The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  In my primary school playground in Liverpool, I had hung around with the other boys in improvised football games, rolled up pullovers serving as goalposts, but I was never in danger of gaining possession of the ball. However, Liverpudlians are a sentimental lot – I think, like Australians, they get it from the Irish – and on my last day at the school my mates conspired to let me score. Time and again, the ball was passed to me a metre or two in front of the goal, the keeper falling over or bending down to tie a shoelace, thus affording me an unimpeded shot. Time and again I would miss. I can hear the other boys’ exhortations: ‘Give it to Fordy!’ To no avail. I returned to the classroom for my final afternoon of a Liverpool education, touched by the attention but shamefaced at my inability to repay the other boys’ confidence in me.

  Just a few weeks later, at my new primary school in Kent, everything was different. Football hadn’t happened in a formal sense at my school in Liverpool, but here we had games lessons, and the boys were divided into teams, identifiable by different coloured vests. The new school was not especially well appointed, but there was a playing field, with real goal posts and even some markings on the grass. Mr Jones, a kindly Welshman, refereed with a whistle, just like in a real game, and it all appealed to my sense of showmanship. For the first few minutes I was able to pretend I was a footballer, but suddenly everything went wrong.

  I was minding my own business at the edge of the penalty area when the ball landed at my feet, so I booted it in the direction of the goal. Somehow or other I really connected with it. The timing, though solely a matter of luck, was perfect, and the ball flew with considerable speed and accuracy past the helpless keeper. Had there been a net, it would have bulged gratifyingly out of shape. As it was, I can still hear the thwack the ball made against the wire fence several metres behind the goal. Boys whose names I had not yet learnt ran across the field to pat me on the back. But my elation ended when I saw the faint smile on Mr Jones’s face and the faraway look in his eyes. He was staring at me without quite focusing, and I knew what was going through his mind. Here was this new boy in his first games lesson – a new boy from Liverpool – and he had just scored a brilliant goal. It was as though the great Liverpool and England striker Roger Hunt had suddenly enrolled at Green Street Green primary school.

  I saw all this and more. I saw the future, in which I was destined to prove a major disappointment to Mr Jones. Should I have said something? Ought I to have walked up to him and confessed that what had just happened was a fluke? Of course I didn’t. I was nine. But I recognised what was coming and knew there was nothing I could do to stop it. The following week, a notice was posted announcing the teams for the forthcoming game between the school’s third-year and fourth-year classes. Taking the field at centre forward for the third-year team would be ‘Ford, A.’

  For a fleeting moment I felt proud. Part of me wanted to believe that a hitherto unsuspected talent for football had been discovered in me by the nice Welshman, but I knew the truth, and it was confirmed by the look that passed between my parents when I told them the news of my selection. A dreadful error had occurred; the only possible outcome was my mortification, and the rest of the story is sadly predictable. The following week, the fourth years beat the third years 10–nil; and the third years’ centre forward, in his first and last representative game in any sporting code, had the ball at his feet precisely eleven times during the match – kicking off at the start and kicking off after each of the ten goals his side conceded.

  Strangely enough, my meagre skills with a football were about to be shared with thousands of British cinemagoers. One of the first people I met at my new school was a friendly boy called Victor, who could play Eric Coates’s Dam Busters March on the piano. This was something I found beguiling, my own piano lessons having stalled, but I was just as taken with the fact that Victor’s father was an actor. My ambitions in that area, though undimmed, were no nearer being realised, but knowing Victor brought me tantalisingly close to the mysterious art. The fact that his dad landed roles in which he hardly ever spoke did not for a moment diminish the magic of this association. His biggest claim to fame, as ubiquitous as it was anonymous, was as the chef on the Paxo packet, Paxo being a brand of instant stuffing (add boiling water and stir). Dressed in chef’s whites, with a toque on his head, he smiled winningly from a shelf in our kitchen cupboard. He also had a role in a new TV series called Dad’s Army. As usual, it didn’t require him to say anything, but you could see him standing in the second row of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard platoon. He was, in other words, an extra, but I looked out for him each week and felt a buzz of excitement when he appeared.

  One day, Victor’s mum rang mine. A casting agent wanted three boys to take part in a film shoot for an advertising campaign in cinemas. Victor would be one of these boys, and he had suggested my name. It would be shot in London, and there was a fee of ten guineas. There wouldn’t be much to do, we were told. We’d just have to kick a ball around in a park.

  The advertisement was either for a camera or a brand of film – if I was ever told, I have forgotten – and the plot, such as it was, involved a man with a camera creeping out of the bushes to snap a young woman in a yellow bikini sunning herself on the grass. Meanwhile three boys (that’s me on the left) are playing football, when one of them (Victor, the star) kicks the ball in the direction of the man, who is concentrating on the woman, knocking the camera from his hands.

  So it wasn’t Chekhov, but I learnt quite a lot that day. There were many things I liked about the process of filming, from eavesdropping on the director (‘Maybe you could lick your lips,’ he told the actor in the bushes), to the novelty of my proximity to a woman in a bikini, to riding around in the back of the camera van. But above all, it was what happened at lunch that impressed me.

