The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  LAVINIA GREENLAW

  The Importance of Music to Girls

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Note

  1 My papa’s waltz

  2 Dapples and greys

  3 A cloud struck by lightning

  4 All wound close in a ring

  5 Plaine and easie rules

  6 Kore

  7 A grope pizzicato

  8 Come on something

  9 Spanish dancer

  10 Ventages

  11 What shall I do to be saved?

  12 Cover versions

  13 Crush

  14 Taxonomy

  15 Laughing gas

  16 I late went singing

  17 Delicatissimamente

  18 The cat’s whisker

  19 Joyful occasions

  20 The kitchen arias

  21 Broken voices

  22 The other side of the air

  23 The electrified self

  24 The slow dance

  25 As if in space

  26 Spirits

  27 Another ten seconds

  28 The white room (1)

  29 An exuberance

  30 The white room (2)

  31 Towards music

  32 Twelve copies of the same original

  33 Silver Jubilee

  34 Elvis est mort

  35 Separation and contrast

  36 Freedom

  37 Protest and survive

  38 Lost people’s meeting point

  39 A home for good music

  40 Secondary worlds

  41 High mountains

  42 Diastole, systole

  43 A certain disorder

  44 Forget me not

  45 The electric ballroom

  46 Spiral scratch

  47 Forever young

  48 Punk est mort

  49 Split the lark

  50 Expressive values

  51 Unquiet

  52 Ping

  53 Won’t you be my girl?

  54 Fuck art, let’s dance

  55 CCD

  56 Seven years later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  for Georgia Elizabeth

  leaving home

  This is a work of memory – facts have been altered. Names have been changed.

  1

  My papa’s waltz

  The hand that held my wrist

  Was battered on one knuckle;

  At every step you missed

  My right ear scraped a buckle.

  THEODORE ROETHKE, ‘My Papa’s Waltz’

  I remember the dancing of my earliest years in silence, as about the body alone. My father must have hummed a tune as I stood on his shoes and he waltzed me, but what I remember are the giant steps I was suddenly making. The world rose up under one foot and pushed my body to one side as that foot set off in a high violent arc. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to follow but at the last moment the world gathered up the rest of me. And so it went on: the world pulled and shoved while I lurched and stretched.

  This was not a gentle game, which was why we four children loved it. We liked to be thrown about – by a rollercoaster, slide or swing, in a rough sea, on a trampoline, or by grown-ups who in moving us at their force and speed, gave us a taste of the dimensions of adult life. We had a young uncle who played less carefully than my father. He would take me by the hands and spin me round like a teacloth full of wet lettuce until I thought my arms would be wrenched from their sockets. As the pain bunched in my shoulders and my brain shrank, I was amazed that such movement was possible. I wasn’t scared. I knew that I could break and had an idea of what it felt like to break, but I also knew I wasn’t going to.

  The waltz was more interesting than other such games because its force had to be met. It depended upon the tension between trying not to move and letting yourself be moved. I trod down hard on my father’s shoes, braced my arms and dug my nails into his shirt-cuffs like someone finding a hold on a cliff. This is the starting point of dance: something – the music, the steps, your partner – holds you but you also have to hold it and to achieve the necessary tension, hold yourself against it.

  A lot of my childhood was about being held back or slowed down. It took hours to leave the house as to get us all ready, and keep us ready, was like trying to keep four plates spinning. Someone lost a glove or refused their coat, was cross or hungry or needed a clean nappy. We spent a lot of time waiting – to be delivered or collected, for the school day to end or the night to be over. We moved in caravan formation and at the speed of camels, taking two days to drive the 250 miles from London to the west coast of Wales, pottering along in a pair of Morris Travellers.

  Once released, we were fizzy and impatient. If something was high we climbed it and jumped off; if it was steep we hurtled down it on cycles, sledges or trays. We ran or rolled down any hill we came to regardless of nettles, glass, dog shit or stones. If the landscape filled up with rain, leaves, fog or snow, we continued to move through it as fast as we could, not fearing what might now be concealed.

  Every now and then the world gathered itself in refusal. I slammed into it and got hurt. At four, I went down a slide sucking on a bamboo garden cane which hit the ground before I did. The top two inches jammed into the roof of my mouth and I stood over a basin and watched it fill up with blood, feeling nothing, interested only in my sister offering me a teddy bear she would not normally part with. When I woke up after the operation to remove the piece of cane, I was curious only about the coal fire opposite my bed and the taste of hospital ice-cream.

  For a long time, this accident was just something that had happened to my mouth. Other people had to make the connections for me.

  ‘That cane was lodged very close to your brain,’ my mother later said. ‘We could tell you were more or less alright but the surgeons didn’t know if they could remove it without doing any damage.’

  My brother added, ‘It’s why people shoot themselves that way.’

  ‘And it could have affected your speech,’ continued my mother, ‘by changing the shape of the roof of your mouth.’

