A Traitor to Memory

I remember those first lessons with Rosemary Orr: my impatience locking horns with her devotion to minutiae. “Find your body, Gideon dear, find your body,” she says. And with a one-sixteenth tucked between my chin and my shoulder—for this was in the days when that was the smallest instrument one could obtain—I endure Miss Orr's perpetual adjustments to my position. She arches my fingers over the fingerboard; she stiffens my left wrist; she grips my shoulder to prevent its intrusion into the bowing; she straightens my back and uses a long pointer to tap the insides of my legs to alter my stance. All along while I play—when she at last allows me to play—her voice rings out above the scales and arpeggios that are my initial assignments: “Body up, shoulder down, Gideon dear.” “Thumb under this part of the bow, not on the silver part, please, and not on the side.” “The whole arm up-bows.” “Strokes are big and detached.” “No, no! You use the fleshy part of the fingers, dear.” Continually, she has me play one note and set up for the next. Over and over we engage in this exercise until she is satisfied that all body parts which exist as extensions of the right hand—that is to say the wrist, the elbow, the arm, and the shoulder blade—function along with the bow like an axis and wheel, with the body parts keeping the bow on course.

I learn that my fingers must work independently of each other. I learn to find that balancing point on the fingerboard which will later allow my fingers to shift as if through air alone from one position to the next on the strings. I learn to listen for and to find the ringing tone of my instrument. I learn up bow and down bow, the golden mean, staccato and legato, sul tasto and sul ponticello.

In short, I learn method, theory, and principle, but what I do not learn is what I hunger to learn: how to rupture the spirit to bring forth the sound.

I persevere with Miss Rosemary Orr for eighteen months, but soon I tire of the soulless exercises that dominate my time. Soulless exercises were not what I heard issuing forth from her window that day in the square, and I rail against having to be part of them. I hear Miss Orr excuse this to my father, “He is, after all, a very small child. It's to be expected that, at such a young age, his interest wouldn't be held for long.” But my father—who is already doing two jobs to keep the family at Kensington Square—has not attended my thrice-weekly lessons and thus he can't perceive the manner in which they're bleeding life from the music I love.

My grandfather, however, has been there all along because during the eighteen months that I have been with Miss Orr, he has not experienced anything resembling an episode. So he's taken me to my lessons and he's listened from a corner of the room, and with his sharp eyes absorbing the form and the content of my lessons and his parched soul thirsty for Paganini, he has drawn the conclusion that his grandson's prodigious talent is being held back, not nurtured, by well-meaning Rosemary Orr.

“He wants to make music, damn it,” Granddad roars at my father when they discuss the situation. “The boy's a bloody artist, Dick, and if you can't see that much when it's painted in front of you, you've got no brains and you're no son of mine. Would you feed a thoroughbred from the pig trough? I don't bloody think so, Richard.”





Perhaps it is fear that garners my father's cooperation, fear that another episode will be forthcoming if he does not acquiesce in Granddad's plan. And it is a plan that my grandfather makes immediately apparent: We live in Kensington, no great distance from the Royal College of Music, and it is there that a suitable instructor of the violin shall be found for his grandson Gideon.

So it is that my grandfather becomes my saviour and the trustee of my unspoken dreams. So it is that Raphael Robson enters my life.

22 August





I am four years and six months old, and although I know now that Raphael would only have been in his early thirties at the time, to me he is a distant, awesome figure who commands my complete obedience from the first moment we meet.

He isn't a pleasing figure to behold. He sweats copiously. I can see his skull through his baby-fine hair. His skin is the white of river-fish flesh and it is patched with scales from too much time in the sun. But when Raphael picks up his violin and plays for me—for that is our introduction to each other—whatever he looks like fades to insignificance, and I am clay for him to mould. He chooses the Mendelssohn E minor, and he gives his entire body to the music.