My mother was much more excited about my first day at Wenona than I. She had set her heart on my attending the school ever since she’d first admired its pale grey uniform, worn by the girls who rode the bus she took home from her weekly shopping trip to David Jones in Sydney’s central business district. A keen observer of the surfaces of things, she took in the ribbons trailing from tidy ponytails, the shiny Clarks shoes, and the neat rows of metal braces on rebellious teeth. In a singular act of synecdoche, she took the part for the whole and concluded that the school would make a suitable environment for her musical daughter. Neither she nor my father had any information on Wenona’s intellectual credentials. They had conducted no investigation into the quality of its musical training. And they had spared little thought to the daily commute required to get me there and back for the six years they planned on paying for me to study there. As it turned out, depending on the precise combination of bus, ferry and train, my round trip took between two and three hours every day. One morning in my final year, squeezed into a crowded bus farting its way up the hill to the school, I calculated that I had spent about five months of my life on public transport. But, as always, I said nothing. I had learned how important it was to keep all my surfaces polished and shining. My wayward front teeth were the only visibly defiant thing about me.
At some point a senior girl approached me as I waited for Suzanne. She saw my erect posture for the rigid terror that it was. She must have been seventeen, but to me she seemed a giant of a woman who contained bodies of knowledge—let alone knowledge of bodies—far beyond my powers of cognition. Smiling gently, she asked if I needed any help. I shook my head, willed threatening tears to subside, and advised in my best polite voice that I was waiting for a friend, thank you. She hovered briefly then retreated. I was seized by the fear that Suzanne had walked straight past me in that crucial lost minute. Unbeknown to me, most girls arrived via the rear gate at the opposite side of the school. I turned my head back to the front entrance, waiting for a footstep that never came.
‘The piano is such a lonely instrument,’ thinks Athena in Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, ‘always by yourself with your back to the world.’ My experience during high school was the complete reverse: the only place I never felt lonely was at the piano. Accompanying the school assemblies two mornings every week for six years, I didn’t care that all I got to play were Anglican hymns for hundreds of teenage girls in grey hound’stooth, because it was often a relief to be able to turn my back on them. Alone, most definitely; but never lonely.
Fifteen minutes into assembly in the school hall, just as hundreds of adolescent bottoms were starting to itch from sitting still on plastic seats, our headmistress Miss Jackson would look down from her podium on the stage to where I perched on the puckered black leather stool. In front of me was the Steinway, a majestic black grand on three bronze caster wheels. Its dark sheen threw the countless scratches of its lid and curved sides into high relief. My feelings were similar to those of Beth March in Little Women, who, when finally granted access to a grand piano, ‘at last touched the great instrument, and straightway forgot her fear, herself, and everything else but the unspeakable delight which the music gave her, for it was like the voice of a beloved friend’. As slow and deliberate in her movements as a container ship, Miss Jackson would raise her imperious eyebrows above the rim of her large-framed glasses and nod gravely. By now I had my timing down to a fine art. At the moment I spied the tip of her silver bun dawning over the horizon of her forehead, I began, for the umpteenth time, the four-bar introduction to ‘Jerusalem’.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
These lyrics, taken from William Blake’s 1808 poem, suggest England might have briefly enjoyed a stint as heaven on earth if, as the apocryphal story has it, the young Jesus took a holy detour to Glastonbury in the company of his uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Somehow he’d turned up a few centuries early for the music festival. Performing the anthem was a dissociative exercise in separating the affecting melody and its melancholy harmonies from the ludicrous words—in my mind, the obvious answer to each of Blake’s four questions as they were sung was a resounding no, no, no and no. The idea remained as fantastic as it had been in 1916 when Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s poetry to music during wartime and turned ‘Jerusalem’ into a rousing nationalistic anthem.
‘Thank you, Victoria,’ said Miss Jackson, immune to my silent scepticism. As far as she was concerned, my name was Victoria and ‘Jerusalem’
