The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  Because her father was on shift work and her eldest sister did not control her much Sadie, during these weeks, became mostly a creature of the streets. Perhaps in recollecting that period Sadie’s memory united it with earlier summer holidays, giving that time a density which her later adult years did not have. Perhaps the life of the streets in childhood was as rich and teeming as she remembered, with its peever beds and ball games, the chalked love messages on tenement walls, the rounders, kick-the-can, leave-oh, the back-court concerts. Above all she remembered the songs, the street ballads.

  Down in yonder meadow where the green grass grows,

  Sits Sadie Maxwell a-telling all her woes.

  She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet

  That she sang Alec Anderson from across the street.

  Sadie made a wedding cake, she made it awful nice,

  She cut it up in slices and gave us all a slice.

  Saying, ‘Taste it, taste it, don’t say no,

  For tomorrow is my wedding day and I must go.

  The voices of her companions would become mocking and shrill as they shouted out her name and the name of some boy, but that mattered less than the song’s mysterious suggestion of sweet and heart-catching expectation. The most glamorous song was the one that started,

  There came a Prince a-riding, a-riding, a-riding,

  There came a Prince a-riding, long a-go.

  When they sang these songs she felt a strange sad warmth in her throat, a nostalgic happiness attached to no previous memory and experience, which explained the sadness in them. Perhaps only those who never sang them recognise how sad they are, with a kind of sadness only felt by those who learned them as their first songs. They took their power from the density of childhood in streets through which no glittering and specific prince ever rode. The street ballad is a powerful, naive art whose power came from children whose simple life-energy depended on naivety – that energy which goes on hoping and believing in life through pain and disappointment. For most of her life, Sadie would be one of those whose desires and ambitions would attach to nothing specific because nothing very specific existed for her. Her life-attitude would always be hopeful rather than expectant. This attitude, more than anything else in life, diminishes intelligence by preventing its use, for intelligence has to grapple with the concrete by creating new individual expectations and situations – too great a risk for ballad singers who sing:

  Sadie Maxwell says she’ll die,

  For the want of the Golden City.

  Art which suggests real possibilities has to be self-conscious.

  So the children played and sang in the hot dusty streets during long weeks of summer and Sadie sang with them. The boys scuffled after their footballs, kicking and dribbling their way through the rings made by the girls. Together the boys and girls twisted and dodged one another on the pavement, slipped through gaps in the railings in the backyards. Their voices clanged up and down the closes and stairways. The sun shone and the dust rose and when the buskers came to play the children sat on the pavement edges as if in orchestra stalls. All day long like motes in a sunbeam until dusk – sometimes afterwards under the streetlamps – through the warm summer holidays the children teemed and swarmed.

  Early one morning after the holidays began Sadie wandered through intervening streets toward Anna’s home. She had no conscious intentions until she found herself in Anna’s street and decided to call on her. For a while she stood uneasily outside the heavy iron gate, then timidly opened it and walked up a curved path through the garden, mounted a broad step and pressed a doorbell. Anna’s mother opened to her and Sadie spoke the ritual words, ‘Is Anna coming out to play?’

  For a few moments Anna’s mother stood regarding the grubby little girl now standing nervously in her faded cotton print frock and frayed, lilac-coloured cardigan. The cardigan was unbuttoned and Sadie was twisting the hem in her fingers.

  ‘Come in, come in!’ said Mrs Berman, ‘Anna is practising just now. You can wait until she finishes.’

  She brought Sadie into the hall. From one room came the very faint sound of piano playing, from another the rumble of a man’s voice. Mrs Berman opened a door and said, ‘Anna has a visitor.’

  Again there was a man’s deep rumble and Mrs Berman closed the door, smiling, then said, ‘Would you like something while you wait? A biscuit and some milk perhaps?’

  For a moment Sadie could not forgive her for this question. Babies were offered food and drink, but offering them in those days to a working class girl might imply that her family could not feed her properly. Sadie had never before encountered such formal hospitality and said, ‘Naw, I’m no hungry.’

  Mrs Berman’s eyebrows went up so comically that Sadie nearly laughed in spite of the offence and her nervousness.

