They will never go unforgotten those Friday evenings when, as the black marble clock in the drawing room struck eight and with the gas turned up to the full in its red and blue globe, there would crowd into the hall, stamping and muffled in the cold night air, the musical friends of our father and mother. There were Gladys and Clarence Burgess, Fanny Rakestraw, Sam Pitton with his invalid wife who had to be carried to the front door from a bath-chair, the flamboyant Maudie Lawrence and a frail little man, a Mr Brocklebank, who usually rounded off the evening by reciting a long sad piece called, 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'. And upstairs, already in bed, our moment for creeping under the bannisters not yet at hand, anticipation of their arrival was not entirely impersonal; for had we not, during the late afternoon, assisted at, with unflagging enthusiasm, the building up of a mountain of ham sandwiches and helped to stir, until out arms ached, the currents into the rock bun mixture?

Before the first ring at the front door bell our mother would come into the bedroom to say goodnight. It was seldom that she had the leisure to make herself - as we thought - beautiful. On these Friday evenings she would wear a dark grey hobble skirt with black stripes, pulled in at the waist by a black patent leather belt. Her blouse was white and flimsy and down the front was a long and fascinating row of pearl buttons. For social occasions she would part her red hair in the middle and catch the back pieces into a handsome tortoiseshell comb. As she bent over we could feel, cold against the cheek, the heavy gold bracelet dangling from her wrist. At these times there was a strange unmotherly scent about her clothes.

"Now remember," she would say, pausing at the door, "You are only to sit on the stairs for half an hour and you are not to get out of bed until you hear me play the 'Entry of the Gladiators', or whatever march it was that she had chosen for the opening of the concert.

Our mother seemed to possess in abundance an unusual understanding of those pleasures which are the more delightful because they are contrived and kept a dead secret. Although she could never be persuaded to let us so much peep into the drawing room after the last guest had gone in she would make a glorious compromise by allowing us to sit on the stairs behind the closed door between eight fifteen and a quarter to nine. It was a narrow staircase with a twist towards its head. We were not to sit beyond this point nor were we, for any reason, to hang over the bannisters. This meant that we could occupy - we were a large audience made up of two brothers, a sister and myself, Pansy, a rag doll, a stuffed monkey and a stuffed dog called Ceaser - the fifth, sixth and seventh stairs from the top. We sat there in black and white check dressing gowns cut out of blankets which had once belonged to a great aunt, and my sister and I would spread wide our nightdresses, like silken gowns, over the stair carpet.

At eight o'clock there came quick, successive rings at the front door. Then up the stairs, following our mother, hurried Miss Burgess, Miss Rakestraw and Miss Lawrence, all in a pleasant flutter of conversation. (Ah-ah was our own special name for Miss Lawrence, "That's Ah-ah singing." one of us had said when, day after day, over the next door fence, we heard her voice rising to a high a - ah - ah -AH up the scale, then coming down it to a low and deep AH - ah - ah - ah.) "And how are the children?" we would hear them remark as they laid their hats on the bed in the front bedroom. The hats of the gentlemen were hung on the stand in the hall and from the top of the stairs they looked like large black berries dangling from a tree. Sometimes we tried to guess, in whispers, the owner of each hat.

A few minutes after eight o'clock our father would gently close the drawing room door and the voices and the laughter became hushed and far away, no longer part of a children's world. How keenly, then, we strained our ears for the signal from the conspirator within! And suddenly it came - that wonderful march - strummed out loudly like a challenge on the old walnut piano. Usually it was the 'Entry of the Gladiators' which was a favourite march in the house at that time. To cover  

the flurry of our settling on the stairs our mother would press down the loud pedal with an especial determined firmness. Then, safely there, huddled tightly into the mysterious half-light from the gas in the hall below, we would hear Sam Fitton clearing his throat as he prepared to soar lyrically into 'I Hear You Calling Me'.

To be a part of these evenings and yet not of them was an enchanting experience - like sitting in a dark cave within sound of the sea or listening to the birds from a closed tent on a summer afternoon. It was a delicious sensation to hear the voices of people we knew and they not be aware of us; to hear our mother play and sing, 'Take my head on your shoulder, daddy'; to listen to Fanny Rakestraw - whom we thought among ourselves to be rather silly - singing very sadly about a little grey home in the west. And Gladys and Clarence Burgess and Maudie Lawrence, trotting nimbly along together, like lively ponies, through "Three Little Maids From School Are We' at least two or three bars before the pianist.

Sometimes it was our good fortune to be still sitting on the stairs when our father got up to recite, and that was a joy indeed. If he was in a sober mood - the mood when, on other evenings, we were told to keep away from the high-backed chair in the drawing room where he would sit lost in some profound book - then he would recite some verses from Alfred Lord Tennyson - perhaps, 'At Flores in the Azores' or 'The splendour falls on castle walls'. But if it happened to be a carefree Friday evening he would put on a black silk top hat and turn himself into 'The Showman'. And to everyone, especially to the alert and bubbling audience on the stairs, it never failed to be the climax, the piece de resistance of the concert. We had seen 'The Showman' so many times that every move and every gesture were as familiar to us as the story of 'Alice in Wonderland'. Beyond the closed door we could see our mother, wearing an old cloth cap, waiting on the piano stool with uplifted hands for the moment of command to 'Bang on the drum, Billy!' When it came she would pounce down on the bass notes and a great roll like a drum would fill the drawing room. Then, in what seemed to us a very professional manner, the showman would wave his arms and shout 'Walk up, walk up! The show is about to begin. The 1d seats is all a penny, the 1/2d seat is four for tuppence! Be in time, be in time! Bang the drum, Billy!' And, as the piano rolled on faster and faster, our father would bring into view some thick white cards as wide and high as the dining-room table. On each of these was drawn, in bold, black outline, a phenomenal and absurd beast with a name which we listened for, each time, with a new delight. As the showman presented to his audience the Spotted Babe of Peru, The Orang-Otang, the Sypho-cras-Tomato or the Trickly Polliwog of the Ipacacuanna mountains, the Bobus Communis or Commin Cow, he would give as brisk and lively account of the habits and origin, using fastidious language and a manner histrionic. To round off the showing of the Bobus Communis our father would say a few lines of poetry which went like this:

Pretty creature, who hast made

Nice warm milk to soak my bread,

Do not eat the hemlock rank

A-growing on the weedy bank,

But where the grass is soft and fine,

Pretty cow, go there and dine...

Then, for us on the stairs, the concert was over. After the last, 'Bang the Drum, Billy', we heard our mother close down the piano lid and walk to the drawing-room door. When she came into the hall - flushed and, in a way, not belonging to us tonight - we would smile at her through the bannisters and she would smile back and say, "Now to bed, quickly," and go on into the kitchen for the plate of sandwiches. For a short time, tucked away in our dark rooms, we would try to hold on to the chatter and the music. We would listen to the sound of doors opening and shutting, the tinkling of plates and cups and Maudie Lawrence's loud and friendly voice as she passed through the hall with the coffee - warm sounds of everyday which sent us drifting happily to sleep.