FOUR
The False Young Man
Shirley, Dolly and their mother Dorothy on the Railway Bridge at Coghurst.
Dolly and I first sang in public at Oakhurst Hotel, on The Ridge at Hastings; it was a large Edwardian building set back from the road, and not too far along from another guest house, Netherwood, where Aleister Crowley had lived for a couple of years, until his death in 1947. Known as ‘The Great Beast’, among other titles, he had a reputation as a person to keep clear of – and I know that when Dolly and I were walking along The Ridge to The Harrow where our Uncle Wally and Aunt Nell lived in their Tudor farmhouse, we'd always cross to the other side of the road and creep by. Then run!
Oakhurst itself might have been equally alarming to some people, as it was where the Hastings Communist Party held their meetings and social weekends, and it was on these occasions, because of our mother's Party membership, that Dolly and I were invited to sing. So out would come the Czechoslovakian guitar that Dolly had bought on instalments from an advertisement in The Daily Worker, and which, since she hadn't learned to play it properly, she put in open tuning, laid across her knees and strummed. We sang, in two-part harmony, our rather limited repertoire: some were family songs, some from school, others we'd picked up from the radio. Josh White was our favourite; an African-American, he had a series of radio programmes on the BBC in the early 1950s called My Guitar is Old as Father Time. He had a lovely gentle presence that came across the airwaves, and he sang blues and spirituals in his soft, sweet voice. His theme song was:
I can tell the world about this
It wasn't until recently that I learned that he'd had a long recording and singing career also as Pinewood Tom, that he'd been blacklisted by the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s in the States, and later was an activist in the Civil Rights movement. So he was a hero. Recently, when I was checking his name, I came across the fact that at some point in the 1940s there had been a plan afoot in Hollywood to make a film: Alan Lomax & The Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. It was proposed that Josh White would play Leadbelly, and Bing Crosby, Alan! Josh was honoured in June 1998 when his likeness appeared on a US postage stamp.
Other radio favourites included Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell and Jo Stafford, who sang folky pop songs such as ‘Shrimp Boats’. The only one we learned was ‘Two Brothers’, a song about the sweethearts of two brothers on opposing sides in the American Civil War.
One wore blue and one wore grey as they marched along their way
It ended with the loss of one of the brothers:
Two girls waiting by the railroad track for their lovers to come back
It really touched us: it was anti-war without the point being hammered home; it had a lovely tune and we could harmonise it in a way that pleased us. We practised our singing at the top of the stairs where there was an enhancing echo, and we thought we sounded really good. We sang a few other anti-war songs that Dolly had written. I still can't get out of my head the line ‘a bullet hit him in the battle’, which always made me smile to myself back then, wondering which part of the body was ‘the battle’. How callous and superficial youth can be.
There were other advantages to be found at Oakhurst, too, such as the Christmas that Mum won a chicken in the raffle! (It was still the years of chicken being a Christmas-only treat). Another was that one of the more earnest members of the CP fell in love with Dolly, but she scorned him. So he'd take me to the pictures instead as second-best, and he'd always bring a box of chocolates for me to take home to Dolly. He chain-smoked, and kept offering me cigarettes, which I accepted and tucked behind my ears to give to Mum.
Romance did blossom for Dolly, however; it was at Oakhurst that she first met a young conscientious objector, Jonathan Clowes, an intellectual and an activist who was then earning his living as a painter and decorator. He was a dark-haired, black-bearded young man, very thin, who wore brown corduroy trousers that were too large for him and which he continuously hitched up, chuckling as he did so. It's a gesture that I still associate with him, as he didn't lose the habit later in life, even when he became a very successful literary agent.
