‘Once I was sitting in the little kitchen of the Three Choughs at Casterbridge, having a bit of dinner, and a brass band struck up in the street. Sich a beautiful band as that were! I was sitting eating fried liver and lights, I well can mind – ah, I was! and to save my life, I couldn’t help chawing to the tune. Band played six-eight time; six-eight chaws I, willynilly. Band plays common; common time went my teeth among the fried liver and lights as true as a hair.’
THOMAS HARDY, Under the Greenwood Tree
The background sounds of the village were percussive: church bells, the cawing of rooks, and the swish and rumble of traffic. Above that ran the airy noise of children whose shouts, threats, pleas and games simplified on the wind into bleats and swoops. Adult noise was either the careful building of greetings and transactions, or mutters and sighs like those a house releases as it tries to settle.
I lived in that village between the ages of eleven and eighteen, when I was neither a child nor a grown-up and so while I listened, I would not join in. Sometimes adults burst into song. This happened in the pub or in church, but also in my home, where our large empty living room became a kind of second village hall. I would be making coffee for friends in the kitchen when the house would fill with ‘Swanee! Swanee! How I love ya, how I love ya, my dear old Swanee!’
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘What?’
‘That … singing.’
‘But it’s coming from your living room.’
‘Is it?’
‘And it sounds racist.’
‘It’s not racist. It’s some sort of barber-shop thing.’
‘Barber what? Why are they doing it in your house?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me. Let’s go upstairs.’
It was something to do with me because it was my father, the village doctor, along with the dentist, lawyer and bank manager, singing. They did it well and it sounded convincing but, at thirteen, I was mortified. By that age, my singing had been reduced to singing along to records in my bedroom. The shrieking of a gaggle of girls walking down the street might tip over into some blurted lyrics, but this was done to entertain one another and to resist the decorous volume at which life was going on around us. We mimed in assembly and refused to join the choir. We didn’t do the kind of singing that meant joining in.
We required our grown-ups to be grown-ups and so found it unsettling when they dressed up, danced or sang. Still climbing out of childhood, we needed to see the seriousness of what was ahead of us, to make a distinction. The doctor in black-face and a boater? When the police stopped him for speeding on the way home from the performance, he hadn’t even bothered to take his make-up off.
* * *
My father had a friend called Raymond, who was an opera singer. A Yorkshireman, he was bluff and warm, and liked to tell stories about his days in the chorus at Covent Garden when careful timing enabled him to nip out during a performance for a pint in the pub next door. We were fond of Raymond. He lived with his wife in Surrey, or at least I think he did, as he seemed to be perpetually on the road.
For some years, he turned up at our house each week and gave singing lessons and so we would come home from school to hear the women of the village going through their arpeggios and scales. There was something unbearable about hearing them struggle to make a real noise. We expected strength from our grown-ups, and would rather have them confidently burst into song than display such querulousness. It reminded me of the way women who enter a room late sometimes creep as if doubled up by shame, and there is something shameful about that.
Their noise was not loud but it carried. We hurried through our tea and biscuits, and went to turn on a radio or the television, to shut doors and pull pillows over our heads because it was like having a bird trapped in the chimney. Wherever you went in the house, you could hear this tremulous flutter: ‘a aa A AA A aa aah … a aa A AA A aa aah … a aa A AA A aa aah … a aa A AA A aa aah … a aa A AA A aa aah …’
If there were a sound that something makes when it gets on your nerves, then this would be it. I wonder now if it was those arpeggios that kept Raymond on the move up and down the country – a flock of birds too timid to fly, flapping along in his wake: ‘a aa A AA A aa aah …’
* * *
Music was the only thing that filled that living room. My mother’s madrigal choir met there for a while and I remember them standing around congenially, as if huddled on a church path waiting for a newly married couple to appear. Then someone would raise a hand and they would start to sing, filling the room with a noise that billowed and folded as if tidying itself away. They might have been folding laundry.
The English are keen on the madrigal, a relatively modest form adapted from the Italian, like the sonnet and at around the same time. It has survived from the last Elizabethan age to this, and has about it a complicated stoicism: ‘Of joys and pleasing pains, I late went singing.’ I liked these songs for their melancholy but they had a neatness I found unsettling. They were so carefully arranged, their dark corners so well swept; no heart could be broken by a song like that.
The choir carefully completed each sound and each song. They looked the same at the end as they had when they started, and softly departed, helping each other back into their coats, buttoning up and checking their torches before setting off home.
* * *
At Whitsun, Morris Men would appear outside the pub on the green. I never saw them arrive or leave or become, and can only picture them now mid-leap, those portly silvering red-faced chaps who smiled as if their smile were what got them off the ground. They wore flimsy white trousers and shirts, red ribbons around their elbows and knees, and sometimes a waistcoat or sash. They waved sticks and handkerchiefs, and clinked with tiny bells. Someone played a concertina and that is what the music sounded like – squeezed out. It was effortful and repetitive, and punctuated by the clack of their sticks and the trivial smash of bells as they stamped their feet. It seemed joyless to me.
Morris dancing is hundreds of years old and no one seems to be sure of what it means or where it came from. No wonder it sounds and looks like something that has got stuck. Anyone making their way across the green on a Whitsun afternoon would get stuck too. Walking past, I wandered into its tempo and found myself unable to move. This stuck music would be an augury of the leaden summer to come when I would be here with my family or away with my family, and nothing would happen until September.
* * *
Teams of carol singers began to arrive in mid-December. They were raising money for the victims of famine, a new church spire or the football team’s kit; to send deprived children to a farm, or pensioners to the seaside. They were good and bad, sometimes twenty-strong and sometimes just a couple of teenagers who forgot the words and held out an unlabelled tin. They all came to our house because we lived in the middle of the village and while we children liked to turn off the lights and hide, our parents would throw the door open, join in, give them all something and more often than not pass round mulled wine and mince pies.
On Christmas Eve, the pubs emptied just as the last bus got in from town and the villagers made for Midnight Mass. My father attended the Protestant church, which was sunlit and hearty and had a gourmet vicar who was keen on ceremony. It was a more professional operation than the Catholic church my mother had adopted. Gloomy and marooned, this was a squat building set back from the road alone with its graveyard, which was walled in by poplars.
For the village to be out and about at midnight was a remarkable thing and it prompted a kind of all-round benevolence. At the Catholic Church, drunks wandered the aisle, tramps were given a seat somewhere warm and no one laughed at Judge Smallbone’s organ playing, even though he might play the last hymn again or something else altogether. I was happy to join in and sing, and only withdrew back into my teenage self when it came to ‘making the sign of peace’ when I chose to pre-empt any hugs with a handshake.
* * *
In the seventies, the English countryside was half feudal, half looking to the future. Men touched their caps as the squire went by while farmers sold land to property developers. My father cured warts by touching them with a gold watch but he also kept ampoules of diamorphine in a locked cupboard at home. There was less nostalgia than there is now, and more evident history.
The village was not the silent place it seemed, or that I perhaps wanted it to be. From when I arrived I saw it as a place to get out of, and tripped over myself in the rush to grow up and leave. I did not like to think that it had any effect on me, but I was caught up in its rhythms and could not escape its music.
The quietest day of the year was Armistice Sunday. I was usually still asleep as the parade approached the war memorial outside my window. Each year the men were fewer and those left had grown smaller. It was always cold and grey, and while I knew they must be wearing their medals on their black buttoned-up coats, I could not make them out. The same man played a shaky trumpet voluntary each year but the sound I remember is the drum to which they marched – the slow strong beat of something you wish would pass or wish had never come to pass, and that was caught in its moment and so could not move on or go away.