It must have been a great disappointment to my mother that none of her children showed anything but a mild forbearance in learning to play the piano. She herself could both play and sing with great charm. They were always the same old songs she sang, like 'Strawberry Fair' or 'Shenandoah'. At the piano, except for 'Liebestraum' and occasionally breaking away into 'The Rustle of Spring', she never ventured for from homely, sentimental little tunes. Until the Basket children came to live next door we had rarely heard the name of Schubert or Schumann.

Sometimes my mother would sigh over our haphazard methods of practising. "If only," she would say, "If only you would all settle down and try to practise as hard as the Baskets."

The Basket children - Herman, Hertha and Arno - had long since left us far behind. They were already engaged on pieces undreamed of in our first piano tutor - difficult German pieces formidable with sharps and flats. But then the Baskets had a German mother which seemed to put them in a world removed. And the Baskets were never guilty of leaving - as we did - traces of jam or treacle on the keyboard.

Cloistered in the drawing-room for a solid hour with 'Smallwood's Piano Tutor', practice time loomed heavily, its boredom broken occasionally by a rapid spinning round on the rotating piano stool. The only pieces to which we gave earnest attention were those dramatic, descriptive ones where, perhaps, the misuse of a solitary sharp could go undetected in an orgy of sound; where nothing disturbed the even tenor of crotchets, quavers and semi-breves.

'Underneath the Gaslight's Glitter' was one of these. It was a sad piece about a little fragile child who sold flowers in the snow. We made it sound all the more sad by playing it entirely on the treble notes, up in the right hand corner of the piano. There, in a bleak tinkle, the little match-girl withered away to nothing and was lost in a whirl of snowflakes. Then there was a descriptive fantasia which we found among my mother's music in the piano stool. Its two flats we ignored completely. It was called 'A Naval Battle off Zeebrugge' and in place of the usual instructions - lento, allegro and p.p.p - we came on more stirring reminders of light and shade. The loud passages were indicated by terse phrases such as 'A Volley of Guns' and 'The Guns Spit Back'. These moments were fully realised by hearty thumping on the bass notes with both feet pressed fiercely on the loud pedal.

When we arrived at the quiet part called 'Entering Tranquil Waters' hands were lifted high in the manner of the Basket children, touching the piano delicately and with commendable restraint. Sometimes in the Finale - 'Safe in Harbour' - we would arch the right hand over the left one and vice-versa, playing cross-armed - a triumphant homecoming in the more advanced manner of the Baskets.

Each week our music teacher, a Mr Potter - he was also the school attendance officer - came to give us an hour's lesson. Mr Potter was almost bald with a head shaped like a coco-nut. It was a matter of consolation to us - indeed it seemed something of a miracle - that he was always hungry. On his arrival, our mother would lay out a meal for him on a table well behind the piano. Then, while we prepared to journey soberly through our scales he would tuck a serviette into his waistcoat and eat either a boiled egg or ham and eggs, followed by home-made damson jam and doughnuts of which he was extremely fond.

Mr Potter rarely came near the piano. He would intervene only at an especially provocative passage with a gentle 'Once more, please.....' He had a pleasant way of addressing one as 'dear'; we thought it sounded more refined than the blunter endearment of 'luv' which, in the North of England, is the more  

accepted term of affection.

The only time I ever saw Mr. Potter show perturbation was when my brother and I failed to respond to a duet he had chosen for us to play. It was called 'Only You'. On the cover was a picture of a languid lady framed in an oval of for-get-me-nots. It seems, now, a surprising piece to put before two young and robust pianists. We must have felt, keenly, its incongruity for, as we struggled through it, with tears dropping onto the key-board and voices trailing in disharmony, we were brought to a dismal end by a staccato-ish rap on the knuckles from Mr Potter's fountain-pen.

Later, Mr Potter gave us a brighter and more suitable piece which had the name of 'Twickenham Ferry'. In this tune we eventually reached to something of a triumph for we were asked to play it at a 'Social Evening of the Band of Hope'. Any diversion during our daily hour of practice was highly appreciated. I remember a morning in the school holidays when the sweep, a Mr Myerscough, came to sweep the sitting-room chimney. Everything but the piano was covered in a white dust sheet. Mr Myerscough was given to understand that I would be continuing my practice of scales. During the pauses when he was not following his brushes up the chimney he whistled and listened cheerfully. Then, after going into the garden to witness the appearance of the brush above the chimney stack, he came over to ask if I could play his favourite tune: 'What Are the Wild Waves Saying?' It was a tune I had never heard of. Mr Myerscough then proceeded to thump out the tune on the bass notes with one large black finger singing tra-la-la in a deep, sooty voice. My mother came into the room and said, "I hope you are not interrupting Mr Myerscough too much" and gave us each a cup of cocoa and a rock bun. Through the wall, in the sitting-room next door, we could hear Arno Basket, a little less sure of himself on the piano than Herman and Hertha, going slowly up a long mountain of scales.

It was a memorable practice hour. Usually it was only enlivened by my friend, Queenie Vulcan, making ugly faces outside the drawing-room window. In the winter the Basket children wore white woollen stockings and lace-up boots and sometimes they wore their boots in the summer too. Arno looked very wise and wore steel-rimmed glasses. Hertha's black, wild hair was scraped starkly back in a circular comb, and Herman liked to wear a strange cap with ear flaps which his grandfather had worn in Germany.

They were all fond of my mother who would leave her baking or sewing to gather them round the piano. When she sang their favourite song 'Alabama Coon' a sweet smile of pleasure would spread over Arno's serious little face. She would play sentimental tunes like 'Shenandoah and 'I Won't Play in Your Yard'. And we all watched the rings on her fingers tapping, like a woodpecker, on the keys. Sometimes, she played for us 'The Rustle of Spring'; then a quietness came over us all as we lolled on the carpet in the warm, summer drawing-room.

The Basket children liked her to play 'Liebestraum' but here they were back in their own world and would, like ourselves, shuffle about politely until she came to the end.

The once familiar brass plate with its bold-lettered announcement - 'Teacher of the Pianoforte' - has almost vanished from the suburban front gate. Gone, too, are the pianos from the sitting-rooms and the teachers on their stools but I often wish, now, that I had set about my piano practice in a less haphazard manner. What pleasure it might have given my mother if, on a late afternoon, I could have sat down at the piano and gone steadily through the 'Under the Gaslight Glitter' without making any of the usual and time-honoured blunders.