has always been good at dressmaking, and she made us flowing Arabic robes, which we then had to share out in the vestry before the service to all the other children from the village, who had come ill-prepared, dressed in tracksuits and trainers, with tea-towels on their heads and who strongly felt the inadequacy of their garb when they saw ours! Fortunately we had lots of cloth to spare. And we got a mention in the following month's parish news too, a dry little comment that "some of the actors had even managed to grow black moustaches for the occasion!" Metia and I had been into Mummy's make-up bag for an eyebrow pencil...
In the following June, after a winter and spring of preparation, we were ready to play to the world with the Hollinsclough Silver Band. Our first concert was at Chelmorton, 15 miles away over the Derbyshire border. It was a breezy day. We had to march in the street without lyres to hold the music, as there were none to spare, I remember, and we wore black velvet jackets, as the band did not have a uniform yet. Then we went into the village institute and gave another concert to the local people as they sat in plastic chairs on the wooden floor eating home made cakes and drinking tea. That was where I first saw my boyfriend, Paul. His Mum played tenor horn with us and he was sitting behind the cornet players watching the band. He was 13 and I was 18, so we never talked, but seeing his school photo on his parent's mantelpiece when I first went to visit them, I realized many years later that it was himself.
Well, we loved playing with the band, we practiced long hours, until we could play solo parts and we blew up photocopies of the music at home so that the older, long-sighted band members could read it better. When the band had a uniform made, some nine months later, we also got one each, and really felt ourselves to be integral members. Metia and I were also working on a piece of music for brass, Cappuccino, which we spent every waking hour on, sometimes staying up until two in the morning. Composing 26 parts in the respective keys of E and B flat was quite a challenge.
The trouble began with solo parts. The band had a solo horn player, who wouldn't play solos as she claimed to be too shy, and so the conductor gave Metia a solo piece to practice. The solo horn player didn't take this very well, unfortunately, and the E-flat bass player, who always bought her Martini at gigs, joined in the cause and they began to look for any excuse to get at us. As for me, the solo euphonium was brilliant, and good-natured, and gave me a lot of help, so I didn't realize there was anything like this going on for some time. But Felix was having trouble with a flugel player from the neighboring Warslow band, who's husband was a footballer for Nottingham Forest. She didn't seem to like his giving us music lessons, or inviting us to join the Warslow band, and she attacked Felix when he asked her for help with a piece of music at a concert, saying, "You think you know everything, don't you Sunshine?!" To make things worse, her husband was the brother of the solo horn player! She and her husband's sister and the E-flat bass player hatched a plot to get rid of us from the band, playing on our Achilles heel, if you like, which was that us girls had always refused to wear a man's tie with our uniform. We wore bow ties in the correct color for each band, silk bows our father had purchased for the Tie Rack on Euston station at considerable expense. So the pressure grew on us to wear men's ties, starting with their presenting us with the ties, being told that we objected to this, and then continuing to nag and pressurize us over the matter at every forthcoming concert and practice.
So we completed our piece of music, and took it to Warslow band practice one night with us. Steve Sutton, the footballer conductor, put the sheets up on the music stands, and told everyone that we had composed the music ourselves, a statement which was greeted with surprise, incredulity, and from some, disbelief. There was a moment of confusion when he asked the band to try the piece, which, to make matters worse, we had written in the key of A-sharp, and then they launched into it.
It was incredible! Metia and I were so thrilled, we could have cried. The horn solo at the start worked perfectly, and after the first few bars everyone threw down their instruments and there was total pandemonium. Metia and I were being banged on the back and told that we were their composers, and how great it was, and how pleased they were. We were bought a drink by the conductor, and our conductor, John Roper, said he felt he could begin taking his band to some contests now, as we had done so well, and especially as we could write for brass too. One of the members offered to iron out the mistakes in the music, and we went home as happy as larks.
We ran upstairs yelling. Daddy was sitting up in bed with a book.
"Guess what!" we cried. "It worked! It really worked!"
"It sounded gorgeous! They said we could be composers!"
Daddy grinned. "It won't last," he prophesied.
He was right. The very following week, we were taken aside by the E-flat bass player and dismissed for not wearing a man's tie.
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