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.
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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