I, too, was to meet a man at Oakhurst who became of importance to me, although not romantically. John Hasted was a Marxist and a lecturer in physics at London University. He was a tall, rather gangly man with a cheerful but vague manner. He was a poet, too, but more essentially for me, he loved folk music. He told me about Cecil Sharp House in London, the headquarters of The English Folk Dance & Song Society, about the library there, where there were hundreds of books of folk songs for me to pore through. He played guitar and five-string banjo and had enthusiasm and a generous spirit. Later I would see how much like Pete Seeger he was: the same tall, rangy figure, exhorting his audience to join in the choruses as he sang; the same light of fervour in his eyes. In John I found my first Communist folkie, a man whose passion for Socialism (in which I had very little interest, feeling bludgeoned by it at home, and blaming it for the loss of my father) meshed with a passion for the folk songs in which I was very, very interested.
He encouraged young people like me to sing; I would later join the evenings in London when he ran ‘singarounds’. He was also a supporter of The Workers’ Music Association (the WMA), an organisation founded in the 1930s to promote songs of the working-class struggle. In 1939 the WMA founded Topic Records, still to this day the most important folk music record label in Britain. By the early 1950s, left-wing politics and folk music were drawing even closer together. It was John who suggested that Dolly take lessons in classical composition from the WMA's founder, the composer Alan Bush, and for two years Dolly travelled every fortnight from Hastings to the WMA in Paddington. She flourished under his tuition. But that was all a little in the future.
Like so many ordinary people then, I hadn't been away from Hastings, or travelled at all (apart from being evacuated). The furthest we went from home as children was when Mum and Dad treated us all to an evening or Sunday afternoon outing on the Maidstone & District Buses. The coaches were lined up along the promenade, each with a wooden noticeboard denoting a destination. By far our favourite was the ‘Mystery Tour’. You didn't know where you were going but you were certain to end up at a pub out in the countryside. Children weren't allowed inside pubs, but Dolly and I were always content to sit at an outside table with a glass of fizzy lemonade and a packet of Smith's Crisps – no flavoured ones then, just a twist of blue waxed paper with a helping of salt to shake over the crisps. The salt sank to the bottom of the packet, making the crisps almost inedibly salty; but we still ate them, and licked our fingers clean.
Sixty miles up the road from Hastings, the post-war world was awakening in London, but by the age of sixteen I had been there just twice. Once was a school trip to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank in 1951. It was all thrilling, but I was especially taken with Richard Huw's ‘Water Mobile’ sculpture, a series of elegant steel containers. As water poured down through the arrow-shaped funnels, each in turn tipped as they filled, the water cascading to the one below; a beautiful sight and sound. It was a great outing, only spoilt by having to write an essay about it the next day at school.
The only other time was when Dolly and I travelled, in our early teens, to World's End, the more lowly part of Chelsea, to stay for a few days with Uncle George and Aunt Edith – or Dixie as she liked to be called, a far racier name that she'd acquired when she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the War. George was an artist, and his flat was filled with his satirical paintings of workers and bosses. It was from here that Dolly and I ventured out into the posher, more exclusive streets in search of Laurence Olivier: Uncle George lived among painters and actors, and he knew where ‘Larry's’ London home was. We lurked across the road, and by some miracle, he appeared, and gave us a jaunty salute. We both burst into tears, overwhelmed. But we deserved this little bit of attention – after all, we'd spent all of our newspaper-round earnings to see all his films. Henry V thrilled us, and we'd seen Hamlet at least ten times when it was showing at The Gaiety in Hastings for a special fifteen-day run. In those days, you could stay in the cinema and see the whole thing a second time round – no wonder we virtually knew Hamlet by heart. We sobbed over Wuthering Heights, and I can still sing the music composed by Alfred Newman that played over Heathcliff's words as he holds the dead Cathy in his arms:
O Cathy, my heart's darling; hear me this time Catherine at last. I cannot live without my life; I cannot die without my soul…
Once we'd cycled the thirty-six miles to Cranbrook and back to see him as Lord Nelson in Lady Hamilton, although it turned out to be our least favourite. We didn't really like to see our hero with only one arm and one eye.
