One of my other volunteering roles is as a pianist in a South London Hospital, playing on a baby grand piano in the atrium of the building. There is always a flow of outpatients and visitors many of whom come by and say hello or thankyou. So, this is a post for all music lovers and Donald in particular who recently celebrated his birthday.
But first I will ask this question of you all: have you ever been anywhere, a bus, a doctor’s surgery, a school or hospital where one’s person voice is head and shoulders above all others? Usually, they are a pain in the neck. Well, last Thursday I came across a patient’s wife in the hospital whose voice boomed out in a common souf London accent. This lady I later learnt was Shirley who was accompanying her husband due for an appointment. I could visually Shirley selling fruit in a street market, bellowing out “’alf a pound of tomata’s.”
Well, as I was playing a tune on the piano, I could her shout out to her husband, “Oi Bill, someone’s doing a concert.” And then “ooh I love piano’s”. I turned round to see this lady in her eighties. She came up to me and said, “you can stick violins, drums, guitars: I just love pianos”. Everyone could hear her, the receptionist, the lady with the book trolley, other patients sitting around and staff passing through. Her voice bellowed out. And guess what, her husband was hard of hearing. So most often she repeated what she had said till her husband could understand. It was like watching a TV comedy.
I then asked her if she had any requests. “Oooh,” she said. “My mother’s favourite was always “Moonlight and Roses”. Well, I had a stab at it. It was made famous by Jim Reeves. “That’s it” she exclaimed, even though I made a few errors in playing! And then, as if to help me out, she asked “Can you play Jingle Bells”? “It’s only November”, I replied, teasing her, but then I skirted through it at pace as she became a little girl again, singing along at the top of her voice. And why not – only six weeks away! (Oh, I forgot to tell you she had no teeth.)
She told me she had sung at school and at church back in the day and had always liked the hymn “Thine be the Glory” which has a rousing tune by Handel. Can you play it, she asked. Well, I can and yes, I did, and she began singing that too. Finally, she wanted to show me the tune Lavender Blue, dilly dilly, and attempted to finger the melody on the piano keys. She got the sequence of notes wrong but at least got some of the notes in the right order (cue Morecambe and Wise) and sufficient for me to guess the chord progression so after her attempt I had a shot at it and more or less accomplished the task. I do remember singing that song at school in the early 1950’s. That took me back 70 years. One of the receptionists came up to me later and told me that I’d really done well with that lady, who she had met before in the library! As for the lady herself, she had a whale of a time ha ha.
If you are reading this Donald, do you have any memories of school songs?
