Annie Asra was the kind of girl to whom people give a job, even when they didn’t originally intend to. Her name sounded foreign, but wasn’t. She came from Birmingham.
Annie was a little square curly-headed creature, not a complainer. Certainly, at seventeen, she would never have complained about her childhood. She had spent the part of it which was most important to her on the move, trotting round beside her father, who was a piano tuner. In the city of a thousand trades, he had seen his own decline, but he still had quite enough work to live on. He was a widower, and it was felt in the other houses in their terrace that he wouldn’t be able to manage, but he did.
It was a curious existence for a child. Winter was the height of the piano-tuning season, and she became inured at an early age to extreme temperatures. The pianos that were considered good enough to tune were in little-used front parlours and freezing parish rooms, sometimes in the church itself where on weekdays a tiny Vesuvius struggled with the frost’s grip, its stovepipe soaring high into the aisle vaulting. She didn’t have to go, the neighbours would have minded her, but that didn’t suit Annie. She knew all their regulars, who her father would have to speak to and where he had to hang up his coat. The pianos stood expectantly, some with the yellowed teeth of old age, helpless, once their front top was unscrewed, awaiting the healer’s art. There were two Bechsteins on their round, one belonging to a doctor, the other to a builder’s merchant, but Mr Asra didn’t prefer them to the others. To each according to their needs.
It often seemed a very long time before the actual tuning began. The ailing pianos had to be put in good order first, cracks wedged up, the groaning pedals eased with vaseline. Annie was allowed to strike every key in turn to see if any of them stuck. If so, a delicate shaving of wood had to be pared away. Sometimes the felts needed loosening, or even taken right off, to be damped and ironed in the kitchen or the church vestry. They smelled like wet sheep under the iron, and lying all together on the board they looked like green or red sheep. Then they had to be glued back onto the hammers, and Mr Asra never did anything either quickly or slowly.
When at last he took out his hammer and mutes, ready to tune, his daughter became quite still, like a small dog pointing. While he was laying the bearings in the two middle octaves she waited quietly, though not patiently, watching for him to get the three C’s right, tightening the strings a little more than necessary and settling them back by striking the keys, standing, bending, tapping, moving his hammer gently to and fro round the wooden pins, working through the G’s, the D’s and the A’s until he came to middle E. When middle E was set Annie left the spot where he had put her, the warmest place, close to the stove, and stood at his elbow, willing him to play the first trial chord. It was a recurrent excitement of her life, like opening a boiled egg, the charm being not its unexpectedness but its reliability. And Mr Asra struck the chord of C.
‘But the E’s sharp, Dad,’ she said.
That too was in order, she always said it. To please her, he lowered the E a little, and sounded the perfect chord, looking round at her, an unimpressive man in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, able to share with her the satisfaction of the chord of C major. But he couldn’t leave it like that, she knew. The E must be sharpened again, all the thirds must be a little bit sharp, all the fifths must be a little bit flat, or the piano would never come right. At this point he quite often gave her a boiled sweet from a paper bag in the pocket of his waistcoat.
When he reached the treble Mr Asra worked entirely by ear. The treble for Annie was entering a region of silver or tin, the wind through the keyhole, walking with due care over the ice, sharpening gradually until the uttermost tones at the top of the keyboard. With the bass she felt more at ease. There was danger, in that if a string broke it couldn’t be replaced and had to be spliced there and then, but the tuning itself was easier, the strings ran easily and willingly over the bridges, and their warm growl took her downwards into a region of dark fur-covered animals crowned with gold who offered their kindly protection to the sleepy traveller. Annie, in fact, when she was very young, often fell asleep during the bass, even though she loved it best. The torrent of chromatic scales which signified the final testing, and which the householders thought of as the tuner (who’d probably once hoped to be a concert performer) letting himself go at last, didn’t interest either of them nearly so much.
While her father was putting away his things into the familiar leather bag, worn threadbare round the edges, they were often brought a cup of tea, with two lumps of sugar put ready in the saucer. The owner, coming hesitantly out of some other room, looked at their piano, with everything screwed back and in order, as if it was a demanding relative newly come out of hospital. ‘The Queen of the Home,’ Mr Asra called it, when a remark of this kind seemed necessary. Sometimes there was a vibration of distress, which Annie deeply felt. ‘If you’re going to give singing lessons, madam, you really ought to have it tuned to concert pitch. I could do that if you want, but it may mean replacing a few strings,’ and the pale-coloured woman could be seen to shrink, anxiety adding to her embarrassment over handing him the right money.