Around 1952, when I was seventeen, I went to Furzedown Teachers’ Training College in South London. It had been proposed by the head teacher of my school, and as Mum was very keen on girls being educated, I went along with it, living in one of the student halls, but I felt at such a disadvantage there with very little and sometimes no money. Dad was supposed to send me a postal order for a few shillings each month, but it mostly failed to arrive. In any case, teaching wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and I left after the first year. At home, things had changed a bit in the time I'd been at college. Together with other Oakhurst regulars, Jonathan Clowes, our Uncle Fred (Mum's brother), and Barbara and Henry Chapman, a would-be playwright1 met at one another's homes to discuss writing, music and politics. Jonathan, although politically committed, wasn't over-earnest. There was a lingering sense of wry humour and fun about him. Dolly found him handsome, intelligent and excitingly different, and it wasn't too long before they had a committed relationship. He soon moved in with Dolly – and the rest of us! – to Athelstan Road. What Mum made of this I don't know; she was enough of a prude to object, but sufficiently romantic to allow it.
My first job was in Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street where I was a counter assistant on jumpers, the garments all neatly folded and laid out on display. The customers couldn't touch the goods – they had to ask to be shown them. I'd lift out a jumper and hold it up for the woman to look at, and perhaps feel. All well and good if they decided to buy it, but if not, you had to fold it up and return it in pristine shape to the others.
My time-keeping was hopeless – I simply couldn't sort out how the Underground worked, because from Highgate Tube the line separated at Camden Town, one going to the City, the other to the West End; I'd end up rushing to another platform but getting hopelessly muddled. One morning this made me so late I decided not to go in to work. The next day, my supervisor sent for me to explain my absence. I had to think fast! ‘I had to go home to Hastings to see my mother. She's ill.’
I was trying to cry to make it more convincing.
‘And how old is your mother?’ asked the supervisor.
‘Ummm’ – a quick reckoning here – ‘thirty-nine? Forty?’ It didn't work. She gave me a very hard look and what sounded like a suppressed snort before she handed me my notice.
My next job was in Collets Bookshop on Haverstock Hill – a much easier Underground ride from Highgate. The manager was Edgell Rickword, a First World War poet. Just the two of us worked there; it was reasonably quiet, and I was more than happy looking through the bookshelves ‘acquainting’ myself with the stock. It was here I found the two volumes of Cecil Sharp's and Maud Karpeles's English Folk Songs From the Southern Appalachians, a collection that was, at that time, unknown to me. They were priced at sixty-three shillings for the two volumes, one of ballads, the other of songs. I bought them with my first two weeks’ wages – thirty-two shillings a week. I had to live very frugally for a while, buying buns for lunch from the baker across the road, and a packet of dried chicken noodle soup for my evening meal. With no protein and no vitamins I got very run-down that winter, and had painful chilblains on my heels. It's called ‘suffering for your art’, but I maintain to this day that it was the best money I ever spent.
First published by GP Putnam's Sons in 1917, the year following Cecil and Maud's field trip to the Southern Appalachians, the two volumes were then put out by Oxford University Press in 1932, with a reprint in 1952 – these were the volumes I bought. They were hardbacks and quite weighty, the boards of a deep blue/green linen cloth (though faded now), with a green Foyle's label stuck down on the inside left-hand corner, and the price – ‘63/– 2 vols’– lightly written in pencil. Volume 1 (Ballads) included a fold-out map showing the counties in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, where the songs had been collected. I pored over the songs, delighting in their number and variety, enthralled by the thought of their survival and discovery in the mountains – songs that had travelled over with early settlers, indentured servants and ‘transports’. (Yes, people were transported as criminals to America before Australia was even discovered.) I was thrilled, too, that I knew some of the English versions of the songs, and I was utterly beguiled by the names of some of the singers: Philander and Napoleon Fitzgerald notable among the men, and by the given names of the women: Luranie, Zilpha, Tempa, Sina, Memory… Where did those names come from? And crucially, in many of the songs and ballads, although they remained remarkably intact, the names of the characters were often changed, the place names, too; and sometimes the stories were muddled, parts of one ending up in another. Well, of course that also happens in our tradition at home, too, but here in these books it was right in front of me on almost every page.
