Tag Archives: piano lessons

Piano Lessons and Strangulation

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~

I Choon You

When I phone at 5:20pm every second night, Mom Mary usually launches into her set routine: “I’m in bed, I’m warm, I’m comfortable, I’ve had my eyedrops, I’m just waiting for my cocktail.” But tonight is different.

She’s not in Azalea, she’s in Arcadia. Her second night in Greytown. “I’m sitting at the dining room table enjoying a delicious soup. The food here is wonderful,” she enthuses. Oh boy, looks like Greytown is going to be a dorp of wild late-night jolling. She may not get to bed before 6pm. She’s loving it. But there is one problem:

“Koosie, the piano here is badly out of tune! It sounds terrible. It sounds alright when Barbara plays it because she really thumps the keys, but when I play it some of the notes don’t make a sound.” Omigoodness Mom, let’s get Professor Bloch to come and choon it, I suggest. She hoses herself. “He’ll have to come down from heaven,” she says. “Did he tune pianos?” she asks. “I think he only tuned violins.” Oh well . .

I try another dodge. Mom! Maybe the reason I only went to one piano lesson in my rugby togs was cos Miss Underwood’s piano was out of tune?! Nooit! She leaps to Miss Underwood’s defence. “Oh no, she would have had her piano fully tuned. And I would have noticed. I had lessons from her for twenty years, from when I was six to when I was sixteen,” she defends stoutly if arithmetically dodgily.

True, I conceded, and you’ve been practicing for eighty years since. “Ooh, I spose that’s right,” she says sounding amazed.

~~oo0oo~~

“You know, when I used to play the piano in the Boksburg-Benoni hospital sometimes some of the nurses would just carry on talking.” Um, right Ma. I mean, NO!?

A few weeks later: “A man came to play the piano for us. He’s very good, some of the best playing I’ve ever heard. He teaches music here in Greytown.” I’m thinking, the piano can’t be too bad then. I ask, What did he play? “Oh, modern stuff. Sinatra, Blue Suede Shoes, I asked him to play What A Wonderful World, and he said, ‘Oh thank you!  I love that and I haven’t played it in so long!’ It was beautiful.”