Song of another summer
A school teaching assistant encounters the magic of street piano
Friday morning's lesson was a bit different. Not coordinates or states of matter: we were to listen to a piece of music, and say how it made us feel. Did we notice any changes or patterns? What did we like/ not like? What moods or emotions did we feel?
You can close your eyes if you want, the teacher, Dave, tells us. I put my head down on the desk, pretending I am leading by example and not just tired. Twenty-eight children sit in silence as the first six notes chime.
Comptine d’un autre été: l'après midi by Yann Tiersen, the composer who wrote the painfully beautiful soundtrack to Amelie. It is only a few sweet, melancholy notes before I am sailing back over the years to our wedding day, walking into a hall full of red and white balloons, and children's faces lit by sparklers. That's how I remember it, anyway, like an old super-eight film. It is two years ago; it feels like another world.
Like a homing pigeon, the music finds its way to thirty hearts, returning; a tune that has always existed, that is about each of us. It is a soundtrack telling of all that happened on the way to being ten, or 24, its melody blowing through calendar pages.
When the final chord rings out to silence, Dave asks the class to tell the person next to them how the piece made them feel.
"Like, happy and sad" says Fahanna, proving that having a speech and language difficulty and limited vocabulary do not always prevent you from saying things exactly as they are.
Tariq thinks it felt like the seasons passing, and Yara says it made her think of people going and others coming, of change.
But it was Hazim's response that really struck me.
"It made me think of my grandad being born, and getting old and unfortunately dying" he tells me. "And then my dad wanted there to be another Hazim in the world, so he had me and name me after my grandad. And one day I will die too, like death and rebirth."
*
The following day, Saturday, I went to Hampstead Heath to reconnect with a close friend I hadn’t seen for a few months. Hot in the mid-afternoon sun, we take jeans and leggings off from under our skirts and lie in the long grass eating chocolate, massaging each other's feet and necks, bitching about work, laughing about men, forgetting our heavy weeks. We only realise how much time has passed when the sun begins to go down, and we clamber, dazed and happy, back through the gap in the hedge, returning from Narnia through the mothball cupboard.
We emerge to find teenagers drinking from plastic cups and dancing to a pop song they all know, which is somehow confusing after so long spent sitting down playing with blades of grass. We had been so focused on each other we had missed all this human activity the other side of the hedge: tennis courts, first dates, funny dogs, and – a piano? Really?
Yes: On the tarmac pathway around the edge of the Heath there is a man in a baseball cap playing a piano, which is wildly painted in oranges and reds and blues, with huge green eyes gazing out of the front panel. Apparently this magical apparition is a 'street piano': www.streetpianos.com is written on the front, along with the words 'Play me, I'm yours'.
When the baseball cap suddenly gets up and walks off, Heather wants to play. We squeeze in next to each other on the shiny black seat and there is nowhere I would rather be. Today has been one of those days that shouldn't be rare but are, when you manage at last to forget time, and see that you are really, deeply blessed.
"I only know how to play one thing" says Heather, placing her fingers on the keys. And, to my amazement, she begins to play Comptine d'un autre été, to Hampstead Heath in the late afternoon.
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