Janet Christie's Mum's the Word - why I'm finally in tune with my parents

My piano playing was more painful for them than it was for me

Janet Christie's Mum's the Word. Pic: Adobe

Only from the perspective of adulthood do I see what my parents were up to and I’m impressed. It’s taken me decades to work it out but when I do I wish for the millionth time they were still around and I could thank them. Top parents.

The penny drops when I’m discussing left or right side dominance with my gym buddies and the conversation meanders to learning to play the guitar with your ‘other’ hand. I mention I can’t bend my little finger (so no boxercise), but can play the piano.

It started when I was five and shutting our massive wooden garden gate in a gale and it thudded shut on my little finger, chopping it off. Cupping it in my other hand I ran indoors, heading for the kitchen to find my mother.

“Has he been hitting you again,” was her response (she meant my entirely innocent brother with whom I enjoyed a robust physical relationship) before she turned white at the sight of the blood pooling around the exposed white bone.

“No, it was the gate,” I explained because my bro and I may have been happily hitting each other with sticks outside, but I’m keen to avoid a miscarriage of justice. With surprising calm for a woman known to faint at the sight of blood, she drove us to the cottage hospital where the district nurse sewed the finger back on.

“What, they joined all the nerves and everything?” asked my friend.

“No, this was the Sixties. They just put it back together and sewed it up, with the skin and nail in the right place, and turned their attention to the alarming swelling of my abdomen, which was in fact a doll I’d stuffed up my jumper, so we all laughed. It turned out later the bone was back to front so when I was 12, they broke it again and turned it round. It doesn’t bend but it didn’t stop me learning the piano,” I say.

It’s then I realise why my parents had out of the blue bought an old upright and sent me for lessons, gritting their teeth through years of me plinky-plonking my way (eventually) through Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, while they were trying to watch the telly. Rehabilitation.

Clever parents, I think as I sit down at our old neglected piano. Touching. It’s time to start playing again.

Janet Christie’s Mum’s the Word