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Friday 17 August 2018

WORDS & MUSIC



Those of us growing up during the second world war and the years that followed were exposed to a range of words and music that today have largely vanished. We were encircled by music in those fragile years but it was a collective experience rather than that which today’s child might be more accustomed to, where a background of popular song is conveyed via earphones or savoured for minutes at a time on mobile phones and Ipads. The melodies that preoccupied us came from The Wireless and even the poorest home possessed one and so our music was also the music of our friends and neighbours.

Reigning supreme was Music While You Work a half hour programme featuring non-stop popular tunes, twice daily, mid-morning and mid-afternoon and every household in Northfleet tuned in. Those with more upmarket tastes and a yen to become socially upwardly mobile , whose ranks I aimed to join, were able to sample the delights of such programmes as Desert Island Discs presented by the legendary Roy Plomley and thus occasionally listen to Chopin waltzes and light opera sung by Richard Tauber. For the highbrow or lowbrow and all in-between, The Wireless inevitably became The Radio at some stage in the nineteen fifties when it was only referred to as The Wireless by people of our parent’s age who were decidedly old fashioned and vaguely embarrassing. Our particular set was very similar to that in the houses on either side of us, a large polished wooden box that might almost have been classed as a piece of furniture if only a little bigger. It evidenced its own importance with its stylish design, contoured and rounded and highly polished with an important looking speaker dominating its face. A number of knobs and a dial sat smugly below the speaker. One knob simply turned the set on and off and twisting to the right adjusted the volume. Another, used much less frequently searched for stations, listed temptingly and mysteriously and sounding like destinations on some long distance European train trip. A smaller knob of different shape adjusted the tone and another selected long, medium or short wave. I think it was a Murphy Model 674 and it had cost an astonishing nine guineas when purchased in a sale in 1939, a joint wedding gift to my parents from a group of aunts. Later I learned that my youngest aunt, the much derided Freda, had managed to get her name included on the card but had failed to contribute to the purchase which apparently was Just Like Her! Despite this sad confusion concerning a most significant wedding gift The Wireless immediately became a prized possession and was given its own specially built shelf in the corner of our kitchen, high enough to ensure that I wasn’t able to fiddle with its knobs, which I longed to do. And to ensure the continuity of on-call news and music all that was henceforth needed was the broadcasting license which cost a not inconsiderable ten shillings a year until it doubled in 1946 and became one pound! According to Old Nan who had suggested the set as a suitable wedding present in the first place, this development was nothing short of Daylight Bleeding Robbery. Rightly or wrongly we wireless owners could not take our daily dose of news and music completely for granted in those days.

During the war more modestly designed radio receivers were available for hurriedly wed young couples with knobs only for volume, tuning and on/off. Presumably these were made to government specifications and were unable to receive long wave which ensured that we British would be unable to be influenced by German propaganda. As I grew older I became increasingly fascinated by the wide range of European radio stations that could apparently be sampled and more than a little peeved that my mother seemed disinclined to avail herself of the opportunity to do so. This had not been the case during the war when we regularly listened to Radio Hamburg becoming more and more infuriated by what the dastardly Germans were telling us. Not, I hasten to explain, that I understood any of these developments but I was more than aware of what I should think and believe. Not a day went by without a relative or neighbour reinforcing the fact that Adolf Hitler needed to be Strung Up and that generally speaking all things German would contaminate normal people like us if we got too close to them. That was why breathing the same air as POWs was particularly dangerous and so we must cross the road if we saw a group of them heading towards us bent upon some community work project. These were facts and the BBC confirmed our prejudices on a daily basis, there being in those days no local radio where alternative views from the man in the street might be heard. Some time after the war when a new channel was launched called The Third Programme I would have liked to investigate it properly but my mother maintained that it gave her the creeps.

When my mother and aunts were children, before the advent of regular broadcasting, music for the working classes was that which they produced for themselves via sing-songs in the pub on Friday and Saturday nights starting with Two Lovely Black Eyes and ending with Roll Out The Barrel. Everyone knew the words and prescribed order and as the decades passed the ritual changed little so that the youngest of us listening from our beds in the late 1940s were comforted by the sounds radiating from locals like The Volley.

Those Northfleet families aspiring towards the lower middle classes and perhaps living in Springhead Road rather than Shepherd Street had at some stage wisely invested in pianos for their parlours and held more genteel sing-songs without the aid of beer and gin. Their repertoires were also more refined featuring such numbers as Come Into The Garden Maud and I’ll Walk Beside You. My grandmother who was completely familiar with most popular music hall numbers viewed these parlour songs with more than a little suspicion regularly noting that they were more for the Toffs than the likes of us. It was undoubtedly due to her background of singing for the amusement of theatre queues that I became word perfect in such numbers as Waiting At The Church, Boiled Beef and Carrots and Oh, Oh Antonio by the time I was three. Because of the amusement this caused among adults not completely familiar with the depth of deprivation that existed in our family background, I was prone to burst into song at the slightest encouragement and bask in the attention that followed. It was perhaps this attraction for the music of the masses that years later caused equal surprise and merriment when my pre-school son entertained the unwary on trains and buses with She Was Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage neatly demonstrating that he had the same desire to draw attention to himself as his mother at a similar age.

