As I sat in the bay window of my Edinburgh tenement, a large owlish face suddenly loomed through the glass. ‘Here for the tuning,’ came an American drawl. As the man spoke, what looked like a miniature cheerleader’s pom-pom bobbed on his chin. I stared until I realised it was a neatly coiffed and purple-dyed goatee.
Although I was expecting him, it was a startling appearance. Leaning on a cane, he was sporting a golden polka-dotted bandana, a blue printed shirt under a pinstriped suit jacket and baggy trousers that semi-concealed sausagey toes packed into sandals. The overall picture was one a child might produce if you asked them to draw a pirate.
I opened the front door and he swept past me into the hall. Kicking off his sandals, he made straight for the living room, big meaty feet slapping on the bare wooden floorboards. ‘You’ll have to clear away your trophies,’ he commanded, gesturing to the knick-knacks on the piano top.
I’d found the piano tuner Ben Treuhaft on Gumtree where his profile picture grabbed my attention. Based on this image, I’d half-expected a hippy who’d never returned from orbit, not the appraising glance that hit me through the window or the funny observations that poured from him all afternoon. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, however, as Ben’s advert also mentions that he’s the son of the ‘muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford’.
Jessica, or ‘Decca’, was one of the Mitford sisters, the six aristocratic siblings whose bold lives have fascinated the British public since they were first splashed across the pages of the society weeklies in the 1920s. They were later chronicled in Decca’s sniggering memoir Hons and Rebels, and fictionalised forms of their various relatives populate her eldest sister Nancy’s novels, which prickle with the family’s distinct silly-nasty humour.
Continuing interest since their heyday has spawned the ‘Mitford Industry’ of countless articles, biographies and even an upcoming TV series, creating an almost mythical aura around the family.
Two of the sisters, Unity and Diana, had close connections with the Nazi party. Adolf Hitler was stalked by a besotted Unity in Munich, and was an honoured guest at Diana’s wedding to Oswald Mosley. As the runaway ‘red sheep’ of the family, Decca fled Britain for the USA, where she devoted herself to left-wing causes.
It was staggering to consider all this as Ben fixed the wonky piano in my living room. ‘It amazes me as much as it amazes you,’ he agreed. ‘Mostly I know this stuff through being told it as a little kid.’
