Room for Improvement

By Martyn Steel

This volume is offered to readers as a series of personal and random reminiscences and reflectionssometimes rambling, sometimes serious, and sometimes more lighthearted. The book contains a number of cameos spanning fifty-seven years, a number that is of particular significance in my life. Sorry to keep you in suspense; perhaps in the next book, all will be revealed!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543488821

Martyn Steel

Born in March 1955, Martyn was brought up and educated in Bristol, England, a city in the south west of the country. From 1977 he worked as a teacher in London and lives in East Finchley, a suburb in the north west of the metropolis. Now retired, he is still very busy as a church musician, and thoroughly enjoys photography and travel.

Book preview

IRON MEETS STEEL

a.jpg

I met Margaret Thatcher, our first woman prime minister, at Friern Barnet County School in North London in 1983. The mixed high school had about six hundred pupils, and I was in charge of the music department. Friern Barnet is slap bang in the middle of the constituency of Finchley and Friern Barnet, a parliamentary seat Mrs Thatcher held from 1959 until 1992.

She was, and remains, the Marmite Woman. People loved her or hated her.

I remember that at her funeral procession to St Paul’s on 17 April 2013, some in the crowd lining the streets turned their back as the cortège passed by.

Don Houghton, the head teacher of Friern Barnet County School in the 1980s, received a call one spring day. The conversation went something like this:

Can we use your school hall for a dinner attended by the prime minister?

Yes, of course.

Can your music teacher play the piano for us?

We can do better than that and have the school orchestra play for you, conducted by the music teacher.

Well, that conversation led to the school orchestra playing at that event in 1983 and again in the spring of 1984, sadly for the last time. Later that year, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) attempted to assassinate Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet at the Brighton Conference during the early hours of 12 October 1984.

After that tragic incident, a combination of stricter security arrangements and a changeover to a new dim-witted head teacher abruptly ended those annual events at the school.

Baroness Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’, 13th October 1925 – 8th April 2013.

ANYBODY SHOCKED?

I’ve been doing a bit of decluttering recently. I made it a resolution when I took early retirement back in 2013. As with all resolutions I make, the reality is that they are rarely resolved. However, I have made a token effort, and although not all is necessarily visible, I have dealt with a good deal of it.

Just recently, I came across a plastic case of audio tapes. For those under the age of thirty, audio cassettes preceded CDs and were useful, as they could have prerecorded material on them or you could record audio material yourself. I still have a cassette recorder/player gathering dust somewhere.

The plastic case had numerous cassettes, many of which were rather old and had never been listened to. However, I had neither the space nor inclination to keep them anymore, and they ended up in the black refuse bin, apart from one particular tape I spotted. That tape stood out amongst the rest and reminded me of an event that had taken place thirty-five years earlier. I salvaged it and made a digital copy.

In 1981, I met Archbishop Michael Ramsey (1904–1988) at St John’s Church, Friern Barnet, for the first and only time. He was the one hundredth archbishop of Canterbury and earlier had been the bishop of Durham, and is to be seen on film footage waddling on the queen’s right-hand side at her coronation as they processed to the ancient throne in Westminster Abbey. Thirty years afterwards, I met him in North London, and he seemed to have aged little. I remember his trademark bushy eyebrows being further emphasised by his twitching eyes.

The rector, the Reverend Victor Stock, was the incumbent at the time, and I was one of two organists in the parish. Victor was a friend of Lord Ramsey and had invited him to preach at Pentecost that year. I can still recall the words Tongues of fire! Tongues of fire! resounding dramatically from the pulpit on Pentecost Sunday; it was as if he were auditioning for a major male lead in a Shakespearean play.

Aside from preaching, Lord Ramsey led a parish weekend retreat. It was a time when parishioners could get away from the hustle-bustle and the ordinary things of life, a time to recharge physical batteries and come away refreshed and renewed.

The retreat ended after evensong on the Sunday with a question-and-answer session. Chaired by the rector, the former archbishop had no idea beforehand of the questions that he would be asked.

This session was recorded, and thanks to my preservation of the tape, I have a full and accurate transcription of my question.

What did he have to say about my question about Adam and Eve? It was a controversial question, and I wanted to be a little mischievous in asking it!

Here is the transcript of Michael Ramsey’s answer:

The question is about what we make of the Adam and Eve story. There are those who take it as a literal bit of history, that we literally came from two first parents, and there are those who believe it to be a myth or symbolic story. Now about this, I don’t think it’s possible, sensibly, to believe in it as a literal bit of history because we really do by now know that the human race has evolved from an animal creation earlier than itself. Yet I think that the Adam and Eve story is a most powerful and divinely given story, not as a bit literal history; I wouldn’t use the word myth because the word myth has become a rather sort of contentious one. I would rather say parable or symbol, a wonderful parable of the fact that God created the human race, God gave the human race moral responsibility, and the human race has rejected that human responsibility by choosing wilfulness and selfishness. And I think it’s a very fine story about man’s relation to God and the predicament in which the human race now is. I think it’s a very powerful story if we treat it as a symbol than it is if we treat it as a literal story about a bit of gardening in Mesopotamia. Anybody shocked? Anybody shocked?

Seeing his answer in print gives just an idea of his thoughts. To get the real flavour of his answer with all his repetition, stammering, and inflections, one needs to hear the audio tape.

CAN I TALK TO YOU WHILST YOU ARE PLAYING?

b.jpg

It is interesting to note how many people are totally unaware of the multitasking efforts required by an organist. He or she might not be an octopus but does need both hands and feet to control such a complex beast, and that’s before arranging the stops with toe and thumb pistons. Just one misplaced foot or a wasp in your face can lead to a hideous row!

To quote an anonymous paragraph from the Internet, with my own amendments:

Playing the organ can be rather like driving a hired left-hand driven car with bald tyres, in a foreign country, without a satnav, in the snow, at night-time, without lights or functioning windscreen wipers. The children are in the back seat with their own private agendas, which could include any combination from a menu, including a full nappy, a toy car emitting vile electronic siren noises, an empty stomach, a full bladder, and requests for the umpteenth repeat of Peppa Pig on the tablet.

Concentration is all. Over the years, many people have come to speak to me as I play after a service. This is a good thing generally, as the comments and intentions are positive, but it is terribly difficult to respond conversationally, especially when playing and reading from sheet music.

My abilities, such as they are, were tested recently when I was playing in Bristol. The bishop of the diocese was present for the morning and was due to preach at the next and more highly attended service. He was passing time till his bit and sat just behind me, which was rather unnerving.