  Being pushed out of shape made me realise that I had a shape to return to, like my toy cat who sat on a drum and whose parts were kept in tension by elastic. If I pressed the underneath of the drum, the cat fell to its knees or slumped to one side. I let go and the cat sprang to one side as if jiving. I was fascinated by the instant way it changed shape and then snapped back, and by the ambiguity of its bright little face – so eager to please and yet so imperturbable.

  My body had felt like that of the toy cat, an arrangement of parts. I would watch my hand touch the bar of an electric fire or my foot tread on a nail, and discover that they belonged to me. I now knew that my mouth shaped my voice and that my brain was right there, just above it. I saw this most clearly thirty years later on an X-ray which showed that instead of arching back to cradle my skull, the vertebrae at the top of my spine thrust my head forward. In that accident, my head had been thrown back so abruptly that it had been compensating ever since, leaving me with the feeling of being precipitate, of tipping into rather than entering the next moment, thought or sentence.

  So the body adds up and the world reminds you of the body’s limits, although it can be surprisingly kind. At eight I jumped through a window and can still remember how the glass billowed and held me before it exploded. I was mid-air, I had escaped the person I was running away from, and I was being held. Nothing has seemed as peaceful since. I stepped out of that ring of shattered glass like a corpse from a chalk silhouette and walked away
with a cut on each knee.

  These collisions with the world taught me its substance and laws as well as my own. I had danced before I knew what my body was, and did not understand what moved me. It was not music yet.

  2

  Dapples and greys

  Or a woman’s voice sang and reached a little beyond expectation …

  RAINER MARIA RILKE, ‘The Vast Night’

  The women in our family have one voice. People cannot tell my mother, sister, daughter and me apart on the telephone. Sometimes I play back the answering machine and think I have left a message for myself. When it comes to singing, though, my mother’s glassy soprano stands apart. The rest of us have dry, deep singing voices. We strain in church and at carol concerts; as the descant rises, we crack and hold off and concentrate on the underpinning.

  My mother never raised her voice. A doctor, she was clinically pragmatic. When she dislocated a finger, she set it herself. When there wasn’t time to bake a cake, she served up the raw mixture for pudding. When she couldn’t get four children to stay in bed at night, she used our toddler harnesses to strap us in. (There were times when we cried out to remind her, ‘Reins! Reins!’) She had a lucidity which was dazzling and liberating but in some ways too clear. Sometimes I did not want to see more than I expected.

  Even when the question has been formulated, it can be impossible to ask. My mother was so private and I felt so conditioned not to know her that it would not have occurred to me to ask whom she’d had lunch with, let alone how she was. Yet we reveal something of our nature when we sing, something that can be disguised in our speaking voice. It’s as if we are opening the door to an inner acoustic, and the acoustic of my mother’s voice was absolute space. When she sang me to sleep I felt at peace, but it was like being settled into emptiness. I felt love and unboundedness and whenever I sing, those are the sensations that arise.

  What we sing to a child who is too young to sing along is perhaps as undirected as what we sing to ourselves. My mother’s singing was not a plaint, but the arrested atmosphere of ‘Greensleeves’ or ‘Scarborough Fair’ was clearer to me in her tone than it ever was once I understood the words. While I was still too young to follow a story I held on to details, which her voice laid out with forensic care (my father had first seen her in the dissection room of their medical school, cutting up a body): a longboat, a narrow street, a cambric shirt, all the pretty little horses.

  Folk songs, show tunes and sea shanties were freed of their theatrics, their images clarified into light and shadow. ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’ had not a whiff of rum, seasalt or jolly Jack Tar about it. For me, it hung on the line: ‘Put him in the longboat till he’s sober.’ I saw the tall side of a ship, the drop into the dark, the deep water and somewhere out there, not adrift but apart, a place of punishment or rest – which, I couldn’t tell. In ‘Cockles and Mussels’, Molly Malone ‘wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow’, and this again is what held my attention – the small girl and the towering houses: the idea of a journey through the dark alone. I was fascinated by the oddly sombre ‘Pretty Little Horses’ and when my mother sang of those ‘Blacks and bays, dapples and greys’, they rippled across my mind as elusively as sun on water. Elsewhere, I conjured substance out of sound: the ‘cambric shirt’ of ‘Scarborough Fair’, roughly hemmed with two hard ‘c’s that stuck in the throat; or the stretchy length of the trailing ‘Greensleeves’ on which that song repeatedly tugged.

  Before we were old enough to catch the bus, my mother drove us to school, sometimes still in her dressing gown. My swaddled baby brother rolled around in the back while we older ones squabbled and she sang: ‘Who will buy this wonderful morning? Such a sky you never did see …’ I realise that this might have been ironic. Then again, she could have been trying to get us to notice that it was a wonderful morning.

