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That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tan Houser and Pomp and Circumference March. The sharpie who egged Billy on to this fatal enterprise was named Jeremiah Feldfloh, which Ellen has trouble getting right; she tries Flyblow, Fieldflow, Freeflow, Feelflo, Fallfly, Flowflaw and numerous other permutations, most suggesting the evanescence of entrepreneurship.
Despite her little learning, Ellen is something of a student of the language. She ponders little oddities of British speech: "I wonder why everything always has to be nice, a nice cup of tea, a nice plate of bread and butter." Not surprisingly, the term brothel attracts her attention: "That is a terrible word and yet also a funny word, kind of domestic in a way, it always brings back my aunt saying when I was a kid living with her: Drink it all up now, that broth'll stick to your ribs." She looks at stale sayings with new eyes: "Don't cross your bridges till you come to them is my motto, though how you can cross a bridge before coming to it I've never properly understood."
Best of all, she makes her disreputable old father seem oddly heroic and their life together, despite the troubles, a comic romp. To read The Pianoplayers is to understand Ellen's observation, gleaned from watching those music-hall routines at Blackpool, on the infectious quality of laughter: "Once an audience starts they'll go on all night."