childhood - I want a piano!
My mother, Ingeborg Grete Thote, came from Hamburg to work as Au Pair for a family near Norwich in 1958. She met my father, David Charles Freeman, in a fencing club. Born in Leicester, he was an Art Teacher at nearby Wymondham College. He offered to drive her home. He had a car, a blue Riley, that he would drive very quickly along the Norfolk lanes. Later she could hear him screeching along the lanes on his way to pick her up. Before taking up pipe smoking, he smoked Passing Cloud cigarettes. He would do drawings for her on the packets. They took a holiday driving around Germany, France and Italy in the summer of 1958, after which they went their separate ways, until my mother found she was pregnant. She would go and sit in the Michaelis Church near her father's ship chandlery in Hamburg and listen to the Organ music when, she says, I would become quite active in the womb. Maybe that's why I like JS Bach so much.
They were married in January 1959. I was born David Christopher Simon Freeman in Eppendorfer Krankenhaus in Hamburg at 21.20h on 23rd March 1959. The large, rather stern midwife said "with these shoulders, he's going to be a boxer."
The British Consulate plastered my Birth Certificate with plenty of official-looking wax seals. "The Germans like all that" the official told my father,"it looks more impressive."
After six months in Hamburg being doted on by my mother, grandmother and aunt Uschi, we moved to England by which time my father had qualified for a family Nissen hut in the college grounds, which looked like something from an Army camp.
I remember the smell of my pram. I also remember cars. I was bonkers about cars.
I was also bonkers about pianos. I wanted one badly and would go crazy whenever I saw one. Once, in a department store in Hamburg, I saw one and started screaming on the escalator. "I want a piano, I want a piano!" As my mother grappled with me an elderly German woman in a fur coat and hat was standing at the bottom and snapped "can't you see the child is in distress?" "Mind your own ****** business!" she snapped back.
I was five when my father's Aunt Olive died and we inherited her piano.
I started piano lessons with Gertrude Gaunt in a very dark, Victorian, tunnel-back, terraced house in Lincoln. Miss Gaunt, who was probably in her 70s, lived with her sister and had a cane resting at the end of the piano keys. She never used it on me, although my duet partner Anne Powell would get the occasional rap.
At the age of 6 I was entered into the Lincoln Music Festival and won my competition. Afterwards Mum took me for lunch to Lincoln's first Chinese restaurant. I had sweet and sour pork followed by lychees. So exotic. I still have a weakness for both.
My parents were not so well-off on a teacher's income. There was always a strong emphasis on education, loads of drawing and whenever Katrin (my sister, two years younger than me) and I would want some toy or other, they would say "why don't you build it with Lego?"
One of the things I learnt from my parents was, use your imagination, you can do anything.