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Learning By Heart

I was born in 1948 and so I stepped over into vague adulthood during the 1960s. My parents were what you might call bohemian, which meant they used Freud as the springboard for seeing sex in every aspect of life and they believed in doing whatever they felt like doing and to hell with the consequences. They were also good people in their way: my mother full of laughter and sociability, my father full of booze and poetry and fascinated by the transforming power of metaphor ‒ just so long as you could find the right one to fit the occasion.

I always had an easy aptitude for learning by heart. I’d hear a song just once and if I liked the way it went, I’d remember it forever. My father would recite poems, perhaps as a substitute for conversation, and as long as the rhythms and the rhymes were strong, I’d have learnt them after a couple of repetitions. From the age of 9 I could recite from memory the first hundred or so lines of Vachel Lindsey’s ‘The Congo’, in which death is an elephant torch-eyed and horrible, foam-flanked and terrible; along with huge chunks of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. When  I was chosen to play the part of Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was  embarrassed to realize at the end of rehearsals that I now knew the entire play within the play,  starting with ‘Gentles perchance you wonder at this show’. But although I enjoyed all these tumbling incantations, none of them really spoke to me, none of them brought me closer to my own self.

It must have been 1962 when a record player entered our house and I acquired my first EP. I can still see its cover: a photograph of Joan Baez with black hair, a long pale face and the sculpted cheekbones of a Plains Indian. I was startled by her high silvery notes, but it was the clarity of the words and the stories they told that entranced me. She put her finger to a bush, hoping to pluck the fairest flower, but the thorn it pricked her

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I was born in 1948 and so I stepped over into vague adulthood during the 1960s. My parents were what you might call bohemian, which meant they used Freud as the springboard for seeing sex in every aspect of life and they believed in doing whatever they felt like doing and to hell with the consequences. They were also good people in their way: my mother full of laughter and sociability, my father full of booze and poetry and fascinated by the transforming power of metaphor ‒ just so long as you could find the right one to fit the occasion.

