Working by themselves in rooms filled with other people’s most intimate belongings, piano-tuners give the impression of wanting to be somewhere else. They’re known to jump at unexpected sounds. At the sight of blood they’d run a mile. And yet early in 1943 Eric Banerjee, along with some other able-bodied men, was called up by the army to defend his country. ‘Mr Banerjee wouldn’t hurt a fly’—that came from a widow who lived alone in the Adelaide foothills, where her Beale piano kept going out of tune. It followed that, if a man as harmless as Eric Banerjee had been called up, the situation to the north was far more serious than the authorities were letting on. For the piano-tuner it could not have come at a worse time. He had a wife, whose name was Lina, and a daughter who was just beginning to talk. It had taken him years to build up a client base, which barely gave them enough to live on. Then almost overnight—when the war broke out— there was a simultaneous lifting of piano lids across the suburb of Adelaide, and suddenly Banerjee found he couldn’t keep up with demand.
