The Big Grey Building

Chapter 6 Scaleville

"We are now coming to the little village of Scaleville," announced Minnie, pointing to the side of a hill, where there was a row of eight houses, some of them separated by fences.

"Oh, look!" said Annette. "All the people have come out to meet us. They must have known we were coming."

Sure enough, there was a row of eight people, just like the row of eight houses they lived in. When the two travellers reached them, Minnie said, "I'll introduce you to Mr Doh first, as he is the most important. Mr Doh, I'd like you to meet Annette. Mr Doh lives in that first house, which has 'Tonic' written on it. Mr Doh is a baker, and, as you can see, he is very rich."

"Tell her about my pet rabbit," said Mr Doh.

"Oh, yes! Mr Doh has a female rabbit - a doe."

"And my brother has a female deer - that's a doe too!"

"That's his brother on the other end of the line," explained Minnie. "He lives in the top house, which is also called 'Tonic'.

The next person in the row had shining eyes, from which rays of light seemed to be streaming. His name was Ray. "Ray lives in that second house, which looks like a space-ship. The words on it do not say 'Super-sonic' but 'Super-tonic.' This doesn't mean it's any better than the Tonic; it just means that it is the house after the Tonic."

"Why is there a fence between those two houses?" asked Annette.

"Because Doh and Ray are a tone apart. And so are Ray and Me, because this is a Major village."

"What do you mean by Ray and you?" asked Annette. "You are not part of the scale."

"No, Me is the name of this next boy, the one who is pointing to himself. The name of his house is 'MEdiant', because it is halfway between the Tonic and the Dominant. As you can see, his house and the house called 'Sub-dominant' have no fence between them. This is because Me and Fah are a semitone apart, so they have to be right next to each other."

"I see. And is that Mr Fah, way back there in the distance, waving at us?"

"Yes, that's right. And his house is called the 'Sub-dominant' because it is just a little lower than the Dominant."

"I suppose this next person lives in the Dominant house," said Annette. "What is his name?"

"Soh!" said the man she had just spoken of.

"So what?" asked Annette.

"Just Doh, plain old Soh - that's my name!"

"Mr Soh is a farmer," said Minnie. "He sows seeds in the ground. At the moment, though , he is sewing up a hole in a pair of socks, one of his favourite hobbies."

"That's right," said Soh. "The only part I don't like is the job of making the holes in the first place. I'm thinking of employing somebody to do it for me."

"Mr Soh's house is called the 'Dominant' as it is the most important apart from the Tonic. In fact, if Mr Soh moved the fence on his left to the space between the Mediant and the Sub-dominant, then he would become a Tonic himself and he could change his name to Mr Doh. The Super-tonic would become his Dominant."

Annette thought the conversation was getting a bit complicated so she turned to the next person, who was merrily singing, "La la la la la", etc.

This is Mr La," said Minnie. "He lives in the next house, which is called 'Sub-mediant' because it is halfway between the Sub-dominant and the Tonic. And this next man is Mr Te. He likes drinking tea, and he plays golf."

"Because of the tee, you see," said Mr Te, and he gave a little giggle. "Tee-hee!"

"Mr Te lives in that house that's leaning over, second to the top," said Minnie. "Its name is the 'Leading Note', because once you're inside it, you are only supposed to go out the back door, straight to the Tonic. Unless you are part of a scale passage or something, when you have just come from the Tonic. So, here we are, back at the Tonic again. We are an octave higher than when we started. And here is Mr Upper Doh, Mr Doh's brother."

"Pleased to meet you," said Mr Upper Doh, "and now, Minnie, we have some news to tell you. We have just found coal near the village, and we are all going to be miners. So we want you to help us make our Major village into a minor one, by helping us move a couple of fences."

"Certainly," said Minnie. "Annette and I will help you."

"Which fences are we going to move?" asked Annette.

"Well," said Minnie, "how do you change a major scale into a minor one?"

"You lower ther third and sixth notes."