  ‘Hungry? You need to be hungry to drink a glass of milk and eat a biscuit?’

  She led a forgiving Sadie into a kitchen and gave her a glass of milk and (not a biscuit but) a strange kind of spicy bun.

  The kitchen was tidy but busy. The end of the table where Sadie sat was dusted with flour and covered in bowls, bags of flour and broken eggshells. From a big pan in the cooker came the heavy smell of deep frying.

  ‘And which one of Anna’s friends are you?’ Mrs Berman asked, tidying the table very efficiently, putting floury utensils on the sink’s draining board, putting away eggs and transferring paper bags to a cupboard.

  ‘Sadie Maxwell.’

  ‘Oh, you’re the one who sings?’ – Mrs Berman sounded pleased – ‘You are the one who sings?’

  ‘Me?’ – Sadie was genuinely surprised – ‘I cannae sing Mrs Berman.’

  ‘But Anna tells me that you are the best singer in the class.’

  But Sadie was a poor singer because in schools like hers teachers seldom persuaded children to project their voices confidently enough for anyone, including themselves, to know if they could sing or not. Even now the middle-aged Sadie remembering all this tended to speak through a tight throat when outside her usual milieu. She could, however, sight-read music with uncanny facility, just as outside the classroom she could easily follow any melody at any required interval – could ‘harmonise’.

  Having tidied the kitchen Mrs Berman asked if Sadie would like to hear Anna playing and Sadie nodded her head shyly. They went back into the hall and Mrs Berman opened another door just as Anna played some ringing octaves, the notes sounding out with such boldness, such brio and flair that Sadie found herself gasping. The piano was on the far side of the room and Anna played with her back to them with such delicious entrancing motions of arms and head that Sadie felt a rush of love for this friend who was responsible for such glorious sounds. It was that lovely, satisfying and unequivocally good response we call admiration.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. While Mrs Bermant smiled, the notes rang out, Anna’s childish wrists rose and fell and Sadie, in her grubbiness, cotton-print dress and twisting her fingers in the hem of the frayed cardigan, found an emotion isolated within her which henceforth she would always recognise with a shock. She would never give it the name – aesthetic – but it became, nevertheless, there, fully formed. Anna was playing one of the Clementi Sonatinas with no more than some childish physical panache. She went on to play a few little classical pieces which are all the more touching for having been written by grand distant masters for the fledgling hands and ears of little girls with frayed lilac cardigan hems twisted in their fingers.

  Perhaps it was an outrageous and unwarranted interference in Sadie’s life that two years later Mrs Bermant taught Sadie to sing some German lieder. Better to have left her to her ballads because the Bermant music room had a thick Indian carpet, polished wooden floor, Buhl cabinet, bow windows hung in velour, a Bergère suite, an inlaid escritoire, silver display and music drawers. The big dark polished upright Bechstein was surrounded by the privileges on which appreciation of Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, or Wolff depended – the formal musical art of Europe. Yet it stopp
ed feeling foreign to Sadie. A year later she and Anna learned a song they performed together at the class concert held before the summer holidays. It was Mozart’s ‘The Violet’. Then Sadie wanted to learn something more difficult, but Anna could not manage the very difficult accompaniment to Schubert lieder. So though Sadie eventually, in her weak but true voice, sang ‘Heidroslein’ and ‘Auf Dem Wasser zu Singen’ Anna’s mother was to accompany her. Mrs Bermant was puzzled that Sadie could read the staff notation so easily, for she knew that the school had not taught her this method. She never found out that Sadie simply learned the key signatures, then transposed the intervals into sol-fah.

  So, when a year had gone Sadie knew Mrs Bermant considered her Anna’s musical superior. Sadie was musically better than the beautiful blazing Anna who had sat before her in the arrogant pianistic pose, lifting her hands high, the lax wrists making those delicious, entrancing curves over the keyboard, her head jerking proudly as she thumped the chords. Mrs Bermant said so one day with Sadie sitting on the very edge of one of the Bergère chairs. Anna had just left the room when her mother struck middle C on the Bechstein and asked, ‘What is this note Sadie?’

  ‘Doh.’

  ‘Is it? What is this one then?’

