Miss Plum has a curious set of fans, friends and acquaintances, most of whom seem to live in gay or otherwise hybrid situations. We students have met some of them at her house, for instance at parties or in formal environments, but most of all at Covent Garden, where Miss Plum has renewed her ambition to be a household name.
It all gets even worse when a small group of American students arrives on Fulbright scholarships for a year's postgraduate voice-strapping.
Actually they are quite nice, but their bragging about their scholarships, their international status (‘we have crossed the ocean’) and this feeling of being small fry they give us is not conducive to friendship. They have had years of lessons with at least one of Miss Plum’s students in the USA, so they know the required vocal ropes well. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that their vocal training up to the time they had crossed the 'pond' date was more efficient than ours.
In no time at all, they are the stars of the class. They profess to adore Miss Plum, and in no time at all they are being held up as paragons of vocal virtue and can do no wrong, except for one of them, if I remember rightly. She did not get a scholarship, so her status is more humble. She could almost be one of us, in fact.
But the status thing soon overrides this pecking order. We poor Brits are chicken feed for these well-travelled Americans and therefore world citizens. The question now is whether Miss Plum will bother about us at all anymore. After all, she is supposed to be teaching us, even though we are patently below her niveau. At the time I probably thought that would be a disadvantage, but in fact, her having a few more robust, prepared voices to go at was a slice of salvation for us. She always had them to look forward to, but I still had the first lesson slot and not one of those ambitious Americans was prepared to take it even once.
So life actually improves beyond our wildest dreams with this American invasion. Miss Plum is pleasantly distracted from having to teach students she regards as beginners, nincompoops, untalented kids, or all three. The dirty work on the US candidates has already been done in Oklahoma, or Texas, or was it Kansas by former students who have been taught without abusing the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and what is more, these budding opera stars already have some sort of diploma in their pockets.
Mind you, it doesn’t take me long to realize that getting a diploma in the USA must be a walk-over, judging by the contents of the exercise books produced with pride as proof of learning or attainment. They proved nothing more than that those diplomas were based on low common denominators (e.g., 10 points for knowing how many sharps there are in G major, or a distinction for being able to notate the key of C for one octave going up from middle C); unthinkable in the real world where music theory is taught thoroughly and at an early age to instrumentalists. Singers are as often as not non-instrumentalists, so they haven’t gone through that part of educations. It explains why to this day many singers cannot read music properly, let alone teach themselves their repertoire.
The Americans all have lots of extra voice lessons, not least I am sure it’s because they are constantly reminding Miss Plum of her greatness (a diplomatic ploy if ever there was one) and she is quick to justify her generosity by pointing out that they are supporting the British economy by spending lots of dollars whose source is admittedly a bit of a mystery to me, given that I survive on a fraction of what they have.
I get friendly with one or two. Sometimes I think they like to have someone to look down on, and I am only a poor Brit without the growing-up experience of crossing the Atlantic. Those Fulbright scholars and others are often rather insufferable, if one is objective. When one of the others even presses me to share a flat with her, I refuse adamantly because it’s the last thing I would have done anyway, as she is the most insufferable of all. Imagine my surprise when I realize that the kind of hospitality I am being offered fits in with the hybrid sexual activities indulged in by Miss Plum’s nearest and dearest. But that only dawns on me months later, when we are again invited to a Christmas party at the holy of holies, Miss Plum’s West London abode.
***
Some of life’s experiences are, in retrospect, joined up, and others are unique. It cannot be said of Miss Plum that she is lacking in a sort of charity, though it does not reach out as far as her merciless yes-know pedagogy is concerned. Occasionally she reaches out to us in a humane way and we all feel cherished for a moment or two, or privileged, or maybe even both, depending on whether we have a grant from the local council or a Fulbright scholarship to cross the ocean.
Some of life’s experiences are, in retrospect, joined up, and others are unique. It cannot be said of Miss Plum that she is lacking in a sort of charity, though it does not reach out as far as her merciless yes-know pedagogy is concerned. Occasionally she reaches out to us in a humane way and we all feel cherished for a moment or two, or privileged, or maybe even both, depending on whether we have a grant from the local council or a Fulbright scholarship to cross the ocean.
It is only at Christmas that we, the ingenuous and over-awed Europeans straight from school, are allowed to share in Miss Plum’s private life, though this limitation may only apply to Gray and me, of course. It is thinkable that one or two had more contact, judging from the degree of intimacy between them which is declared to be friendship by Miss Plum and treated as a giggle, for instance by the astute Lily, who is much better than I am at knowing which side of her bread is buttered.
