The Confession

BACK in the early-70s, when I was a young scallywag - as opposed to a scallywag no longer able to blame his questionable behaviour on the errors of youth - my mother would forcibly dispatch me to a weekly meeting of the Upper Norwood cub scouts. There were around thirty of us in total, yet not a single one of us wanted to be there. I don’t think we had earned a single badge between us and spent much of the time trying to throttle one another with our neck-ties or giggling through the obligatory raising and lowering of the Union Flag. Given that the HQ was right next to our council estate and full of its most notorious misfits, myself included, the beleaguered adults charged with organising this Monday evening free-for-all possessed the leadership skills of a battlefield deserter.

We used to arrive more than an hour early and play football against the wall of a hideously modern baptist church, its Brutalist architecture a less-than-subtle reminder that wisdom does not come with age. On one particular occasion, around fifteen of us arrived at the top of the concrete steps leading down to the subterranean HQ and discovered that a grand piano had been left nearby by a delivery company. It was wrapped in foam packaging and obviously intended for the church organist, but once we realised that it had wheels we began pushing it around like an oversized skateboard. Before long, the foam wrapping had been stripped away and we had lifted the heavy lid and started hammering out some of the most disjointed, atonal recitals known to humankind.

Being the ring-leader of this unruly mob I soon perched myself on top and had them wheel me around like a deranged Liberace. Suddenly, the piano crashed against the railings at the top of the steps and almost plunged to the bottom. The fact that it didn’t actually plunge to the bottom, of course, meant that we felt obliged to give it a helping hand and the gleaming instrument toppled down the staircase with wild abandon. Naturally, horrible little tykes like us rarely pause to consider the consequences of their own actions and the noise it made as it shattered into a thousand pieces has since entered the realms of South London legend. Sirens followed. Needless to say, when the cub leaders arrived and discovered the enormous pile of broken keys, hammers, pedals and strings that now blocked the main entrance to the HQ we were sent home early.

I’m sure that the moral of this little tale is that if you want to have them dancing in the aisles on a Sunday morning then make sure your Steinway isn’t blocking the stairway and that it doesn’t fall into the feral hands of a gang of musical philistines. The trigger for this unexpected excursion down Memory Lane? Overhearing Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1926 work, Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 12. Now if that doesn’t sound like a grand piano falling down an enormous flight of concrete steps, then I’m the King of Siam. Finally, if these revelations lead to my immediate extradition back to London and a belated show-trial before an outraged assembly of the Musicians’ Union, I only have myself to blame.