Just as our experience of music differed substantially from that of those that followed us, so did our experience of words. We may not have been educated to a level that might ordinarily be described as equipping us with an elevated vocabulary but it is true to say that there was a depth and richness to the language we were familiar with. Although by the nineteen sixties and seventies daily life in North Kent had gone through enormous changes, three decades earlier it was not particularly unusual for the smallest child to ingest and assimilate ideas and knowledge unconsciously and so large tracts of verse were learned seemingly by osmosis and no-one considered this to be unusual. By the time local children were five years old they not only knew the words of the songs their parents and grandparents routinely sang, but also their prayers and a wide range of rhymes and jingles. The more determinedly religious had also absorbed and could quote a variety of Bible verses. The very first nursery rhyme I could repeat on command was when I was eighteen months old – Hark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town, some in rags and some in jags and one in a golden gown. Six months later my repertoire had grown to include such ditties as Bye Baby Bunting, Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross, Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket, and Goosey, Goosey Gander. By two and a half I knew all routine nursery rhymes including a reasonably full rendition of Who Killed Cock Robin. This was not surprising because even those women sadly lacking a depth of maternal instinct and with a weakness for alcohol such as my grandmother, were somehow or other familiar enough with the oral tradition of England to be in a position to pass it on to their own children, who did likewise. And so those of my generation inherited an oral folklore and became totally aware of nonsense jingles, lullabies, counting formulas, puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, tongue twisters, nursery prayers and singing games. Under the circumstances it was not all that surprising that a selection of more impudent music hall melodies, though less suitable for infant consumption, were effortlessly added.

It would be accurate to say that back then more people were expected to know songs and hymns than are these days where the tradition seems to have remained only in the villages of Wales. This was not so in the 1940s when women sang on factory assembly lines whether they were regarded as having Good singing voices or not. There was then less self-consciousness as far as performing was concerned. My mother had a very good voice, inherited no doubt from my grandmother and when she sang people listened and complimented her. And so she became in the habit of doing so regularly and her singing formed part of my very first memories so frequently did I wake up to Sonny Boy, Always, It Had To Be You, April Showers, After You’ve Gone, As Time Goes By and Night and Day. So with complete ease the lyrics of popular song were also absorbed into my sub-conscious so that they too became part of my words and music frame of reference.

And The Wireless continued to ensure that we became acquainted with all the numbers that rose to the top of the popularity polls so that Peg O My Heart and Now Is The Hour remained firm favourites with me and my friend Molly before she went on to diversify and become Doris Day’s No 1 fan, in the process becoming word perfect in yet another raft of lyrics. Not surprising perhaps, because this was still at a time when children could reliably sing the National Anthem and were familiar with the hymns loved by The Anglican Church. Abide With Me, Rock of Ages, Jerusalem, He Who Would Valiant Be, also became so ingrained in memory that I would be able to recall them decades later during more intermittent Church visits. Undoubtedly there was something valuable to be gained from contact with our Christian mythology by way of occasional Church attendance with our school class because most of us, underprivileged though we were, and whether we came from a rock solid or decidedly shaky Christian background, came to have a firm knowledge of edifying moral tales. This provided us with a basis on which to judge our own behaviour and that of others whether we chose to do Right or Wrong. By contrast today’s child would only barely comprehend righteousness and would have only a hazy idea of what might be meant by the words of the 23rd Psalm. My own family was one wherein the members indulged in a great deal of behaviour that was decidedly Wrong but at least I was completely aware of this fact.

It’s tempting to believe that the working class children of our particular part of North Kent were possessed of an undoubted educational edge over those that followed us, an edge that displayed itself in an ability to harvest language and use it productively and to react to the many and varied dimensions of music. And it is sobering to realise that if this is so it emerged from a combination of diverse influences. The sometimes bawdy lyrics of the Music Hall and the poetry of the King James Bible. The catchy melodies of Musical Theatre and the stirring strains of Anglican hymns with perhaps an added sprinkling of operatic arias courtesy of Roy Plomley. And for those of us who were never completely won over by early television, it is hard to dismiss the unique sound of that late night radio favourite, The Shipping Forecast. The disconnected, hypnotic voice intoning weather conditions in strange, faraway places – Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber ….. names that were only ever encountered in The Shipping Forecast but which seemed to somehow define us as part of an island nation. An odd mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, deftly twisting the common landscape into a dreamworld peopled by communities we were somehow connected to yet knew little about. An important facet of the entire Word experience that would ultimately define us, The Shipping Forecast provided yet another essential dimension to a childhood devoid of 3D Printing, TV on Demand, Iphones and Ipads, but at the same time hardly deprived.