Then it was my turn (and as I play she sips a glass of water with lemon slices like yellow fish. She peels an apple and its skin falls in coils; there is greenish flesh. Her pale hands cut away the core. A bead of spit shows at her mouth). I played, and my notes sliced the lovely vagueness of the apple and its frilled skin and the silent metronome and the clock that ticked the time. And I played from A Garden of Melodies and Puck’s Pieces and she said it was quite good (but my scales are very bad and also arpeggios. I have exercise books in rose-bud wall-paper and do Theory, and learn Italian words and there is curly treble like a Persian and bass clef is a fish, middle C has a bowler hat, sharps are cross-patches, notes are tadpoles. I know ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit’ and ‘FACE’).

At ten minutes to eight the bell rang, and my teacher wrote in one of the exercise books the pieces I must practise for next week. I was jealous of the girl who sat on the seat.

I walked home the front way, relishing the freshness — the feeling that anything might happen. The gravel crunched underfoot; I was cut by thorns as I fished the newspaper from its rose bush cage. Nan let me in. There was the smell of sausage; I heard eggs spitting in the pan. My mother ran past in her petticoat.

At first I paid Carol’s mother ten shillings a week to practise at the German piano on the verandah (but there were the cats, and Carol’s mother, and then Carol got jealous and always wanted to play Chopsticks).

Then I took my ten shillings to Mrs. Scuse who was my grandmother’s friend (cocky-face, dropsy husband, a piano). Mrs. Scuse lived very near Great-grandfather Collins so I had to walk down Dew Street with my head strangely averted. I was ushered into a front room with family photographs, a plastic pineapple for ice, and brass pyramids and camels and genie lamp. The piano had a hang-down music-rack and candle-brackets. An artificial coal fire spiralled; there was a clock on top of the piano that timed my hour (I have a rest at half past and watch the people coming home from work — or look into the drawers, but mustn’t make a noise. And once I stopped too long and she nearly caught me).

Then one day I came home to find a piano in the sitting-room (Nan got out her old pieces and tried ‘A Dream of Paradise’ but said she couldn’t do it — her fingers were too stiff).