Mike Hatchard’s Jester Column!
by Mike Hatchard, no less.
A lot of people acknowledge the importance of
a particularly inspiring teacher in their life, and I
am no exception. I owe my chosen career path
to one Mr Cleave who was the headmaster at
my grammar school. At the age of about twelve
I had to make my own choice of subjects for the
coming year so I chose music and art; it seemed
reasonable, I always came top in these subjects
and failed in just about everything else. I was
summoned to the head’s office where he looked
at me and then barked (I know this sounds like a
metaphor but it’s not really, I swear he actually did
bark) ‘you cannot possibly do BOTH music and
art’, going on to explain that neither were serious
subjects and it wasn’t possible to make any sort
of living at either but he was magnanimously
prepared to let me do one of them. From
that moment my mind was made up. If that fat
pompous twerp told me I couldn’t make a living
out of art and music then a living out of art and
music was what I was going to do.
Years later I am given to reflect that he might
have had a point but I’m proud of the fact I’ve had
a bloody good try.
It seems extraordinary now to thing that I started
doing gigs shortly after that seminal moment, but
I did. I wasn’t yet fourteen when my friend Ken
who was completely grown up (he was a whole
year older) suggested we went to The Railway
Tavern in Poole. It’s not there any more. We
looked through the murky plate glass windows
and my mate Kev said, there’s a piano in there,
you play the piano, come on, let’s see if you can
play it and to my amazement he walked into the
saloon bar dragging me behind him and there was
this piano, this great big black beast of a piano,
this piano that wouldn’t have looked out of place
in a tank museum, a converted pianola with the
front missing, all the Victorian convolution of an
Arkwright Spinning Jenny but designed by Brunell,
powered by steam, perpetually being painted by a
team of dour workmen who occasionally died for
the cause. I ogled at it with extreme trepidation.
‘Can my mate play the piano?’
‘I don’t know. Can he?’ The barman replied with
disarmingly unexpected sarcasm, but his hands
www.thecartoonistsclub.com
indicated I could try and so I took a deep breath
and sidled up to the beast. And began to play.
Well, they must have thought I was all right
because they moved the dartboard. Perhaps
they thought they’d take a risk on the underage
drinking but thought it wise not to risk getting an
uninsured fourteen year old punctured.
‘Ere, son, you’ve a dab ‘and on that old Joanna,
ain’t cha? Do you want a drink, me old sonner?’
Now, apart from at my sister’s wedding when
I got – I believe the expression is totally ratarsed – on half a pint of cider I wasn’t really over
acquainted with drinking culture, but I didn’t want
them to know that so I said ‘I’ll have a pint of keg,’
because I’d heard somebody say that on the telly.
I didn’t have a clue what a pint of keg was, I think
I imagined it was going to arrive in a pint-sized
barrel, and I only just about knew what pint-sized
was, and that also because of the telly, where they
described Ronnie Corbett as being just that.
So this pint of beer arrived, and I drank some of
it and was horrible. I nearly choked on the smell
alone, but I wasn’t going to let them know that, so
I took as big a sip as I dared, and went back to it
every now and again, but somebody else offered
to by me a drink and I wasn’t going to let them
know I was a novice to alcohol, and that I was
only familiar with one type of drink. So I asked
for a ‘dry martini with ice’ and that arrived and
it tasted a lot nicer than the keg and I alternated
for a while until yet another drink arrived and
this time I asked for rum and desperately tried
to think of another drink so I wouldn’t betray my
ignorance, and thankfully I thought of crème de
menthe which I remember looking remarkably
like Fairy Liquid.
I say remember, actually I hardly remember
anything of the evening at all except that I
discovered the piano got easier and easier to play
the more lubricated one was, and I discovered
that the left hand didn’t really matter too much.
In this respect I’d been misinformed by my piano
teacher, Mrs. Growling, who’d maintained quite
incorrectly that accuracy in the left hand DID
matter. The important thing I now discovered
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