My paternal grandmother was a trained classical pianist and a member of the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy), a fact she could slip into conversations where there was but the merest of cracks to allow such a link. Her personality carried all of the drama potential she could elicit from her music when she played.
Her sister Lil, my grandaunt, was a singer and my mother had once let it slip that she performed on stage in New York in vaudeville, probably in the 1920s which I gathered had not been approved of by the family. She could be persuaded to perform her favourite “My Gal Sal” accompanied by my father on the piano, always finishing with a theatrical bow and curtsy whenever there was a get together in our house.
My grandmother gifted our family with a Bechstein grand piano, a wonderful and generous gift, perhaps in the hope of stimulating one of us, her four grandsons, to follow in her success. We were fortunate to live in a house with a front room large enough to accommodate it. It truly was a beautiful instrument and to play the simplest of tunes on it sounded almost symphonic.
Musical legacy
She was determined to leave her musical legacy and even though five out of six of us, including my parents, played the piano it was unfortunate that the eldest child of our brood did not and he was first up to be trained by her. She made a number of attempts to teach him but these usually ended with her in a heap in an armchair and my mother supplicating her with copious amounts of brandy to help her recover from the emotional trauma that had gone before.
Both my grandmother and grandaunt lived well into their 90s. They eventually went on to share a room in a nearby nursing home. True to form my grandmother finished on a suitable note of high drama. She had been unwell for a short time and late one night we got a call from the nursing home to say she had passed away. It transpired that during the night Lil had awoken to see my grandmother standing on the end of the bed. She kept saying how she could see angels in the clouds below her and, to Lil’s utter astonishment, she launched herself in a swallow dive to join them ending up in a crumpled heap on the polished wooden floor at the foot of her bed.
Her talents were not wasted however. I play popular music daily purely for my own enjoyment and one of my sons is a singer/songwriter/ producer in London.
