I was in Grade 7, at the top of the heap in primary school. I was in undeclared love with Veronica Hutchins who improvised on her uniform with a series of light blouses and got away with it. I had already done the male equivalent of this the year before by wearing an ex-army officer cap and in Grade 7 graduated to a blazer from another school with the pocket emblem removed. The slower kids called it a suit. Even at twelve I knew that a suit needed at least one more piece to qualify. Knowing that the naysayers were so provably ignorant made it very easy to defy them and would throughout my twenties and early thirties when I affected a series of increasingly sadder tuxedos as normal wear.
I took a pair of jeans to Nanna who cut them just below the knee and put a seam around the edges. !8th century knee breeches with the added convenience of a zip fly. If I could have worn them every day I would have. Learning how to wash and wait taught me how to use a washing machine at the age o' eleven and a bit. Chucked the school uniform in there, too. This didn't have the slightest effect, however, on my habitual use once and leave in the shower recess policy on bath towels. They piled up until Mum realised (every single week) that I wasn't going to slug them in the washer with the rest of my stuff. Maybe she considered it a trade off. Anyway, everything was good because I could now walk around like a pirate, privateer, soldier of fortune or someone from either side of the French revolution of the American War of Independence. Soundtrack by Mozart, Corelli, JS Bach and any of the folky hippy stuff my sister listened to (particularly Pentangle whose high "trad. arr." numbers I mentally set in the 18th century or earlier).
All this stopped at the gate. Never did I emerge from the leafy bounds o' Jetnikovka in anything but school uniform or the kind of civilian wear that would render me culturally invisible to the great unwashed. But within the confines I was in Leon Garfield World. Leon Garfield was one of the few age-appropriate writers I read then. His books of boy adventurers in the world of pirates and footpads and redcoat armies were set squarely between 1700 and 1801. The first was the short story that was a hit among us at school: The Restless Ghost. Two boys plan to act out a locally famous haunting as a prank but get haunted by the real thing (oh, I always had a taste for horror and would read reams of it and wake up in the lightless predawn in a cold sweat). That's where I lived and when I went to school I might as well have ruled it for there were none to challenge any of us grade seveners putting the flag up if we wanted.
Everything ends. Primary school and the roll monitor job I took to get myself out of sport on Friday afternoons and all the rest. As the last weeks rolled they grew lighter by the day as we tidied the classroom of the year's mess and the schoolwork faded into board games after exams were over. It was like a camp more than school. There were some pangs knowing it was the last we'd see of it but they were swung tot he ground by the tides of relief that we'd soon be rid of it and excitement that we'd all be in high school the new year.
I'd come home early on these days, tuck into some cold lime jelly and ice cream and draw to the music. Nita borrowed the Pentangle albums then. They were easy to get lost in as I made grey aristos walk up to the guillotine on the pages of my sketchbooks. And on Christmas day 1974 her present to me was the best thing in the world. Getting past the bizarre Yellow Submarine cover art I could see a picture of two ageing men taken side on. They were playing what looked like organs but were in fact, as the record's title attested, harpsichords.
Christmas records get put on whatever else is happening and straight away. And so in the chattering micro cataclysm of joy that burst on that Christmas midmorning a stately strum of broad chords. This soon gave way to some glittering gymnastics that impressed even through the signal fogging noise of a family's Christmas fun (we were screamers at Christmas ... in a good way). I put it on again, quietly, as we settled into the massive groaning-table Christmas lunch and then again as the company dispersed to the pool to splash and scream, stroll out to take the shade of the African tulip or mango trees, or collapse beneath a ceiling fan I lingered in the rumpus room and played it yet again, on my back on the floor, headphones on, volume cranked. As the black and white hijinks of the St Trinians movie flickered in my peripheral vision and the glassy heat of December thickened and invaded I closed my eyes and drank some music.
This was not chamber music the way a string trio is, although it was mean for a room rather than a hall (harpsichords are very quiet things). Nor was it a series of student pieces that the composers dreamed would immortalise them. These were explorations in sonata form, emulations of folk music rendered high baroque or pastoral headache relief for the contemporary migraine. With the expansion of the four handed form the single timbre sound took on the colours of orchestration I hadn't thought possible. Here were worlds.
The thing about having a pair of harpsichords playing at once is that the orchestration is clear to the note and any unison chords punch with extra power. Harpsichords don't have sustain pedals or soft pedals. If you lightly touch a key or slam your fist down on it the sound will be the same. But what that also means is that the sound allows for more clarity than the brightest of grouped pianos. Here the orchestration is as plain as the details of a blueprint. This is music that shows its working.
It is music that also opens countless tiny doors of a Rococo palace. Some open on to bright spaces where tables groan with confections of all sugars. Some lead to dark places invented solely to illustrate the prescriptive horror of a total absence of light. One piece by Couperin, a kind of mock pastoral in a suite of them was intended to sound like a musette. When I heard this I thought not about the bagpipe it was evoking but of a young man in a lace cravat and brocade suit, knee breeches and buckled shoes, playing it in one of those rooms. This one was not bright as much as golden from the early evening. Out the window was more gold, fields of swaying crops glittering in the magic hour. For those few minutes I stood there and felt the security of the heir to the manor house and, being me, wondered at the oncoming revolution with its stinking city hoardes and guillotine ..... Anyway ...
Tableaux and movies generated by this album are with me still. Perhaps that's because it never made it beyond that vinyl copy that I so effectively played into flat noise. A curious nostalgia leads me into the images I conjured and dispenses with even the pleasanter of the day to day details. I recall the power chords at the start of the Mozart sonata and I'm back in one of my own daydreams.
And then there's the final piece. After the brilliance of the Rondo from Mozart and its mix of fairyland light and complex darkness of observation comes one of the most severe pieces of classical music ever. It's part two of a larger work but ditches the first movement and cuts to the fugue. Darnt darnt darnnnn darnanana darn darn DARNNN! A fifth hammers down on to the tonic, scurries up again but then hammers harder from the flattened 6th. And .... Well, here it is in its supposed original form for strings. Doesn't convey the desolation or the sense of mounting evil that the harpsichords do but you'll get the idea.
The fugue engendered drawings of such darkness that I used to 6B pencils down to the stubs before I was easy with it. The power it demonstrated of pure music and the great efficacy it brought to the creation of ideas through sound alone still schools my listening. Mozart, delightful Mozart who sounds like the taste of chocolate and champagne, could do this. Any music that couldn't would never get more of a hearing beyond its initial saturation phase and never has.
This was all just in time. A few months later I traded in my green primary school fatigues for the blue-trimmed grey of Pimlico High and eased myself into the ranks of the untouchables all over again. While my comfort with feeling alien to everyone else my age withstood the slings and arrows of high school I did buy into some of the culture. The first rock song I liked without the formal introduction of an older sibling was Sherbert's Life (is For Living). It's echoed opening shout gave way to a chromatic bass and guitar riff that felt like home. I never liked anything else the band ever did with any sincerity but it made me listen around with some knowing.
The knee breeches jeans found their way into the perdition at the bottom of my wardrobe, never to be worn again. I drew scenes from my own century. The attentions of a girl called Patricia stopped me in my tracks and I started wondering if feeling different couldn't have some currency after all. It wasn't all fun after that but most of it was and now that the world had opened retreating from it when needed was a relief rather than a way of life.
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