Something to think about

Quotes: I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. (Maya Angelou)..The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull. (Eric Berne).. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Friday 19 June 2015

41 Innocent abroad

This is either the road to hell or just plain nemesis. Only posterity can tell.
At nine sharp we first year music students are gathered together in the Duke's Hall at the  Royal Academy of Music. If we thought we had already completed the long journey to success, we are in for a big surprise.
Those who don't come from the back of beyond and are informed about the customs of this educational institute have taken the precaution of choosing their first study teacher, and are already comparing notes. The others, like me and Ann Gray, who from a distance seems very friendly and is even smiling in the midst of the general confusion, are standing in a relatively small countrified cluster on the edge of the gathering, near the exit, waiting apprehensively to hear who has been allocated to which teacher. The teachers are also round and about. Some singing teachers will continue teaching students whom they already coached for the entrance audition. One teacher has coached nobody – but I don’t find that out till later. She is the one with the loudest voice, the most operatic figure (bust out to the front, bum out to the back, waist held in by a corset, like old-fashioned pictures of opera divas in encyclopaedia), the most jangling jewellery, the most eye-shadow - and she is arguably the most apprehensive.
We small fry, having expressed no preference on our application forms - in my case because I don't know any of them and am therefore in no position to judge anything - are banking on the luck of the draw. Those who have already secured their professor are looking down on us charitably, because we are really the leftovers, though we don't know it at the time. That doesn't dawn on me till much later, for a very good reason. Our teacher has not been on the list even if I had wanted to study with her, and it’s on the cards I would have wanted to, since all the other names were unknown to my parents and had certainly not had illustrious careers.
I later learnt to my cost that you can become a music professor even if you have never walked an opera stage, hardly every sung a concert, and of mediocre talent, if – and I say this with emphasis – if you know the right people. I also learnt that music professors are chosen mainly by their peers, who would not want to introduce a rival into their midst, now would they? Their students were thus good candidates for vacant posts. But – I learnt later – you were not a good candidate if your teacher disliked you, and it did not take me long to find out that the teacher to whom I was allotted at music college did not like me. I should add that the feeling was mutual.
This teacher turned out to be a brand new famous lady who had returned from a decade in the United States teaching at a very posh university to honour her old Alma Mater with pedagogic splendour. Since she hasn't been on any lists of preference, nobody has had the opportunity of choosing her. What could be more natural than to send the clueless to her, clueless as she is about the nepotism and favouritism which is to become the bain of her existence, all the more when the full realisation of her fame becomes known to those who have spent their 'best years' with more hard pedagogic grind and less success than she has.
We novices are all unknown quantities. I succeeded in my audition after three years with Tommy, but without any prior precautionary lessons with one of the teaching staff. I am unversed in the noble art of networking. I am fresh from the country and bear the reputation appropriate to someone from the Land of Song. I am a natural singer without any of the hang-ups of those fellow students of mine who have not had Tommy to spurn them on. I am vocally uninhibited to the point of exhibitionism and I am judged to be the right material for this extraordinary woman. The fact that I am really rather introvert and shy has had no bearing on this casting decision.
Half an hour later, six of us can be found hanging out in front of the second floor room that is to be her studio. We discover that her name is Miss not Mrs Plum, and we make first tentative efforts to get to know each other.
I am drawn to Neville, as Ann Gray likes to call herself after the middle name of her dad. She is smiling, but I notice that she is pale and thin, and I wonder how she has managed to get through the audition if she is as anaemic as she looks.
She tells me that she has given up the idea of studying medicine after nursing her mother, who has recently died of cancer. Now she wants to wing her soul into the realms of song. In the knowledge that my father is also terminally ill, I sense that there is a bond between us. Her pain is my pain.
Then Miss Plum arrives. She is short and buxom, dressed to the nines, dripping with jewels and Chanel something or other and raring to go. She has good legs and a huge mouth, and we have heard her shouting long before reached the top of the wide staircase. She is the most energetic person I have ever met.
Neville and I are in shock. We have already exchanged horrified glances about her at the reception, and now we are about to get her in full throttle.
‘Well, dee-hahs”, come on in,' she commands, with extraordinarily deep and studiously well enunciated received English vowels, and we trail into the studio in her wake. The received Italian consonants come next.
