The Dreaming Suburb by R.F. Delderfield Read Free Book Online Page A

scales and short pieces. Tin-Pan Alley was cock-a-hoop. More sheet-music was being sold than at any time in history and, of all musical instruments, the piano far outstripped all others in suburban popularity. At any time between the hours of 4 and7 p.m. a passer-by, pausing outside almost any of the detached, semi-detached, or terrace houses between the Lower Road and Shirley Rise, could hear a cacophony of blundered scales issuing from the open windows of the drawing-rooms (as parlours were now known) for every other house possessed a cottage piano, at which two or more of the family took turns to pick their way through the shorter and simpler excerpts of Schubert, or the inevitable Down on the Farm jingles. On a summer evening in 1919 one might have heard half a dozen renderings of A Merry Peasant Returning from Work, L'Orage, or Autumn Ride in the Avenue alone, and the leather music-case, in the hands of sullen-faced boys or their pig-tailed sisters, became as familiar in the street as the school satchel.
    Edith, who had been soundly taught as a child, divided her hour-long lessons into thirty minutes theory and thirty minutes practice, and was thus able to cope with two pupils at once. She relied almost exclusively on a fat book of scales, and a Down on the Farm for beginners, for the latter tinklings possessed for her, an exiled country-woman, a strong nostalgic flavour, and she never grew weary of hearing In a Quiet Wood or Now All is Sleeping.
    She quickly learned to distinguish between those of her flock who would never progress beyond the musical farmyard, even when anxious mothers guaranteed regular practice with the help of twopenny canes, sold in bunches at all ironmongers along the Lower Road, and those who, with a little patience, would soon master elementary theory, and absorb as much as she could teach them.
    Among her first dozen there were only two who did not regard the weekly lesson, and its accompanying obligation of at least half-an-hour's daily practice, as a monstrous inroad into their playtime. Of these two, Esme Fraser, of Number Twenty-Two, was one. The other, little Sandra Geering of Lucknow Road, subsequently obtained her L.R.A.M., but that was years later, when she had far outgrown Edith's methodical “One-two-three, one-two-three's a straight back dear, and don't, oh don't encourage lazy fingers!”
    Edith found a curious sense of fulfilment in these music lessons and, as time went on, they came to mean more andmore to her, for they brought her out of the tiny world in which she and Becky had been living since they left Devon, a world in which the only breaks in the routine of getting up, housekeeping, shopping, reading, and going to bed, were Becky's occasional spells, and the migrations, and prodigal homecomings of Lickapaw, the cat.
    The arrival of Ted Hartnell, the lodger, provided a sharper and more permanent break with the past.
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    It might be said that, through Ted Hartnell, Edith found, and grasped, the thread of purpose that she had lost the day she left the Vicarage to fetch Becky home. Perhaps she realised this. Perhaps that was why she came to love him....
    Ted knocked on the door of Number Four one evening in early autumn and Becky, who answered the knock, looked him over, shuffled back into the kitchen, where Edith was making loganberry jam, and said: “It's a man! I think it's Mr. Fosdyke's boy!”
    Edith wiped her hands very carefully. She knew, of course, that it was not Mr. Fosdyke's boy; Mr. Fosdyke's boy, George, had been killed on the Somme, in 1916, but she remembered him well enough—he had sung in the choir for years, and was once very sick in the middle of For All the Saints. Edith's long habit of translating Becky's curiously accurate recollections from past to present told her, at least approximately, what the man on the doorstep would look like. He would be dark, sleek, and probably about nineteen, for that would be George Fosdyke's age when Becky ran off with her