Open Writing

I do not claim to be stone deaf, but I do believe it could be a great stimulus to my singing if everyone else was. That way people would never know what they were missing when I gave my vocal chords an airing in song.

I remember when at school being called upon to render my version of ‘Admiral Benbow’. It was so far off key as to be almost in the next street. There were times when I didn’t seem capable of talking in the right key.

The first song I ever remember being sung properly was in Woolworths at Blackpool one very wet and very windy Easter holiday in the early 1930s. I was with my parents and Woolworths in that particular instant was one of the few undercover areas where one might shelter from the inclement weather -- for nothing. There were other people in the store, about 75,000 it seemed to me at the time. They too heard the music being played, on a gramophone record as it went round and round and round. No one could actually walk in that throng. We all simply aped the record and shuffled round and round and round. It was later claimed by my father and substantiated by my mother that, “Ther’ wor that many fowk i’ t’place yer cud ‘ev walked on ther’ ‘eads.”

I learned from later conversations that a week’s holiday had been planned, but by the Tuesday enough was enough, and we packed our traps and came home. However, that was not before we had made around two dozen visits to Woollies, where the same song was continuously being churned out and recordings of it sold for 6d.

The song?

‘The bravest man was Captain Brown
And he played his ukulele
As the ship went down.’

Powerful stuff, and had we remained outdoors we too would have drowned in all probability. There would have been no need to wait until the tide came in.

In that same era a girl of similar age to myself lived in our vicinity, and hadn’t she got a voice? Without any deliberate intention of hyperbole I can state that her voice was brassily strident and stentorian. When she sang, nay shrieked, her way through a rendition, the roof slates on our row rippled across all ten houses.

What was it she persisted in repeating time after ear-splitting time?

‘Wheezy Anna, Wheezy Anna,
Down where the watermelons grow,
And they’ve all got pips in.’

Somewhere around the same time, there presumably occurred a long dry spell of weather. This was recorded in another song of early memory and ran:

‘It ain’t goin’ rain no more, no more’

followed by the intriguing question:

‘How in the heck
Can a fellow wash his neck
If it ain’t goin’ to rain no more?’

Couple these two masterpieces of musical composition with a further gem telling that

‘In eleven more months and ten more days
They’re goin’ to turn me loose.
In eleven more months and ten more days
I’ll be out of the calaboose.’

They don’t write songs like that anymore. It’s all shallow stuff that is churned out these days, ones which raise no in-depth curiosity or demand answers to penetrating questions such as:

‘Who was it that was in the calaboose?’
‘Why was he there’ -- presuming it was a man.
‘Was he worried because he couldn’t wash his neck?’

We in our gang wouldn’t have been. Mind you, mushy songs were written, although we, as ten and eleven-year-olds couldn’t figure out what a chap was doing ‘South of the Border down Mexico Way’ if he wasn’t chasing bandits -- the Mexican variety -- as per t’ pictures on Saturday afternoon.

Also, why should someone voice the appeal, ‘Oh, play to me, Gypsy?’ Everybody’s mother said gypsies pinched children and ran off with them, and we knew for a fact that gypsy peg-hawkers gave the evil eye to any housewife who didn’t patronise them. But we never saw anyone transformed into a frog. We would have enjoyed seeing that. We knew a few women for whom we would have willingly paid the price of transformation had we possessed the wherewithal.

With military recruitment drives in the early 1930s, intended to relieve the unemployment situation and bolster the armed forces, a selection of songs suggesting the attractions of a martial lifestyle came into being. There was ‘Around the Marble Arch.’ There was also a ruder version which we sang when well out of parental earshot. ‘There’s Something about a Soldier’ was another.

However, it was my father who unwittingly introduced me to a more cultured form of musical appreciation and away from what my wife’s grandfather called ‘Red Indian music’, and that was played by Henry Hall!

Father had bought a wind-up gramophone, a table-top model. Floor space was unavailable for one of cabinet dimensions. My high chair and toy cupboard saw to that. In fact it was my presence which curtailed any further purchase of records, thus breaking all his dreams of rapture and tranquillity. Nevertheless, there was a tidy collection of what was referred to in some circles as ‘high brow music’, and Father deeply appreciated the renditions. ‘Captain Brown’ was not among them.

Even at my tender age I realized the reverence paid to the playing of such music since it was most noticeable that prior to every musical session he always took his clogs off, the sign of a dedicated devotee. When the BBC broadcast ‘Messiah’, I would see him sat beside his home-made wireless set, score in hand, humpty-tumptying, muttering and chuntering his way through it -- all unintelligible to an eight-year-old.

With Dad’s demise I inherited the lot. Mother had died ten months previously, so gramophone records and, equally important, needles all came into my possession. Well, the wireless had to go. We couldn’t afford the license fee, accumulators and batteries. We only had gas.

But I did give those records some needle. I learned the words of many of the recordings, ‘Father O’Flynn,’ ‘A Wandering Minstrel’, ‘Oh Thou that Tellest’ and ‘Rejoice Greatly’. I did. I played and replayed the discs, picking out the words, trying to hit the groove which held a missing word and failing to do so many times, with the result of a scratch which obliterated half the verse as well.

‘Aum Brau Mia Fu’ baffled me. That was in a foreign language, an’ ah cud nobbut speik Yorkshir’, so I’d to give it a miss. Yet ‘Messiah’ then ‘The Gondoliers’, ‘Mikado’, ‘Merrie England’, all were literally flattened in my renditions.

Mendelssohn escaped. He wrote ‘Songs without Words’, so I pom-pommed to them and tapped out a tattoo with a baton I’d shaped for the purpose, thus leaving the cabinet top on which the gramophone rested with a permanent pattern of indentations. These varied in depth according to the form, tempo and volume of the music. Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque’ was quite light relief, but Rossini’s overtures copped some stick.

Then disaster stuck. Disaster spelled TOM. I became curious and asked myself, “What makes the gramophone turntable turn?” With the aid of a screwdriver I found out. But afterwards the table never again turned in its original orderly fashion. Erratically, spasmodically, eccentrically, yes, but smoothly and regularly, no. Grandma didn’t mind. At least she knew where I was, even if she didn’t know what I was doing. That made two of us.

Thus my education in the world of ‘cultivated music’ came to an end. Shortly afterwards the gramophone went to the salerooms, as did the remainder of the house contents, and I went to live with godparents. There was a wireless there. I hadn’t heard one play for five years, and since screwdrivers were taboo in its vicinity, I became indoctrinated into ‘Red Indian music’.

Yet the melodies of the Masters remained ever with me, and today I am still transported into realms of rapture and delight by the outpourings of my Magnificent Trio -- Mozart, Beethoven and Johnny Walker.