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– Mr Snow, Headmaster

Long, long ago, in The Mists of Time, when I was at school, our music teacher was the turbulent Mrs Waller, who was famous on two counts: one, she was reputed to own a dinner service which could accommodate a seating of twenty-one people, all with the same pattern on all their plates…and two, she always had to go to the staff room for ‘some notes’ halfway through every music lesson, returning ten minutes later, much calmer and smelling of cigarette smoke. At every Parents Evening, her first words to my parents were always, ‘You don’t really want me to tell you what Bryony’s like at music, do you?’, and my parents, who did know exactly what I was like at music from the many entertainments mounted by my sister and I in our kitchen, bedroom, back garden…would say, ‘No, of course not!’, and the talk would be of Other Matters. I thought the clef-carved doors to the World of Harmony, Finding the Note and Singing in Tune were forever closed to me. Then I started to write for a living and realised I could sneak in the back door as a Lyricist. What’s more, when you are adapting the work of a great, poetic wordsmith like Mary Webb, you can pretty much use all her wonderful words as the lyrics! So it is, this year, that I get to be a part of this exciting event…not only do I work with the peerless Theresa Heskins again, whose eight talented actors tell the fabulous story of Precious Bane, but I am also part of Mary Keith’s gorgeous, haunting music, sung by the fantastic choirs of Shropshire, Worcestershire, Somerset and Berkshire. For someone with a tin ear and Florence Foster Jenkins’ talent for rhythm…it doesn’t get any better than this! If there is a heaven on earth this summer, it is here, it is here, it is here.

Now all I aspire to is that 21-person dinner set…

Bryony Lavery

June 2003