Stylised treble clef design

The reunion committee has asked me to say a few words on Saturday, and I have spent three evenings failing to write them, so I will tell you the true thing instead. The treble clef you drew on the blackboard in the spring of 1987, the one with its tail flicking off the top like smoke from a match, is still scratched into the lid of the upright in Room 14. Mr Pryce sanded it off twice. It keeps coming back, the way your handwriting did whenever I asked you to copy out your scales neatly.

The lower curls were always the trouble. You would carry the bottom loop round and round until the chalk wore flat, insisting that the spiral was where the note actually lived, and I am sorry to say you were partly right. I have spent forty years teaching children to stop the line at the bar and move on. You never once stopped. I used to think it was defiance. Now I suspect it was simply the most honest thing anyone drew in that room.

The school is selling the piano at the auction on Saturday afternoon, and the man from the auction house wants it cleared by four. I told him I would wait for the person who knows where the spirals end. He did not understand, and I did not explain.

Come early and bring a pencil. I have kept the rest of your chalk in the tin in my bottom drawer, and the lid of that piano is still warm from the radiator, the way it always was when you sat down to play something you had no business knowing. Nobody else in that room will remember the tune. I would like you to play it once more before they take it away.