The piano has been in the family for generations. Broadwood, piano makers to the Queen, built it in 1888. My Dad inherited it from a relative in Blackburn, Lancashire which is where the North family roots were based. When I was growing up, it sat in various corners of our downstairs rooms, depending on how the furniture was arranged, and which coal fire was being used that year (my Dad wasn’t known for wasting money on fires: a mandatory maximum of six kindling sticks were to be used to set a fire). I practiced for half an hour every day from the age of seven to fourteen which was the blight of my childhood. I hated it with a passion. I had a lesson once a week with Miss Tinsdale, spinster of this parish, in her slightly damp house, with her slightly damp mother stationed grimly in the room next door.
I resolutely refused, even at the age of ten, to take any grades. My argument was that if I was playing the piano for “pleasure”, why did I need to prove anything to anyone? I think this sort of stubbornness has stood me in good stead, others may disagree.
I was so ashamed of being the only kid in the town to have piano lessons that I would hide my music books under my coat on the walk home after my lesson. This came in useful on the occasion the school bully collared me on my way past the library (I don’t think he was brushing up on his Dostoyevsky), and then failed to make any impact on me with his stomach punches. He left me alone after that, clearly believing I had some sort of super power, rather than the sturdy sheets of Mozart’s ‘Piano Sonata in F’ and ‘Highlights from the Classics’ (various composers) which were actually protecting me.
When I moved with my wife (as was) Lucy into our cottage in Derby, my parents decided it was time the piano re-joined me, or at the very least my Mum decided she was fed up with dusting it. At the age of thirty I reckoned the trauma would have sufficiently subsided, and was pleased to have it back.
At fourteen, having dropped the piano like a lead weight, I picked up a guitar for the first time, and discovered I had a moderately natural talent for it. It was a cheap electric, but I couldn’t afford an amplifier until twelve months later. By the time I had the means to make an actual noise with it I had taught myself all the basic chords and more. Friends with violins, drums, bass and acoustic guitars were all keen to play, and we formed a series of short lived house bands through my teen years. [When I say house bands I mean bands that only ever played in someone’s house, rather than ones that had an actual residency.]
And so when I finally got my piano back, I had little expectation of being able to play it. Astonishingly, although I couldn’t remember anything in my mind, my fingers could. I would sit at my stool, watching my hands move over the keys playing the tunes I used to know, with seemingly no conscious input from myself. Finally I began to enjoy playing the piano, despite it being very out of tune, very honky tonk, and what tuning there was being a quarter tone down from true pitch having had a severe warning from one piano tuner that if it was ever tuned to full pitch the whole thing would implode. I didn’t care. I heard what I thought I was playing, not what I was actually playing.
We then moved to a larger house, where the living area was on the first floor, and I supervised the removal men in their struggle up the steps onto the balcony, and though the French windows to where the piano was to live.
After separating from Lucy, I lived with a friend Kev for a while, then in our rented fridge freezer in Little Fenton, and Lucy was still in the family home with my son, and I didn’t want to take anything significant from the house while they were still in it, so it was over three years until I was finally in a position to retake possession of the piano. I reassured Lucy that I would handle all this and she didn’t have to worry about anything.
On a visit up to Derbyshire I asked my furniture-loving, perennial house-moving friend Polly if she knew of a specialist piano removal company. She did, she said. She gave me details of a “man and a van”. This is where it all started to go wrong.
I rang the van man.
“Do you move pianos?”
Slight pause. “Yes, we do.”
“I need one moving to Cambridge.”
“OK, no problem.”
“It’s on a first floor, is that ok?”
Slight pause. “Yes, that’s fine.”
I arranged a date, and waited to see what happened. The first thing was a text from Lucy.
‘They’ve arrived. There’s two of them.’
Optimistically, my first thought was that they were clearly experts in their field, if they could move it with two of them. A few minutes later.
‘Their van’s got a puncture.’
I could detect a slight cynicism, even in the cold characters of a text message.
‘They’re trying to get the piano down the steps from the balcony, and it’s stuck.’
I felt a slight clamminess on my forehead. This wasn’t going quite as well as anticipated. My mobile rang: it was a throaty masculine Northern voice.
“Mr North, I’m afraid we can’t get the piano down the steps, it’s stuck. I think we’ll have to leave it.”
“Can you get it back into the house?” I asked in what was intended to be a calm, measured and merely confirmatory manner, but came across more like a partially strangled chicken.
Slight pause. “I’ll let you know”.
Three long hours later, well maybe twenty minutes, I got another call confirming the piano had indeed been returned to the house, and was still roughly in one piece, as I hoped too was the balcony. Following that, not unreasonably, was the so what are you going to do now? call from Lucy. Leave it with me, I said cheerfully and confidently, but with an appropriate touch of gravitas, I’ll get it sorted. So what do I do now? I phoned Polly to ask whether she had actually employed the services of these gentlemen herself, and whether in doing so their spurs had damaged her skirting boards, at which point it became clear she’d been talking about two different companies, a specialist remover, and a man with a van who had moved a bookcase or something for her. Not a piano for sure.
Back to square one. I searched “specialist piano removals Derby” and came up with a name, and a phone number.
“Hello. I need a piano moving from Derby to Cambridge.”
“Yes Sir. What’s your postcode? Right, let me see, I can see the house on Streetmap.” This was more like it. “It’s the left hand house is it… thirty yards back from the road… and the piano’s on the first floor. The drive looks steep. Do you mind when it’s delivered? No? OK leave it with me Sir.”
So reassuring! Such professionalism! A few days later I received a photo from Lucy. It was of a magnificently massive crane parked in the middle of the road outside the house, outriggers solidly extended, and my tiny piano dangling from the end of the hundred foot boom. I whooped for joy. A week later it arrived at our new house, and I was so pleased to see it I decided to give it a present.