Families, eh?

If you are a regular reader of this rubbish, then you may be forgiven for believing that there was only one relative in my life to influence the development of my formative years - my Great Aunt Dolores. This is not the true picture, for actually I come from a large and diverse family. We are a disparate lot - and as such, we rarely have anything to do with each other. I have twelve first cousins, yet I would have trouble recognizing more than a handful of them if I were to pass any of them in the street. There are fat ones, thin ones; rich ones, and poor ones. Some are probably pleasant people, some are undoubtedly not the sort of people I would ever seek as friends. I have no uncles left alive, and only one aunt - and she is blind and hates me anyway. So really, living within a large family is certainly no guarantee to living within an extended family.

However, besides Dolores there was another family member who had an influence on me during my upbringing. My father's cousin - a strangely Quixotic character by the name of Géraint de Braose - was the first person to teach me to appreciate classical music. You might think that there is nothing unusual in this, but in my immediate family there was little appreciation of anything but popular music throughout my early years. Whereas I knew the lyrics of everything Doris Day, Frank Sinatra or Perry Como had recorded (for example), I didn't know my '1812 Overture' from my 'Unfinished Symphony'. Nobody in my immediate family did. And then one day, Géraint dropped by - he pulled up outside our tiny house in his massive and gleaming pre-war open-topped Jaguar saloon, and breezed into our sparsely-furnished living room carrying a record under his arm. Without a word to my parents, he removed the disc currently sitting on the turntable of our ancient gramophone (I remember it was a recording of "Hold Out Your Hand You Naughty Boy" by Alma Cogan), span it onto the cushion of a nearby chair with an almost disdainful casualness, and replaced it with his own.

What came blaring next from the tinny and highly inadequate little speaker had me immediately spellbound and captivated. The recording that he had decided to impose upon us on that spring Saturday morning, was the 'Háry János Suite' by Kodály. From the very opening, with its mischievous musical "sneeze" (a device from Hungarian folklore that, according to Géraint, indicates that everything to follow is not to be believed - I now suspect he may have got that the wrong way round), to the majestic and sweeping grandeur of the finale 'Entrance of the Emperor and His Court', I was totally mesmerized by the outrage and audacity of this previously unheard-of music. My father, presumably thinking it was all a load of rubbish, went off to the kitchen to peel some potatoes and my mother, presumably of a similar disposition, decided it was time to scrub the front doorstep. My siblings (all eight of them) scurried away into the woodwork like frightened mice, presumably to entertain themselves elsewhere. There was only me, awestruck, left alone in the room with my second-cousin. We sat in near silence while the record span its way to its conclusion, interrupted only by a brief explanation from Géraint to the meaning of each movement as it began.

"You like that?" he asked, when the record had stopped spinning. In response, I nodded enthusiastically. "Then there's more. Lots more. I will send you a parcel in the week - let me know how you get on with it, will you?"

The following week I duly received a package - the first time anything had ever arrived at our humble house addressed specifically to me - and I eagerly tore off the wrapping. Inside was a magpie's hoard of sparkling treasures: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Wagner - all names of which at that time, I had never heard. The only trouble was that I had nothing on which to play such delights - the indulgence that my family had offered towards Géraint's intervention was not to be repeated towards me, nor to my pleas for a monopoly of the gramophone. In fact, my elder brother threatened to smash the whole collection if I so much as whispered a suggestion of Mozart's 'Violin Concerto No. 4' ever again. In the end, I had to "make myself useful" to an old Polish widower who lived down the road (the term "child abuse" hadn't been coined in those days), and as a reward he bought me a second-hand Dansette record player which I was able to keep at his house, and on which I was allowed to play anything I chose while he grunted and spat his way to a climax.

I was on my way!