  We’d begun shooting in Holland Park, only to be ejected by a council official, so we drove out to Isleworth, where the film crew knew of a bushy park near the famous film studios. Lunch was in a restaurant round the corner. It must have been fairly up-market, because I remember a red velvet interior and curtains drawn against the bright sunshine. The crew and cast (if I may call us that) sat at a long table with candles, and I found myself opposite the make-up lady, a rather grand, theatrical woman, the like of whom I had never met. One of the things that struck me about her manner was her confidence. She had a deep, fruity voice like the actor Hermione Gingold, and was given to proclaiming her thoughts on the smallest matters.

  ‘Well! I’m going to have the mushroom omelette,’ she announced to the table with abrupt finality, as though we’d all been waiting on tenterhooks for her decision. When my family went out for lunch nobody made such important-sounding declarations; I’m not sure food was even discussed. Yet somehow she managed to make a mushroom omelette sound like the most sophisticated thing you could eat.

  Next, the restaurant door opened and a shaft of sunlight brightened the interior as two men stepped inside. As the door closed behind them and the candlelit gloom settled once more, the place fell suddenly, respectfully quiet. The men, nodding to some of the other diners as they moved through the restaurant, disappeared into a private room at the back.

  ‘The Master!’ whispered the make-up lady dramatically.

  I couldn’t see him very clearly, and probably wouldn’t have recognised Noël Coward in any case, but I certainly knew his lunch companion, because John Le Mesurier was Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army. Today a bit of research suggests they must have come to the restaurant from a morning’s shooting on The Italian Job, which was filming at the Isleworth Studios. So it was a brush with fame that might have been a bigger brush with even greater fame, yet what I remember most about it is the make-up lady. As for my advertisement, for years I went to the cinema expecting to see it, but I never did.

  There was more music at my new school than there had been in Liverpool, and certainly plenty of singing. The headmaster – who had a shockingly bad voice – liked to take these classes himse
lf, and we worked our way through a wide repertoire of songs from around the world. They included ‘Donkey Riding’, ‘Green Grow the Rushes-O’ and ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’, the last of which we sang with gusto and, as its composer intended, in canon. Fifteen years later, having learnt that I would be moving to Australia, part of my preparation involved immersing myself in as much Antipodean culture as possible. Australian classical music was thin on the ground in the UK, but Australian pop was enjoying something of an international golden age, and I was pleased to discover ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ making a cameo appearance in Men at Work’s big hit ‘Down Under’, along with what I later discovered were numerous other bits of Aussie popular culture (at the time, for instance, I had not the slightest idea what a Vegemite sandwich might be). Twenty-six years after that, I found myself an expert witness in the Federal Court of Australia, giving evidence that ‘Kookaburra Sits’ really was in the Men at Work song, as though the song itself were not evidence enough. It still amazes me that the case ever went to court.

  It wasn’t long after my family’s relocation to Kent that a new piano teacher was found for my sister and me, as different to Miss Halliday as it was possible to be. Harold Dresser was a loud, brusque, almost boorish man with a club foot, who boomed though our front door every Wednesday afternoon after we returned from school and frankly intimidated me and my sister, who had lessons with him one after the other. Part of the intimidation was physical, I now see, and I suspect his closeness to me on the piano stool might these days have been deemed unacceptable. There was also a lot of leg squeezing, though nothing more. But what Mr Dresser brought to our house, at last, was real music: Bach and Haydn and Beethoven, and no more Walter Carroll.

  The trouble was, I couldn’t actually play Bach and Haydn and Beethoven. I liked the music, indeed I was fascinated by it, but as a pianist I was a poseur. I practised the beginnings of certain pieces until I could play them with a degree of flair. I recall I was quite convincing, at least in my own mind, with the start of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata, but I couldn’t get beyond the introduction. It was the same with the three piano preludes of Gershwin. I could play the slow middle one until the right-hand octaves arrived, and I could manage the start of the first. I wanted people to believe I could play, and I would happily perform for anyone who was prepared to listen to a recital consisting mostly of the starts of pieces. But over the years I simply failed to get any better. I lacked concentration, and as soon as a difficult passage came along, I gave up. In later life, working in universities, I often had an office near to practice rooms and I could always hear the students who were like me, and whose practice regimens, such as they were, involved giving little recitals for themselves, the same mistakes always occurring in the same places.

  By the time Mr Dresser retired, when I was about sixteen years old, I had not truly progressed at the piano from a technical point of view, though my knowledge of music theory was quite advanced and I had begun composing with a degree of earnestness.

  Six years later, I tried again. By now, I had won the music prize at my grammar school, completed a first degree in music and been appointed Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford. As a composer, I’d just received my first commission. I suppose it could fairly be said that not playing the piano – or any other instrument – wasn’t holding me back. But I felt that my work would be enhanced by the ability to play reasonably advanced music tolerably well. That was all I ever aimed to do; I was never going to perform in public.

