Practice Night

It wasn't going well upstairs in the band room above the Market Tavern, and even the regulars in the Tap Room downstairs had noticed. Old Jed, now on his third pint of Old Perculier, looked across at Beryl behind the bar and uttered one of his pearls of wisdom through a toothless grin.

'Could be worse, I suppose,' he said, pausing for dramatic effect, ' but not much.'

Upstairs, there was a tension growing in the room that had begun long before a note had been played. Someone from the Caged Bird Society had been in earlier, stacking the band's chairs into the corner and arranging the tables into a defensive square ready for tomorrow's annual show.

'It were t'same last year,' snapped Des, twiddling the valves of his Euphonium furiously. The awkward buggers know it's our practice night. They do this just to annoy us.'

Des's assessment of the situation seemed unanimous. The buggers had known, and it had annoyed them, and the dastardly deed had set everybody off in the wrong key....again.

'Right, we'll try that once more,' said Derek, the band's long suffering conductor. 'This time in the key it's written in please. The key of G major involves F sharps and one or two of you don't seem to have quite come to terms with that fact.

The trombones sniggered, looking for encouragement as they always did, so Derek stared at the second cornets instead.

'From bar twenty-four please, and this time I'd like to hear the hope and the glory. We only have one more practice before we're playing this at the concert.

They got underway again, but the business with the tables seemed to have cast a spell. Tuning was out, the Bass players were half a bar behind, the percussionist went syncopated when he shouldn't have and the soprano cornet was too busy admiring what he'd just dribbled onto the floor from his spit valve, to grace the ending with his towering descant.

Derek stopped conducting and the whole sorry performance came to a stuttering halt as he placed his baton on his music stand and stared at them. Derek was a retired headmaster of formidable reputation, and many of the band's players had been his pupils. They knew that look of old and a guilty silence suddenly filled the room, just like the time they'd been called to a special assembly twenty years earlier when someone had trashed the toilets.

'Edward Elgar,' he began, in headmasterly tone, 'was arguably this country's greatest composer at a time when our country had established the world's greatest ever empire. It was written to stir patriotism, national pride and confidence in our country's leading role in the world. We lived in a land overflowing with hope and glory.' He paused for his words to register and then reverted to his favourite technique. Picking out one individual to terrify everyone else.

'Martin,' he said, aiming his attention, rapier like, at the hapless tenor horn player. 'What would be your definition of the word hope?'

Martin instinctively lifted his instrument a little higher in the hope of disappearing from the group gaze, and put his thinking face on.

'It's that feeling you have when none of your other feelings feel very permanent,' he responded with obvious pride.' It's the feeling of last resort.'

'Good answer,' Derek replied, 'but hopelessly wrong. Hope isn't wishful thinking. It's believing something good is going to happen because you've done the work to make it happen. Elgar understood that. Britain believed in itself. That's what this music is trying to capture. That's why its sung every year at the Proms. You've all heard it on television. Nearly six thousand people singing their hearts out and waving their Union Jacks.'

Downstairs in the Tap Room, Beryl looked across at old Jed, now working his way down his fourth Old Perculier.

'Gone very quiet up there,' she said.

'Aye, they'll all be in the headmaster's study getting a bollocking,' he quipped flashing his toothless grin. 'If ever you're in need a good bollocking, Derek's your man.'

The band struck up so suddenly and with such vigour that the occupants of the Market Tavern all stopped in their tracks. Perfectly in tune and note-perfect, the band blazed through the piece as if some miraculous transformation had taken place, and when they reached the rousing chorus section, everyone within earshot burst into song.

'Bloody hell, Jed, you were right. They must have all been in the headmaster's study. I haven't heard 'em sound that good for a long time.'

'Perhaps as well,' grinned Jed. They're playing that at a concert over in Castleton next week, and you know where Castleton is don't you,' he enquired impishly. 'It's in the Hope Valley.'