Vanora Bennett's violin is not a Strad, it's a Vanorissima

It may seem an odd thing for an ex-Reuters hack to do, but for the past two or three years I’ve been making a violin, former correspondent Vanora Bennett writes.

It isn’t quite such an odd thing for me to be doing, however, since, before turning the reporter of accurate fact that all Reuters journalists are, I came from a family of chaotic musicians and grew up with the sound of the flute, piano and cello - mostly my father’s flute - playing somewhere in the house at all hours. I started learning to play the violin myself at the age of five, though I don’t think I was ever that great at it, and I gave it up as a teenager… and, even if I had been the stuff musicians are made of, I don’t think most people who play instruments then start making them. 

In my case, what probably made that transition feel possible was the fact that my father was the rare exception - a professional musician who did mess about with his instruments, improving them at boring moments in rehearsals with the help of the tools he carried round in a decrepit Gladstone bag, or spending hours in his workshop moving the holes and the keys covering them up and down his flutes. At the time he was said to be a bit touched (if harmless). But he ended up perfecting a set of measurements for a beautifully-in-tune flute, now widely imitated and admired. So there was method in his madness.

I remember wanting to make a violin even as a child. There was something very beguiling about trips to Ealing Strings, the shop where our bashed-up instruments were repaired and bows re-haired. But it was only very recently, long after I’d returned from my wandering-journalist period abroad and settled down in England to have a family and write novels that I hit on the idea that finally made me start. I decided to write a book with violin-making characters. Suddenly, once I’d recast it in my mind as work rather than play, it became easy. Within weeks, I was in Juliet Barker’s luthiers’ workshop in Cambridge, being handed a set of violin wood and a plane and given my first instructions.

As I’ve learned over the past couple of years, violin making requires very precise and attentive listening, a willingness to take orders from the far more knowledgeable tutors who edit and improve your work, and a high degree of accuracy in execution. Flair helps, too. In other words, making a violin turns out to require pretty much the same skill set as writing a Reuters news story.

PHOTO: Vanora Bennett with the violin she is making from a Stradivarius 1716 mould. The hand-written maker’s label glued inside its belly reads “vanorissima * cambridge 2013″ - an incentive to finish it this year. ■