  We don’t sing when we’re feeling harassed. Her singing was part of her coolness, like the cool white hand she placed on my cheek to wake me each morning and the cool way she held me when I was in a frenzy, as if she were marble and I were bubbling mud. It was part of the hauteur with which she carried herself so you knew that if the car broke down and she had to walk across London in that frilly sky-blue dressing gown she would do so gloriously. She still had the regal posture of a debutante, and above all she wouldn’t give a damn. Just as she would do anything for us, she would do anything.

  This sung world was serene in its truthfulness and without comfort. It sent me off into space and, from early on, the idea of deep space became a source of consolation. I closed my eyes and trusted my mother’s voice even as it seemed to let me go, because I understood that it was releasing me as an act of love.

  3

  A cloud struck by lightning

  The cat went here and there

  And the moon spun round like a top,

  And the nearest kin of the moon,

  The creeping cat looked up.

  W.B. YEATS, ‘The Cat and the Moon’

  When I was so young that like a cat I was oblivious to mirrors, I sang and danced for myself.

  I was the second of four children and grew up in the city, and so much of life was movement and noise. If I sang or danced, something of life took shape.

  Was I a noisy child? I made noise as a way of bringing people towards me but also to see them off. How were they supposed to tell which I intended? How was I? Was this a war cry or a love song? A display of grace or a show of strength? Ugly or beautiful? We four kept up our noise as a form of vigilance. It was the sound of rocks banged together, shields drummed by swords, boots stamping, jet-planes swooping. How much song and dance have come out of just this?

  My family held me. It was complicated but strong, a machine which made life happen so that I didn’t have to. It protected me, too. Until I was eleven or so, I was not made to take on substance.

  I had as much capacity for delight as for fear and did not experience any unusual trauma. It was a matter of impact. All experience was trauma.

  I liked our noise yet came to find the volume of life too high and as I couldn’t turn it down, turned myself down instead. Before then, I felt like a cloud struck by lightning. This was how someone once described being in love to me, and it could be said that in terms of how the world acted upon me, I was in love.

  4

  All wound close in a ring

  Sometimes all wound close in a ring, to which as fast they spunne As any wheele a Turner makes, being tried how it will runne While he is set; and out againe, as full of speed, they wound, Not one left fast or breaking hands.

  HOMER, The Iliad, Book 18

  When children meet other children, they have to do something – fight or play. Our games were disordered, their rules the subject of further meta-games. We four were born each twenty months apart and so these games were also predicated upon wanting to kill one another. I persuaded my older brother to climb on to an aerial railway when I knew the seat was unhooked. He flipped over and fell, cracking his head open on the path below. He would dare me to eat a wasp, climb on to a roof, jump out of a tree, confident that I could not refuse. When we had building works, my little brother made a game of throwing bricks at the rest of us. My sister was quieter and more frightening. As I sat reading in a chair, she liked to inch silently across the room and then throttle me.

  Four was in any case an uncomfortable number. Two people can dance alone and a roomful of people can dance together. Six people make a decent-sized ring. But can you imagine four people dancing? It would look awkward – halfway between intimacy and an occasion. Whereas two is concentrated opposition, three cleanly unbalanced and five rich with possible alignments, four is too obvious. The only way to achieve tension within it is three to one, and I, being too close to my older brother to want to admire him and too close to the younger ones to be admired, was the one.

  When I was five and started school, I had to give up fighting as a way of expressing myself. It was around this ti
me that dance became a dangerous thing. At school I had to sit still and be quiet, stand up when a teacher came into the room, walk on the left in the corridor, go to the lavatory only at break, sit cross-legged with arms folded during assembly, queue to enter a room, queue to leave, queue for lunch, raise my hand and wait to be given permission to eat or speak. I was bewildered. I did not know how to order myself, how to exercise that amount of control.

  It was even harder to master the rules of playground games; not words and steps, those I picked up quickly, but the nuances. These games involved attentiveness and co-ordination, which were not only physical but social. I had no idea how to make friends, having relied until now on the scrum of my siblings to overpower or exclude any other children we met. I felt held in place by them despite our battles, and had little need for anyone else. And then I did: at school, I suddenly wanted my own world and my own people to go in it. The children I looked to were those who had already found their place, formed their circle and closed it. To have friends, I had to break into a ring.

  I already knew circle dances such as ‘Ring-a-ring o’ Roses’ and ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, but I had no idea how potent they were. In a playground full of girls, the circles were large. If you were not part of the discussion in which the circle was proposed then you had to rush in while it was being formed. Once all hands were held, the circle was closed. You might hover on the edge and hope for someone to stumble and create an opening or, if you felt more confident, you might tap someone on the shoulder or tug their sleeve. Once you were in, you had to keep up and there would always be someone older, taller and sharper, who was going to move the circle faster or send it into reverse. They might add extra rules, gestures or steps. You had to keep up.