One of the most vivid memories of my early childhood is of
my mother singing. She would sing while doing the housework, songs her mother
had sung, or current songs from musicals. When her infant daughter (me) sat listening to the daily ritual of the ‘wireless’ voice of Daphne
Oxenford broadcasting ‘Listen With Mother’*, my mother would sing along with the
nursery rhymes and hum the closing excerpt from Faure's ‘Dolly Suite’.
We are talking about the nineteen fifties, a time which
would seem like an alien world to any young visitor from today. Put into
context: Britain was dragging itself out of post-war depression, broadcasting
patriotic and cheerful music on its BBC ‘Light Programme’ which was conveyed to
factory workers as ‘Music While You Work’. We didn’t have supermarkets then,
and the idea of music as a background to shopping would have been considered
frivolous. Remember: many people were still suffering a reaction to appalling
experiences during the war, while others conformed to a hard and rigorous code
of living out of a kind of terror of losing everything for which the country
had been fighting. Disapproval was the order of the day! Yet people sang. They
whistled on the way to work, sang readily and easily when encouraged, and sang
at home.
My mother’s life had been filled with music. She came from a
musical family where playing the piano was a basic requirement; singing was in
her genes. My father, to whom all this was novelty having been brought up as
the son of a clergyman, and having served in Burma during the war where he lost
many friends, delighted in her joy. We were never without a piano, which she
played in her spare time, heedless of sheet music: she had that rare talent – the ability to play by ear.
As the years passed and her children grew up she sang less,
preferring to listen to music, until even that pleasure turned to sadness as
familiar tunes became tainted with sad memories. People died and she withdrew
from the emotion such associations induced. Which to my mind is a greater
sadness in itself, but I understand. If I listen now to the ‘Dolly Suite’
– which many years later I played on the piano with a great friend – it shouts
out nostalgia and I am momentarily transported back in time…
Today as I write this I realise how much more difficult it
will be from now on to listen to some of the music from my childhood. I am
incredibly fortunate to have been brought up in a secure and – usually – happy
household, and to have memories of songs and laughter as a background to my own
stability. I want to thank my mother. I wish I had done, but I think she knew.
Tomorrow, on her birthday, I won’t be able to listen to any music, because she won’t
be there. Last month she slipped away...
Pauline 1929 – 2017
