MUSIC TEACHERS

Music teachers come in all shapes and sizes,
Like dinosaurs, they are thin at both ends
And fatter in the middle,
They come in a mixture of genders,
An assortment of ages,
And they peer,
As teachers do, over your shoulder,
As though seeing the sound you make.

They can be plump old-maids - not quite nuns -
Middle-aged puffs with dripping fingertips,
Down-at-heel school masters with good imaginations,
Would-be sergeant majors, forever tapping their batons,
From a podium,
Euphoniums growling um-pa-pas
Screeching Stravinsky strings,
And cymbals missing that one chance,
To smash the silence,

And their peering goes on,
Relentlessly,

Miss (Sister Bernadette) Ogden,
Had a mission,
To refine country girls,
Recorder on a Monday, raffia lampshade-making Thursday,
As if farmhouses needed the cows piping in,
Or, raffia lampshades, come to think of it,
My descant filled the gap between 3.30 and teatime,
It was a chance to get out of milking,
But ‘London Bridge is burning down,’
Did not impress my bible-bashing dad,
Who liked to sing ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’

Before I had time to master hymn tunes,
Miss Ogden went to live with God - they said,
Leaving her little cottage full of raffia lampshades

Mr Haygarth was tall, thin, and fussy,
He had a double piano-stool
And a ‘naughty pussy’ called Tibby,
He peered over my shoulder, wagged his arms,
And pursed his lips to say, ‘Oo – dear - mistake,’
Like a pantomime dame (he’s behind you),
My Dad said he thought he was a bit queer,
It made no odds to me,
Until he ran off with a senior boy
From the grammar school,
Leaving Sonata in C, unpolished

Sonata in C played on my rescued-from-the-rubbish overstrung,
Two notes in every octave missing,
Didn’t impress anybody either
Dum, thud, dum, dum, thud-dee thud, Thud,Thud, dum…

It would have stopped there,
But my parents had entered ‘the mission’
And found me another teacher,

Miss Hall was a serious mistress, (so my Daddy said),
With a grand piano and a metronome,
She corrected my sloppy performance,
And drilled me into accuracy,
While peering incessantly over a red fan
That she closed to hit me with,
Whenever I made a mistake,

It was a miracle I passed exams,
Thinking of ‘naughty Tibby,’
Expecting a fan on the wrist,
Playing scales without a ‘ray’ or ‘soh’
And finally, I lost the will to ‘thud’,
Wanting to rip the felt out of my Knauss
Hating the sight of my Adler,
And wishing I could make a raffia lampshade,

Mr Michael Murphy, Catholic, with three kids,
And a head full of organ music
Tried to teach me harmony
But teenage hormones and Bach didn’t mix,
No matter how much peering he did,
And I began to loose sight of the plot,
The title,
That ‘thing’ that I was ‘to be’,
In my case, ‘not to be’,
When I grew up,
A music teacher,
I began to like Michael Murphy more than Bach

My Dad stopped my lessons and blamed the Pope,
He said Murphy was the devil in disguise,
Meanwhile my best friend had just won first prize
At the show, with her raffia lampshade

Mrs Gillian Ruddick, short, plumpish,
Happy graduate,
Cambridge Cap and gown,
Came down the street singing, ‘The hills are alive…’
A knowing twinkle in her eyes,
And a fan tucked into her handbag,

I should have clocked the look,
I should have recognized that pernickety smile;
That dinosaur stance;
The way she peered into my hands
As though hearing trapped melodies

And now I’m back in the chair,
Or on the stool, as it were, (not double)
With Mrs Gillian (on a mission) Ruddick,
Hell bent on extracting the bad wisdom
That I grew up with,
Drilling and filling-in the un-refined gaps

I am loving every single minute
Mrs Gillian Ruddick extraordinaire!
Not a hint of a raffia anywhere!

Jane Sharp
9 March 2010

Notes: Knauss was the name of my German Upright piano.
Adler was the make of my descant recorder.