By

Craig Ennew

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Two: Killing Pianos

This week: Craig grapples to get rid of unwanted baggage in the form of an unwanted piano…

By moving from our four-bed semi in town to ‘The Shack’ in West Lulworth, we are effectively ‘downsizing’. This is a fashionable Gen X term to describe the action of eschewing offspring before drifting into an uncomplicated but enjoyable retirement.

With us it’s less straightforward: we are moving to a smaller property, we will be simplifying our lives, but The Boy, bless his odd Pokémon / Minecraft socks, firmly keeps his place in Team Ennew.

Effectively, our house at Kings Road occupies 1400 sq feet of space as opposed to 950 in the Dorset bungalow we hope to buy and renovate. In short, we need to chuck out of a lot of our shit. Some of the shit we acquired with the house. The previous owner was, as we now are, eager to sell and offload. At the time, he sold us a selection of his imposing Victorian furniture for £400: a dresser, a Jacobean-style sideboard and a dining table as well as countless dusty framed prints that stank of fags. In a sober moment, thinking that he’d probably parted with these too generously, he then offered us the bespoke shelving in one of the bedrooms for a grand. That was what it had cost him to have them measured and made, he said. We politely declined, but ended up keeping them anyway.

Our vision for West Lulworth, should the sale go through, will be a clutter-free minimalist’s dream. There will be no space for tat or mantelpiece kitsch.

There will certainly be no place for the piano.

“Pianos are about as difficult to get rid of as Liz Truss at a Tory Party conference.”

At some point in your life, someone will offer you a free piano. My advice here is to keep on walking by. Pianos are about as difficult to get rid of as Liz Truss at a Tory Party conference. Unequipped with this knowledge, we’d acquired one just after we’d moved to Kings Road. I’d always wanted to play and, like millions of other deluded non-musicians, rather fancied that a sparkling Liberace lurked beneath my sombre teacher’s tweed. So, thrilled with our good fortune, I actually hired a van to pick it up. Pulling away, we could hear the sounds of gleeful hand-rubbing as the back of our van scraped along the floor. We parked it in the dining room and over the passing months I forgot about it. The instrument sat, forlorn and neglected, doubling up as a makeshift laundry basket and magazine rack.

Musical Innards: The Sound Board

During Lockdown though, I spotted an opportunity to avoiding teaching our son proper subjects. “We can learn to play the piano together!” I announced to my wife, whose silence acknowledged my dubious motives . Undaunted, I spent £60 for the subscription to a tutorial app– probably more than the piano was worth – and lessons began. During the first, The Boy and I found out that the thing was hopelessly out of tune- and there were no socially-distanced piano tuners nearby. We also found out that three middle keys weren’t working. Nevertheless, I proceeded to write all the note names on the white keys only to realise that I was using a permanent marker Sharpie. During the second (and final) lesson, my son called me an idiot and stormed out, not before slamming his fists on the lower notes in protest. Short of being able to play Billy Joel’s My Life with one finger (initial attempts of Piano Man proving hopelessly optimistic), I was an abject failure as both pianist and tutor.

Therefore when, years later, we got around to decluttering and downsizing, the piano was one of the first things that had to go. Our piano proudly made its inaugural appearance on Facebook Marketplace. I didn’t mention the tuning issues or the missing notes, as I thought anyone would be over the moon to snap up a free Joanna. But no. Not a single bloody bite. I then found out it was on the list of things that Wiltshire County Council would most definitely not take away – even for a modest fee. A man-with-a-van quoted a figure not too shy of £200 to do so. That clearly wasn’t happening. “Not a problem,” I told my wife, “I’ll just take a sledgehammer to it, and we can take the parts to the tip.”

I Googled how to dismantle a piano – but of course, like all blokes, I didn’t bother watching the second half of the YouTube video. This happened to be the important half – the one with the health warnings. For me, everything seemed quite straightforward – there were bits you could just lift out or unhinge – even the keys slipped out nicely. Easy-peasey, lemon squeezey, I thought.

Finally, I was left with what I later found out was called the ‘sound board’. To the uninitiated, this is the bit in the middle with the strings and the cast iron harp – all screwed on to a big block of wood with giant, stubborn brass screws. I first found out how heavy this was when I pulled the last wooden parts of the case away, only for the carcass to tip onto me. My body literally could not support the weight, and as I tumbled back, it slid down my torso to land on the floor with a cacophonous thwang of many grumbling lower notes. With a huge amount of effort, I managed to heave it upright to let it embed itself into the plaster of the dining room wall. Possibly our second knock-through.

Now I realised I had a problem – but as yet I was blissfully unaware as to the extent of it.

I decided I’d take my conundrum back to Facebook – The Dull Men’s Club to be precise. This was either a huge mistake or it saved my life – to this day I remain uncertain which.

The Dull Men’s Club has over a million members worldwide so, let’s face it, there are going to people who know something about pianos, surely? This turned out to be something of an understatement. Within hours, over four hundred people had answered my query about how to get rid of the section of a piano that is heavy as a silverback gorilla. I skipped through the usual banal suggestions – turn it into wall art (how strong are their walls, for Pete’s sake?), make a coffee table out of it, use it as a bloody giant wind-chime – before a reply by Morgan, a piano tuner from Texas – caught my eye. ‘Have you heard of exploding fermenting watermelons?’ he asked, somewhat cryptically, ‘well this has the potential to be more devastating.’ He must be exaggerating I thought – he’s American after all; but other contributors were backing him up. With all that tension in its many strings, the bloody thing was a ticking time bomb about to explode, they said. I was regaled with stories about taut strings whipping from the pins to embed themselves into the ceiling; of metal shards flying like shrapnel into bodies; of one poor soul who, oblivious of his piano’s vengeful rage, had his eye taken out. I stepped back from the piano and a shiver of horror ran through me. Only hours earlier, I had been letting Frankie whack the strings with my hammer with gay abandon. Unwisely, I decided to share my fears with my wife.

After a while, she retrieved her jaw from the floor. ‘Right,’ she said. She grabbed hold of me by the arms and shoved me out of the dining room. She shut the dining room door, her eyes closed as she leant against it. “No-one is going in that room until that thing is made safe,” she said. I wondered if there was any such thing as a Piano Disposal Squad.

I wish there was some neat ending to this post. As I write, the innards of that wretched piano remain intimately acquainted with the dining room wall. The dining room remains firmly out of bounds.

An online scrap metal dealer tells me he might take the piano off our hands if I get rid of the wooden bits. Frankly though, I’m coming back to the wall art idea. If I could just drag the bloody thing around to the side of the house and lean it against the brickwork at a jaunty angle, the next owner much just appreciate its aesthetic appeal…

©Craig Ennew 2024

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