Dear Peter

Letter to a friend

Hello Peter,

You wrote :-

Was anything that happened over the 50 year interval part of the younger self’s plan? Does the older self feel any connection with the younger self?

Largely, I prefer to try to leave the younger self behind. My mother had an unhealthy obsession with me. She lavished gifts on me which I could not refuse, like the Ferrograph C.B.L.6 stereo tape recorder which enabled me to study Wagner’s Ring, and bought me tickets to experience the whole cycle at Covent Garden. After being expelled from school she paid for me to attend Pitman’s College where, treated as an adult and free from the regimentation of Tulse Hill School, I managed to get ‘o’ levels and thus proceed to Norwood Technical College where I got good ‘a’ level results.

But by then she had instilled such solipsism in me that all universities turned me down for two years running. I only got into Southampton through the back door, thanks to a letter from my Spanish teacher’s wife, after they had already rejected me.

My step father was the wheel man for a gang of lorry hijackers : his advice was “be a man, get out and nick a bit”.

One of his hauls contained some classical music records. Nobody wanted that sort of rubbish so he gave them to the boy, me. The records sat around for months until one day I chose to try one instead of Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Piltdown Men, Helen Shapiro and Duane Eddy. It was Brahms violin concerto played by ‘violinist of the century’ Jascha Heifetz. When it came to the cadenza I thought there were two violinists playing together. Then I realised that Heifetz was double stopping, playing two complementary melodies simultaneously on the same instrument. I sat stunned, like a child blinking at its first glimpse of a snow covered world. Next day I took my whole collection of popular music to the canteen at Pitmans College and sold all the records for sixpence each.

Decades later, as a tradesman, I would listen to whole cycles of all the piano sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert
while it seemed like somebody else was doing the painting, plasterwork or whatever. On one occasion I was listening to Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben when I swooned and slid down the wall to the floor.

But now, as Keats put it in his Ode to a Nightingale, “fled is that music”. If I listen to Heifetz I can remember every note but can hear almost none of it. The same is true of my eyesight : three different very competent ophthalmologists have told me I am no longer fit to drive. I have to use a mobility scooter, travelling at 8 m.p.h. : after 61 years of driving that is humiliating.

I last played in the Suffolk Festival in 2023, a piano arrangement of part of Holst’s suite, the Planets. You would instantly recognise the piece : it has become a kind of second national anthem always played at royal funerals with words added by someone else – “I vow to thee my country”. It went well and, as almost always happened, a lady came up to me afterwards and thanked me. It’s the barely suppressed tears and the wringing of the hands which tell me I have got the message across.

But this year, despite my quixotic intentions, I had to cancel. There have been plenty of blind pianists but playing when you are deaf is like trying to drive a car with no steering wheel. I’m told I will be missed.

The younger self bought a 1934 Austin hearse for £20 in 1965. “You fool” said mother but we students had a good time in it. We would club together the ten shillings worth of petrol and drive off to Kent in the middle of the night. On one occasion there were fourteen of us in it.

But after a few years it kept grinding to a halt. What did I know about a cracked inlet manifold? So I sold it for £169. As it was driven away I felt a deep sense of foreboding and regret. Two years later the new owner, ignorant of the fact that if you build a hearse on an ambulance chassis, the plate glass windows make it top heavy. Drunk, he swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle and the whole thing turned over, smashing it to bits. Two years after that he gave the wreckage back to me and I spent the next fifty two years dragging it from one location to another as I painstakingly rebuilt it. The job was completed in 2017, after getting ripped off time and again by persons who knew exactly what to do only to get things desperately wrong, time after time, as I spent £130,000 of inherited money on my dream.

You can see the result at https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/forever-cars/madness-ursula-nightmare-hearse/

It was mostly women who would stop me in the streets of Woodbridge to say “that is absolutely beautiful”. And it was : hauntingly beautiful.

Then, in 2018, my friend and nearly wife Mary, died in Wales. At the time I had no other vehicle so I made the 500 mile return journey in Ursula, the ‘earse, to her funeral. That left the cooling system full of limescale. I was quoted £26,000 to put things right by the only company who I knew could and would get it right, but by then that kind of money was certainly not available. I could, of course, remove the radiator, have a new radiator core made in Ipswich and clean out the water jacket, but post operative complications to vascular surgery in 2021 have left me with poor mobility and I am not fit enough to do that.

So, Ursula now sits on axle stands here, outside the kitchen window, in her custom built car port, until somebody inherits her.

Thus, while the younger self might be dismayed, the older self says “I did all I could. I gave my life to Ursula and even played Liszt’s piano transcription of the finale of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde twice in public. I did all I could, with devotion. I am a very lucky and privileged man. I have no regrets.

Thus, much disabled, I sit here at my 27inch desktop Mac and surf youTube, returning at last to the six volumes of Buddy Holly whom I now adore. Such a poet! So much achieved at age 22.

My consolation and comfort is this huge garden where my Giant Lebanese Cedar reaches for the sky. I planted it eight years ago in memory of my beloved dog, Branman. By 2225 it would be the biggest tree in East Anglia, but somebody will cut it down. We Live. We learn. We are not of this world.

All the Best to you and Jan

Peter