Mom tells me sister Barbara is taking piano lessons again, some sixty years after her lessons with Miss Underwood ended.
And off she went! Memories… If only I had continued my piano lessons, sigh! Younger sister Sheila may have followed, muses Mom. As it was, she refused to go, as I had refused to return after one lesson.
And her Mom Annie stopped playing when she stopped singing, after winning a gold medal at the eistedfodd. Such a pity. Annie’s sister carried on however, and Mom would play for her aunt Jessie. She remembers playing with Jessie in Granny Bland’s big dining room with the fireplace, while Brenda Longbottom danced with Jack Shannon in his kilt. He was with the Transvaal Scottish, see. This was second world war time.
What did you play, Ma? She starts singing… Besides the Shalimar…
Wikipedia says the song is from Kashmiri Song. That was based on a poem by Laurence Hope, who was actually Adela Florence Nicolson in the days when women often felt it’d be better to publish under a male pseudonym.
This was the most popular of the Kashmiri songs, and it was ‘widely played in drawing rooms until WW2’
It spoke of lost English love in India and got into something about ‘I’d rather your pale hands were on my throat strangling me than…’ Whoa!
Ma! You were playing that and people were dancing to it?
~o0o~
Pale hands I love beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,
Before you agonise them in farewell?
Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains,
Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,
How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins
Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell.
Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would have rather felt you round my throat,
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
Makes Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love sound mild and peaceful in comparison, no?
~o0o~