WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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My mother had been a schoolteacher. She taught us to be inventive, to create

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things. I went to art lessons and learned
how to draw, to paint and then it was

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time to go to music lessons and I
naturally thought I was supposed to

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write music. So, I went home after my
first lesson and struggled away writing

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music and went back to my teacher the
following week with my piece and she was

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so furious that she caned me across
the knuckles and said I had to stop that

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because all the composers were dead and
that was that. So I wrote it under the

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bedclothes for a year with a torch at
night and I loved doing it really and

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also it was like my secret, after all 'all
the composers were dead' so I was being a

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composer and I found that exciting. One
night my parents discovered me and they

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said that's fine if that's what I wanted
to do. They didn't treat it

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as being anything special which is good
because if they had I might have stopped.

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Before Eric's painting most portraits by
other artists that were done of me

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tended to be rather dark and
expressionistic

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whereas Eric's painting brings in the
Sun and there's no anger there because

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I'm not an angry person anyway it's a
real painting of me

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oh, it captures my heart, my soul, my
spirit

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my music, everything.