'Now, who are you?’ she asks the first of us, rolling her ‘r’ till her tongue gets tired.
Three minutes later she has memorised all our names and birthdays, and proceeds to tell us what our vocal prospects are on the basis of our horoscopes.
I am even more horrified. Nobody told me I would be having lessons with a fortune teller. I have come here to sing, not see into the future, and at ten thirty I haven't opened my mouth yet.
One by one the others are tested to see if they have the necessary guts. Miss Plum sits straggled across the piano stool, clacking away at the ivory keys of a simply splendid grand piano. Poking around the keys, her lacquered nails are taking a beating. And so are the young, unfinished voices.
‘Shhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ she commands, showing us, with thumb and index finger pinched in front of her mouth exactly where the tone has to sit.
She plays the notes we are to sing, but she doesn't launch into song herself. She can't, I soon discover.
Good God. She's hoarse.
‘Ahhhhh!’ she declaims in stentorian tones some octaves below the normal female vocal range.
We are meant to sing about 2 or is it 3 octaves higher. I don't think I should have any problem with that, but some of the others seem perplexed, even distressed by the idea of competing with the terrific din that is going on from behind the raised lid of the grand piano.
‘Louder!’ she shouts, hacking away punishingly at the lower end of the keyboard.
‘Shhheeeee! Shhheeeee! Shhhheeeee!’ the next victim emulates as she hits a series of unrelated notes in quick succession.
“Attack! Attack!”
One by one we are nailed to the mast. Pale-faced and with trembling lips we take the stage, which is a Persian carpet in front of a larger than life-size mirror, only to leave it again after a vigorous round of vocal stampeding.
At last it is my turn. I, the Libran who, spontaneously and without any justification apart from my date of birth, has been prophesized failure and called a defeatist, have been left to the tail end. She has taken an instant dislike to me and will probably throw me out, I have decided.
Wishful thinking.
‘So you are....let me see....Faith,’ she muses. ‘A lovely name. I hope you live up to it.’
Not that again. I'll walk out if she asks about the other two.
I'm in luck. The business of the horoscopes is still uppermost in her mind.
‘Ah, yes’ she sighs sadly. ‘You are the Libran, aren't you?’
‘Well, yes, Miss Plum,’ I am obliged to admit.
Having followed my birth sign in Woman and Woman’s Own every week for several years, I am an experienced horoscope reader and firm disbeliever, because for one thing, my horoscopes invariably range from mildly pessimistic to fatal, so I would become suicidal if I started to believe them.
And now here I am, on my first day at college, being categorised for all time depending on when and where I have had the good or bad fortune to be delivered into this tortuous world, according to Miss Plum's interpretation of the stars.
‘Well, of course, you are too sceptical, depressive, fatalistic, and defeatist to be an artist,’ she is saying again, drawing the words out like rabbits from a hat and churning them round in her posher than posh elocution.
Oh, really, I'm thinking. And who are hell are you to know?
‘I was born on March 10th,’ she informs us. ‘I'm a fish...’
You're a silly old cow, I am thinking, as Ann Gray sidles up to me and whispers just that. The bond is sealed. Big mouth is the enemy.
‘...and fish is Pisces, and nearly all the greatest artists are Pisces,’ she concludes smugly.
‘Well, nearly all.’ She nods graciously to a student named Lily, a thin necked, curly haired girl with an almost inaudible voice, who is a Leo on whom she has obviously set her sights.
It isn't long before Lily is accompanying her to the hairdresser's so that the latter can exactly match Miss Plum's hair dye. It could have been me. My hair is fair and pretty. But I am not Lily the lioness with lesbian tendencies. I am only Faith, the failure.
Nobody argues with Miss Plum now and few are to take her on in the years to come. She's forgotten or chooses to ignore one or two of the other Libran qualities I have in abundance: persistence and a dogmatic pursuit of justice.
There is a pregnant pause while Miss Plum blows her nose on a scrap of lace-edged gauze, which she subsequently stuffs down the front of her dress.
During this natural break I stand motionless and poker-faced. I think she is taking time out to see what I will do. But she's out of luck. I don't react at all. And that's the going to be my way of dealing with her moods and tantrums in future, too. It baffles her.
‘'Your only saving grace is your Welsh ancestry,’ she tells me, in rather more charitable tones. ‘Maybe I can make something of you, after all.’