Annie became self-contained, a serious tranquil believer in life and in the time ahead when she would know what was most important to her. She went to school with her brown curling hair in decent pigtails. Her aunt, her dead mother’s eldest sister, came in from next door every day to do it for her. At the end of her first morning at Church School, when the teacher told them to go out for their second play, she half got up and then sat down again quickly, feeling her head dragged painfully back by a cruel weight. Dick Dobbs, the boy sitting behind her, had tied her pigtails to the back of her chair, perhaps with her aunt’s new ribbon, perhaps with string. She sat there perfectly still until the teacher, who had gone out to patrol the yard, came back and found her sitting stiff and serious as a little idol. ‘Why didn’t you tell me as soon as class was done?’ she asked, relieved that there were no tears.
‘I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.’
At the end of the Christmas term there was a letter-box in the corner of the classroom. It was made from a dustbin covered with red crepe paper; the handles sticking out each side spoiled the illusion to some extent, but the teacher put a cardboard robin on each. In the box the children posted cards to one another, bought at Woolworths, carefully inscribed the night before, and brought to school in their cases that morning in an atmosphere of jealous secrecy. Some got few or no cards. The teacher could do nothing about this, the box was opened at mid-morning and she was unable to get at it in time to redress the balance. Annie, however, had plenty. When she was eight years old she received a large snow scene covered with glitter, beautiful, and from the expensive box. The rest of the class gathered round to admire until she slowly put it away in her case.
‘I put that in the box for you,’ said Dick Dobbs.
‘It’s a pretty card.’
The teachers asked her why, at Christmas time, she couldn’t say something more friendly.
‘He’s a dirty devil,’ Annie replied calmly. She accepted that people couldn’t be otherwise than they were, good, bad, and middling, but one ought to be allowed to take them or leave them.
She kept seeing Dick, because although he didn’t come on to grammar school with her friends, he sang in the same church choir as she did, at St Martin’s. When she was twelve and a half he caught her behind the vicarage bicycle sheds, took a firm grip of her and pressed her back hard against the wall.
‘I expect you think it’s wrong to do this,’ he said, unbuttoning her coat.
‘I don’t think it’s wrong,’ Annie replied. ‘I daresay I’d do it if I liked it.’
He was disconcerted, hesitated and lost hold. Annie walked away, but not in a hurry, she stopped to do up the six buttons of her coat. There were one or two boys she liked at school, but not Dick. She’d not do any better for Dick by pretending. Luckily his voice was breaking.
Annie did well at her lessons, and would have liked to please the music teacher, who wanted her to start piano, but for reasons that were not clear to her, and therefore caused her annoyance, she didn’t care to learn. Her father could have found the money, but he never made her do anything she didn’t want to.
When she was nearly sixteen, Mr Asra fell ill. He asked Annie to make the round of the customers and tell them that unfortunately he wouldn’t be coming. When she rang the bell-pulls which she hadn’t been able to reach as a little girl, and saw through the front windows the familiar pianos, and the silver-framed photos on them that had to be moved away when the tuner called, she knew for certain that her father was going to die. The doctor couldn’t make out what was wrong, but that was no surprise to their neighbours in the terrace, who were well aware that doctors don’t know everything. Mr Asra didn’t have to be sent away to hospital to die. Annie managed pretty well, sleeping on two chairs in the passage outside his room. He was with them one night and gone in the morning, when she got up to fetch him the medicine which the district nurse had left.
Her aunt, who lived next door, asked her to move in for the time being, and no-one could fault the arrangements. But they were not surprised, either, when in spite of the emergency Annie went off to try her luck in London. That was on the 8th of July, the day they announced the tea-rationing, two ounces per person per week.
Annie left her luggage and umbrella at Paddington and took the Underground, hoping, as the result of this, that she’d never have to travel in it again. The windows of the trains, following regulations, were painted black, with a tiny square of glass left to peer through and to make out the name of the station. This presumably meant that the tube came above ground some time, but it didn’t do so before she got out at Oxford Circus.
The passers-by were quick to tell her that she couldn’t miss Broadcasting House, because it looked like a ship with the wrong sort of windows. She walked right and left between the sandbags that masked the entrance and realized, from the way the sentry looked at her, that she’d done right to put on her white blouse and navy-blue skirt.
The entrance hall of BH worried her not at all. It reminded her of the Midland Hotel, where once or twice, when a friend had been taken ill, her father had been called in to tune the concert grand. In its size and height she recognized the need to impress. People had to feel they’d arrived somewhere. She remembered, too, that they hadn’t much wanted a child running around the hotel, so they’d told her to go and look at some comics in a little room upstairs, much like the room where she went for her interview now.