  I asked a friend, Joan Dixon, a wonderful pianist with an excellent reputation as a teacher, if she would give me lessons. It would be easier this time, I reasoned. Music was now my life: I didn’t have all the distractions of childhood and adolescence; I could devote a fair proportion of my time to the piano. We began with the easier pieces from Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Stravinsky’s Les cinq doigts; and we ended with them too. It took a few weeks of mounting embarrassment on both our parts before I faced the fact that I was coming up with excuses for not having practised, or worse, claiming that I had practised, when it would have been evident to any teacher I had not. It’s one thing to do this as a child, but at the age of twenty-two?

  If my keyboard skills would never advance beyond those of a lazy child, my listening, always avid, deepened significantly in the years after we moved to Kent, and this was at first thanks to the Beatles, who remained the centre of my musical imagination. In this I was no different to most of the rest of the world, but something was happening with the Beatles and their music that coincided with our family’s move away from Liverpool. Within weeks of our arrival in Kent, the Beatles released a single bearing two of their best songs, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Everything about it seemed strange. Instead of a generic, bottle-green Parlophone sleeve, this record came with a picture of the Beatles on the cover, and they didn’t look like the Beatles I knew. They all had droopy moustaches, they weren’t smiling and they were sitting in the dark.

  Musically, too, something was afoot. ‘Penny Lane’ included a high trumpet that, to my knowledge, none of them played. ‘Strawberry Fields’ had a melodic line that was far removed from anything I’d heard in pop music. And there was one more thing with which I particularly identified as I clung to my Northern identity: these were the Beatles’ most Liverpudlian songs. Both were named after places in Liverpool – a bus terminal and an orphanage – and they contained flashes of Scouse (‘it’s a clEEn m’-shEEn’ and ‘the barber shaves a-NUH-ther CUHS-tomer’) and Liverpool slang (‘nothing to get hung about’ and ‘finger pie’ – not that I had the remotest idea what the latter was).

  At the same time the Beatles were moving from the poppy energy of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to the dreamy, druggy multilayers of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, I went from being six to nearly ten, a lifetime for a child. Looking back, it seems astonishing that the Beatles’ musical development should have taken them so quickly from simple chords and rhymes to tape loops and Bach trumpets. Their entire output, from first single to last, spans little more than seven years. Had they been songwriters alone, the Beatles’ production of more than 200 songs for themselves and others would have been impressive, but we should also remember their range, for there is really no such thing as a typical Beatles song. While writing and recording, they pursued an onerous touring schedule for the first four years. They influenced every other popular musician on the planet, and became ‘more popular than Jesus’ while garnering critical attention such as pop had never before received, their later albums reviewed in the Times by its classical music critic, William Mann (who called them the ‘Beatle Quartet’ and compared them to Mahler). At the time of their break-up, all four were still in their twenties. You do sometimes encounter people who are dismissive of the Beatles’ achievement, but that’s always seemed to me a posture.

  In 1968, Britain still had what was known as the 11-plus, an exam undertaken by all students at the end of primary school to decide, in effect, how academically bright they were. Those who passed went to grammar schools; those who ‘failed’ – the word was used – were sent to ‘secondary modern’ schools. My general feeling about exams is that they waste valuable resources and time that might be better spent educating children. Sometimes they measure a child’s understanding of a subject – though they seldom tell teachers what they don’t already know – but the only thing they consistently reveal is a child’s ability to pass exams. Anyone who has ever taught in a school or university knows that students develop at different rates, and that eleven is both an early and arbitrary age to condemn a child to woodwork instead of Latin, which was more or less the choice. I got Latin, doing well enough in the exam to go to grammar school, but I was no academic star. The first and only time I did really well in exams was in my university finals, ten years after the 11-plus. It’s hard not to wonder about the millions of children who never had the chance to develop that far, whose prospects were shut down after
being told they were eleven-year-old failures.

  The 11-plus exam was only introduced in 1944, so my father never sat it, but having left school at fourteen he was conscious his whole life of a want of formal education and often spoke of it. This was a quick-witted man, interested in everything, who solved the Guardian’s cryptic crossword puzzle most days (even now I can’t manage a single clue), and yet who carried with him a profound sense of academic failure. The night before my 11-plus, he came into my bedroom to wish me good luck. He hoped I would do well, because then people would say I took after my college-educated mother; he didn’t want anyone to say that I took after him. I found this sad and still do.

  Years later, on one of my visits home from university, Dad made a pun on the French expression faux pas. I didn’t get it; I didn’t know the expression.

  ‘Don’t be so sodding superior,’ he said, when I looked at him blankly. I realised later he must have thought he had mispronounced it and that I was pretending not to understand, whereas I was genuinely mystified – so much for a French O-level! That made me sad, too. Dad wouldn’t have snapped at me without cause, and while on this occasion he was wrong, there must have been earlier occasions when he’d thought I was lording it over him.