Two Oboes on the Cherwell, and a Boy Who Pestered

“Took the plunge” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. I know, because I have taken it.

Our youngest, Kit, heard a trombone at a Year 4 assembly in March. By April there was a picture of one on my pillow. In May he demonstrated the slide at dinner with a broom handle and took out the gravy. His sister signed his petition on condition that lessons happened at a different end of the house. We held the line on noise and price for eleven weeks.

The school, meanwhile, plans its evening to the minute. The music calendar for Trinity term 2023 lists an extended rehearsal for Madrigals on 6 July, 13.30–16.00, ensemble rehearsals on School Field the next afternoon, then “Pre‐Madrigals Music on School Field and picnics” at 19.00 and the madrigals themselves at 20.00. The picnics are on the timetable. Somebody has thought about the rugs.

School Field, as an old boy, Phil Archer, at the school from 1954 to 1961, describes it, is an island about 100 yards downstream from Magdalen Bridge, with the Cherwell all round it. He is modest about his own schooldays: “We were ordinary mortals then, or I was.”

The boy on the bank was George Caird. He was at another school in the city at the time, and the oboe, once his parents gave in, kept him busy. He studied it at the Royal Academy of Music, played with London orchestras, and spent 17 years as principal of Birmingham Conservatoire. At school he once played oboe in an opera of The Hobbit with J.R.R. Tolkien in the front row.

Kit has had his trombone since July. He is not at the Tolkien stage. He is at the stage where next door has started mowing whenever he practises.

I have drafted a letter asking whether Magdalen would consider a trombone for next year’s madrigals. On a punt. Moored well out.