Music to my ears

My grandmother – Bubba Sophie – lived in a tenement block in the East End of London. She had an outdoor toilet and her sister Aunty Becky, who lived upstairs. My Nan had blonde hair, which I only found out was dyed in my mid teens. She looked like Sophie Tucker.
Her three rooms comprised a bedroom with a big double bed covered in a magnificent pink eiderdown and an oblong bolster pillow, which I had re-ticked and use for visiting guests.
A kitchen with a cast iron stove, a heavy pressing iron that she heated up on the grate and a pantry.
A parlour with a piano that had candleholders attached, a plush piano stool and a big table covered in a green chenille tablecloth, which we now have, it comes out every Christmas.
I have a photograph of Sophie herding all five grandchildren. We all kneaded her soft under arms that were a source of ridicule and comfort.
Sophie made the best chop-meat balls in Aldgate, and sweet tea on tap. Sophie also made chicken soup. What Jewish woman didn’t? Chicken soup with knadels (matzo balls) or kreplach ( meat filled dumplings).
Opposite the tenement block was an alleyway with a Cannon Bollard. Women of the night would congregate round the bollard waiting for a wayward client.
My bubba, with the heart the size of Tomsk, made her soups in a giant Schissel, Yiddish for saucepan.
My family, like the majority of our neighbours, came from Eastern Europe. Money was scarce so generosity within the community was paramount. At night the bollard was surrounded by cold, hungry women. Sophie took her schissel and an assortment of broken cups, and plodded down two flights of stone stairs. Crossing the road where she was Leman street’s solo soup kitchen.
Somehow a blind boy from Battersea who played the piano, found Sophie. He was hungry so she fed him. That pianist was George Shearing. I like to think my grandmother’s broth had a part in the boys development. He ended up in America, writing ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ and dying a millionaire.
I have lots of his music.
This morning I grouped my fingers over the piano. George’s notation always has clumps of chords. Harmonious and not so hard to play once you’ve opened up your hands and taken a deep breath.
Images of Sophie and George, kreplach and matzo balls, flood my head whilst playing the piano. It’s a kind of meditation.
For thirteen years I studied with Mrs Lylie, Peter Churchill and Miss Spottiswood. I always forget how integral music is to me.
Ingrained in my DNA from my parents singing ‘Apple Blossom time, in perfect harmony, to my mother banging out hymns in pub style, or my father playing the biscuit tin with knitting needles, not to mention my bubba accompanying all of us as we sung ‘Show Me The Way To Go Home’, in the parlour; the chicken soup bubbling away on the stove and the future as tasty as her kreplach.