The feeling of Sunday afternoons

The daughter of one of my neighbours a few floors down has been learning the piano for the past three or four years. Her progress in that time has been slow, although she has moved on from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to the largo from Dvorak's New World. Her practising fairly regularly wakes me up, when I am attempting a lie-in at the weekends, but I find it impossible to rouse any resentment. There is something deeply comforting about the sound of a piano afar off, even when played poorly.

I wonder if my particular affinity for the instrument can be traced to the period when we were living with one of my grandmothers after the failure of my father's business (he was one of the many people in Britain in the 50s and 60s who were conned into paying an inappropriately large sum of money for a franchised petrol station on a road that was about to be bypassed). I was not yet four years old, and most of my earliest - and perhaps happiest - memories date from that time. My granny had an old upright piano in the dark, dusty (otherwise largely unused) 'parlour', and I would spend hours banging away on it, untutored, and mostly unsupervised. It must have sounded dreadful, but I was in heaven.

And I think I catch glimpses of that lost world of innocence whenever I hear a piano now - perhaps especially when I hear a piano played badly.

Here are two favourite poems that touch on the emotional resonance of music and the nostalgia for childhood. For reasons beyond the tinny early morning tinkling of my teenaged neighbour, I think, such wistful reflections on the past, and on my distant childhood in particular, tend to overtake me on a Sunday. Perhaps because it is the only day on which I have time to stop and think...

The first of today's poetry selections is by Lawrence, who I've quoted on here a number of times before.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings back home, with the winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast down
In the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

And this is a great favourite I had long feared 'lost'. I hadn't seen it in nearly thirty years, and could only remember the barest outlines of it, a half-phrase or two, and a not-very-confident identification of the author. My estimable blog-friend JES, who has of late become my 'personal search engine', was able to locate the full text online for me - something I had often tried and failed to do. 'Thank you' is inadequate. I absolutely love this piece.

Suburban Dream

Walking the suburbs in the afternoon
In summer when the idle doors stand open
And the air flows through the rooms
Fanning the curtain hems,

You wander through a cool elysium
Of women, schoolgirls, children, garden talks,
With a schoolboy here and there
Conning his history book.

The men are all away in offices,
Committee-rooms, laboratories, banks,
Or pushing cotton goods
In Wick or Ilfracombe.

The massed unanimous absence liberates
The light keys of the piano and sets free
Chopin and everlasting youth,
Now, with the masters gone.

And all things turn to images of peace,
The boy curled over his book, the young girl poised
On the path as if beguiled
By the silence of a wood.


It is a child's dream of a grown-up world;
But soon the brazen evening clocks will bring
The tramp of feet and brisk
Fanfare of motor horns
And the masters come.

Edwin Muir (1887-1959)