pocket of my jeans, whereupon he chased me all round the room demanding to know why I had never told him of my passion for rugby league, and Wigan in particular, with not the foggiest that it was his rosette I was sporting, and that I was trying, with considerable lack of either clarity or effect, to express thereby my deep attraction to him.
Anyway, he left, with a group of others, and I stood on a rainy corner in King’s Cross with the rosette. I think that’s what happened.
London and Wigan, 1970s
A grand piano’s feet take up only a tiny area: three indentations in the carpet, each the size of a conker, cradling a brass ball clad in a brass foreskin attached at an unlikely angle, like a stallion’s ankle, to a rising pillar of polished hardwood. Very small, to hold so much weight, and cover so much area: a superior crate the shape of Africa, hollow yet full. With the solid wing raised it shows the heartstrings within, laid in green felt across swirls of miniature golden architecture, and the internal teeth, the hammers coming up from below, sharks from the darkness to bite and bump the strings; dampers above swooping down to see them off every time.
Robert’s Bechstein, as long as Rachmaninoff was tall, his father’s before him, lives with me now. (I smile as I write that. To Robert, saying a thing ‘lived’ somewhere was an unforgivable anthropomorphic poncey fuckin’ southern bourgeois affectation.) Underneath it are boxes and suitcases containing the entire history of Robert’s family. It has been my job to poke around in them, sorting things out. I find a brown paper-covered booklet, costing 30p, 15p if sold on Saturday only: the programme of the Wigan and District Competitive Music Festival, 1972, affiliated to the British Federation of Music Festivals, of which Her Majesty the Queen is patron. It smells of coal-dust and rain, and opens with a message from the mayor, who with the mayoress hopes to see the festival well supported. It lists the patrons, the areas which count as ‘local’ – Abram, Aspull, Billinge, Ince, Orrell, Standish, Skelmersdale, Holland, Chorley. Perhaps it is in fact these place names which smell of coal-dust and rain. It lists the scale of marks (for piano: accuracy of notes and time, technique, fluency, pace, touch, expression, interpretation); the trophies and medals available and who they are in memory of, the general regulations, appreciations, thanks, and the policy for receiving suggestions. There are ninety-nine classes, with up to twenty-five entrants in each. Choirs, recorder solo, folksong, violin, instrumental ensemble, organ, sight-reading, girls’ vocal duet. Thirty-six ten- and eleven-year-olds play ‘Ship Ahoy!’ by Arthur Pickles on the piano.
In Pianoforte Solo (ages thirteen–fifteen), Robert Lockhart, turned thirteen a week earlier, plays Debussy’s 2nd Arabesque, and comes first with 91 points. He wins £1.65, and a stiff certificate with a gold, red and green coat of arms. The following night he comes back to hear Pianoforte Solo (open), and marks what he hears. His marks are a little harsher than the adjudicators’ and his observations, in tiny blue biro, are precise. Betty Wilson was slightly too temperamental in her Dohnányi; Richard Eastham lost all movement in his La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin. Alison Cratchley’s rubato was not up to scratch, though otherwise her Bartók was superb. ‘Not delicate,’ he writes. ‘Dotted notes not clear’; and ‘Too much Chopin style for Bach’.
I have Robert’s little red Letts diary for 1969, when he was ten: lists of rugby players in pencil, and a few entries in splatty blue fountain pen: ‘Grandpa just out of bed been ill. Grandma in bed now.’ ‘Play with train practise putting hippy wig on.’ I have photographs: tiny 1960s black-and-white ones with scalloped edges, carrying all the freight of the out-of-focus faded technology of the past. There he is: a fat baby in incredibly tidy clothes with smocking across the front, chortling. With an ice cream, in Blackpool. Aged about seven on Coniston Avenue in Wigan, with a cricket bat and knobbly knees under baggy shorts. Hurtling towards a finishing line, when he was the second fastest boy in Wigan. With his four plastic horses hitched up to the Bonanza covered-wagon playset. There at the piano with his father, John.
