Among the parents of the Kates and Sarahs and Fionas who populated my year, my father seemed to be the only one who performed anything close to physical labour outside of the home. As far as I could tell, other girls’ fathers paid for their white-collared uniforms by working white-collar jobs. They were CEOs and lawyers and doctors and pharmacists, men who wore jackets and ties in office buildings. My father rose each day at dawn; put on his white singlet, khaki work shorts, long white cotton socks and boots; ate his cornflakes with warm milk; then drove his yellow Holden ute for miles to building sites where he worked alongside the men who subcontracted to him until the light gave out. My father was most proud of the fact that he had always been, from the time he was a teenager, his own boss. As a boy he was never interested in books or sitting still; he wanted to be out with his father on the farm, playing with his dog Barney, or pitching cricket balls at a water tank for batting practice. He laughs recalling how intimidated he was by the three girls in his class of seven students, who weren’t only much smarter than he, but also the daughters of his teacher.
When my father finally had money to spend, he wasn’t interested in strolling the Champs-Élysées or sailing Sydney Harbour in his own catamaran. He would provide for his family, whether or not they wanted him to. He would insist that his wife stop working outside the home though she loved her job as a comptometer operator—the precursor to the electronic calculator—at Amalgamated Wireless. He would send his children to expensive schools to have the formal education he did not. At his wife’s urging, he would buy his daughter a piano.
It was just over one hundred years since the farmer Gabriel Oak first proposed to Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Oak sweetens his futile offer to make Bathsheba happy with the promise of her own instrument: ‘You shall have a piano in a year or two—farmers’ wives are getting to have pianos now—and I’ll practise up the flute right well to play with you in the evenings.’ By the late nineteenth century the piano might have been within reach of working-class families, and domestic music-making a common entertainment, but ownership of an instrument was hardly a sign of leisure. A farmer might be able to afford a piano, but not the time for his wife to play it. Anyway, Bathsheba wasn’t having a bar of it.
A century later, the builder’s wife had the time to play, but no longer the inclination. Their daughter would be the beneficiary of piano lessons. She would have a piano. She would be their instrument. ‘The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1929 essay ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’. ‘The middle classes jeer at the colliers for buying pianos—but what is the piano, often as not, but a blind reaching out for beauty.’34
‘I think it’s time you started competing in eisteddfods,’ my new piano teacher announced to the middle of my back after a few weeks of lessons.
Mr McFarlane taught in a ground-floor studio apartment on the corner of two leafy streets in Sydney’s lower north shore. Upstairs lived his mother, whom in eight years of instruction I never met but who made her presence felt, rattling pans and dragging chairs above my head like some irritable landlord of ancient mythology. The small teaching studio undulated in mounds of books and sheet music, as if a blizzard had never managed to melt. A bust of Beethoven frowned at me from the lid of the black upright piano, which was graffitied with scratches and fingerprints.
Mrs Wilcox had ambushed me at the end of my last lesson of the school year. ‘There’s nothing more I can teach you, dear,’ she said by way of explaining that our lessons, like primary school, had come to an end. Though my feet now touched the floor, I was devastated. While I was proud of my technical accomplishments, after hurdling the annual grade examinations like a prize show pony, the news stung. I was not quite twelve. ‘Mr McFarlane is his name,’ she said, thrusting an envelope into my hand as I sat dumbstruck on her piano stool. ‘Give that note to your mother. I’ve sent a few of my students to him over the years. You’ll have to audition, but you’ll get in. He’s very good.’
E-sted-what?
Despite having been accepted as his student, I felt daunted by Mr McFarlane’s thick glasses, his balding head of honey-coloured curls, and his severe demeanour. Even now I can’t specify what I was so frightened of. I can’t imagine anything in particular that caused my anxiety, because generally speaking, everything did: saying the wrong thing, playing the wrong note, it was all the same. I spent each piano lesson in a straitjacket of fear, looking directly ahead of me at Beethoven from the first greeting to the last minute, except when I cast furtive glances over my right shoulder now and then to gauge Mr McFarlane’s speaking tone. Always on high alert for the nuances of my mother’s voice, I wrongly heard in any voice of authority a punitive tone—and lived with the constant feeling that I had either just made a mistake or was about to.
My teacher sat a few feet behind me on
