They Sent Me To Bed Just As The Party Started

Then Grandad Would Sit Down At The Piano

You could tell how good the party had gotten by how far up the stairs the noise had climbed.

By nine it was at the bottom step.

By ten it was past the landing and coming under my bedroom door, and by then I’d given up pretending to be asleep and was just lying there in the dark, listening to the best night of the week happen right under me and without me.

That was the deal.

The grown-ups got the evening. I got sent up the moment things were clearly about to get good, marched off to bed while downstairs the front room filled with aunts and uncles, friends and neighbours.

The best glasses came out, having been washed and polished by me earlier in the day.

Always babycham for the ladies and the pints of bitter for the men. Later on, out came the whiskey.

It was the great injustice of my childhood. A whole world of adult life going on beneath me, and I was expected to sleep through it.

Then grandad would sit down at the piano.

I should explain about my grandad. He was, and I say this as a plain fact, a gifted man.

He could play six instruments, all of them properly, none of your one-finger business. He could have played you anything, even difficult things with a lot of notes in.

And what did the room want, at 10 o’clock at night, four or five drinks in, with my uncle probably already standing up conducting the singing.

‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

Again.

That was the great comedy of it, though it took me years to see it.

A genuinely talented man sat at the piano, deploying the full range of his abilities on ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ so that a front room of tipsy relatives could bawl along to the one bit everyone knew.

‘My Old Man’, with the whole lot of them joining in banging out the words they were sure of and just making a noise where they weren’t.

‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, which turned grown adults back into six-year-olds faster than anything I’ve seen before or since.

He could have played Mozart, but they wanted the barrel rolled out. So he rolled it out.

Every time.

I couldn’t see any of this. The floor of my bedroom was the ceiling of the party, and it all came up through the floorboards, and I had to put the picture together myself.

My mother laughing and giggling with my dad both just that little bit tipsy.

Other relatives being sillier than they’d ever admit to in the morning.

Grandad, quietly the best musician for streets around, cheerfully wasting it on a singalong and having the time of his life doing it.

I used to creep to the top of the stairs and sit there in the dark, out of sight, just to be a bit nearer to it.

‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)’ came near the end, when it got late and the room went quieter and everyone remembered they were sad about something.

That was my cue that it was winding down and I’d missed the whole thing again.

I’d take myself back to bed genuinely disappointed, because I missed a party.

Grandad’s gone now. So’s the piano, off to a house I don’t know where.

Nowadays, there’s no more parties, no aunts, no uncle up on his feet conducting, and no gifted man at the piano refusing to play anything harder than a song about a barrel.

I’d give a great deal to be kept awake by it now.