We have at least our fair share of junk and clutter knocking about in our house, waiting to be sorted out... somewhen. Three or four whole rooms are bedecked with the stuff that one accumulates over a lifetime of having parents and children, with mess that you're left to clear up and sort out. It's really stressful and gnaws away at the back of my mind but I'm generally too busy at the moment to think about it all. From time to time, though, it overwhelms me and I flee to the loft bedroom, a haven of cosy peace to escape the mess and the projects lying around waiting to be finished.
We liquidated our Big Yellow storage locker some time ago and the contents have been on the floor of the front reception room - loftily and through some fantasy called the music room - ever since. One of the boxes contains the pictures I saved from my mum's sheltered flat after it was cleared. There is an aerial picture of their old house which is obviously going out, and a portrait of my mum as a young woman done by an artist friend. I'm sure that we'll find somewhere for that.
Then there are the pictures my mum herself painted, because she loved art and sewing and reading, though she had no time between work and me when I was young and as she aged the television took over as her source of entertainment.
I remember when I was about seven, she took great pride in painting a still life in oils of a vase of garden flowers. It took her ages and she left it on a chair in the kitchen to dry. My mum would never have bought - or ever thought she could afford - a proper easel. She had grown up making do and buying the minimum possible. Waste was not an option. As she took her routine afternoon nap Bored Summer Holidays Me surveyed her painting and thought I could make a few improvements with a stroke here and a dab of colour there.
I'll never forget her distraught sobs and tears to my dad as she hunched over the kitchen sink, scrubbing the paint off the canvas that I had ruined. She had told me not to touch it and I had. Ruining something that had given her so much joy was the worst thing I'd ever done and it gnaws at my conscience to this day. She stopped taking classes after that.
From time to time, a few years later, she took up her brushes when inspiration took hold, and this one above holds special significance for me because I absolutely hate the lie that it tells:
I had piano lessons from the time I was nine and I absolutely loved making music. It was unheard-of for someone of my background to be allowed music lessons, and one reason why I'm now so passionate about giving young people of all backgrouhnds access to the Arts.
When I did really well at my 11+ my parents were so delighted that they bought me a second-hand 1926 Kramer piano. It was never in tune but it did have a lovely tone. I never had a piano stool: I used to sit on the largest of a nest of tables that they'd purchased from an ad in the Observer.
My piano teacher didn't put me through the grade exams, though, and we largely worked through the small classical pieces in Marion Harewood's Piano Lessons books. My mother used to complain that she spent all this money on lessons and she couldn't recognise a single piece I played. How hard could it be just to learn a couple of nursery rhymes? That was what her friends wanted to hear, after all. (Much later, as she aged and dementia took hold, she'd bash out one-finger tunes on any piano she could find, but at this point my piano was her Nemesis)
My parents were quite sociable people and their friends were intrigued that they were wasting money on music lessons for me. Obviously my parents wanted some return on their investment and demanded that I perform for their guests. I, a painfully shy, solitary child, who froze with nerves and cringe and then at the resultant wrong notes, never failed to disappoint them with my truly dreadful renditions of The Merry Peasant or a movement from a Mozart Sonata or whatnot. Nothing they could recognise, at any rate.
Besides which, why did I always insist on doing my piano practice just as she wanted to watch the Six O' Clock News? The piano and the television were both in the front room of our ex-housing association semi-detached, of course and my daily practice always clashed with her viewing. I don't know why we can't have sorted this out. People didn't have multiple tv sets over the house in those days and perhaps she just wanted some time out of the kitchen to sit down, but I had my homework to get on with so I had to get my piano practice done.
So, no, my mum would not stand at the sitting room door, head tilted, listening to me play and smiling with pleasure. Never happened. And no, she was certainly not taller than the top of the piano. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I don't know what to do about this painting, which is probably why it has languished in a box for the best part of a decade. On the one hand my mum created it from her imagination, from her mind, so I know I should treasure it. On the other hand it's a reminder of the battles, the embarrassment, the disappointment I was to my parents and myself, and of our increasingly fractious relationship as time went on. I want to bin it, but that seems mean and rude, and sacriligious. What to do?
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