Striking the Right Note: three (inter-connected) voices

A friend once told me I had the worst singing voice he had ever heard. My late husband John, who himself had a beautiful speaking and singing voice, encouraged me to carry on regardless, praising my attempts and joining in with me. Our relationship was a second chance for both of us and was complicated at times by John’s experiences of mental and physical illness. Maybe more on that another time.

My starting point here is my memory of John’s voice, I hear him in my head teaching, debating, joking, swearing, singing. Through good times and not so good John and I never ran out of things to talk about, whether arguing about politics or literature or about music or the football (which he loved and I didn’t). We smugly felt sorry for couples who shared a restaurant table but no conversation. Once in a pub we were amused when a woman looked towards us and whispered to her male companion, who she hadn't exchanged a word with for quite a while, ‘they're having an affair.’ We weren't being especially physically affectionate. No snogging or cuddling, just eating together, interrupting each other with stories and responses and laughing.

One of the first things that attracted me to John was his voice and I loved to hear him sing as well as to talk. Whilst cuddled up, spooning together in the perfect fit that all loving couples surely think is unique to them I would sometimes ask him to sing to me. I so enjoyed those verses. John’s claim to fame was that he gave the Irish folk singer Christy Moore a verse to a traditional song after Moore heard John sing it in a pub in Bolton. Although, when we met, he no longer performed in public he exercised his pipes regularly, and not only when we were in bed together.  At his funeral in February 2010 two of the three good friends that I asked to speak in celebration of his life mentioned his voice, The first, like me, remembered the loveliness of his tone and the passion of his arguments, the second recounted the tale of the two of them being evicted from their local Conservation Club for belting out The Red Flag.

Like me, John originated from the North of England, like me he had moved several times, leaving him with intonations rather than a strong accent. My own pronunciations and inflections adapted and developed the most during my childhood as my parents and I, having left Liverpool, lived in Scotland, Wales (North and South), London, Blackburn, Sheffield and, for a memorable nine months, the Bahamas. The teasing I received (which I hated as a child but enjoy as an adult) for my different way of speaking were signifcant in the changes to this particular presentation of self.  

My father’s concerns about his voice were less about his regional roots but rather the impact of a speech problem. As a child his stammer greatly affected his confidence. As he wrote in his unpublished Memoir of a Life: 

As I grew older I became more introverted and preferred my own company to that of others except for one or two very personal and close friends. I suffered tremendously when made to stand in class and recite or read from a book. I attempted to avoid all situations that could bring me into the limelight and could perhaps result in me being held to ridicule. . . .

He went on to detail his particular problem and his response to it:  

All stammerers are individuals, and although there may be similar causes and similar ways of stammering, there must also be the individual cause and the individual type of stammer. The common conception of a stammerer is one who spurts his words out with the first letter repeated rapidly like the firing of a machine-gun. This is often not the case. People have afflicted speech of many different kinds. My own was an inability to actually begin speaking. When faced with beginning a sentence my throat muscles constricted and my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth. All I could do was make inarticulate noises. I grew breathless, and helplessness twisted the tighter inside me. Once a sentence was begun I could continue speaking until I ran short of breath with only the occasional break into a stutter. Then the agony of beginning started all over again. I developed mannerisms that helped me over this initial obstacle. Words and sentences that began with letter such as “I” or “A” were particularly difficult, so I began speaking by blowing out, often having to say a word or make a sound that had no connection at all with what I wanted to say. At other times I pinched myself or bit my finger as I began speaking. The shock usually got me started, taking my attention momentarily away from my speech (Ronald Thornton unpublished: 6-8).

Dad told me that his headmaster, in an effort to make it easier for him to express himself, insisted that he sing rather than speak in his presence. His helped with the stammer but not with the anxiety or feelings of ridicule and he hated to sing ever after. It was a progressive School Authorities Clinic that my dad attended twice in each school week from the age of 12 for a year or so that changed things for him. All those attending stammered and the format was English and literature based classes with attendees encouraged to speak up and join in. No one was laughed at or hurried, and the focus was on what was said not how it was said. My father responded, so much so I do not remember ever hearing him stammer, and I feel sure too that his love of words, of reading and of writing was stimulated greatly in these classes.

Although much more confident as an adult my dad was a shy man, happier with his small family, my mum and me, and a few close friends than in larger company. He died when I was 20 but left us with wonderful memories some of which I have written about previously. I’ll add a few more here. Dad and I (I’m about four or five) are giggling together at the bottom of my parents' bed hunting for fairies whilst my mum is trying to have a Sunday morning lie in. I’m the same age and older, and my dad is dancing around the living room with my two small feet on top of his rather larger ones. The dancing didn’t stop when I grew bigger. For much of our time living in Cornwall we were short of money and for at least two years we didn’t have a television set. We would read and play games instead of watching the programmes my school mates were talking of. Once in a while, for a treat, we would go to the cinema. On one memorable occasion after seeing Scrooge the Musical, dad grabbed my hand and we danced together up the middle of Falmouth High Street. As a teenage we talked and argued constantly, not least about whether, as we had a TV by this time, I could watch Top of the Pops. We compromised and once a fortnight I got my way whilst on the alternative week he watched a documentary on another channel.

Having left school at 18 to train to be a nursery nurse, I took A Level Sociology at my local FE college and began studying for a Sociology degree aged 28. I met John, the first year tutor at that time, on my first day. Although it wasn’t until five years later when we were teaching together that we became a couple. Although I began to think about the world in very different ways in the earlier evening class, John, and the other women and men who taught me across my three year undergraduate course, plus my fellow students, were significant in my flourishing adult political development. As this was happening I wondered often about the conversations I might have been having with my father. Various incidents during our travels (again, for another day, another set of reflections) led me to feel sure that his politics were more Left than Rght but I had no concrete memories of us discussing personal or party politics. More than 30 years after his death I reread my dad’s memoir (last looked during the first couple of weeks of raw grief) which led me to other writings and notes: poems, short stories, daily thoughts and jottings for a novel, plus the first couple of chapters. All this convinced me that, had he lived, we would have continued to discuss and debate, and that he would have been another person in whose company I would have been able to find and refine my personal, political voice.