It was the intensity of many of the love songs in particular that held me.
Come in, come in my old true love
I can't come in, I won't sit down
For I ain't got a moment's time
But when you were mine, my old true love
And your head lay on my breast
There's many's the star shall jingle in the west
Sharp collected and published several versions of each ballad, and it's fascinating to compare them to other Appalachian versions, let alone our English ones.
I love, for instance, the absolute forthrightness in ‘Little Musgrove’, when the adulterous pair, Lady Barnard and Matty Groves, first clap eyes on each other in church: ‘He looked at her, she looked at him, The like was never seen…’
So that's that! Not much you can do about such a coup de foudre – but it does result in a lot of bloodshed!
I learned some of the songs straightaway and started to sing them. ‘The False Young Man’2 was one of the first. ‘The Foggy Dew’* another, with its closing two verses, so unlike the twee and rather misogynistic ending of some English versions taken up by trained singers, sung so coyly with a knowing half-smile: ‘Now I am a bachelor, I live with my son…’
I taken this girl and I married her
In many of the ballads it's the directness, the instant power of the words, that hits me hard, such as in ‘Lady Margaret and Sweet William’:
Sweet William arose one May morning and dressed himself in blue
We want you to tell us something about the long love between Lady Margaret and you
I know nothing of Lady Margaret's love, I'm sure she don't love me
But tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, Lady Margaret my bride shall see…
It's cold, it's cruel and you know there's tragedy to follow.
The Appalachian books were newish when I bought them all those years ago; now they have a slightly fusty smell and the covers are faded, but I still treasure them. As I pored over them when I first owned them, I could never have dreamed that in 1959 I'd be in Appalachia collecting songs myself, or that in 2014 I'd be asked to write the preface to the book The Dear Companions, a selection of the Sharp/Karpeles Appalachian collection, published by the English Folk Dance & Song Society.
As my repertoire began to grow, so too did my experience of life in the big city. It was while working at Collet's Bookshop that I paid my first ever visit to a bank, to pay in the week's shop takings. I felt so nervous; the bank felt so grand and imposing, even though it wasn't a large branch. I had pretty much the same feeling on entering it that I used to have when seeing a policeman on his beat – guilty, although entirely innocent, as if the bank staff might suspect I was a robber or, more likely, that I had no right to be there. I didn't have my own bank account until I was twenty-six; I'd only ever had savings stamps books. It was a common feeling in the society of the 1950s, a time in which seemingly every situation drew a distinct line between the classes.
A couple of times a week I'd go to Birkbeck College where John Hasted was running the evening singarounds he'd told me about back at Oakhurst in Hastings. I was so nervous, and so excited the first time I walked through the tall iron gates at the entrance to the college, and stayed that way all evening, waiting for it to be my turn to sing, longing for it, but dreading it. John was always generous with his comments to us young singers; he encouraged everyone, was never critical, and sometimes accompanied us, playing guitar or five-string banjo. How good it was to hear the songs enhanced by simple harmonies. There was quite a mix of singers there, some members of John's London Youth Choir. Judith Goldbloom (later Silver) was one, Fred (later Karl) Dallas another. Fred wrote political songs with choruses which we all dutifully sang.
In the month of July in the year of ‘54
There were slates off the roof and there were holes in the floor
There were rats in the cellar, and we hadn't got a cent
And the landlord came and told us he was putting up the rent
‘Wimoweh’ was another favourite tune, and again we'd all join in the choruses. I sang some of the songs I'd heard at home, and others that I was learning from my first incursions into Cecil Sharp House, the HQ of The English Folk Dance & Song Society. Sometimes it felt to me a bit like singing very earnestly around a campfire – although the only experience I'd had of that was in the Brownies, before I'd been thrown out at the age of eleven. I was really upset by that; I had loved my uniform!