Like Geppetto and Pinocchio? Or Svengali and Top Hat? Neither notion impresses me in the slightest.
Ann Gray is a Gemini, that means she has the makings of a first rate schizophrenic. She is saved by the bell, though, because she comes from Lancashire. Miss Plum reverts to Oldham AyeLuv twang and I get the impression that she is schizophrenic herself, this bumptious character with the overgrown fingernails, slightly loose dentures and a corset in which she seems uncomfortable, judging by the number of times she lifts up her skirt to pull the offending garment down a bit. Lily, the only other Welsh girl in the group, reminds Miss Plum of herself when she was young, we soon discover. No wonder she has a head start on the rest of us.
On occasions when the hooks on her corsets go astray, which is quite often in the years to come, she calls out for Lily – and only Lily - to hook her up again. If that’s the price of favouritism, I’m glad I don’t have to pay it.
I can't help feeling a little cynical. No way could Miss Plum have ever looked like Lily, who is pretty by any standards. Lily’s Welsh accent is thick, though her knowledge of the Welsh language seems negligible. She laughs with exactly the right mixture of gurgle and guffaw. You can tell that she's not as ladylike as she looks. There is something youthfully obscene about her. That's probably what attracts Miss Plum to her. For a few minutes the rest of us are all on another planet while Miss Plum auditions Lily and is stupendously fascinated by what she hears.
To be fair, I don't think Lily is really comfortable under the gaze of this diva. None of us are. But Lily copes with it better than we do. Maybe she senses that she is onto a good thing.
Lily actually has more of a warble than a voice. Thrush-like, but with one or two nice open Welsh vowels and bags of charm. No hint of a dramatic soprano in there, despite Miss Plum’s diagnosis. I learn there and then that Miss Plum is prone to hearing only what she wants to hear.
Gray and I exchange some more disapproving glances.
Bless her, Gray is making a brave show of being amiable, nodding co-operatively when Miss Plum says something, but her eyes are narrow and glinting, and she is hiding her scepticism under a thin-lipped smile.
I am not being amiable. I have resolved not to be. I'm going to give Bossy Boots a hard time.
AND I SING THE LOUDEST.
On reflection, it is possible that I have disappointed Miss Plum by showing I have a talent with which she does not actually credit Librans, or would prefer not to, and thus contradict all her prophecies, convinced as she is that she also has clairvoyant powers.
I think she sometimes even tries to console me for being who she thinks I am. She interrogates me frequently in these early days and weeks because, as she herself admits, she wants to know what make me tick. But I'm hanged if I'm going to let her find out and when she finally realizes that she is drumming on a psychological wall of sighs, she drops the third degree and starts telling me that I have a ‘good brain’.
She rewards me for my ‘good brain’ by putting me through drawn-out lessons which start at 8.45 a.m. twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays and actually last till one of the other students – as often as not one of the Americans who soon track her down to London and queue up on her doorstep - turns up, which despite their intercontinental enthusiasm can be as late as 11 a.m., though they are scheduled for 9.30 onwards.
This takes the biscuit. She tells me it is to ‘get me going’, but the truth is that no one else is prepared to turn up at that unholy hour and she is not prepared to start later as long as she has someone (me) to victimize. So, intentionally or not, she has made me the scapegoat for the others in her class. I am an unwilling martyr to the cause. During the 6 years I attend her voice class, never once does a fellow student agree to swap lessons with me. If for any reason I can’t attend – and it has to be a good one - she starts later.
I am therefore stuck with the pre-breakfast sparring sessions – or punch-ups, often bordering on fights to the death - and what is worse, a couple of years after starting the course I move to a part of London which is connected to the college by the same tube line. Sometimes - woe is me - she gets into the same non-smoking compartment as me, just one station later. If I spot her, I hide behind someone. But if she spots me first, she calls out through the crowded carriage for me to open my vowels (at least, I hope that is what she is bawling) and stop being a defeatist. After storming the lifts and escalators at Baker Street there follows a steeplechase down Marylebone road, past Madame Tussaud and various other aristocratic-looking buildings to the college. Miss Plum has never heard of the Highway Code and never driven a car, so she is unhampered in her movements by awareness of impending danger. I am all the more aware of her foolhardiness.
