My pianola moves house

Warning:  this post contains confronting scenes of the manhandling of a pianola.

My pianola on the move

Pianolas are passed from one generation to the other - not necessarily because they are family heirlooms, but because the bottom fell out of the pianola market 50 years ago.

Back then, pianolas were the kareoke machines of the pre-electricity age, when people would stand around them and sing the words rolling by on the pianola roll.

[NOTE:  Like kareoke machines, pianolas or player pianos, were designed for people with no musical skills.  You could play them with your feet.  You inserted a music roll (a continuous sheet of paper rolled on to a spool) into the spool box, hooked the free end of the music sheet to the take-up spool, and started pumping with your feet.  The roll would unwind across a reading mechanism (called the tracker bar) and the music score, programmed onto the paper with a bunch of holes, would play.]

You pumped the pedals, and the pianola pumped out music, no hands.

It also gave you a damn good workout, and looked a lot classier than an exercise bike in the lounge room.

So I bought one.  Market research revealed that pianolas ceased production before one of the last wars, leaving only a second hand market.  You can find them in piano shops, reconditioned and ready to go, or in private homes, often in genteel decline and not so ready to go.

How to buy a second hand pianola

The market for pianolas thrives under P in the classified FOR SALE ads in the local newspaper.  Mine was for sale in a house nearby, at a price within my budget, so I gave it a test run.

The house was the bottom of a battle axe driveway.  The pianola was in the rumpus room in the lower level of the house.  It had that battered partied look, as pianolas do.

I play a roll or two, inspected its innards by lifting the top lid and peering down at the bellows which are its engine.  The owner threw in a full set of pianola rolls and the specialised sloped stool.

I paid a deposit, the rest to be paid when the pianola changed hands.

How to move a second hand pianola

Pianolas do not travel well.  Their little wheels are merely cosmetic because their stout wooden exteriors conceal a steel frame and massive mechanisms from the Sydney Harbour Bridge school of engineering.

One pianola weighs about the same as three conventional pianos.

It also could not negotiate spiral staircases, which was the internal entrance to its current residence.

How to move a second hand pianola by barge

The vendor informed me that the pianola could only leave the same way it had arrived: by barge.  The river lapped at the end of the back path, and a small wooden jetty offered itself as a mooring.

You can find barges listed in the telephone book.  The local barge person was not surprised at a pianola as cargo, so I tried not to be surprised at his fee, which was $100 per hour.

On top of that I had to engage pianola moving people who charged a flat $200.  They would liaise with the barge people so they could be picked up from the nearest loading dock where they would park their truck.

Always move your second hand pianola at high tide

Then there were the intangibles such as time and tide.  At low tide, when the river retreated and left behind a mud flat, the barge would have no access to the jetty.

The tide chart was consulted and we settled on a day with a high tide at 7am, and usually when there was little wind.  Calm waters were vital, as pianolas are not good sailors.

On the day I arrived at the house at 6.45am.  The river was mirror flat.  I was standing at the back door when the barge chugged along the river and tied up to the jetty.  On board were two barge people and two pianola movers.  Their truck waited at the nearest loading dock, about 10 minutes away as the boat goes.

The movers were, by necessity, large men - roughly two metres by two metres.  By contrast, the pianola looked dainty.

They shepherded it, on its silly wheels, to the back door.  Then they lay it on its side, mounted it onto a flat trolley and ushered it along the path to the jetty.

They made it look so easy, I wondered if I was getting my $200 worth.

Wheeling it along the footpath was the easy bit

The pianola then rumbled onto the jetty - trod the boards so to speak.  The wooden planks bowed under the combined weight of pianola and two pianola handles, and suddenly there was frailty in the air.

The planks of the jetty groaned

The planks groaned and the men moved with more urgency.  At the same time, the barge driver pulled the ropes tight, straining to hold the edge of the barge flush with the jetty.

The moment of truth: shifting the pianola from jetty to barge

Then the moment of truth.  The movers were actually sweating (at last, value for money), as they manouevred the pianola level with the barge which was floating half a metre below the level of the jetty.

There was a distinct sound of splintering from the jetty.

They steered the pianola sideways to the barge, and with much deep muttering - having revved themselves up to full power - they lowered it from jetty to barge.

As it hung weightily in mid-air, two sets of muscles quivered as they restrained the pianola in a frozen downward plunge.

Heave!

The river lapped mischievously around the barge.

I was holding the cheque for the balance of payment in my hand and it occurred to me: who, at this point owned the pianola?

