A Gift from the past

A GIFT FROM MY PAST by Pamela Clarke

“So, what’s the catch?” I asked in a shakey voice. My throat was suddenly dry and there was a tightness in my chest.

Mr. Joseph kindly brought me a chair and I took a tissue from my pocket. I was grateful to sit down, and took some deep breaths.

“No catch. You have told me how you come to own it, and we have carefully checked what you said, and everything seems to be in order.”

His nice face was smiling at me, and I just stared at the mellow wood, which had become part of me. I wiped the tears from my cheeks.

“It’s probably a bit much to take in all at once,” he said in a kindly way.

I just nodded. Words were beyond me.

After a few minutes I stood and gently picked it up and tucked it under my chin. Massenet’s beautiful Meditation filled the room until I had to stop to cry some more. He gently took the Amati from my hands and wiped some of my salty tears from the burnished wood before putting it gently back on the baize mat on the counter.

My name is Rebecca, and my mother is ill and she desperately wants to go back to France before she dies. Me? I am a humble music teacher. I teach voice and violin to assorted unruly children in a large and chaotic state school in South London.

“This is so boring, Miss.”

“Why does my string sound funny”

“It fell out of the case when I was going up stairs. Will it glue back together?”

“You say it’s a minim, but what’s that?”

“I’m still a beginner Miss, I’ve only been learning for two years.”

But, and this was the ‘but’ that occasionally thrilled me,  if I discovered a pupil who could sing in tune, who enjoyed creating music, and who progressed beyond a cacophony of discordant sounds, it became worthwhile. Maybe it didn’t last, but very occasionally, a child would accelerate to a level where I could tell the parents to consider a music scholarship to a better school.

Outside school, I lived with my mother, who was also a musician, and we belonged to a small amateur orchestra, where the two of us would catch a bus  to rehearsals, then sit beside each other at desks three and four.

Life was orderly, and our harmony sprang from music.

Then she got ill. It was only when she was coughing up blood that she agreed to see a doctor with me, I almost had to drag her. He sent her for x-rays and tests, and the news was bad, really bad.

The pernicious treatments they insisted on giving her left her with constant tiredness, nausea, mouth ulcers and damaged fingers and nails. She was unable to play her violin, and somedays she couldn’t even struggle from her bed.

My world was crumbling inside. We both knew she was dying, and she told me she wanted to go back to her roots before she went. She had not often spoken of her past, but I knew her parents had brought her to England from France in 1940.

I sat on her bed one evening as she tried to swallow some chicken broth. After a few mouthfuls she seemed to perk up, smiling at me and thanking me for my efforts. She took my hand in hers.

“I was ten years old when my parents brought me to England. We only had one small suitcase between us, the clothes we stood up in, and of course your grandmother’s violin, which you now play. It was hard at first, but friends in our faith offered us friendship and help, and your grandfather managed to find work in a munitions factory. Your grandmother took in sewing, and also did a bit of violin teaching from time to time. I joined in with her pupils, and we used to play for people in the air raid shelters when London was bombed.” She laughed as she remembered, which set her off coughing, and gasping for breath. I gently wiped her face with a damp flannel, and she lay back on the soft pile of pillows.

I picked up the half eaten bowl of soup and took it down to the kitchen, returning with some small slices of honey cake. She had been dozing, but opened her eyes when she heard me enter the room.

“Perhaps a little bit of honey cake?” I suggested, sitting down beside her again.

She took a slice, and nibbled at the edges of it.

“It’s very good.”

“Grandma’s recipe of course,” I said smiling. “I will always be grateful for both her cookery and her violin lessons. The honey will do you good.”

She tried to look enthusiastic about eating the cake, but I could see she was struggling, so I gently took the plate from her hands, noting how thin and bony her long fingers looked now. I put the cake on the small table beside the bed.

“Just eat a little bit, when you can,” I said encouragingly.

“I will, darling, I will.” She smiled. “Can I try and finish telling you what I started?”

“Of course, but don’t wear yourself out.”

She took my hand in hers again.

“Your Saba got killed in an air-raid when I was twelve, so it was just me and Savta. It was difficult for her to earn enough, but people were kind to us, and I was a good girl and worked hard at school and at music. When I was eighteen I joined my first orchestra, and that’s where I met your father. He was helping to set up and organise all our seating and stands. With his parents and my mother’s permission, we got married, and a couple of years later we were blessed with your birth.” She squeezed my hand. “He wanted to earn more money after you were born so he went to work on building sites. The rest you know, he got ill from asbestos and it took him away from us.” She stared across the room, lost in memories, then closed her eyes for a few seconds, squeezing my hand again.