Shirley in the basement of the Troubadour Cafe, Earl's Court, London circa 1954 (Herb Greer).
I sang occasionally with John and Judith at the recently opened Troubadour Coffee Bar in Earl's Court where there was a folk club in the basement, known as the Cellar. The ‘Troub’ was owned by a charismatic Canadian couple, Mike and Sheila van Bloemen. They had leased the premises – a grocer's shop – on the Old Brompton Road and decorated it in a way that for its time was completely innovative. The Troubadour stood out splendidly on the street (and still does). Sheila made a large birdcage out of wire containing two artificial birds, and placed it in the window. It drew a great deal of attention from passers-by and inspired friends to make their own birds, which Sheila hung inside. The walls were covered in murals and political posters and hung with various artefacts that the couple found in markets and junk-shops. The coffee tables were low, their surfaces of colourfully decorated tiles, while the handsome heavy wooden front door was carved with medieval figures.
Mike and Sheila had transformed the basement with various musical instruments hung from the walls. Like all folk clubs at the time, it was very smoky, lit by candles with very little fresh air coming in. The fug was added to by several male singers who, before they started a song, would light up a cigarette and stick it onto the end of a guitar string, letting it burn away under their noses. Of course, it wasn't only folk clubs that were full of smoke in those days, it was virtually everywhere – pubs, cinemas, offices, buses, even the doctor's surgery.
Mike and Sheila needed an assistant in the coffee bar, and offered me the job. I gave up my bedsit in Highgate and moved to one in Earl's Court, where I could walk to work. I served in the café, learning as I went. I can only remember serving coffees and pastries, spaghetti bolognese and scrambled eggs with herbs. In those days though, you couldn't buy fresh herbs, only dried, acrid so-called mixed herbs. The first time I served the eggs, the customer came straight back and asked what quantity of herbs I'd added. ‘A heaped teaspoonful,’ I replied. She laughed, quite kindly though, and advised me to put only a pinch in, and waited while I made a fresh serving. I'd never had spaghetti before, unless it came out of a Heinz tin, so I was rather bemused when I was instructed to boil the pasta itself in a massive pan, then transfer it to tall sweet jars, ready for almost instant use – just a plunge in hot water before I served it. I learned how to make the bolognese sauce (more dried herbs!) and to make the dish look tempting by grinding parmesan all around the outside. And all this while serving coffees and such – it got pretty hectic sometimes. I preferred the customers, like a rather grumpy Richard Harris, who sat nursing a mug of coffee all morning – much less trouble.
I sang occasionally at the folk club downstairs, where there was quite a variety of guest singers from all over the country; Alex Campbell, a tall roguishly attractive Scot; a young Martin Carthy (well, we were all young then, weren't we?) who inflamed the passions of the ladies, and impressed with his guitar playing and his repertoire of songs; Dominic Behan who sang Irish rebel songs and who grew more vicious the more he drank; Louis Killen from Newcastle, a fine singer of a great many long ballads about sea-battles, which he sang in his strong Geordie accent and which, I must confess, I gave up trying to follow. There was the Scots duo Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor who went on to become household names with their regular appearances on BBC TV's Tonight programme and Hootenanny.
