Read Online Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn - Free Book Online
Authors: John Mendelssohn
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girl whose idea of fun was visiting nearby Plumstead Cemetery with school friends.
The den’s floors came over time to be littered with cushions, records, books, magazines, and Incredible String Band, Dylan, Beatles, and T. Rex record sleeves, the walls to be covered with her poems and drawings, several of the latter inspired by Jay’s poem “The Devil’s Mouth”. She was fond of hamsters, cats and a rabbit called Took, named after Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo player, but less so of her purpose-built Tudor-style Wendy house at the bottom of the garden, though Took is thought to have enjoyed hiding beneath it.
One evening in the Sixties, she and a chum from school agreed it might be fun to frighten Took into the open by jumping up and down, little realising that he was not only inside with them, but under foot. The school chum, landing atop him, broke his leg, requiring an emergency visit to the vet. But if the school chum expected to be called an imbecile, she’d come to the wrong place. The Bushes were too kind for that.
In between playing Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert, the genial, balding, ginger side-whiskered Dr. Bush accompanied Kate on piano when she practised violin pieces for school, where every student was compelled to learn an instrument. After he showed her a C-major scale, she twigged that what worked in one key would work in others as well, and soon had chords sussed. She took to grinning and bearing it while practising her violin, yearning for the moment when she could consign the infernal thing to its case and improvise happily on piano. And when she tired of the piano, she retired to one of the farm’s outbuildings, formerly a Victorian wash-house, where she played the ancient church harmonium that had been home to countless generations of mice, and which a new, spiteful generation of them would soon gnaw to splinters.
Paddy, later to specialise in medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture, seemed to feel compelled to learn to play every exotic stringed instrument of which he got wind – including mandolin, balalaika, sitar, koto, and violin. He played old English folk songs popularised by A.L. Lloyd, whose ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ Kate would later admit to Radio One remained one of her favourite songs.Bigger brother Jay, who’d later read his poetry on the radio and be published in
Poetry Review
, introduced her to Greek mythology and the work of the Sufic mystic Gurdjieff.
Having passed her 11-plus, Kate was enrolled at St. Joseph’s Convent Grammar School, run by enlightened nuns in modern clothing, but housed in a gloomy Victorian building in Abbey Wood. Small and skinny, younger than her classmates by virtue of having been born in late July, she would occasionally get walloped, but never fight back, not even verbally. The ability to slash her tormentors to ribbons with her tongue might have served her well, but East Wickham Farm was a sarcasm-free zone. She declined to play in the school orchestra, but sang, without particular distinction, and not very high, in the school choir. She did well at English, Latin, biology, music, and made her first contribution, the poem “The Crucifixion,” to the school’s end of year magazine when she was 11, at which age a school photograph shows her to have been dumpy, with no idea of what to do with her hair. (She’d seemingly tried to brush it straight, but had succeeded only in splitting a great many ends.) She would later contribute poems entitled “Blind Joe Death,” “A Tear and a Raindrop Met,” “Death,” and “You” to the school magazine, but didn’t tell boys she was making songs of them for fear of being seen as an emasculating overachiever.
She read science fiction, and was keen on John Wyndham. She shared her own stories with chums on the playground at lunchtime and in at least one instance – that of
The Haunted Mill
– was able to induce them to come over and act the story out. Isolation seemed to
The den’s floors came over time to be littered with cushions, records, books, magazines, and Incredible String Band, Dylan, Beatles, and T. Rex record sleeves, the walls to be covered with her poems and drawings, several of the latter inspired by Jay’s poem “The Devil’s Mouth”. She was fond of hamsters, cats and a rabbit called Took, named after Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo player, but less so of her purpose-built Tudor-style Wendy house at the bottom of the garden, though Took is thought to have enjoyed hiding beneath it.
One evening in the Sixties, she and a chum from school agreed it might be fun to frighten Took into the open by jumping up and down, little realising that he was not only inside with them, but under foot. The school chum, landing atop him, broke his leg, requiring an emergency visit to the vet. But if the school chum expected to be called an imbecile, she’d come to the wrong place. The Bushes were too kind for that.
In between playing Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert, the genial, balding, ginger side-whiskered Dr. Bush accompanied Kate on piano when she practised violin pieces for school, where every student was compelled to learn an instrument. After he showed her a C-major scale, she twigged that what worked in one key would work in others as well, and soon had chords sussed. She took to grinning and bearing it while practising her violin, yearning for the moment when she could consign the infernal thing to its case and improvise happily on piano. And when she tired of the piano, she retired to one of the farm’s outbuildings, formerly a Victorian wash-house, where she played the ancient church harmonium that had been home to countless generations of mice, and which a new, spiteful generation of them would soon gnaw to splinters.
Paddy, later to specialise in medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture, seemed to feel compelled to learn to play every exotic stringed instrument of which he got wind – including mandolin, balalaika, sitar, koto, and violin. He played old English folk songs popularised by A.L. Lloyd, whose ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ Kate would later admit to Radio One remained one of her favourite songs.Bigger brother Jay, who’d later read his poetry on the radio and be published in
Poetry Review
, introduced her to Greek mythology and the work of the Sufic mystic Gurdjieff.
Having passed her 11-plus, Kate was enrolled at St. Joseph’s Convent Grammar School, run by enlightened nuns in modern clothing, but housed in a gloomy Victorian building in Abbey Wood. Small and skinny, younger than her classmates by virtue of having been born in late July, she would occasionally get walloped, but never fight back, not even verbally. The ability to slash her tormentors to ribbons with her tongue might have served her well, but East Wickham Farm was a sarcasm-free zone. She declined to play in the school orchestra, but sang, without particular distinction, and not very high, in the school choir. She did well at English, Latin, biology, music, and made her first contribution, the poem “The Crucifixion,” to the school’s end of year magazine when she was 11, at which age a school photograph shows her to have been dumpy, with no idea of what to do with her hair. (She’d seemingly tried to brush it straight, but had succeeded only in splitting a great many ends.) She would later contribute poems entitled “Blind Joe Death,” “A Tear and a Raindrop Met,” “Death,” and “You” to the school magazine, but didn’t tell boys she was making songs of them for fear of being seen as an emasculating overachiever.
She read science fiction, and was keen on John Wyndham. She shared her own stories with chums on the playground at lunchtime and in at least one instance – that of
The Haunted Mill
– was able to induce them to come over and act the story out. Isolation seemed to
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