I had started piano lessons in autumn 1966. My teacher, Mrs Nuttall, was a Church organist, a strict but motherly figure of indeterminate age, with permed grey hair. She insisted on strict timing, lightness, bending the fingers, and proper pedaling. She was keen on Mozart but not Beethoven, and when she allowed rubato in Mendelssohn, it was only within strict limits of decorum. In 1966 she charged 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence or half-a-crown) for a half-hour lesson; by 1974 the price had quadrupled to 30 new pence. She taught me well, for by late 1968 my piano was the glue that held together a miscellany of glockenspiels, tambourines and recorders in the Wisewood Primary School Assembly ensemble. We played for assembly once a week, and our speciality was the "modern" settings from 20^th century hymns, a slim music book with a pink cover. A watershed in my musical education was hearing Mr Fenton, our headmaster, syncopate one of those hymns, "Oh Jesus I have promised". I could play this straight, but I had no idea that you could swing it. Once I'd heard it done, I was certain I needed to learn how. Mrs Nuttall was not going to teach me, so I learned by clandestine imitation. Eight years later, while accompanying Trial by Jury for a high school production, after many rehearsals playing straight, I unconsciously swung the introduction to "Come the broken flower" in the dress rehearsal. My covert apprenticeship in syncopation had reared up, unbidden, exposing my dark side. I did the Trial by Jury performance in a psycho-musical panic, watching myself and waiting for the next stolen beat. Luckily it never came.