The Songs

by Charles Elton

  She was a chain smoker. Perhaps she had a cigarette out there and threw it down to the street. Perhaps she was worried it had fallen into a dustbin full of dry paper and might catch fire. Perhaps she looked over the edge to check and slipped, but Huddie and I did not really think that she was the kind of person who might be concerned about litter or fire.

  By the time the police arrived there were fewer people in the flat than when they had been called. We thought that a body hitting the pavement would clear a party pretty quickly, particularly if there were drugs around. Statements were taken in the usual way but there did not seem to have been an exhaustive investigation. There was no implication that foul play was involved — not even the conspiracy theorists have suggested that.

  There was an inquest and the coroner pronounced an open verdict. It was impossible to say what her intentions might have been because of the amount of drink and drugs inside her — what the papers called “a lethal cocktail” but whatever was in her system was not the lethal thing. It was the fall that was lethal. Huddie said that the drink and drugs were just the icing on the cake.

  Magnetic North was released only after she died, and some live recordings had to be added to bulk out the songs our mother had recorded in the studio. The track that people loved most was a version of Iz’s song “Let Them See Your Scars” sung unaccompanied, recorded at the concert for El Salvador where Iz and she had first met.

  If they take you from the light

  And force you into darkest night

  If they cut your bodies with their knives

  And you are frightened for your lives

  Do not bow your head in shame

  Let no man hide your name

  Come proudly through those iron bars

  And let them see your scars

  Although her version is often played — it had been used a couple of years before in a documentary about Nelson Mandela — it’s really Iz’s signature song. It was always his encore and people still talk about him singing it at the concert for his seventieth birthday. I don’t remember much about the concert — I was only seven then — but I do remember Huddie and me walking down a dark corridor. Someone was holding my hand and I was holding Huddie’s, not just out of reassurance but because he was a little unsteady on his feet. His illness was starting but we did not know it yet. It felt as if we were moles in a tunnel. I could hear music in the distance and there was a bright light ahead of us. We got closer and closer to it and then suddenly we were bathed in it. Noise enveloped us and I realized we were being taken onstage. People were shouting and cheering. Huddie began crying and I did not let go of his hand. We were taken to stand by Iz at the front of the stage, and he began playing the first chords of one of his silly children’s songs. The cheering grew louder as he began to sing:

  Don’t you cry

  Don’t you cry

  Don’t you cry anymore

  It’s only the gooseberry moon overhead

  Don’t you cry

  Don’t you cry

  Don’t you cry anymore

  The sun will come back, it’s just gone to bed

  Huddie began to bawl. What was odd was that this made everyone cheer more, as if a child weeping was somehow endearing. He had never been as tough as me — even then, when he had the ability to be tough. That particular ability, like all of the others, would go within a few years.

  I suppose that people thought that Iz was singing the song to us because it was an old family favorite, that he sat on the edge of our beds at night singing us to sleep with his children’s songs like “Gooseberry Moon” and “Take Your Tractor for a Dance.” In fact, the song was completely unfamiliar to us — I expect he had written it for children somewhere else, maybe for the children of the Disappeared in Chile, one of his many causes. Anyway, I never remember Iz putting us to bed. Carla always did that.

  Carla was our stepmother. The facts of how she and Iz got together were well-known, but like most things about Iz’s life, finding any meat on the bones of the facts was difficult.

  Carla’s father was called Theodore Wasserman. He taught anthropology at Harvard and was a famous song collector. Iz and he had known each other since the 1950s when they went on a field trip to the southern states of America in search of old folk songs. Years later, Iz went to Boston to give a lecture on the assimilation of Yiddish songs into Hebrew culture and had dinner with his old friend, where he met his daughter Carla, whom he married after our mother died. He was sixty-six, Carla was thirty.

