Why I’m glad my piano teacher spent more time chatting than teaching

At the entrance to Marylebone railway station is an old piano that anyone can play. Unfortunately, whoever had this sweet idea can’t be bothered to fix the broken notes. Even so, about once a fortnight, on my way back from visiting my mother in Gerrards Cross, I put down my shopping bag and bash out Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor.

As I do, I invariably think about Mrs Irene Oates, the first proper eccentric I met. She was my only piano teacher and I’m grateful to her. On the other hand I’m not very good, even by amateur standards, and she’s partly to blame.

When I was 11, my mother told me that she’d spoken on the telephone to a lady who was going to teach my sister and me the piano. ‘She’s a real talker,’ she added, slightly apprehensively. My parents weren’t voluble people.

The apprehension was justified. Once a week my father would drive me to my teacher’s terraced house in Maidenhead. Oates was an appropriate name for her because he knew that, like the polar explorer, I ‘may be some time’. Often I’d return after an hour and 40 minutes, most of it spent chatting. My father was always furious.

But for me it was bliss. Mrs Oates would fling open the door and push me into her ‘drawing room’, which was the size of a teabag but decorated in the style of the Second Empire. She was a middle-aged lady with red curly hair who waved her arms around a lot, her diamanté reading glasses swinging furiously as she tottered on perilous heels. She was big-boned and not naturally graceful; there was always a danger that a bust of Beethoven might go flying.