How I Might Have Learned Japanese
My 'Aunties', my Dad and the library
If South Jutland Was Cornwall
And sometimes one finds oneself supping minestrone in the library and thinking how far we have come...
Perhaps I should elaborate. As I’ve written previously, I’m currently on tour in Denmark with the wonderful people from Teater Møllen and therefore find myself seeking lunch in their home town of Haderslev in South Jutland. In my more frivolously contemplative moments I often play a mental game which I suppose you could call ‘if Denmark was Britain’, in which I try to map the cultural geography of similiar parts of the one country onto the other, and see if this pans out to a greater or lesser extent than you would suppose. According to this algorithm, Copenhagen would of course be London, Sjælland is England, Mid and North Jutland would be ‘The North’ and Scotland respectively , which would make Århus Edinburgh and Aalborg Aberdeen and so on.
On the whole this works. Aalborg has a kind of pawky vibrancy which I’ve often experienced in Aberdeen, Århus, like Edinburgh is a culturally exciting city with an international arts festival, which is nevertheless slightly looked down by the capital Copenhagen, which is a cool place, but can be a bit up itself. You know the kind of thing. By this measure, yet somewhat counter-intuitively in terms of geography, I suppose South Jutland is Cornwall, proud of it’s heritage, a bit singular and blessed with a strangely elided, rising and falling way of speaking no one else can understand. There are probably pirates here too, but no one’s told me about them. One of the features of South Jutland, and in particular Haderslev, that it certainly shares with it’s British analogue is a kind of sleepiness, a lack of much going on on a weekday. Hence I find myself eating lunch in the library cafe, a fine place mostly populated by groups of local elderly people, possibly newly pensioned, meeting up in groups to celebrate their liberation from the tyranny of the working day. I have always loved popping into libraries in strange towns and the idea of there sometimes also being a cafe in there never fails to mildly impress me.
A Bit Milk and Water
It has become somewhat of a cliche among people of my age to wax lyrical about the libraries of their childhood, one I don’t intend to subvert. My own strong feelings on the subject are, I think, rooted in some notion of democratisation of knowledge, a noble goal which the internet might have fixed for all of us a number of years ago, had it not been for the gatekeeping effects of corporate and political interests.
The library of my childhood, in Airdrie, Lanarkshire was Airdrie Public Library a fine Victorian building, the layout of which I reckon I could still draw from memory if asked to. From an early age, and into my early teens, I would go there every Friday evening with my dad to putter around the shelves wherever I fancied while he did the same, often meeting some crony or family member in the process. My dad, who would have been in his fifties at this point, was a house-painter by trade. He was born in 1919 and left school at fourteen in order to get his first job at the local brickworks. He had always availed himself of the endless treasures to be found in libraries. My grandfather died before I was born. He had been a coal miner, but had been gassed in the trenches in WWI. He was probably an alcoholic, had certainly never worked again but was a voracious reader, and not of unsubstantial fare. My dad often made the claim that my grandfather had read Smollett and Fielding, whose works my dad clearly saw as the pinnacle of impenetrable heavy-going fiction. Having never read either of them, I wouldn’t know. While my dad was never ‘aspirational’ in any class-mobile sense, he certainly had precious little snobbery, an extraordinary, undying curiosity about all forms of knowledge and the arts, and he very rarely pooh-poohed people who appreciated ‘high’culture. I often feel, and also do now while writing this, that any description of his intellectual and artistic openness must seem like an impossibly idealized cliche of the self-educated working-class guy - his name was coincidentally ‘Guy’. However, I have spoken to others who knew him and I really don’t feel like the glasses through which I see him are too much tinted by either rose, nostalgia or class-romanticism. He really was like this, and while he was as imperfect as most of us are, I don’t see many like him in these times and I’d love to tell you more about him someday. He was also sometimes very funny, a big fan of Spike Milligan and could laugh until tears streamed down his cheeks.
At first, as a small child, I would roam the childrens section in the library, checking out Lavinia Derwents ‘Macpherson’ stories, Enid Blyton’s ‘Shadow the Sheepdog’ and loads of kids books about science. Eventually I plucked up courage to explore the grown-up stuff, and that’s where things got more interesting. And it was all free, both in the sense of not costing any money, and also being available to all without question or qualification.
From when I was about eleven, I developed an interest in books about art. My dad had painted a bit but I wasn’t particularly gifted, so I don’t quite know how this arose. On a caravan holiday on The Isle Of Skye, at my request, my parents had got me The Obervers Book of Painting and Graphic Art and The Observers Book of Modern Art from the little bookshop/newsagents in Portree, the main town on the island. These tiny books with their little grainy illustrations of Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt (‘the master’ according to my dad) Raphael (‘Nah…insipid… a bit milk-and-water’) and others held me spellbound for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. There was also the bonus of being able to look at (oddly unarousing) images of naked women with no shame or reprobation – peering at these simpering mythological figures didn’t seem to count.
On coming home to Airdrie, I discovered that they also had a great collection of art books in the library and – I suspect not without a certain degree of, to this day still undiagnosed, neurodivergence – I became a nauseatingly precocious devourer of coffee-table tomes, leafing through massive collections of illustrations from the Pushkin Museum or illustrated histories of Dutch Genre Painting.
