A Broken Reed

Memoir Contest Second Prize

by Lee Dickman

I was born tone-deaf. The story runs thereafter from a cucumber frame through a mouth-organ to a bar of soap.

I was the youngest of six brothers, three of us at home—the older ones had already left. Some of my elder brothers had learned to play an instrument, piano and violin mostly, but when my turn came, family financial problems intervened; I was not offered any musical education. 

First one brother, then another, learned to play the mouth-organ, becoming quite proficient, experimenting with bass-harmonicas, reading sheet music, playing duets and eventually forming the melody section of a small amateur band, “The Happy Harmonics.” I loved to hear them practice, but whenever I tried to sing along with them, the resultant discords had me banished from the room.

I compensated by learning the words of all the songs they played.  It was by no means sufficient, and I longed to be able to join in the fun.  Eventually, I was offered a bone.  A reed on one of the instruments broke, and I was given the discard to play with.  At the end of our back garden, behind the vegetable patch, was a cucumber frame.  The glass was broken, it was choked with weeds, but the concrete surround made a comfortable, and sufficiently remote, seat for me to experiment.  One brother gave me a manual for a simple tune, in the blow-suck-blow code using the numbered holes. Gradually, over some months, I somehow began to make progress, play a few more simple tunes, and to my surprise, and my brothers’, I found that I was able not only to hold a tune but, by ear, to play others without the code.

A war intervened, “The Happy Harmonics” was  disbanded but I clung to my mouth organ and my new-found ability to make music.  By the time I volunteered for military service I had progressed to an instrument with all its reeds, and over the next few years, initiated many a sing-song in camps in South and North Africa and Italy. Usually, it was a few of us in a canteen, but it grew to larger groups, the occasional concert, and, on one memorable occasion in the Western Desert, I was invited by the touring ENSA group to keep things going while they – mostly professional musicians – took a tea break. 

I had their microphone and amplifier, and started a sing-along that grew in momentum and far exceeded the ten minutes I was allotted.   Everyone clapped in time to tikkiedraai – “Suikerbos” and “Sarie Marais” (Afrikaans folk songs) and the requests came thick and fast. I was fortunate in that I had learned to play, by ear, most of the wartime songs through previous requests and I skipped the ones I didn’t know.

It was a wonderful experience for me.  I don’t imagine for a moment that it was the skill of my performance that went down so well – they would have sung as enthusiastically if I had just waved a banner with the words; it was the occasion.  Far from home, sick and tired of the everlasting sand, and flies, the uncertainty of tomorrow, surrounded by fellow sufferers, it was a chance of letting off steam for most of the several hundred young voices, but it thrilled me that my thin melody led this outpouring; I was making music. It made up in some measure for the banishment I had suffered in the past.

The instrument I had with me was becoming old when months later, in the closing days of the war in Europe, we drove into the Maximilianplatz in the center of Innsbruck. The emperor, petrified atop his 50 foot column gazed impassively as we drove around the circle.  It was completely deserted.  Not a single person about, every shop window boarded up.  One faded sign above a small shop caught my attention “Musikinstrumente” and beneath that, among others, the magic word “Höhner”. I peered through a crack in the shuttering, and there it was; the familiar tortoise-shell box, the curved lid, the name in plain block capitals; the Höhner Super 64 Chromonica, unavailable since the outbreak of war. 

I hammered on the wooden slats. Harder and harder.  Eventually a dim light came on, a wooden side door opened, a timid face peered out.  Quickly I shouted in my stumbling German “Kann Ich Kaufe – mundharmonika?” (Can I buy- mouthorgan?).

She opened the door fully, a small blond woman with a toddler on her hip.

“Are you English?” she asked. 

It turned out that she was; had married a German engineer studying at Manchester University.  He was somewhere on the Eastern Front, his father, who owned the shop, was frail and bedridden – she was frightened and bewildered.

“But can I buy the mouthorgan?” I repeated.  She dithered - had no idea of price- finally, shyly, she said, “Would a bar of soap be too much to ask?”

I ran to the truck and searched through my small pack.  I found a cake of Lifebuoy soap, still in its red and yellow paper.  I also grabbed a half-wrapped bar of chocolate  and hurried back to claim my prize. When I offered the chocolate to the boy, he shied away.

“He’s never had chocolate before,” she said.  She broke off a piece and put it in his mouth.   The expressions that flitted across his little face would have been comical had the circumstances not been so sad.  Initial refusal, query, surprise and a gradual beam of pleasure as he stretched out both chubby arms. “More!”  he mumbled.

I reverently opened the box – yes, exactly as I had imagined it.  As I hugged this treasure  and turned away to the truck, I knew that for all the mouth organ had ever meant to me, its real value was a bar of soap – and the delighted smile of a cherub who had never tasted chocolate.