I loved it when the genuine traditional singers came down occasionally, such as Seamus Ennis, the sublime uilleann pipe player, singer and story-teller – ‘a lean greyhound of a fellow’ as Alan Lomax described him.3 There was The McPeake Family from Belfast, whose song ‘The Wild Mountain Thyme’ became surely the most sung anthem in the folk world; and the great Irish singer and tinker Margaret Barry, knocking people out with the power and intensity of her voice and her remarkable presence. But the most popular of all was the American Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, who sang a lot of talking blues in a very laconic style. He was joined by another American, the very laid-back Derroll Adams, who wrote ‘Portland Town’, a song that the audiences loved and sang themselves into a trance-like state with its repetitive chorus. So when another visitor arrived from the States, he was thought of as a young upstart. His name was Bob Dylan. Jenny Barton (now Hicks), who was running the club at the time, told me that he asked to sing, so she gave him two songs: he sang them, then disappeared for the rest of the evening into the toilet, smoking some substance or other. I didn't reckon him much at the time, but other people said – years later – they recognised his genius straightaway…
Ewan was a looming figure that you couldn't ignore, although I had taken an instant dislike and mistrust of him the first time I heard him sing. I found him pretentious and pompous, although those probably aren't the words I'd have used then. I simply knew that here was a vain, conceited man and, to my ears, not a convincing singer. And his habit of turning a chair round, straddling it backwards, before tipping his head back and cupping one ear with his hand made me giggle – it looked so silly. This image of him hovers into view in my mind occasionally; I try to dismiss it as quickly as I can, along with the memory of the evening he invited me to his home to look at his collection of books. He was already undressing the minute I walked through the door. I fled, furious that I'd wasted money on the bus fare.
But I have to acknowledge that he sang some very fine songs, and I even learned three and later recorded them, ‘Proud Maisrie’, ‘Richie Story’ and ‘The Cruel Mother’. I entered a folk-singing competition at Cecil Sharp House singing ‘The Cruel Mother’. I was so nervous that at the end of every verse I lost control of my voice and sang every last line in a sort of tremolo. There was nothing I could do about it, and it certainly didn't go down well with the adjudicators, who criticised it as if it had been intentional! I longed to tell them it was entirely involuntary. I didn't get placed in the competition, but at least I was put forward to sing in the evening concert.
Even so, wary as I was of Ewan, in the mid-1950s I accepted the part in the production. All I remember of it now is the one song, its tune, and the lines ‘I may be gone a year or more in Kenya or Malay’. What I remember far more clearly is how inept I was as an actress, and Joan Littlewood's attempts to turn me into one, admonishing me because I couldn't make my moves across the stage while emphasising the rhythm of my song. I was far too self-conscious. It was the same paralysing embarrassment that I felt when walking past a building-site where the labourers wolf-whistled anything female that went by; your legs wouldn't work properly and you knew your bottom wobbled. I'd invited Mum up to see the final dress rehearsal with an audience, in a hall near King's Cross, and at the end, after we'd taken our curtain calls, I jumped down off the stage to greet her. Joan fetched me back and tore me off a strip for being so unprofessional. She was quite right though about my behaviour – it was absolutely against theatre etiquette. I cringe now when I remember it.4 But for good measure she also told me not to wear eyeliner! And it was Ewan who had told me off for wearing nail varnish – according to him it wasn't what folk-singers did. Ewan and Joan had been married at some point; what was it with these people and cosmetics?
I've written about the trips to both Warsaw and Moscow and the time I sang in the Kremlin in my book America Over the Water (2007). But I hadn't included that it was in Moscow that I met a tall, slender young New Zealander, Tom Shanahan. He was from a farming family, and was travelling the world before settling down back home. He had light straw-coloured hair, pale blue eyes that had a distant look about them, and I was thrilled when he said he was travelling to London after the festival, and would get in touch.
We saw a bit of each other in London while I was working at the Troubadour. It was Tom who first introduced me to curry. I can picture it clearly. I sat opposite him reading the short, typed menu in its stained plastic cover. I didn't want to appear ignorant or unworldly, and I thought it wise to be safe, so I ordered egg curry. It was tasteless; hard-boiled eggs in what passed as a curry sauce on a mound of boiled white rice. On the next occasion I thought I'd be bolder, and ordered a vindaloo. I ended up with streaming eyes, a dripping nose and a red face. How could romance survive that? Still, it did for a little longer.