  She struck the G above.

  ‘Soh.’

  ‘What are these notes then?’

  She struck the G major chord. Sadie paused before answering, then said slowly, a little puzzled, ‘Soh, lay, ray?’ and frowned anxiously at Mrs Bermant as if asking ‘Am I right?’ Mrs Bermant frowned too, then struck the chord again and held it while singing ‘Doh, mi, soh –’ Then she turned to Sadie who, having suddenly realised something, smiled at her and said, ‘It’s not the real doh, mi, soh. But you can call it that if you like.’

  ‘If we called it that, what would this be?’ said Mrs Bermant, striking again this little trick. Without hesitation she said, ‘Now you could call it fah.’

  After that Mrs Bermant worked through the key cycle until she got to F sharp major.

  ‘Where’s your Doh now?

  Sadie put her hand to her face and giggled at Mrs Bermant through splayed fingers, then hummed and haw-ed a bit and shook her head. Mrs Bermant struck a couple of arbitrary chords before hitting C.

  ‘That’s it!’ Sadie shouted triumphantly, at which Mrs Bermant announced ‘The gal who found the lost chord!’ and also had a fit of giggles. But when she finished laughing she asked why Sadie called that particular note Doh. Sadie came to the piano and showed it was the only piano note she knew by saying, ‘You have to start here to play the scale,’ and played the C major scale with one finger.

  ‘I see.’

  Again and again Mrs Bermant tried to catch her out but Sadie always knew where her Doh was. Mrs Bermant then explained that neither herself nor Anna (not Anna!) could do that simple thing, remember their Doh.

  ‘Very few people can do it. It’s as if, you see, you had a perfectly tuned piano inside your head, so can always hear exactly where it is being struck. It’s called, having perfect pitch.’

  Sadie nodded gravely as children do in face of adult seriousness. She was neither particularly impressed nor interested.

  ‘It means –.’ Mrs Bermant shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t you like to learn to play the piano, Sadie?’

  ‘Naw, Mrs Bermant,’ said Sadie, smiling and shaking her head.

  * * *

  It would not be impertinent to remember here that teeming street, the room-and-kitchen tenement from which Sadie came, her frayed lilac cardigan, nor the street ballads she and other girls sang in the street that summer.

  This tonic note – this Doh – ran almost unconsciously through Sadie’s life, a life that needed no talent or perfect pitch. In Anna’s house she had glimpsed a lucid world of new possibilities from the moment she had heard Clementi’s octaves ringing and repeating beneath Anna’s fingers on the keyboard, but she only experienced that lucidness as a line of feeling, attractive to her because she recognised the complex artifice producing it. This, which required training, mastery of technique, active conscious control, was all a belief in human freedom and choice. And that belief Sadie didn’t have.

  A child of teeming street, she was saturated with brave but passive ballad wisdom, teaching her to thole and not expect. She had no model of dominance, no close example allowing her to believe that athleticism – style in action – the physical imposition of fingers in a keyboard performance could be hers. She perhaps half-believed what Mrs Bermant told her about her magnificent ear, her gift, but had no sense of grace and beauty this could give her. Pianism belonged to Anna’s exotic world – to her blaze, her beauty, her tan, whose stain was on her brow and not, like Sadie’s vulgar freckles on the bridge of her nose. So she said, ‘Naw, I wouldn’t like to learn the piano, Mrs Bermant, I couldn’t.’

  The other banal, pathetic reasons – poverty, no money for lessons and the price of a piano, no space for it in a cramped room-and-kitchen where seven people lived – were only practical difficulties. Sadie’s urchin fatalism made it really impossible, that terrible and common denial, not essentially from Sadie herself, but from her circumstances and history, her life, if you like. Thirty years later, the sudden weakening of this denial made her walk through the dusty summer Glasgow streets clutching her purse.

  ‘We want rid of it,’ the woman selling it said, ‘It hasnae been tuned for donkeys’ years. Anywey, naebody can play the damn thing. It’s just a burden – I’m sick of dusting and polishing it. All we can dae wi it is keep photies on top. He says we’ve tae get rid o’t.’

  ‘It’s a lovely looking piano.’