Miss Plum is always anxious for us to know that she does not take an erotic interest in her own sex, citing the advances of tenors she has known at the theatre as proof of her attraction to and for men in days when coming out about one's sexual preference was still dicey if not downright politically incorrect, illegal and possibly career-halting unless you shared the same 'aberration'. Now and again she indulges in innuendoes, though I have no idea what she is going on about and anyway, I would be inclined to ignore any advice from her, since I already have a clear idea of the mechanisms that control her and much of her preferred company. I think she views me as a challenge, since I do not exchange confidences with her, and certainly would not let her share in my emotional life even if I had one worth talking about. When I later hear that she has actually taken some of the more privileges ocean-crossers (and others?) for holidays in her villa at an Italian Lake, I view it as a lucky escape that I have not been invited, though her reasons for not doing so were plain to me even then.
That first Christmas (and on succeeding Christmases while at college) we six UK beginners are invited to a party at her posh flat in Bayswater, which I learn is only part of the mansion she otherwise lets in floors to upper-crust spinsters with face lifts and poodles. Gray and I decide to face it together and it is with some nervousness and a great deal of curiosity that we alight from the No. 13 bus and march up a wide street lined with Edwardian mansions to her house.
Her secretary-housekeeper opens the great panelled door. I would not have been surprised to see a butler standing there.
“Come in and take your coats off” she commands in a broad Lancashire dialect, which I cannot begin to phoneticize. I gather that this is the famous Madge who deals with everything in Miss Plum’s busy schedule, except the teaching, though I later realize to my detriment that she even gets in on that, for she is Miss Plum’s recognized deputy at functions below her dignity, which include the performances of her less treasured students, which includes me except when Wales is on the schedule. Miss Plum accompanies me (uninvited) to concerts in South Wales, where she indulges in her own form of self-marketing that embarrasses me and makes me cringe. I am sadistically gratified when Welsh inborns who once experienced her singing tell me she had a reputation for screaming and singing sharp, meaning off-pitch. I could now explain technically that the shrill singing was a feature of her way of doing things since she often confused it with vocal brilliance. But there is also local Welsh praise for her stentorian tones that were uplifting when they hit the notes. I need not describe the way I was pushed by her into the shadows, though when I had sung well she was prepared to own me as a student and take part in the success of my work. I have Tommy, my old teacher, to thank for any success I had, since he taught me to make it all look effortless and still sound good.
“Come in and take your coats off” she commands in a broad Lancashire dialect, which I cannot begin to phoneticize. I gather that this is the famous Madge who deals with everything in Miss Plum’s busy schedule, except the teaching, though I later realize to my detriment that she even gets in on that, for she is Miss Plum’s recognized deputy at functions below her dignity, which include the performances of her less treasured students, which includes me except when Wales is on the schedule. Miss Plum accompanies me (uninvited) to concerts in South Wales, where she indulges in her own form of self-marketing that embarrasses me and makes me cringe. I am sadistically gratified when Welsh inborns who once experienced her singing tell me she had a reputation for screaming and singing sharp, meaning off-pitch. I could now explain technically that the shrill singing was a feature of her way of doing things since she often confused it with vocal brilliance. But there is also local Welsh praise for her stentorian tones that were uplifting when they hit the notes. I need not describe the way I was pushed by her into the shadows, though when I had sung well she was prepared to own me as a student and take part in the success of my work. I have Tommy, my old teacher, to thank for any success I had, since he taught me to make it all look effortless and still sound good.
At her terraced London villa the whole of the ground floor is carpeted from wall to wall in velvety, dove-grey carpet, such as you see in furniture shops and glossy articles about the rich and famous. The main room with the bay window facing the street is a big studio with dove-grey walls and ceiling, opulent sofas and upper-class ornaments, a plush-cushioned seat made to fit the window with its dove-grey velvet drapes, and not forgetting the very grand grand piano, on which stands a brass plaque engraved with the unforgiving command to ‘SMILE’, not out of friendship, but because the smile position reflects her wide-mouthed vocal technique. The back room behind the studio is Miss Plum’s bedroom, which, if I remember rightly, had a crimson velour carpet. The guest toilet, furnished with high class porcelain straight out of the Ideal Home exhibition, is at the end of the corridor. The houses in that part of London were often intended as luxury flats and stretch back quite a bit. They are built rather like Miss Orlando’s house in Rhyl, actually, but there the similarity ends.