  It sounds a bit like a gothic fairy tale: an evil woman who steals a father and supplants the mother who died in mysterious circumstances; a little girl in rags sweeping the floor, lying down at night on straw matting in the cellar holding a tattered photograph of her dead mother and crying herself to sleep. I’m not sure how Huddie would fit into this story: I’m not sure they have wheelchairs in fairy tales.

  But it wasn’t like that. Carla had her faults but as stepmothers go she did not do too badly. You would not have caught Carla falling out of the same window twice. I sometimes think that a person’s best quality can also be their worst and Carla’s detachment from us was both of those. She just got on with her life and let us get on with ours. What Carla was not detached about was music: she was a multi-instrumentalist and could play the guitar, the banjo, the dulcimer, the Autoharp, the pennywhistle, the recorder and probably other things, too, many more than Iz could. He had just picked things up as he went along. Mostly she sang traditional folk songs. She didn’t interpret songs, like people say our mother did.

  Carla came into our lives a few months after our mother died. She was certainly around for the court case in which our grandmother Evelyn tried to get custody of us by proving that Iz was an unfit father. I suppose you could look at that as an act of love on her part, but I thought it was unfair. After all, her own daughter was someone who might be thought of as an unfit mother.

  Against everybody’s advice, Iz refused to hire a lawyer and represented himself in court. Evelyn brought up everything she considered bad about Iz: his various marriages, his “itinerant” and “unsuitable” lifestyle, his political affiliations, his time in jail, the fact that he was already living with Carla, and so on. She even brought up how Iz had treated his first child, his elder son, Joseph.

  There was a lot of debate about his “kidnapping” of us — her lawyers interpreted this as the act of a deranged and unstable father — but what impressed the judge was Iz’s quiet dignity. The thing that finally turned the tables in his favor was when, to everyone’s astonishment, he picked up his guitar and sang a song. Although it had been written about the children of Soweto, it seemed strangely pertinent to the children of Muswell Hill. After the judge had deliberated, Iz was granted full custody.

  Carla had told us all this. When we were small it was like a magical fairy tale in which good triumphed over evil. It was certainly a wonderful story, and one that I’ve seen people go misty-eyed over. I feel slightly less misty-eyed about it: reading about Iz on the internet and putting dates together, I discovered that two days after the custody hearing ended he flew to Chile for six weeks, presumably leaving us in the care of Carla, whom we hardly knew. I don’t know whether it makes it better that those concerts in Chile were among the most famous he ever gave and drew the attention of the world to what was happening there. Apparently three thousand people singing “Let Them See Your Scars” was an extraordinary sight. People who look into the past still talk about it.

  So: in their own ways, both our parents had left us. I could forgive Iz — after all, there was some kind of purpose to what he was doing in Chile and all the other places that he went to even though it meant he was never at home. It was different with our mother. At Highgate Cemetery, apparently, people still put fresh flowers on her grave sometimes. If that is true, there’s one thing I can tell you for certain: it would not be me. I cannot forgive her. I cannot forgive her for leading a life so utterly devoid of logic.

  Maurice


  AT THE BEGINNING of July 1947, when he was seventeen, Maurice Gifford was sent by his parents to his uncle’s farm in Kent, the consequence of events that had taken place in his hometown of Godalming, somewhere that now seemed as far away to him as the moon. Although he had waited for as long as he could remember for his life to change, for some force to shake him out of the skin into which he had been born, this was not the change or the force he would have wished for. But when he first met the boy called Isaac Herzl there he had no idea that he had stumbled on what he had always been searching for.

  Maurice rather liked the idea that he had been banished by his parents because of his beliefs. There was a fine tradition of that happening throughout history. He had read many books on the subject. Everything was so clearly delineated there — the oppressor and the oppressed in Darkness at Noon, the proletariat and the ruling class in Das Kapital, not that he had really made much headway with that one even though he religiously carried it in his satchel to school and produced it as ostentatiously as he could when he took his books out. The level of ignorance amongst his peers was staggering: some boys thought Das Kapital was a German book about the alphabet. To search for truth and only find indifference: that was his lot in life, he thought mournfully, a biblical curse sent to punish him by a nonexistent god, a curse that seemed to have accompanied him like an old dog from his school to his uncle’s bleak farm.

