My own fears were neatly internalised even if they were as obvious as daylight to the outside world. I clutched my beginner’s book in front of my sausage-shaped torso and worried that Mrs Weir’s son Andrew, who went to my school, would be home—I didn’t want him to hear me fumbling around, trying to remember which note was which. He was a year older than me but did not play the piano. I couldn’t understand how it was possible to have a piano in your living room and not at least try to play it. If I had a piano at home I knew I would play it every day.
When I arrived, Mrs Weird would have a biscuit and a glass of milk set on the kitchen table for me as if I were Santa. The more she smiled the more embarrassing it was to make my first attempts to string notes together in front of her. I could hardly hear myself playing for worrying about what she thought. There was so much to take in, and I wanted to understand it all at once. While perfectionists understand that mistakes are inevitable, they prefer to make them in private.
One of my earliest tasks was to learn which note on the keyboard corresponded to the black circle with the long stalk on each of the first, second, third or fourth lines of the printed music. Mrs Wilcox had taught me the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit as a way to remember E-G-B-D-F, the name and order of the notes on the black lines in the right hand from low to high. The phrase stuck in my head but didn’t help. I believed that good boys deserved chocolate or a new toy, but C’s home wasn’t on one of the lines. And there was no T for toy, in any case. The piano’s alphabet was quite limited really, going only from A to G. With so few notes to learn, I suspected I’d have the instrument sorted out pretty quickly. The notes that sat in the white spaces between the black lines were easy to remember: F-A-C-E.
The quite ordinary Mrs Weird who had the piano was related to the Weirds who lived next door to us. But they really were strange, having an ant farm in their kitchen and driving to church every Sunday. The only ant my mother would tolerate in her kitchen was a dead ant; she depressed the bug-spray trigger on hapless insects with the zeal of a mass murderer. On Sundays, Dad was often gardening when the next-door Weirds drove past on their way to church; he’d stand up in his tattered white singlet and khaki work shorts and yell, ‘Say one for me, Stella!’ waving them off with his wood-handled garden shears.
My own experience of Sunday school had been short-lived. The photographic record suggests that I wore some great outfits to those Bible lessons. In remedial-sized handwriting we wrote down key points in the life of Jesus and recreated His most significant moments using coloured pencils in soft-cover booklets. Sunday school was where I’d heard stories about God switching on the lights on the first day, an old man who killed his son, a woman who ate an apple. But one day, when I’d answered the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ with a triumphant ‘A superstar!’, the Sunday school teacher had seen fit to call my mother. At this rate, it would take more than a pair of polished shoes and a purple dress to get me into heaven.
Ironically my debut performance at one of Mrs Wilcox’s regular student concerts, after just three weeks of lessons, occurred in the church hall where I had incorrectly identified Jesus. As I strutted towards the piano, I did not imagine that ‘Indian Dance’ was a racial profile of indigenous Americans set to music or a simple tune requiring almost no dexterity. ‘You should be able to keep a twenty-cent piece on the back of your hand without it falling off,’ Mrs Wilcox had said at one of my first lessons. On stage, my left hand stayed in place for the one-minute duration, hopping up and down on two notes played by two fingers. While this was going on, the right hand pretty much stayed where it was, too, hovering over a five-note span and depressing the keys in a repeated pattern. The other thing that didn’t move was my hair, which my mother had pulled back so tightly from my seven-year-old face that it made me look as though I was still only six.
Like Czerny’s teaching method 137 years earlier, Mrs Wilson’s assumed from her student’s first lesson that the goal of playing the piano was performance. In this respect she also emulated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who despaired of practising without the prospect of an audience: ‘Why should she play? Who would hear her? Since she could never sit on a concert stage in a short-sleeved velvet gown, running her light, graceful fingers over the ivory keys of an Erard piano and feeling the ecstatic murmur of the audience flow around her like a warm breeze, there was no point in going through the boredom of practising.’
I wore cotton rather than velvet and sat at a Yamaha upright in a church hall rather than at a grand Erard on a concert stage, but the silent attention of an audience was intoxicating. There was no radio blaring out the news every half-hour, and my brother had no choice but to sit still and listen to me. He and Dad would catch up with the footy in the car on the way home. The piece was so simple that I felt confident performing it, and to