Cissy and Bessie
I was by no stretch of the imagination a cultural prodigy, but I had two arty ‘aunts’, who were actually my dad’s cousins. The first was my Auntie Cissy, who was a piano teacher and gave me free lessons from the age of seven. Her sister, my Auntie Bessie, was a speech and drama teacher of some reputation at the renowned Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Both sisters lived in separate, tiny council houses on Grahamshill Street in Airdrie, their boxy rooms improbably stuffed with furniture and drapery like Edwardian parlours. In Aunty Bessie’s case a baby grand piano filled one of the upstairs rooms; lord knows how they had maneouvred it up the little narrow council-house staircase. Alongside it stood an exotic Egyptian table which my mother shamelessly coveted; it had an ornate round brass top and a tripod of legs in the form of dark wooden snakes. On the walls were large sepia photo-portraits of various familiy luminaries. It was like Sherlock Holmes’s study up there. Aunty Cissy on the other hand had an equally tiny flat with two upright pianos in her living room. She would make me lemon tea when I visited for lessons and sometimes milky coffee, neither of which I had ever before tasted. She had a fluffy grey cat called ‘Pica’, an abbreviated form of ‘Picasso’, so-named because she had found her as a stray at Airdrie Arts Centre. She also had an immeasurably old and fragrant dog named ‘Whisky’, a clumpy black labrador cross with a silver muzzle and a beard which seemed inexplicably stained by pipe smoke, who would sit beside my feet and leak eye-wateringly pungent, silent farts while I played a movement of a Clementi Sonata, or a Bach Two-Part Invention or something. The farts were never referred to as such by Aunty Cissy, who nevertheless saw my winces and would usher Whisky out of the room with an urgent efficiency. The sisters themselves were, in their own way as exotic and incongruous, as lost in a collision of eras as their dwellings. They were aware of, and were unexpectedly also amused by, their resemblance to the drag comedy act Hinge and Brackett, who were popular on TV at the time. No marital partners troubled their existence. Their common surname was, oddly enough, ‘Scotland’, which is a real, though uncommon name in Scotland. I remember as a child hearing Aunty Bessy being referred to by her professional teacher name ‘Miss Scotland’ and marvelling that she had somehow once been a beauty queen and that the title had been bestowed on her for life.
As I result of Aunty Cissy’s efforts, I could read music pretty fluently from when I was about ten. This gave me access to the delights of the sheet music library from which you could borrow collections of music for all kinds of instruments, mostly hardbound albums of piano pieces and some orchestral scores. The beauty of this was that it somehow demystified even the most complex works. I would borrow something like a collection of Rachmaninoff Preludes and would gaze in awe at the pages blackened by swathes of notes, expression marks and pedalling instructions ‘like a knitting pattern’ as my dad would say. Cissy encouraged my forays into these works, which I hadn’t a hope in hell of ever being able to play, neither then or now. She would point out that even the most absurdly complex stuff could be broken down into a series of do-able steps which could, in theory be mastered even by a nobody like me. As a result of this I can still play the odd bar or two of some piano pieces, often the opening, which in their entirety are way beyond my skills, like Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata, or the opening of Greig’s piano concerto, immortalized for many in the legendary EricMorecambe/Andre Previn sketch.
Mozart’s Little Ribbon
That the most forbidding hard-bound brown, heavy, dusty album of classical musical compositions consisted in essence of not much more than sets of instructions which could be followed by any ‘tradesman’ equipped with necessary skills was an insight into musical creation which I’ve never forgotten. Being a composer basically just meant creating these documents, as opposed to being a rock or jazz musician who both made up his own music and played it himself without even bothering to write it down. This was a true democratisation of culture, hands-on in the literal sense. I was looking at the same thing that Beethoven’s musician contemporaries would have been handed by him, his how-to manual, his ‘charts’ as jazz musicians like to say . I became fascinated by the nuts and bolts of composition and (ré earlier reference to neurodivergence) would pore over library books containing detailed analyses of Beethoven Sonatas, picking out all the little themes and motifs on the piano at home, seeing how they interlocked and complemented each other like Lego bricks to make something which expressed….what? The idea of a grumpy old fart like Beethoven, or Mozart with his little ribbon at the back of his hair, or pudgy, speccy Schubert having anything meaningful to express seemed implausible to an adolescent driven entirely by teenage feelings and hormones. But it didn’t matter, these works were still amazing, enigmatic constructions, you couldn’t deny that.
There was also a record library upstairs up in the attic of Airdrie Library, a light airy locality full of record racks and presided over by a lovely, eternally helpful and indulgent middle-aged librarian lady with spectacles on a chain, straight out of central casting, whose name I don’t think I ever learned. Most of the records were of ‘serious’ music, although in later years they had a ‘rock and pop’ section. They also had spoken word records and boxed sets of Linguaphone language courses. My dad let me loose in there and essentially advised me to fill my boots and try anything I fancied. He had a few pieces of advice: The Peer Gynt Suite was great, Wagner was pretty good, though heavy going, chamber music was the only thing he had never had a taste for, oh and Stravinsky was terrifying, especially The Rites of Spring. So, on my first trip to the record library I borrowed Peer Gynt, The Rites of Spring, conducted by Igor himself, Wagners Siegfried, ardently following the libretto on the brochure that came with the boxed set, and finally (causing the librarian lady to lift her eyebrows just a smidgin) a Linguaphone Japanese course. Almost all of these were to prove imposing, slightly terrifying and paradigm-shifting in different ways. Never learned Japanese though.