I always had an easy aptitude for learning by heart. I’d hear a song just once and if I liked the way it went, I’d remember it forever. My father would recite poems, perhaps as a substitute for conversation, and as long as the rhythms and the rhymes were strong, I’d have learnt them after a couple of repetitions. From the age of 9 I could recite from memory the first hundred or so lines of Vachel Lindsey’s ‘The Congo’, in which death is an elephant torch-eyed and horrible, foam-flanked and terrible; along with huge chunks of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. When  I was chosen to play the part of Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was  embarrassed to realize at the end of rehearsals that I now knew the entire play within the play,  starting with ‘Gentles perchance you wonder at this show’. But although I enjoyed all these tumbling incantations, none of them really spoke to me, none of them brought me closer to my own self. It must have been 1962 when a record player entered our house and I acquired my first EP. I can still see its cover: a photograph of Joan Baez with black hair, a long pale face and the sculpted cheekbones of a Plains Indian. I was startled by her high silvery notes, but it was the clarity of the words and the stories they told that entranced me. She put her finger to a bush, hoping to pluck the fairest flower, but the thorn it pricked her to the bone and so she left the rose behind. She wept over the grave where her true love lay buried and the corpse said her tears were wetting his winding sheet. I listened to other ballad singers whenever I could and at some point, hungry to know more about the stories within the songs, I found an old copy of The Oxford Book of Ballads, published in 1910 and compiled by the wonderfully named Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘the one survivor of three men to whom all lovers of the ballad owe most in these times’, as is somewhat enigmatically declared on the dedication page. I have the book here, flanked by The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes and Skeat’s Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, all three slightly foxed, with dark cloth covers and faded gold lettering.  Each has been a good companion, but the Ballads is the book I would save if a fire was raging and I had to make a quick choice. Even if you know nothing of their background history, you cannot help but recognize the authority of the ballads and the way they have been able to knit the generations together from one century to the next; holding them fast with music and rhyme and the most startling imagery. For me, they can be as profound as Greek tragedies, as accessible as Grimm, as vividly alive as a medieval fresco painted on the wet lime of a church wall. I began Ballads with the songs I already knew, but with the addition of a rougher and more authentic language: ‘The Unquiet Grave’ with its visceral conversation between the living and the dead; Sir Patrick Spens, who tries to protect his wounded boat by having it wrapped in a web of silken cloth and another of twine, but to no avail; poor Lord Randal and what had he done to make his true love want to kill him with eels boiled in a pan and did the bloodhounds really have to die as well? Eventually I read all the ballads in their long and often phonetically complex entirety and I quickly learnt my favourites by heart, making them my own. In the family life that I grew up with, the arrival of the contraceptive pill alongside all the new freedoms of the Sixties somehow meant that women, even very young women, were no longer seen as being vulnerable to damage and danger. We had been given the keys to our liberation and were encouraged to enter the adult world without hesitation, knowing that no furious fathers or bloodthirsty brothers would come and take revenge for any loss of innocence or virtue. Nevertheless the world I was being offered seemed to me to be a very difficult and complicated place, and in spite of their old-fashioned morality and violence, the ballads had more to say about how I felt as a young and unprotected teenager than my mother could ever tell me. They also spoke of the nature of love and the pain of betrayal; of loss and revenge and the complexity of remorse in words I could understand. I have never been able to sing in the sense of finding a key and following the movement of the notes, but I could imitate singing in a rather haphazard but heartfelt manner, and so in spite of my inadequacies I became a singer of ballads. I would sing on car journeys, the rumble of the engine masking my lack of precise musicality, and I would sing for hours on my own. Twenty verses, thirty verses, on and on as the strange stories unrolled and merged themselves into aspects of my particular and often troubled state of mind. The shocking visual images and the savage dramas allowed me to think about things without the spiralling confusion of too much analytic thought. I never gave birth to an unwanted child or considered throwing myself into the raging sea, but I felt I understood the desolation of the young woman standing in the wind and the rain outside Lord Cassilis’s gate, her babe cold in her arms, and the despair of Lord Cassilis when he learnt of her sad fate and it was too late to undo the mistakes of the past ‒ ‘at the huffle of the gale, /here I toss and canna sleep’. I grew older and my state of mind grew quieter, but I went on using the companionship of the ballads. I taught them to my children as an alternative to bedtime stories and we sang them together during car journeys and on bike rides. When writing one of my books, I would begin each day by playing a recording of Peter Pears singing ‘The Lyke Wake Dirge’, in which the soul of a dead man has to make a final journey across a strange and bleak no man’s land strewn with thistles and called, for reasons I never found out, Whinny-muir. He was only able to put on shoes and stockings and to eat if he had performed acts of charity, otherwise ‘If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane/. . . The whinnes [thistles] sall prick thee to the bare bane’. Having listened I would then sing the words with only the dog to hear me and it was like some magical incantation that prepared me to enter the writing. How does it work, this connection with old songs? Just recently I was busy helping a writer with a play about the Wild Merman of Orford and that led me to the ballad of the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie. It still sends shivers down the back of my neck, when the woman who has born a child from ‘the grumly guest’ ‒ half man and half seal ‒  is told of what is to come, the future already there, waiting to be enacted:

An’ thu sall marry a proud gunner, An’ a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be, An’ the very first schot that ere he schoots He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.

More than ten years ago my husband was in the throes of a very intensive cancer treatment and one night he woke shaking with cold. I had never thought it possible for a body to be so icy cold. I wrapped him in my arms and willed warmth into him, and as I did so I was suddenly back with the ballad of Tam Lin, the earthly knight who has been stolen by the Queen of the Fairies but who wants to return to the world and to the woman who is carrying his baby. He tells her – Janet is her name ‒ that she must come to a place called Miles Cross just after midnight on the night of Hallowe’en, and a whole crowd of fairy folk will pass by on their horses, but she can recognize him because he will be riding on a horse as white as milk, with a gold star on his crown. She must pull him down from the horse and hold him in her arms, and as she holds him he will change from one creature into another, from lizard to snake to ‘a deer so wild’ and then

They’ll shape me in your arms, ladye, A hot iron at the fire; But hauld me fast, let me na go, To be your heart’s desire.

Janet does as she is told, until finally she has won him and he becomes ‘a mother naked man’ and now, whenever I remember that time of illness and me holding my husband in my arms and willing him with all my strength to stay in the world, I am back with the Ballad of Tam Lin and the beauty and energy of its telling and how its ancient story has become inextricably linked with my own.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Julia Blackburn 2015


About the contributor

Julia Blackburn has written twelve books. Her subjects are diverse – from Napoleon to Billie Holiday – but she thinks the underlying connection is her interest in people caught in a predicament of one sort or another. Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, was published in 2015.

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