Our relationship was an unnerving experience as I had to smuggle him up three flights of stairs to my bedsit, tiptoeing as quietly as we could – visitors were forbidden. My landlady, who lived on the premises, kept an ear and an eye open – and a very sharp eye it was, too. We were caught (although not in flagrante), but still embarrassing enough. I was given notice to quit, kicked out of my London room in disgrace.
However, it wasn't that that ended the romance; it was scuppered by my mother. Tom played a trombone, and he brought it with him when I took him down to Hastings to introduce him to Mum and Dolly. We all sat round the fire in the front room to listen to him play, and although he played very well, he emptied the accumulated saliva from his trombone into the fire, where it sizzled. My mother's distaste was palpable. In any case, he was here in Europe to travel, and that was that.
Back in London, while I was still attending John Hasted's evening singarounds, another person had entered the scene – Peter Kennedy, son of the then Director of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, Douglas Kennedy. Peter was working for the BBC, recording folk song and traditional music throughout the British Isles. Douglas was rather patrician, Peter far more egalitarian, and he too started running evening events at Cecil Sharp House. It was virtually the same set-up as John's, except that every once in a while Peter would bring up a genuine traditional singer from the country and set him or her down amongst us. What a revelation this proved to be. It was here that I first heard George ‘Pop’ Maynard sing and Harry Cox, Bob Roberts and Phoebe Smith. Quite simply, George and Harry both stole my heart, reminding me of my own Grandad, who had died while I was in college.
Both in their seventies, modest, courteous men, they sat in the basement café in their country clothing, knitted waistcoats, flat caps on the table beside them, drinking tea, before coming into Storrow, the room where we all awaited them. And then they sang. Their voices were perhaps not as strong or melodious as they once had been, but there was a gentle dignity about them both that felt heroic; it was authentic, honest and with a direct beauty that simply wasn't there in younger singers; and they sang in their own local dialects. Their songs were a revelation, too; songs that they had known and loved for many years and which went directly into my heart. I had my first real inkling then of how a song should best be sung, simply and directly. That became the touchstone for the rest of my life – no dramatising a song, no selling it to an audience, nor over-decorating in a way that was alien to English songs, and most of all, singing to people, not at them.
I now had a foothold in Cecil Sharp House, but I wanted to gain access to the famed Vaughan Williams Library. It was almost like storming a fortress there was such a resistance to letting me in. You'd have thought they'd be pleased that I cared so much, but it wasn't like that. Perhaps it was a class thing: the Society was very upper middle class at the time. Just imagine, the presumption of a girl from the same class of people the songs had been taken down from over many years! Eventually, with Peter Kennedy's help, I was allowed in. I worked my way through the books; their allure was more powerful than any obstacles put in my way.
Because I couldn't read music, I first went for words that appealed to me: certain songs just leapt off the page, as if demanding to be sung, to have life breathed into them again. I copied the notes of the tunes down on manuscript paper, and later when I went back down to Hastings, Dolly played them on the piano for me. If I liked the tune, I learnt the song, and this was how I first started to build my repertoire. Later I had the opportunity to listen to the field recordings of collectors such as Peter Kennedy, Bob Copper and Alan Lomax, and that was a cornucopia. It's also the best way to pick up songs, learning them in the same way as they had been handed down over generations – by heart.
Recently, before Malcolm retired, he and I were in the library and I mentioned that the first song I ever copied down there was ‘I Drew My Ship Into the Harbour’ from John Stokoe's Songs & Ballads of Northern England, published in 1899.5→ I told Malcolm I could still visualise the moment I took the book off the shelf some fifty or more years back. He went to a shelf and held out an edition of the book. ‘No, that's not it,’ I said. ‘It wasn't on that shelf, and in any case it had a dark blue cover.’ He then went to another shelf (where I knew I'd first found it) and lifted another book out. ‘That's the right one,’ I told him. He was impressed by my memory, and I was pleased that I'd been vindicated, and had also proved to myself that those memories that are so clear to me are true ones.
Most of all I felt I was part of them and of the music of England.