We could have gone upstairs, if that had not been the part of the house rented out to those genteel ladies who were invariably preserved in fuzzy mauve hair, pink face-powder and lavender water, surviving on military pensions, delusions of grandeur and posh vowels, which Miss Plum does not have, at least not like those ladies. She is still a Lancashire lass despite her career and good fortune and fully capable of being crude and rude.
Presently, when the other guests have turned up in drips and drabs and been greeted, some effusively by Madge who tends to curtsy to those meriting it, we are told to go downstairs, which entails doing a U-turn in the upper corridor and descending steep, red velour carpeted stairs. We squeeze into a room decorated in red and gold and filled with a huge table drawn and laid for about 20 guests. On this floor, designed presumably as servants' quarters judging from the stone stairs that lead out through a kitchen door to the road above, apart from the dining room, is Madge’s bedroom and the kitchen in what were formerly (and still were?) the menial housings with the street level apartment being the 'bel étage'. I suppose it is convienient to get from the the kitchen you can get out into the miniature back yard and climb those concrete steps to street level at the front of the house because the dustbin men can collect the rubbish (do they really go down and up the stairs of every house in the district and what do the flat dwellers do with their rubbish?) but I don’t find that out till much later because in mid-December it is pitch black at 7 p.m. Going to the house in broad daylight did at least solve the riddle of where the rubbish ends. I never find out do with their rubbish. I expect Madge had the rubbish under control. She certainly performed well as chief cook and bottle-washer.
Since we have been told to be there on time, Gray and I have arrived much too early and are the first We do not set eyes on Miss Plum and she does not emerge to greet us, her ordinary students, though she must know we have arrived because it transpires that she has been in her bedroom until her entry downstairs. In the continuing absence of Miss Plum, we are directed to our seats by the imperious Madge and told to help ourselves to water. Nervousness gives way to astonishment that the water is not from the tap, but bottled, as though common or garden tap water were not good enough. Our gobsmacked reaction to the water is doomed to be overshadowed by impending events.
Gradually the room fills up with couples. Yes couples. Intriguingly, there is only one 'mixed' pair among the guests, a very large, loud-voiced soprano (made in Miss Plum’s image) and her undersized husband, a smiling character she calls Jim, or darling, or a combination of both. Since there are no ‘darlings’ in my family, this alone is enough to keep me fascinated for long stretches. Finally, when everyone is seated to Madge’s satisfaction, a dinner bell is rung and Miss Plum enters to ecstatic applause, following which everyone gets up (except us, strategically stuck as were are behind the table and pressed against a wall) and there is a furious scramble to exchange kisses and embraces.
Looking back, I realize that I was having my first experience of the gay lobby. At the time I just thought it was an extension of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
The couples are boisterous,uninhibited, extravagant, theatrical, amusing and for the most part nice. They darling each other and everyone else with show-stopping gushes and the conversation with its innuendos and sometimes even openly homo-erotic provocations makes us small fry catch each other’s eyes and giggle surreptitiously. So extraordinary is the company and the repartee that I have no other recollections of that evening.
At the end of the party we are each presented with a leather-bound, personalized diary for the coming year, endorsed with gold letters proclaiming that it is a gift from Miss Plum. Fortunately, we 6 novices have had our own small collection and bought her something or other. Her gushing gratitude, something on the lines of ‘Oh darlings, you shouldn’t have, but thank you, thank you all, dears’ is followed by ‘Aren’t they sweet! or something to that effect, shouted as an aside to her gay admirers.
Being referred to in these unexpected terms is going to take a bit of getting used to, but in upper-class continental Europe, which Miss Plum and many of her groupies know intimately, customs are obviously different.
I attend her Christmas party six times in all, but I do not later seek the company I meet there. Maybe I should have done. Are some of these groupies fortune-hunters, or are they simply gays wanting to socialize? My family would have called them 'arty', and the groupies would have been flattered. Miss Plum's inheritance is apparently up for grabs, including her jewels, which she in turn inherited from a famous colleague. Who will get them? It won’t be me, that’s for sure. After all, we disliked one another intensely from the word go. I disliked Miss Plum not least for her absurd astrological theories and loud mouth, and she cannot fathom my ‘good brain’ and lack of desire to confide in her (which all her treasured students seem to, at least enough to satisfy her curiosity).
***
Many years later, as I review this text, I can report that I once heard a rumour that Lily, whom Miss Plum adored, had inherited the jewels, but I cannot confirm that. I can confirm that Miss Plum was a psychological burden. Any success I had then or later was no thanks to her, but the amount I wrote about her shows how intrusive she really was.The sketches end here, unless I write some more, and I can't decide whether to.
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