There were two middle-aged women who identified themselves as Mrs Milne and Mrs Staples, from Establishment. They were in charge, and yet she felt they needed approval from the man sitting rather apart from them, at the corner of the table, who wasn’t much like anyone Annie had ever met. He was both pale and dark, and had the sort of face that they used to say would make a fortune on the halls; perhaps, indeed, he had. At the moment he was half lying back and looking at the ceiling, which made Annie wonder why he had come to interview her at all. It must be an advantage, she thought, to be like that, and not to bother.
‘You don’t need to be musical,’ Mrs Milne explained, ‘or to have any kind of technical knowledge – just complete accuracy in following instructions, punctuality and reliability. We’ve got the references from your Vicar and your head teacher … and then you’ve had a Saturday job as well, haven’t you?’
‘At Anstruthers,’ said Annie. ‘I was in the loose count sweets to start with, then they moved me to hosiery. We’d instructions to let the old folks help themselves to a few sweets if they wanted to,’ she added.
‘Their letter was satisfactory too,’ murmured Mrs Staples.
‘The job is largely chasing the recordings and seeing that they’re available at the right time, and for the right programmes.’
‘A straightforward service job,’ said Mrs Staples.
Mrs Milne changed colour a little.
‘Service, yes, but of a particularly important nature. The Department is quite indispensable to the Corporation as a whole. The name of your Director, by the way, if you were selected for this position, would be Mr Seymour Brooks. But you would be working on shift – you’ll have to take that into account, by the way, when you’re finding somewhere to live – and you’re not likely to have much direct contact with Mr Brooks.’
Annie didn’t miss the change from you would to you will, and she observed with compassion that Mrs Milne looked downright tired. Probably she’d been interviewing for hours and there’d been very few hopefuls.
Meanwhile the man stretched his legs and shifted in his chair as though he was thinking of going, causing an equal but contrary movement in the two women. Then he said, in a voice almost too quiet to catch: ‘My name is Jeffrey Haggard. I have nothing to do, really, with your appointment, I’m the Director of Programme Planning … You’re from Birmingham, Miss Asra?’
They’d all said that, seeming to think it was rather surprising for her to come. However far away did they think it was?
‘I’ve been through it often enough, but I’ve never stopped there. Tell me, just as a point of geographical interest, would you call Birmingham north or south?’
He smiled, and for the first time since she’d passed the soldier at the door, Annie smiled back.
‘It’s neither.’
‘I imagine that perhaps there’s only one way to settle it. Are there pork butchers, separate from the ordinary butchers?’
‘Of course there are, Mr Haggard.’
‘Then it must be north.’
Annie was wrong in thinking that there hadn’t been many hopefuls among the applicants. There had been none at all. She had been right, however, in detecting, as she did, that her interviewers were not quite of one mind. Mrs Milne was thinking of RPD, Mrs Staples was thinking of AD(E), and Jeff wanted to get away.
‘I think we might as well appoint her at once,’ Mrs Milne said, straightening her back, when she was left alone with her friend. ‘Of course, she’ll have to go through the college, but I hardly anticipate.…’
By this she meant that the BBC would have to ascertain that Annie had never been a member of the Communist Party. But, in view of the understaffing in Recorded Programmes, they thought it safe to issue her with a temporary pass, and tell her to report for work on Monday.
The next problem, of course, was where the girl was to live. It was no use leaving things to chance, she might slip back to Birmingham. Mrs Milne had hostels in mind, but Vi, with Lise still on her conscience, went with Annie to Paddington to pick up the luggage and then brought her back to Hammersmith on that very first evening. Mrs Simmons, who was generous enough to learn nothing from experience, welcomed a new lodger. She was bottling plums, and not ever remembering a year like it for plums. Hitler had given out that Britain would capitulate by August, she added, or rather he’d said it some time ago, but she’d only just read it off an old Mirror that she’d used to spread under the jars.
‘Did you share a room before?’ Vi asked, taking Annie upstairs.
‘Not really, because I hadn’t brothers and sisters.’
‘Do children worry you, then?’
Annie shook her head.
‘My little brothers don’t need much,’ Vi went on. ‘Just fall down when they machine-gun you, half-way will do if we’re at table.’
‘Well, I’ll show you where to put your things. You’ll have to make do with just a bit of the cupboard, because we’ve got all our winter things in there, and these two and a half drawers over here. How will that do?’
And after all, Annie had not brought much.
‘What my mother meant, starting off about Hitler, and the jars, and everything, was that if there’s any trouble you’d be better off in a house like this, where there’s a lot of us.’ She sat down on her own bed. ‘Do you want to use the phone? Will they be worrying about you at home?’
‘Writing will do,’ said Annie stiffly. ‘I don’t think my aunt will be at her house. I think she’s going to let it.’
Vi perceived that they had come to the end of that subject.