Sam Knight - The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story

The music school was in an ordinary terraced house on one of the main roads leading out of London, to the north. The front was pebbledash, like its neighbor; there were lace curtains and neat, cared-for roses growing under the bay windows. A curved archway of red bricks framed the front door, to the left of which hung a black sign, with gold lettering in confidently varying fonts:

Miss Lorna Middleton

Teacher of Pianoforte &

BalletDancing

69 Carlton TerraceNew Cambridge Road

Hardly anyone called her Lorna. Her first name was Kathleen; she signed letters Kathy or Kay. She was, to almost everyone that knew her, Miss Middleton. She played the piano beautifully, with small hands. She had dark wavy hair, buck teeth and a pronounced New England accent, which combined with a degree of innate personal magnetism to make Miss Middleton an object of some fascination in post-war Edmonton. Pupils joined her classes from the ages of three or four. Many remembered her as a singular figure for the rest of their lives.

Miss Middleton never just walked into a room, or stood around. She moved. She posed. Her school followed a syllabus that, she claimed, had much in common with the tuition on offer at Trinity College, the Guildhall and the Royal Academy. But each of her dance classes began with her rolling up the carpet in the front room and shifting chairs out of the way, while six girls, and occasionally a boy, filed in and found a place to practice their port de bras while leaning on a bookcase. Miss Middleton played the piano with her back to her pupils, swiveling on a stool. The furniture around her was dark and somewhat distinguished. A leather sofa with brass studs sat under the window, a note of inherited wealth that was out of keeping with the cheap reproductions of cavaliers and shy eighteenth-century beauties hanging on the walls, and the paper notice, warning of missed classes and late payment, taped to the glass of a display cabinet. Out in the hall, the next class waited on the stairs, trying to stay out of the way of Miss Middletons small, fierce mother, Annie, who had once been a great beauty and, it was rumored, a courtesan in Paris.

Miss Middleton called her pupils the Merry Carltons. Several times a year, she would stage ambitious school performances, which caused her great anxiety. Annie would sew the costumes while Miss Middleton would rehearse pieces with as many as forty children, as well as an ensemble to be performed by the group, perhaps a musical comedy, which she regarded as her great love. During the preparation for these shows, the Merry Carltons would be reminded, more than once, that Miss Middleton had enjoyed a dancing career of her own. The front room at Number 69 was scattered with performance programs with the dates carefully removed: a newspaper clipping from the time she danced on Boston Common, before a crowd of fifty thousand; a photograph of a young woman performing a grand jet, by a Bruno of Hollywood.

Nothing was ever spelled out. Miss Middletons pupils only shared a sense of something grand that never quite happened and the understanding, which developed over time, that their teachers ambitions exceeded their own. Miss Middleton often parted ways with her students when they became teenagers and started to take their lessons less seriously. In turn, her pupils noticed that they rarely saw Miss Middleton outside the front room of Number 69. They picked up gossip that her American accent might be affected or put on. She was not someone you saw grocery shopping in Edmonton Green. Although she was not old (how old, it was genuinely impossible to say), it was obvious that the great hopes of Miss Middleton lay in the past, that her true dreams had gone unrealized.

Late in her life, Miss Middleton typed out a list of her instructions for teaching music. The intended readership was unclear. Rule number five is addressed to pupils: Do not play by ear. Number seven is a teaching tip: Octaves should be taught as soon as possible. Number nine is blank. Many of the rules are not really rules but Miss Middletons observations or personal entreaties.

12. Play as accurately and as well as possible bear in mind the teacher can get a headache and lose patience as well as the pupil.

22. Story of pupil who wore gloves while practicing.

26. Do not keep repeating everything.

On a cold winters day, when Miss Middleton was about seven years old, she came home from school for lunch and watched her mother frying eggs on the stove. After about two minutes, and without warning the egg lifted itself up. It rose up and up until it almost touched the ceiling, Miss Middleton wrote in a self-published memoir, which appeared in 1989. She was excited by the sight and raced back to school to tell her friends. By the time I had re-told the story a thousand times the kids expected me to take off and fly into the clouds, she wrote. But Annie was concerned. She consulted a fortune teller, who told her that an egg that flew out of the pan symbolized the death of someone close to you. A few weeks later, one of Annies best friends, who had recently married, died and was buried in her wedding dress.

I cannot say what I really felt or indeed what I feel now, Miss Middleton wrote. She experienced premonitions, in one form or another, throughout her life. She compared the feeling to knowing the answer in a spelling test. Names and numbers would appear to her. I am drawn to these events by what appears to be a blaze of light, she wrote. An electric light bulb. When Miss Middleton was eleven, she felt an irresistible urge to contact her piano teacher, a young German man, who had recently been hospitalized for nerve trouble. After cajoling her parents to call him, she found out that he had poisoned himself in his apartment. It was probable that fate would have intervened and his moment of death was there, she reasoned. But I could not rid myself of the thought that if I had managed to contact him he would have returned for supper and any problems could have been discussed. Miss Middleton was an only child and she sensed a world that was particularly responsive and legible to her. Everything happened just as I knew it would, she wrote to a cousin. Her mother asked her to stop saying what would happen next.

Miss Middleton considered her childhood to be the happiest time of her life. She liked to reminisce about the large house of twelve rooms where she had lived, and how her father had been offered a position in America. The truth was much more modest. Annie and Henry, her father, were English. Henry came from a prosperous family which owned a furniture-making business and thirty properties across Islington and Hackney, in north London. Annie was one of five children from Liverpool. They met in Paris, not long before the First World War, and sailed to America on a ship named the