He was far more experienced than I was, but never set himself up on a pedestal or showed any measure of self-importance and I was grateful for his attention. Having spent most of my life in a very small community, I found it hard to truly grasp how hierarchies functioned. I knew power dynamics existed that went way beyond my experience and understanding.

I likewise took a slow but steady meander through the canon of music composed for the piano. Until I’d graduated from school I’d hardly ever listened to classical music, so it was a whole new world for me. I was instantly hooked and fell asleep every night to the strains of a Mozart or Beethoven sonata or a Chopin nocturne.

I’d had no idea there was such a diverse repertoire of music – so many sonatas, concertos, ballads, preludes, scherzos, studies, impromptus – and all performed by the widest possible variety of pianists. I had no sense of degrees of merit. I would never have the time to compare them all, so set myself the task of simply listening to as much as I could, trying not to choose the same pianist twice. Just as a newly hatched chick thinks the first creature it sets eyes on is its mother, so I too grew attached to the first performance I heard of each piece. As far as I was concerned, that pianist was clearly the best. The performance might be quirky, might be an interpretation that played freely with the tempo and dynamics, but if that was the first version I heard, it became the gold standard by my reckoning.

Whenever I had a spare moment I’d stand in front of a piano, heave open its mighty lid and peer inside. Eighty-eight keys, each with one to three strings attached. The steel strings were taut, and I felt a jolt of excitement each time I contemplated the line of hammers, ranged across the action like an exquisite row of magnolia buds, just waiting to be used. The forest, with everything in perfect balance, was utterly beautiful.

And here was another thing: ‘beautiful’, like ‘right’, was a totally new word for me. Until I’d found the piano I’d never been aware of things that you might call beautiful, which is a little different, of course, from not knowing they exist. I recalled the milky tea my grandmother used to make me when I came home from school. She’d boil the tea in a small pan, then add the milk, transforming its colour to that of a muddy river after a downpour. I often used to imagine the fish swimming in the hidden depths of the pan. She’d pour out the tea and I’d stare fascinated at the way the liquid swirled around in the cup, half expecting to see a fin or the flap of a small tail. I recognized beauty in that now.