‘My parents, John and Pat, were deemed to be a glamorous couple in their lower middle class (for want of a better term) milieu,’ Robert wrote, much later, in his rehab papers. ‘He a travelling salesman with a souped-up Ford Anglia, she a hairdresser.’ John, charismatic, grumpy, lovable and extremely musical, developed a form of agoraphobia which rendered him incapable of leaving his home town. If he drove ten miles from the town centre he would start shaking, and have to turn around. It happened once during an outing to Manchester to see a special railway yard, for which permission had had to be sought. Robert and his friends were very excited to go, but by the time they got to Longsight Depot John had what we would now call a panic attack; Robert was embarrassed, his pals in the car didn’t know what to say.
John had been a choirboy at Wigan Parish Church and knew everybody in the town. He was once seen weeping in uniform – National Service – at Wigan Casino, in the early fifties, out of unrequited love. As a young man he’d made a record in Norman Leather’s record-yourself studio. ‘Johnny Lockhart’ plays a jazzy, elegant piano and sings in a lustrous baritone the smooth Eddie Fisher song ‘When I Was Young’. He must have recorded it for Pat; they married in 1954, the year after the song came out: elegant, beautiful, a satin dress, a dress suit. It’s from another world, a Terence Davies world of face-powder and Ford Anglias, a Northern world that I never knew, with a lingering G at the end of my own surname, Young, a way I never heard it pronounced before I met Robert. It’s the voice of a man I knew and loved. Not that we pronounced the word love the same either.
John, young, looked like Alain Delon in a raincoat, on a bridge; older, like Michael Caine in the heavy glasses. He stopped drinking overnight in his early forties, but smoked tremendously. Robert called him the Owl of Ormskirk, because of the specs on the very tip of his big nose, always just about to fall off. Or, Pop Lockers. Pat, Robert’s mother, had the maiden name North which was already funny because she was from the South. She was blonde and pretty and ran a hairdressing salon in their front room in Coniston Avenue, where Robert was dandled by the ladies, played at their stocking-clad, high-heeled 1960s feet, listening as they chatted, absorbing their affection and glamour. Later Pat worked on the beauty counter at Boots. ‘Not quite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but never mind,’ Robert observed. I never met Pat; cancer got her before I made it north. Robert could be dismissive about her, which made me want to talk to her all the more. It must have been quite something being the woman in a household made up of John and Robert. They all played the piano, but Pat, who was not a bad player either, never got near it because Robert or John was always on it.
‘I was a relatively happy child,’ Robert wrote, ‘successful academically and at sport, plenty friends … I didn’t think it odd that my dad often got home from “work” at ten p.m. ’
John had a girlfriend called Lily Glinka, an anorexic Russian secretary who was afraid of the wind. John took her out on to Southport Sands to try to cure her. Later there was another, Jenny, who loved horses. Robert knew about these things. He and John always talked. And he was woken by the arguments in his parents’ bedroom late into the night. His mother was protective but eventually she too ‘succumbed to an affair’.
Robert was twelve or thirteen when the family fell apart. John lost his job. He came up to Robert’s room and said, ‘Are you staying with her or coming with me?’ So Robert got up out of bed, put some things in a bag and went with John on their bicycles to John’s mother Granny Annie’s house. There they shared a single bed. Robert was horrified by John’s toenails, which looked to him like nicotine-stained elephant tusks. He and his mother became ‘somewhat estranged’. He said it was not because he loved her less, just that he had more in common with his father. Then Pat’s boyfriend died, of diabetes. The trauma ping-pong started, as Robert shuttled from one unhappy home to the other.
John was playing Tchaikovsky in a public place – a hotel? – one evening, and a woman called Kath Griffin sat next to him, saying, ‘I prefer the slow movement’. It turned out all she knew about classical music was that she preferred the slow movements, but that wasn’t an impediment.
I say all this.