Waiting For The Call

I don't have a problem speaking in public, no matter how many people I might be speaking to.

This comes about because of my work in the Arts, where I often had to address a group of people I had not met before, and usually I would be introducing them to the people that would be leading creative sessions with them, when I was the Education Officer for Opera North based in Leeds, or the Development Director for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra based in Edinburgh.

Development is the word the orchestra used in the same context as education, but with the distinct intention that it should imply that the musicians might learn as much from those that they might meet in the context of development workshops as they would impart through demonstrating their skills as musicians.

But there was one occasion when working in Leeds for Opera North that I had enough kittens to fill a cat rescue sanctuary.

The context is linked to my previous blog about my time spent in prisons. I was in the middle of a residency in Wakefield Prison, during which a team of artists including a director, a writer, a composer, a bassoonist, and a maker/designer, would enable a group of lifers on the education wing to create an opera in just a week. From scratch.

And just to make up the numbers, we had with us an entire BBC television crew, to film the entire process for a documentary that would be shown on BBC2.

I was living at the time in a gardener's cottage attached to a substantial walled garden in the grounds of a beautiful house on the edge of Leeds, in which I had worked for five years as part of a co-operative engaged in offering residential meeting facilities for the not for profit sector.

This explains why I was living rent free in this isolated cottage, the nearest neighbour to which was about 2 miles away, after the farmer's cottage just a few hundred yards from the gardener's cottage.

I was at home in this dilapidated cottage, and not paying rent simply because the house needed somebody living in it so that it remained standing. It was cold even in the Summer, because it was entirely North facing, as the garden faced South, which after all was the reason why the house had been built in the first place.

The entire rear wall of the garden would once have been heated, with a coal boiler that was still in situ behind a door that led almost underground. This would have made Spring arrive just a few weeks early, and I suppose would have had the secondary effect of making the cottage more habitable. No doubt for the head gardener, who would have had the duty of stoking that boiler to keep the early Spring frost at bay so that the garden could serve the table for the main house.

This was a substantial but not grand house, and we used the house and its grounds with the good wishes of the current owner who had no use for it personally, and whose generosity extended to encouraging our role in the development of co-operative enterprise around the UK. we paid a peppercorn rent, literally in our contract we had to pay over a peppercorn annually for the privilege of using this small estate that could accommodate 40 people on a residential basis, but daytime conferences of up to 150 people.

There were 15 acres of immediate grounds that came with the house, including woodland and a couple of fields that we allowed local horse-owners to graze for us. And there was a thatched 19th-century icehouse just on the edge of woodland, were ice would have been dragged from the natural frost trap at the base of a sloping field in front of the house. Now part of 150 acres of farmland that was let to a local farmer, and surrounded the house and its grounds, giving it the kind of seclusion that is rare for somewhere just 3 1/2 miles from the town centre of Leeds.

I was at home waiting for the telephone to ring, knowing that when it rang I would be interviewed live on the drivetime programme. I have never been quite so nervous waiting for a phone call, isolated as I was, but with this ominous machine that would connect me to the audience listening to one of the most popular programmes on what otherwise was the classical music channel within the BBC's stable of daily radio.

I have no idea how many people would have been listening, but it certainly must have been in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.

My job was a simple one, to answer the questions of the interviewer, but of course with the intention of doing so in as interesting a way as possible, and inevitably somehow justifying what we would be doing in one of the country's maximum security prisons.

Waiting for that telephone to ring the time of course stretched to breaking point, and all I wished to do was to get it over with, so that I could just get on with enjoying my evening in this fabulous environment. In spite of the cold damp atmosphere of the cottage, there is no doubt it was a beautiful place to live.

And then of course my peace was shattered by the ringing of the telephone, and I suppose it was all over more quickly than I could have imagined.

I think it went well, those that heard it said as much, and even by then I had plenty of experience under my belt. Local radio, even local television interviews on occasion.

But that single occasion still stands out as my most nerve wracking moment, as far from civilisation as perhaps it is possible to be, and yet suddenly speaking, to all intents and purposes, to the world. Terrifying.