Words From Adelaide: Cello Lessons
...For the first ten minutes Tom would sit, very seriously, applying resin up and down the bow explaining to me, in learned fashion, that this improves the tone of the instrument. I wondered how it sounded without it. Next, Tom would struggle to adjust his crotch area, in embarrassing fashion, so that he could then stretch his little legs sufficiently and beyond the normal call of duty, enabling him to wrap them around the huge cello...
The irrepressibly good-humoured John Powell recalls having to sit-in on his brother's cello lessons.
When, Tom, my older brother was ten, my loving parents decided that something just had to be done to give him some sort of cultural education and that he should learn a musical instrument. Tom, surprisingly, embraced the idea and selected the cello with which to give the world the benefit of his latent talent. And so my ordeal started.
I was five years his junior and my parents, with the mistaken concept that I would be enthused by witnessing his obviously inherited ability, told me to sit and watch him have his half-hour practice.
For the first ten minutes Tom would sit, very seriously, applying resin up and down the bow explaining to me, in learned fashion, that this improves the tone of the instrument. I wondered how it sounded without it. Next, Tom would struggle to adjust his crotch area, in embarrassing fashion, so that he could then stretch his little legs sufficiently and beyond the normal call of duty, enabling him to wrap them around the huge cello. Sometimes it took almost 15 minutes to do so, with a continuous grimace of agony on his face. It was agony for me to watch him and I'm sure that this exercise delayed him reaching puberty. I reckon that he was nearly 17 before he started shaving and his voice broke. It remained a wavering treble beyond its allotted span.
By now he had taken up 25 minutes of his 30 minutes practice time; it was then that he started to play the instrument. Perhaps, ‘play’ is a misnomer, because when I asked him what he was playing, he informed me, coldly, that he was practising. He gripped the bow in his fist with determination, flourished it in the air in debonair fashion to show his readiness and unparalleled dexterity, and, sticking his tongue out in avid concentration, shoved the bow backwards and forwards in a sawing motion with a rather harsh grinding noise, across the protesting strings. Mind you, there was no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing after his weekly lesson - or so he informed me.
My observation of his talent became more enjoyable when I asked him if he could imitate the engine of a bomber. He soon worked this out as it was one monotonous drone. Exactly like his normal practice.
It was then that I suggested a duet. Bringing two of Dad's medical textbooks, I placed Midwifery, and Diseases of the Eye almost next to each other at the base-end of the piano and I stood on them, one foot on each. This made me tall enough to raise my backside above the piano keys. Tom then started his bomber sound; it was a pretty good combination as when I dropped my backside upon the base keys, it sounded just like bombs going off. It was a magnificent duet: original, talented, skilled and perfectly timed. We reckoned our parents would be so proud of us.
When the school had its orchestral concert, Tom was included but when all the proud parents arrived Tom was nowhere to be seen as, unfortunately, there was no orchestral piece involving bomber engines. They agreed that had there been so, he would have had a solo part, (but without my backside accompaniment it would not have been the same I reckoned). So not to disappoint him, they shoved him, complete with cello, under the stage, where, out of sight, out of mind and drowned by the orchestra he could perform for all he was worth which, under the circumstances, wasn't much. It was a good idea except that when the orchestra completed its rather discordant piece and after the completely deafening applause of the proud, adoring parents had subsided, there was the chilling muffled sound of bomber engines. Subterranean Tom was performing magnificently. My parents were so incensed with the cavalier treatment of their talented son that they stopped him playing the cello, to spite the school.
What happened to the cello? You may well ask. When Tom went in the Navy during the war, I tiptoed out in the London blackout and hurled the cello into the River Thames. The last I saw, it was drifting under Vauxhall Bridge; the metal base had sunk while the top of the cello floated along like the periscope of a submarine.
Tom's ship sunk a German submarine in the channel. He confided it was no submarine. The periscope was his damned cello. He reckoned he could recognize it anywhere.
