Or a woman’s voice sang and reached a little beyond expectation …
RAINER MARIA RILKE, ‘The Vast Night’
The women in our family have one voice. People cannot tell my mother, sister, daughter and me apart on the telephone. Sometimes I play back the answering machine and think I have left a message for myself. When it comes to singing, though, my mother’s glassy soprano stands apart. The rest of us have dry, deep singing voices. We strain in church and at carol concerts; as the descant rises, we crack and hold off and concentrate on the underpinning.
My mother never raised her voice. A doctor, she was clinically pragmatic. When she dislocated a finger, she set it herself. When there wasn’t time to bake a cake, she served up the raw mixture for pudding. When she couldn’t get four children to stay in bed at night, she used our toddler harnesses to strap us in. (There were times when we cried out to remind her, ‘Reins! Reins!’) She had a lucidity which was dazzling and liberating but in some ways too clear. Sometimes I did not want to see more than I expected.
Even when the question has been formulated, it can be impossible to ask. My mother was so private and I felt so conditioned not to know her that it would not have occurred to me to ask whom she’d had lunch with, let alone how she was. Yet we reveal something of our nature when we sing, something that can be disguised in our speaking voice. It’s as if we are opening the door to an inner acoustic, and the acoustic of my mother’s voice was absolute space. When she sang me to sleep I felt at peace, but it was like being settled into emptiness. I felt love and unboundedness and whenever I sing, those are the sensations that arise.
What we sing to a child who is too young to sing along is perhaps as undirected as what we sing to ourselves. My mother’s singing was not a plaint, but the arrested atmosphere of ‘Greensleeves’ or ‘Scarborough Fair’ was clearer to me in her tone than it ever was once I understood the words. While I was still too young to follow a story I held on to details, which her voice laid out with forensic care (my father had first seen her in the dissection room of their medical school, cutting up a body): a longboat, a narrow street, a cambric shirt, all the pretty little horses.
Folk songs, show tunes and sea shanties were freed of their theatrics, their images clarified into light and shadow. ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’ had not a whiff of rum, seasalt or jolly Jack Tar about it. For me, it hung on the line: ‘Put him in the longboat till he’s sober.’ I saw the tall side of a ship, the drop into the dark, the deep water and somewhere out there, not adrift but apart, a place of punishment or rest – which, I couldn’t tell. In ‘Cockles and Mussels’, Molly Malone ‘wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow’, and this again is what held my attention – the small girl and the towering houses: the idea of a journey through the dark alone. I was fascinated by the oddly sombre ‘Pretty Little Horses’ and when my mother sang of those ‘Blacks and bays, dapples and greys’, they rippled across my mind as elusively as sun on water. Elsewhere, I conjured substance out of sound: the ‘cambric shirt’ of ‘Scarborough Fair’, roughly hemmed with two hard ‘c’s that stuck in the throat; or the stretchy length of the trailing ‘Greensleeves’ on which that song repeatedly tugged.
Before we were old enough to catch the bus, my mother drove us to school, sometimes still in her dressing gown. My swaddled baby brother rolled around in the back while we older ones squabbled and she sang: ‘Who will buy this wonderful morning? Such a sky you never did see …’ I realise that this might have been ironic. Then again, she could have been trying to get us to notice that it was a wonderful morning.
We don’t sing when we’re feeling harassed. Her singing was part of her coolness, like the cool white hand she placed on my cheek to wake me each morning and the cool way she held me when I was in a frenzy, as if she were marble and I were bubbling mud. It was part of the hauteur with which she carried herself so you knew that if the car broke down and she had to walk across London in that frilly sky-blue dressing gown she would do so gloriously. She still had the regal posture of a debutante, and above all she wouldn’t give a damn. Just as she would do anything for us, she would do anything.
This sung world was serene in its truthfulness and without comfort. It sent me off into space and, from early on, the idea of deep space became a source of consolation. I closed my eyes and trusted my mother’s voice even as it seemed to let me go, because I understood that it was releasing me as an act of love.