One miscalculation, and the pianola would slide into the river and sink out of sight, to be planted into the finest of black mud, where it could only be played at low tide.

I tucked the cheque into my pocket.

But all went well.  The barge received the pianola with flat-bottomed stabilty and the jetty planks let out of creak of relief.

The pianola balancing between jetty and barge

Now much lower in the water, the barge sank even further when the two movers also boarded.

Under the weight of the pianola, the barge settles lower into the water. 

They roped the pianola into place.  The engine sputtered into life and off it went, chugging along the river in the early morning light, as pianolas do.

The pianola chugs along the river in the morning light

My childhood backyard as seen by an artist

Denis Meagher's painting of my childhood backyard

The idea for this painting was a trompe l'oeile, that is, a painting designed to deceive the eye.  It would depict a window, and outside the window would be a view receding into the distance.

Denis Meagher, the artist, proposed to paint it for my kitchen door so that I could see it from the kitchen bench and feel I was looking out at a scene.

The subject of this trompe l'oeile was to be a view of the backyard from my mother's kitchen door.  I did not have a photo of the backyard - my parents and their house were long gone - so I had to describe it to Denis.  

So the brief for my trompe l'oeile was... a concrete path leading to the back fence.  My mother's garden of poppies.  Chooks. A few tough shrubs.  A lawn.  A clothes line.  Tiger the tabby cat.

That's when I discovered the yawning gap between the picture in my head and and the words that describe it.  I knew I could not convey what I remembered of that backyard, so we ended up with two separate mental images, mine and Denis'. 

We were talking about the same thing, but we only had words in common.  

As you can see, Denis took artistic licence with my backyard - and I loved it.  He signed it and dated it 1993, and it hangs on my wall today as one of my favourite paintings.  

So, it is my childhood backyard in name only.  Yes, he had all the ingredients: chooks, clothes line, Tiger, poppies...but not as I knew them.

The chooks were never allowed into the garden.  They had a dusty run down by the back fence, and as a little girl, I was terrified of them.  I never went near them.  

The clothes line was not a Hills Hoist, as depicted by Denis.  It was two lines strung between two poles.  The poles had a strut of wood at the top, giving them a T-shape, and the strut had a line on each end.  And there was a clothes prop to raise the lines when wet clothes weighed them down.

And then there were the poppies.

My mother was no gardener, and her garden yielded few poppies, and not the giddy profusion you see in Denis' painting. 

My pedal car.  Mum's flower garden in background. (apologies for quality of pic)

I had a pedal car, and I would ride it along the path and pick mum's flowers and present them to her.  She was less than delighted, and I do not remember if she ever planted poppies again.

Tiger our tabby.  The thongs belong to Denis.  He inhabited my painting.

As for the flowering shrubs in Denis' painting.  They too were fanciful.
My father tried hard to create a botanic wonderland, but the house was near the coast and the soil was little more than sand.  He struck gold with oleanders and once he knew he was on a good thing he stuck to it.  He repeated them around the garden so much that I learned to hate them.

In later years, I was not surprised to learn that their leaves were poisonous:  they had that sort of attitude.  In fact I was rather taken by a short story about a woman who chopped up oleander leaves and baked them in a cake for her husband.  He died.

Denis' painting also spares us the sight of the outdoor toilet, which was tucked out of sight behind the house.  It had a pan toilet and it was collected once a week by some brave soul who came early in the morning, hoping not to find any one in there.  They would carry away the full one, and leave an empty one behind.

It smelled bad.  To counteract that, a lattice wall overgrown with a thick green vine shielded the door.  Its flowers were orange honey suckles that tried to outperfume the toilet.  These flowers would ooze a thin honey from the centre tube and we would tear them off and suck out the sweetness.  I am living proof that they were not poisonous.

I had a brother.  He was four years younger than me so I could take no notice of him.  I was wise to the ways of the world by the time he came along and he was so dumb, he could not even walk.  But he learned to.  And then, one day, he kidnapped my teddy bear.

I did not tell Denis this.  The memory was too painful.  My brother - I guess he was about two years old at the time - stole my beloved teddy bear and dipped him into the handsomely full toilet pan and painted the result onto the walls.  He was well into the job when he was sprung by my mother.

There was a hullaballoo that he did not understand.  Dumb kid.  I was at school at the time so I was spared the sight of my teddy bear in deep shit.

Mum flushed my teddy bear out, boiled him in the copper and hung him by his ears to dry on the clothes line.  And that's where I found him when I came home from school.




 

Denis among the poppies