There is so much in my heart that is yet to be sung
It’s a strong memory.
I’m 9 years old. Year Four. Faintly freckled. Short, light brown curly hair. Wearing the uniform of a belted and buttoned green and white gingham dress. Shoed in clunky black working-class lace-ups. White socks with a hidden hole.
I’m standing in front of the whole school at the conclusion of the weekly Monday morning assembly, singing my heart out in the Carawatha Primary School Choir.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen.
Send her victorious, happy and glorious . . .
Even though I live on the other side of the world in Australia, I know the Queen in England can hear me singing to God to save her.
My mouth is wide open as the strange words pour from my throat to float over the heads of fellow students standing in rows before me in the sun-drenched quadrangle. It’s a moment of glory. My voice is a part of the heartbeat of the school.
Although I don’t know it, this will be my last performance.
At the next choir practice, our music teacher, Miss Bell (I’ll call her this to hide her identity forever), decides she wants us all to sing on our own.
She chooses the lullaby ‘Sweet and Low’ by Alfred Tennyson.
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea . . .
We all stand and line up before Miss Bell as she sits upright and alert at the piano. The child at the head of the line steps forward. Miss Bell plays the introduction, and the child begins to sing. At the conclusion, Miss Bell tells the singer to either move to the front of the room, or to the back, then she smiles and says, ‘Next!’, using her happy voice.
While I await my turn, I wonder what this division is about: front of the room; back of the room. I’m not worried, just curious. I know all the words and plan to sing the whole song.
‘Next.’
I step up, give a shy smile, take a deep breath and begin.
‘Sweet and low, sweet and low,’ I croon, trying to sound both sweet and low.
As I take another breath and prepare to launch into the second bit, which I especially like, about the wind of the western sea blowing, Miss Bell lifts her right hand off the keys and holds it up, palm out, as if she were a policeman directing traffic.
‘Stop!’ she yelps, points to the back of the room, then turns to the others who have yet to sing.
‘Next,’ she says, and Anne Duxbury, a smart girl with a smarmy smile and shiny, bouncy hair, steps up to take her turn at the fateful musical phrases, after which she joins the hallowed group at the front of the room.
When the siren sounds, Miss Bell makes an announcement to those of us down the back. I sense she’s looking at me, in particular.
‘There’s no need for any of you to come back to choir practice. You’re no longer in it.”
As she says it, she smiles brightly, reminding me of her metal namesake caught in a shaft of sunlight so piercing that it makes your eyes water.
It’s official. I’ve been kicked out of choir.
The following Monday morning I join the rows of ordinary students in the quadrangle and watch the choir sing my favourite song without me. If I’d known the word back then, I would have said that I felt bereft.
I keep on doggedly singing in class when I have to. But what comes out is quieter because I’ve learned not to trust my voice.
The next singing incident happens when I’m 10.
Our Year Five class is preparing for the annual Parents Day. This is attended by mostly mothers, who are also required to bring biscuits or iced cakes for afternoon tea. They come to look at art, sewing samples, and written pieces, pinned to classroom walls and taped along the lower windows. It’s a celebration of our endeavours. And each class plans a performance.
Our class is going to sing ‘The Skye Boat Song’.
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing.
Onward, the sailors cry!
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.
We practise singing it every afternoon for a week. The teacher (whose name I’ve thankfully forgotten and have no wish to even give him a pseudonym) walks between the rows and listens to each of us in turn. He arrives at me as we gustily let out the high note of the first line, on the word wing.
He listens to me for a few seconds. Steps back. Pauses, a frown forming. Leans forward and puts his ear to my mouth again, as if he can’t believe what he’s heard and wants to double check. He listens some more as we move through the next line about carrying the lad that was born to be king. Then he taps me on the shoulder and says this, quietly, so only I can hear:
‘Just mouth the words, Marlane. Don’t. Actually. Sing.’
He enunciates the last three words to ensure I catch them and understand, while classmates sing blithely on around me.
So, when parents gather at the front of the room as we stand in three tiers along the back wall, I mouth those words.
I feel ashamed and can’t look at Mum. I know she’s there in the crowd, in her best pink dress and stilettos, a neat, pretty woman who is doing her best to ensure we don’t stay working-class by teaching my two sisters and me manners, and taking us, dressed in our best lace-topped socks and second-hand white gloves, to free concerts in the park put on by the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra.
Opening and closing my mouth without letting the sound out is something I’ve done a lot of in my life.
For the rest of primary school, and then through high school. In church while those around me sing hymns. At birthday parties when it’s time to sing the song sung the most around the world. At Christmas pageants featuring communal singing of carols. When a peer recalls a popular song from our teenage years and urges the rest of us to join in, like Simon & Garfunkel’s, ‘The Sound of Silence’, with its poignant opening line, Hello darkness my old friend. You see, I know the words. I just don’t sing them. I mouth them.
In case you’ve never had to do this, I’ll tell you what it’s like.
It’s like you’re not there.
In my 50s, I attend a one-day, two-hour, Summer School class at the University of Western Australia, which promises to help me find my voice for public speaking. At the time I was diligently sending out my memoir manuscript to literary agents, and optimistically expected that soon I’d have a publishing contract and a promotional speaking tour. (This still hasn't happened.)
The facilitator, an older woman with blonde hair and enough confidence to order angels around in heaven, tells us to stand up and form a circle.
“We are going to sing,” she says.
I keep sitting down, then raise my hand.
“I don’t sing,” I say when she indicates I can speak.
“You’re human,” she says. “You sing.”
Sensing that arguing with her would be like arguing with the God of the Old Testament, I stand up with the others and do my best to follow her instructions.
“Take a deep breath. Hold it for several seconds. Now, let it out with a sound, any sound,' she says.
All around me men and women let out glorious sounds, richly deep or tinglingly high, filling the room with harmony that bounces off the walls and echoes deep inside each of us.
Although my contribution is shallow and wavering, it’s like being, briefly, in a choir again.
I still don’t know what this exercise had to do with public speaking, but what that woman said has stayed with me.
“You’re human,” she said. “You sing.”
Last week I read in the book, Divine Beauty, by the Irish poet and author John O’Donohue (2003, p. 209):
From the moment of your beginning, through all days and climates of mood and dream, the music of your heart has never stopped. Sending its rhythm along vein and bone, it has held you alive and present. Even when you visited deep into the realm of silence, your heart’s music never ceased.
What a gift those words were to me.
For so many years I’d thought that Miss Bell and my Year Five teacher had silenced my singing forever. But after reading that small paragraph I realised that although my voice isn’t good enough for me to sing in a choir, the music of my heart has never stopped.
Not even when I visited, for decades, the realm of silence.
The fact is that I’ve been singing all my life.
Not all singing comes through the throat.
I sing in many ways.
Actions sing.
Thoughts sing.
Joy sings.
Words sing.
There is music in me, and I’ve been letting it out in my own way all my life.
Now I am 70.
And there is so much in my heart that is yet to be sung.
With love, Marlane
Reference
O’Donohue, John. (2003). Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. United Kingdom: Bantam Press.
First published here.
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