  One of the many things he could not forgive his parents for was the name they had given him. No Fifth Columnist worth his salt would be called “Maurice.” It wasn’t a shame that could be hidden, like athlete’s foot or the angry red spots on his back. It was in his schoolbooks and above his peg in the sports pavilion. It was name-taped to his clothes, written in chalk on blackboards and on an oval ceramic plaque in cursive script with a floral surround on his bedroom door: a present from his parents several Christmases ago and — symbolically — a companion piece to the one that said “Toilet” on the door of the downstairs lavatory. The name pursued him like a sinister doppelganger. “I Am Not That Maurice,” he wanted to shout. “I Am Not Any Maurice!”

  It had been his grandfather’s name: a pathetic attempt by his parents to engender some kind of quasi-aristocratic tradition in a family that had none. If asked, his mother would modestly disclose that they came from “a landowning family in Kent,” a generous description of a clan of illiterate tenant farmers who had managed to buy a few hundred acres and a decrepit farmhouse a couple of generations ago. One day, on the assumption that his uncle was unlikely to marry and have children, it would all go to Maurice as “next in line,” a phrase of his father’s that made him think of a slow procession towards the firing squad.

  His father was a doctor. Although he would have preferred him to be at the forefront of experimental medicine, like the surgeon who pioneered skin grafts on burnt RAF pilots during the war, being a GP was a perfectly honorable profession in Maurice’s eyes. What he could not bear was that his father had grown dizzy with upward mobility: he had recently been in touch with the College of Arms in order to ascertain whether any of his antecedents had been granted arms, were “armigerous” as he called it, and if not, whether they might bestow a crest now on such a distinguished family.

  Once, his father had forced him to look at a glossy book containing other families’ coats of arms. In order to acquire one, it seemed less a matter of how grand you were than simply whether you were prepared to hand over a ridiculous sum of money to the College of Arms. With the war just over, with poverty and starvation and displaced people all over Europe, you might think there were better things to do with your money. There were certainly better things to do with your time than wondering if your Serpent should be Torqued Erect or whether the Ermine should be reversed between Three Swords Points Upwards.

  The other unforgivable thing his parents had done was to send him to King George’s College, a threadbare private school outside Godalming with delusions of being, as it said in the prospectus, “The Eton of Surrey.” All public schools were totalitarian institutions, of course — even a pathetic one like KG which had all the backbone of a bowl of blancmange — but he would rather his parents had actually sent him to somewhere like Eton where he might have at least found worthy adversaries and something solid to fight against.

  But his parents, preferring to spend their money on expensive Daimlers and a wine cellar — although, of course, there was no cellar and the bottles were kept in the boot room — had sent him to KG for one reason: he had got a choral scholarship. It saved them money. When he was twelve, his voice unbroken, he had what his mother proudly called, in the days when she was proud of him, “a voice like an angel.” At his interview at the school he had sung “Blow the Wind Southerly,” which his mother had got him to learn from a Kathleen Ferrier record, and, by her account at least, the headmaster’s eyes filled with tears.

  It seemed a long time ago, but when he had started at KG at thirteen he supposed he must have been the Maurice that everyone thought he still was now, a combination of name and talents as integrated as the matching tie and handkerchief sets his father ordered from a gentleman’s outfitter in London, a plausible construct of a bright boy who could make people cry with his voice, whose exam results swelled his parents’ breasts. Now, at seventeen, he had become somebody quite different but nobody seemed to realize it.

