Remembering ivory and ebony

Pure curiosity. It got the better of me, as I tracked down the retired barman.

‘It’s true! Sometimes the piano at the Sergeant’s Mess tinkles on its own,’ shuddering he muttered as he told me of an old Commandant, who had asked the pianist to teach his gifted daughter to play the piano.

As things went, apparently he taught her a little more than music. Later, in shame, she was packed off to Old Blighty. Our pianist simply vanished. Two hundred years down the road, the music continues. First, the scales of a beginner, as the dainty fingers dance lightly on the ivory and ebony before they finally leap into Bach or Beethoven.

Remember that in the old days, almost every old bungalow possessed a piano. The upright ones, made by by Johann Lorenz Schiedmayer in Stuttgart, around 1895, in Europe, during World War I, were ripped up for the wood to shore up the trenches.

My story, if I may call it that, begins in Stockholm, courtesy of military historian, the Sweden based legendary Ashok Nath’s sleuthing skills. His seminal work on the infantry regiments of the Indian Army during the First War (1914-1919) has been crafted in Sowars and Sepoys. Finding a single sheet of piano music dating to 1909, composed and dedicated to the famous soldier Colonel James Skinner by his grandson Stanley E Skinner, first Duke of Yorks’ Own Lancers, he sends it to me. Trouble? The sheet is incomplete.

‘A Skinner Waltz?’ asks Sylvia Skinner, sister of the late Brig. Michael Skinner, the last of a generation of Skinners, still living in Barlowganj. ‘Never heard of it!’ she insists.

Briefly, the Skinner connection has granddame Alice Skinner building Sikander Hall as a summer home. And that’s what it has been to her descendants.

In desperation, I write to the antiquarian Hugh Rayner, in Bath, who says: ‘This is a difficult one! I’m not really plugged into the world of antiquarian sheet music. I shall give it a shot, but don’t hold your breath; this may take quite a while.’

But a ray of hope peeps through the ominous clouds. It comes from the Templer Research Centre at National Army Museum in London, kindness of the redoubtable David Loyd. Hold your breath, my friends – David is the sort who never let you down. One day a padded envelope in the mail with his return address, tells me the story ere it is opened...All four sheets of the Skinner Waltz score!

For by now, this I have learnt: star dust falls on those who ply through without thought of surrender. Even though every atom of your being cries out loud and clear that it’s all over - done and dusted.

Now who said when words fail, music speaks?

Mussoorie born author-photographer Ganesh Saili has had a lifetime affair with the mountains. His two dozen books are a testament to the hills of home