"Yes. That's the Mediant and the Sub-mediant. But we can't just lift up houses and out them over the fence, so we move the fences instead. The Supertonic and the Mediant have to become a semitone apart, so we will move the fence between them to the other side of the Mediant, next to the Sub-dominant. Then to lower the Sub-mediant we'll move the fence between it and the Sub-dominant to the other side, next to the Leading Note. Here's a plan of what it has to look like."

Minnie drew a diagram on a piece of paper: — / — — / — / — — / / — —.

"The squares stand for houses and the lines for fences. It goes: tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, one and a half tones, semitone."

"But how are we going to move the fences?" asked Annette. "They look very heavy."

"Ready, everybody?" called Mr Doh, and then took a huge fork out of his pocket.

"That's a tuning fork," explained Minnie.

"It doesn't look like one," replied Annette. "It looks more like the kind of fork we eat with."

"I never eat with anything but a spoon," interrupted Mr Doh. "Now, if everybody is ready …"

He held the fork up in the air, hit himself on the head with the prongs, then touched the end of it onto his foot. It made a musical sound."

"Sing C!" he called out.

And everybody sang "C".

"Call it Doh!"

Everybody called it Doh.

"Sing the pillartones!"

Everybody sang, "Doh, Mi, Soh, Doh', Soh, Mi, Doh."

“Sing Doh, Mi!"

"Doh, Mi."

Everybody was singing "Mi" except for Mr Me himself, who was staning with his hands behind his back, looking very embarrassed. Still they all sang, except for Annette, who had fallen out of breath.

"Louder!" yelled Mr Doh. "Now - flatten it."

Gradually the note went down, like a very slow siren, until it was a semitone lower.

"Keep singing! Don't stop!" screamed Doh, as the rest of the crowd turned blue in the face, singing E flat at the tops of their voices.

Then a strange thing happened. The fence between the Supertonic and the Mediant got up on a row of little legs and walked right around to the other side of Me's house, and sat down again. Immediately, everyone stopped singing, some of them sinking to the ground exhausted.

"You see," said Minnie, who recovered more quickly than the others, "the fence gets so disgusted when it hears an E flat where an E natural should be that it gets up and moves to the other side of the Mediant house, to make the E flat correct. In a moment they will do the same sort of thing for the Submediant."

"Tea-break!" called out Mr Doh. Mr Te stood up and ran off to his house, coming back with a teapot and a tray of tea-cups.

"What would you like to drink?" he asked Annette.

"But you have only got tea there," replied Annette. "Even if I did want something else you couldn't give it to me."

"Nonsense! Of course I could. Why, I could even give you a glass of lemonade - if I had some."

"But you haven't though."

"That has nothing to do with it! I repeat, what would you like to drink?"

"Water," said Annette, to test him out.

"All right, then!" said Mr Te, and he shouted, "Everybody sing C!"

"C!" sang everybody.

And suddenly Annette found that she was standing in about six inches of water. She seemed to be at the beach, just a little way out from the shore. On the beach was the hill with the eight houses, and their owners were still standing in a row on the sand, drinking tea.

Just then Minnie came rushing into the water. "Come on, Annette," she called. "What are you doing in there?

"I don't know,: said Annette. "It just appeared from nowhere."

"What did?"

"The sea."

"But you know how that happened - they all sang C!"

"But they did that before and nothing like this happened."

"Yes, it did. You probably weren't paying attention, so you mightn't have noticed."

Annette thought it would be difficult not to notice that she was standing out in the ocean, but she quietly followed Minnie out of the water.

"I'll take you to see the Staff now," said Minnie. "They fixed their other fence up while you were asleep."

"But I wasn't asleep!" said Annette, impatiently.

"Of course you were," said Minnie, apparently surprised that Annette didn’t know this. "In fact, you still are!"

"I'm not!" said Annette.

"But you are. This is just a dream, and you'll wake up soon and see that I'm telling you the truth. Meanwhile, come and see the Staff, while you've still got time."

Annette could not think of a way to prove she was not asleep, and she did not like to argue with her new friend, so she followed her away from the beach, along a narrow track to a railway station. "This is where we catch the train to Staff City," explained Minnie.