When I was at school, we were set a task in an art lesson. We had to find an object and draw it. By chance, I discovered the school had some old musical instruments, so I asked if I could have one to draw, and they gave me a violin.
I carried it off to the bus to take home. Being an all-boys school, it was always a bit of a scrum at the bus stop, but on this day, I was confronted by a bully who was much bigger than me.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” he said. Well, I thought it was obvious, but I replied,” I’m doing some art with it at home.”
“Ha! What a waste of time. Give me that!”
I tried to hold on to it, but he wrestled it out of my hands.
“You don’t need that,” he added, and he held it out in front of me. With one movement, he put it against his knee and snapped it at the neck.
“What do you think about that then?”
I didn’t know what to say, I certainly didn’t have a clever put down and I wanted to reach home in one piece, so I went on my way.
I made my drawing, but it was an odd jumble of strings, neck and body.
I don’t know why, but I kept the violin. I think the violence of the act struck a chord in me (if you’ll pardon the pun). The sudden brutality of some people can be shocking. It went into my box of things from the past, and I forgot about it.
Years later, I was telling the story to a couple of friends of mine. The husband made guitars and had a workshop. He asked me to show him the violin, and I found it again.
“I can fix this,” he said, and a couple of months later, there it was, whole again. I was delighted but put it away and forgot about it again – until last week when it was unearthed during attic tidying. I’m now going to put it in my office.
If I want to be fancy, I can say it is a symbolic triumph of the arts against cruelty. Perhaps I’m sentimental, but I’ve always believed in the saying “what goes around comes around.” The bully would have long forgotten their actions, but down the years, things happened that they would never have dreamed of.