Her voice was hoarse as she continued. “I have decided, if you can arrange it, that I would like to go back to St. Malo before I die. I have the address of where we lived, and some wonderful memories of our time there with my grandparents and the lovely summer days spent on the beaches. Can you organise that for me, my darling, and make it soon?”

I smiled at her. “I will speak to the doctor, and see what is possible, and then by hook or by crook I will arrange it. Then you can show me where you grew up.”

“I’d really like that,” she said, squeezing my hand again. “You are a beautiful and wonderful daughter.”

“And you are a wonderful mother. Now, eat some more cake.”

I knew the violin was a good one. My grandmother had told me she used to perform in Paris before the war. My grandparents moved to St. Malo when the war started, and went to live with my father’s parents. They were all Jewish, and over time they heard rumours of what was happening to the Jewish communities in Austria and Germany. As Hitler closed in on France, they managed to escape to England with their daughter, but with very little else apart from my grandmother’s violin. She kept some old programmes from when she had been a soloist in Paris, which she proudly showed me, telling me about the concerts she had played and the music. They were tucked in a pocket of the case, and I treasured them.

As I lay in bed that night, I decided that if I sold the violin for a few hundred pounds, or maybe even a thousand, I could buy another cheaper one, and could afford to take my mother to St. Malo in a degree of comfort. It would not be an easy trip, but I would organise a comfortable car and driver, and find a nice hotel for when my mother got tired.

My mother had been too ill to work for a time, and I earned very little, so I struggled to pay for food, heating, medicines and the running costs on our small rented flat. The only way I could afford to take her was to sell the violin, and hope that it would give me enough money to ensure her journey was easy.

It was a few days later that I walked into the smart and well known stringed instrument shop, carrying the battered violin case. I had been there once before with a young pupil whose parents had decided to buy him something a little better than the cheap school violin he was using, which eventually paid off with a scholarship offer. As before, the staff were friendly and knowledgeable, and they asked me to leave the instrument with them for twenty four hours so that they could have a good look at it and give me a valuation. They asked me where I had got it from, and I proudly showed them my grandmother’s programmes, explaining that she was a soloist in Paris before WW2. They thanked me for the information, and asked me to come back the next day.

And here I am.

I am in shock.

I was told that my well-travelled, well played violin is worth in excess of half a million pounds.

They explained that everything about the violin is genuine, that it is a Nicolo Amati, a member of the great Amati violin making family in Cremona, where Stradivarius had learned his trade. It was made in the mid 17^th Century and they congratulated me on its good condition, probably due to being regularly played. They were a little horrified to learn that it had travelled on many buses with me at rush hour, and spent a lot of time at a rather rough school in the south of London, where it had played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star many times.

I explained why I needed to sell it, my eyes brimming again.

The Joseph brothers looked at each other, and one spoke up.

“The best way to sell it is at auction, but unfortunately that is not the quickest route. However, if you wish we can try and place the violin with a well-ranked professional player or a collector. Should we find a buyer, we would have to take a commission on the sale, but due to your circumstances, and that of your mother, I am sure we can come to a generous arrangement.”

My head was still spinning.

I would lose the Amati, my link to my grandmother, but in return I could fulfil my mother’s dying wish. I loved that violin, but I loved my mother more, and If I did sell the violin, I would hope that the Amati would go on being treasured and played for years to come. My playing could manage on an instrument far less noble.

So the deal was done, and I received a lot of money, even after the commission was paid to the shop. As an act of kindess, they gave me a very nice French violin worth a few hundred pounds, which I still play today, even though I am now in my seventies.

My mother and I made the trip to St. Malo, and the house where she was born is now a French restaurant. I bounced her over the cobbles in her wheelchair as gently as I could, and she didn’t seem to mind. She pointed out all the landmarks she remembered as a child, and she managed to eat a small amount of lunch in a little bistro before we toured the beaches and the beautiful  countryside she still remembered in the car.

When we eventually got home, she was exhausted but smiling, and she told me she now wanted to stop taking the drugs and let nature take its course. I saw determination in her face, and did not argue, we could afford a private nurse to help with her palliative care, so she could die in comfort in her own bed.

My life hasn’t changed much since she died all those years ago, although the Amati did allow me to buy a small flat, near a leafy park where I often walk. I still play in the same orchestra on my French violin, and I left the rumbustious school teaching environment in order to teach privately. I have been blessed with one or two really good pupils who have gone on to music schools, and if I have a gifted pupil, and the parents have a bit of money, I have enjoyed taking them into the shop where my Amati briefly rested, so the child’s parents can purchase a reasonable instrument to carry their musical talent forward.

The brothers Joseph, now a lot older, always remember me, and we save a little time for a chat.