  ‘Oh aye, my goodness, aye, a bonnie instrument and nothing wrang wi’t. My faither used to play it before he was took. Then I had to look after it.’

  It certainly was a nice looking instrument, and it badly needed tuning. When Sadie tried some of the keys the strings buzzed and sang with a sour, astringent discordance which dried the roof of her mouth.

  However, only half an hour after Andy and Willie had delivered it to her the piano tuner arrived. He worked on the piano for nearly the whole afternoon and it cost her as much to pay him as it did to buy it. Several keys had to be fixed and both the pedals. As he worked through the tuning cycle Sadie herself could hear the piano coming together and she felt a new excitement. When he finished tuning and before he put back the front panel the tuner played a few arpeggios. Sadie was thrilled by the sound.

  ‘By God,’ he said, ‘it really needed that.’

  Sadie laughed, ‘Aye, the people I got it from hadn’t had it tuned for years.’

  ‘Aye? Still it’s not too bad,’ (he played again) ‘even though it’s been neglected. It’s amazing how mucky the inside gets.’ (He had extracted dust with the small nozzle of Sadie’s vacuum cleaner.) ‘How much did it cost you, if I’m not being too cheeky?’

  ‘The owners wanted rid of it so they only asked a couple of pounds.’

  ‘Och, well, you weren’t done. Mind you nothing much goes wrong with pianos if they stay out of draughts and don’t get too much beer spilled on them. A bit like ourselves, I suppose.’

  ‘The owner seemed to think it was mair of a burden than anything else. It does seem a big brute of a thing, noo that I see it in the house.’ Sadie regarded the piano anxiously for a moment.

  ‘I suppose so. In these wee kitchens. Is it for one of the kids?’

  ‘Oh no. My kids are out working and one is married –’ Sadie paused then smiled. ‘No, you see – I’m going to learn to play myself.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Aye. Why no?’

  ‘Nae reason,’ the tuner shrugged, ‘It’s just unusual.’ He paused and looked at her for a moment. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Aye. I’m going to learn to play.’

  ‘Have you got a teacher?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I was going to ask you about that – if you know anyone. A good teacher, like.’

  ‘Well, I do. I know a really good teacher
– but I don’t know –’ He hesitated. ‘I’ll give you his address. And you can go and see him. The only thing is – you see, he’s always pretty busy and he might not take you –’

  ‘Because I’m oe’r auld?’

  ‘It’s a bit unusual, you must admit. But never mind, go and see him anyway. I’ll write his address on my card and you can tell him I sent you. OK? If he doesn’t take you there is no harm done.’

  ‘I’ll try him. Thank you very much.’ Sadie took the card after he scribbled the address.

  ‘Part of the service. Oh, and I might say, if you’re using it, I’ll have to have another look at this piano in a few months. If you learn to play on it you’ll want it kept in tune.’

  When the tuner left it was nearly time for tea and Sadie hurried to set the table. She pulled out the leaf of the dinner table, spread the cloth and noticed how cramped the room looked then fried fish in batter, heated plates, masked the tea, listening all the while for the sound of a key in the lock. She wanted the tea ready before Alec and the boys came home. When Alec’s key rasped in the outside door lock the fish and chips were keeping warm in two big tissue-lined dishes in the oven. The tea was ready for pouring, the draining board clear for cooking dishes. The table was set with sliced bread, fruit loaf, scones, tomato sauce, and a sponge cake with cream filling. When Alec entered the kitchen Sadie smiled nervously and said, ‘You in then?’ Alec grunted, ‘Aye, I’m in.’

  She turned her back to him and wiped the draining board with a cloth, then rinsed the cloth in the sink, turning on the tap too hard and spraying water over her arms and apron front. She waited tensely for Alec to notice the piano.

  He was a small man, not much bigger than Sadie, dressed in a serge suit, with a head of very thick auburn hair which was kept cut short and always beautifully groomed. He was full of masculine bonhomie, dapper, with a small man’s spryness, but very fit, small boned but well-muscular. As he stood in the kitchen doorway Sadie couldn’t help half-noticing, as she always did, the lovely set of his head on his thick youthful-looking neck.