The union had previously gone on strike in 19, both times over wages. It was a major industrial action to shut down the British coal industry in an attempt to prevent coal pit closures. The strike, led by Arthur Scargill, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was against the National Coal Board (NCB), a government agency that had managed the coal industry since 1947, when it was nationalized. But in a sense, she also won the battle in the long-term, since my experience with those lessons scarred me to the point where I didn’t play music again for nearly two decades. She won the battle in the short-term, but when she passed away when I was 12 years old, the lessons finally stopped, as my overwhelmed now-single dad didn’t have the time or inclination to force me to continue. My mother and I spent the next six years in a nonstop battle over whether I was going to stick with the piano or not.
And so, she forced me into piano lessons instead, (which I hated) with a very cruel teacher who used to scream at me and hit my hands when I made mistakes, and who considered my own taste in music to be irrelevant and plebeian, which she reminded me of constantly. I had wanted to play bass since I was 6 years old, but my mother – otherwise a sensible, progressive sort – had a notion, (probably deeply ingrained from her own childhood) that the bass guitar was not an instrument that girls played.
I was 15 years old at the time, and I had long given up my own childhood dream of being a bass player.
Billy Elliot - the story of an 11 year old boy from a mining town in Northern England in the mid-80s who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer despite his disapproving family - was released 20 years ago, on September 29, 2000.
0 kommentar(er)
