I was planning to write today about one of my piano
teachers, and I shall in a moment, but this morning on both BBC and VOA I heard
of an exercise in camel-swallowing that I cannot let pass without comment:
President Obama of the U.S.A. is currently visiting Cuba,
where he has had the astounding gall to ask for ‘improvements’ in its human
rights record. (I think he means improvements in its human rights, rather than
in the record of them, but let that pass; it’s been some time since we have had
a literate American president). Now whatever happens elsewhere in Cuba, and
certainly I know of writers critical of the government who have been imprisoned,
(in America such people are not imprisoned or even tried; they are hounded out
of their country and sometimes suffer unfortunate fatal accidents), there is
one place in Cuba where people are held without trial in cages whose use in a
zoo would be illegal, and subjected relentlessly to torture to extract ‘confessions’.
It is called Guantanamo Bay; it is owned by America and the vile people who do
the caging and torture are Americans working for the American Government.
——#——
I.M. Fred Waterworth
Whenever I have lived in one place for more than a few weeks
I have tried to equip myself with a piano and then find a piano teacher. Thus I
have had many piano teachers, most of them, frankly, no good as teachers,
whatever their abilities as pianists. My present one, here in Greece, is the
best ever; a very gifted teacher who begins to understand the quite special
difficulties of an older person who knows a great deal about music, but can’t really play much.
Anyway, some of my piano teachers have been retired people
living quiet and perhaps lonely lives, so very often we spent more time talking
than playing. Or rather, teacher talked and I listened.
Fred Waterworth lived in a flat on the sea-front at
Lee-on-Solent, between Portsmouth and Southampton. I say ‘lived’ and ‘I.M.’
because if he’s still alive he would have to be well over 100 years old. Once
or twice a week I cycled from the Royal Naval Married Quarters where I was
living to his house. Mostly he gazed soulfully out to sea at the window while I
played the first movement of Beethoven’s C# minor sonata; the one known (though
not by Beethoven) as the ‘Moonlight’. At half-time his wife would bring us tea
and biscuits, and Fred would tell me anecdotes of his life. One of his fingers
was flattened and spade-like at the tip; Lord knows how he managed to play just
one note at a time with it rather than three. He explained it had been crushed
under a rifle butt during the First World War, and the surgeon had wanted to
cut it off, but he begged them to patch it up as best they could.
He had been a cinema pianist in the silent film days;
peering sideways up at the screen and improvising along with the film. Then
talkies came in and one might think he was out of a job, but no, like many
others, his cinema installed an organ, all bells and whistles and coloured
lights, like some nightmare of Scriabin’s, on which Mr Waterworth entertained
the audience before the show and during the interval, and of course played the
National Anthem (everybody standing at attention) at the end of the evening.
This new arrangement left Mr Waterworth free to pop out while the main feature
was on and get a jar or two at the adjacent hostelry; he just had to be sure to
be back for the national anthem at the end of the film, and he always was.
Now those cinema organs were usually installed in what
passed for an orchestra pit, and he actual console would rise on a hydraulic column in front
of the screen, organist already playing, as the house-lights came up at the
interval. One evening our hero, after perhaps a jar too many, came back in good
time, climbed into his organ console, looked up at the screen, saw there was a
good half-hour of film left to run, and dozed off. But in doing so he slumped
forward onto the knob that set the hydraulics working — just as the film was
reaching it climax, the view was obscured by the huge organ console slowly
ascending to full height in front of the screen. Boos, jeers, screams, arrival
of a furious manager, ‘Fred! Come down at once!’ But Fred was deeply asleep;
no-one saw the end of the film.
Fred Waterworth’s career as a cinema organist ended that
evening.
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