“Come along, dear. Don’t dawdle!” she calls over her shoulder. “They’ll wait for us,” she adds optimistically, they being buses, taxis and anything else cluttering up her bit of the highway.
My life takes on a relatively predictable and indubitably strenuous routine, based on the fact that Mondays and Thursdays are mostly taken up with surviving Miss Plum and the rest of the week recovering.
Having discovered that my brain is good, she has decided that I should always be available for comment. Does she really think I may have something of value to say? Does she really want to hear a second opinion from a ‘good brain’ about what she is doing with the other 5 voices plus Americans plus the odd prima donna who comes to learn one of her roles she has sung in her prime? For the most part her handling of untrained voices is disastrous because they tend to trust her and have endless admiration and respect.
But that should have made a difference. It doesn’t. She assumes that everyone is utterly captivated. Why does she go about her teaching of novices – often frightened novices - with such histrionics? Is it to appease her appetite for the stage? She is an exhibitionist. Twice a week she actually keeps me from other essential activities. It isn’t me she wants there, it’s anyone. But, and this may be the real reason, it adds variety to the otherwise monotonous routine of her teaching method, which is indiscriminate and frequently inappropriate.
As far as I can judge the voices are deteriorating rather than improving thanks to her ministrations, but I can hardly tell her that, can I? So she gets to hear the lies she is accustomed to. And at the end of those long, tedious sessions, I make for a practice room to try to remedy or remove some of the most drastic measures she has seen fit to implement on me or the others. Yes, she sends me to another room because she is at her wits’ end. That’s the reason I have sit t in her studio for hours. It isn’t so that I can learn something. It’s because she knows that I know – with my good brain – that she is inflicting merciless vocal pressure on beginners, even Lily.
Lucky for me and sadly for my class colleagues, they don't have Tommy to go back to during the holidays, to get their voices straightened out again. It is to Tommy that I owe my survival during those absurd, nightmarish years. He saves my vocal bacon all the time I am sparring with Miss Plum.
And sparring it is.
In contrast, solving the problem of having a roof over my head has been relatively simple on the face of it. Having remembered lodging with some nice people who later moved down south to somewhere like Brentwood, which is fairly far out but has a good tube connection to Baker Street, that is where Dad sends me. I can spend the first three months or so in their spare room.
During the early days away from home, it’s nice to go somewhere warm and cosy, but these gentle people are aged and don’t really need me disturbing the twilight of their lives together (even if they never say anything to that effect), so it is only a temporary arrangement, and by November I have taken up residence in a hostel for female students in 226 Finchley Road, an house that still exists, though most of the front garden has long since been sacrificed to a dual carriageway thoroughfare. In those days it was a nice place to live, except on Saturdays and Sundays. We were not allowed to practise, the landladies were conniving chain smokers with hooping coughs, the breakfasts meagre and our money-saving habit of cooking clandestine eggs and potatoes on a little stove kept under the bed for the purpose and losing its charm rapidly, Together with a fellow student, I exchange my half a room at the hostel with two whole ones in Chelsea, an address in Edith Grove, that now belongs to the highly coveted residential areas in that part of London. At last we can practise any time including weekends. My colleague is a pianist. She thumps away every day for 6 to 8 on her huge, thankless upright, wheedling it to produce Liszt and Beethoven. I can punish the neighbours with Miss Plum’s merciless vocal gyrations, since I work on the exercises till they are brilliant, though they are entirely unsuitable for my voice. When evening comes, my colleague takes over my gentler voiced piano in the communal bedroom, which is built-on and therefore separate from the house – an acoustic godsend. I can’t remember what I did then, but the whole setup was such an improvement on eggs fried on one ring extracted from its hiding place under the bed at the hostel that I expect I did some cooking. I did not share a room with my colleague in those days and I can’t remember her at all.
The new living arrangements were a success, but it was time to move on. The house in Edith Grove was dilapidated and the gas geyser in the kitchen had exploded, narrowly missing me. I recall the later move into new quarters in Ladbroke Grove as having been a major logistic exercise across London, past, Paddington and Kensington on double decker buses. I have no recollection of how the pianos were moved, but presumably they were. All other memories of this event have been erased.

Moving house either gets to be a habit, or you swear never to repeat the experience. In my case fate decreed the former, as it turned out, but I got the habit from my mother, who was more likely to move house than to undertake major renovations in the house in which we lived. 

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