  He still sang in the choir every morning and practiced most evenings. His voice breaking was not the disaster it was for some boys whose perfect sopranos vanished to be replaced by a gruff stranger in their throats. For Maurice, after a few months of vocal uncertainty, his voice had settled into a clear, warm tenor, but by then something other than his voice had changed: some tectonic shift of the kind you get before an earthquake, a redistribution of strength that frightened and excited him at the same time.

  Sometimes, on Saturdays, telling his parents he was going to visit the British Museum or the Tate Gallery, he would take the train to London and wander around Soho. All the excitement missing in Godalming lurked in those narrow streets. Everything thrilled him there. He found secondhand bookshops — on Brewer Street he bought a battered copy of Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany for a shilling, but it was such heavy going that he went back to reading King Solomon’s Mines on the train home. There were dingy record stalls with racks of old discs that he pored over. If he had any money saved, he would buy scratched 78s of Paul Robeson or the Almanac Singers. They sang about important things. Imagine! Songs about war or building a dam or supporting a trades’ union — not just mindless music in praise of God.

  One evening at the beginning of that summer term, Mr. Costello, who was in charge of music at King George, drew him to one side as he and his fellow choristers were leaving choir practice. It was the moment he had been hoping for: Mr. Costello had a proposition for him. The end-of-year concert — Elgar’s The Apostles — was being planned and he had known that, with one of the best voices in the choir, he might be offered a solo. Now it was happening.

  “How do you feel about John?” Mr. Costello asked.

  He said, “I’m sorry, sir?” and arranged a look of confusion on his face. He knew exactly what Mr. Costello was talking about.

  “Saint John the Apostle. Keep up, man! In the Elgar! Lovely tenor stuff. It’s a big commitment, a lot of rehearsal time.”

  Maurice tried to stay very still. Now the time had come, he was not sure he would be able to go through with it.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You don’t know what?” Mr. Costello said impatiently.

  “I don’t know whether I can do it, sir.”

  “For God’s sake, you’ll just have to make the time.”

  “It’s not that.” Maurice paused for a moment. “It would contradict my beliefs,” he finally said.

  “Your beliefs?”

  “Yes. I’m an atheist,” he said clearly. “I don’t feel I can sing religious music. There is no God, sir. In my opinion.” There: he had done it
.

  Mr. Costello was gratifyingly stunned. “I’m not interested in your opinion,” he said contemptuously.

  “But why not, sir?”

  “Because you haven’t earned a license to speak.”

  “Is that license granted simply on the basis of age?”

  “Yes! And at your age you know nothing.”

  “Actually, sir, I’m quite well-read. I’ve moved beyond Swallows and Amazons.”

  Mr. Costello narrowed his eyes and raised a single finger in a gesture of caution. “I warn you, Gifford: you are sailing dangerously close to the edge.”

  Maurice liked that. Yes, he was in a small boat being buffeted by the waves and teetering on the edge of one of those apocalyptic waterfalls you saw in German romantic paintings.

  “I don’t think you would want me to compromise my beliefs,” Maurice said quietly.

  “I don’t give a fig about your beliefs. Who put you up to this?”

  “Spinoza, sir.” It was a risky card to play. The last thing Maurice wanted was to get into too involved a discussion. He had looked up “atheism” the week before in the many-volumed set of an old Encyclopaedia Britannica that his father had bought in the local saleroom. It had come in a special mahogany cabinet with sliding glass doors and there had been a spat the day it was delivered when Maurice said scornfully, “Knowledge is not furniture.” Now he could not quite remember the specific views of Spinoza as opposed to Wittgenstein or Hume.

  “Don’t get clever with me, young man.”

  “Isn’t that the point of being at school? To be clever.”

  Mr. Costello ignored him. “So: you’d like our end-of-term concert to make no reference to Our Lord, is that it?”

  “There are other kinds of music, sir.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Costello said sarcastically. “And what shall we have at our hypothetical pagan concert — jazz? Schoenberg? Victor Silvester? Perhaps a music-hall show with jugglers and performing dogs?”