THE CHRISTMAS COMPENDIUM

“He doesn’t have any music in front of him.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You don’t do you? You’re playing it all from memory!”

I smiled at the two old men nursing their pints. I was sure we had had this exact conversation last year.

“Well um, pretty much, yeah. These carols are sort of locked in here.” 

I tapped the side of my head, as people do. True enough, the Christmas carols I’d been playing at the pub were, are now, and perhaps always will be, engraved on my memory. All the F majors and A modulations and passing chords, there since childhood when my Grandma would take the Christmas Compendium out of the old piano stool and place it carefully on the piano.

It was a pristine red book, as I remember. On the front were a handful of cheerful cartoon Victorians: one, standing in sideburns and a top hat, the pianist with ribbons in her hair, both gathered around a pianoforte with a handsome candelabra. A portly man belted out the silent carol with hands rolling across a bulbous waistcoat. It was all very jolly. It was all very lovely. I always wished I could be there, in whatever hand-drawn universe they were singing.

I’d sit and turn the pages, little fingers working out each note as it fell along the score. Hark the Herald, with its swirling angels, O Christmas Tree, where the drawing of the tree seemed to grow up through the staves. O Little Town (the American tune) was accompanied by a snowy scene of horses and carts, and Silent Night with some text about the Oberndorf organ breaking down. Every note, with the smell of cinnamon rock cakes wafting from my Grandma’s kitchen, felt like magic.

Same notes. Same ‘magic’, if that is what it is. Though the book has long gone. I’d been thinking about it as the annual St Mary’s ‘Beer and Carols’ night went on. I looked up at the rafters as a hundred voices sang heartily...

“God and sinners reconciled.”

It was all very jolly. It was all very... lovely.

The two old coves looked at me from their pint glasses when it was all over. One of them told me he sang in a choir and the accompanist was brilliant but couldn’t play by ear ‘to save his life’. I said that that was probably more impressive than the other way around, which is, I admitted, pretty much what I do; it was not enough to dissuade their admiration though.

“All from memory eh? Remarkable.”

“Like Elton John,” chimed the other, chuckling.

“Yeah, you even look a bit like him ‘n’ all!”

I laughed, though I didn’t think it was either funny or true. I chose to take it as a compliment that my playing style might have subliminally reminded them of him, and that was just a sociable quip to end the conversation in a non-awkward fashion. People do that, you know.

Though I don’t think that kind of thing happened to the Christmas Compendium Victorians.