Mixtapes

Audio / Video files of songs mentioned in this story

Sarnia Cherie, Gem of the Sea,

Home of my childhood, my heart longs for Thee,

Thy voice calls me ever, forget Thee I'll never,

Island of Beauty, Sarnia Cherie.

~ G.A. Deighton

There was one good thing about Sunday School; and that was there was nothing you had to learn.  They made you sing hymns: 'Onward Christian Soldiers!' or 'Fight the Good Fight with all thy might!' or 'Trust-and-obey-there-is-no-other-way-to-be-happy-in-Jesus-but-to-trust-and-obey,' while they took up a collection for Foreign Missions.

Well, my poor old mother is in heaven now, if she is anywhere at all.  If they got any sense up there they will get her to cook them a meal of ormers.  I can just see her banging away at the old ormers with a flat iron and her sleeves rolled up and singing: 'Where is my wandering boy tonight?'

It was done up like Christmas with paper chains and colored lanterns; 

and the boys played the concertina for the dancing.

What I liked best was to go on the merry-go-round.  Jim and me would sit on two horses side by side and gallop up and down and round and round, 

while the music of the steam organ was playing 'Over the Waves.'

They all said Amen and sat up: and she read a piece from the Bible.  It was the story of the stilling of the tempest on the Lake of Galilee; and every fellow listened with a face as set and serious as if he was in that boat and in that storm.  Then they stood up and sang another hymn:

Jesu, Lover of my soul,

Let me to Thy bosom fly, 

While the nearer waters roll,

While the tempest still is high.

The sea was up against the galley wall and the waves was coming over and the spray was blowing in our faces, and there was a full moon and flying clouds and the sky was green between, and the moon sailing behind the clouds and out again, and we was singing too: 

God be with you till we meet again,

Till we me-ee-eet ... Til we me-eet,

Till we meet ... at Je-ee-su's feet,

Till we me-ee-eet ... Til we me-eet,

God be with you till we meet again!

She was taller than the others and they wasn't so much walking along as dancing, and their little feet was coming out like mice from under their skirts and they was singing:

There is a fountain filled with  blood, 

filled with  blood, 

filled with  blood, 

There is a fountain filled with  blood, 

flows from Emmanuel's veins!

There was a fellow made me think of Terence de Freis.  

When the lights went up again, he sat by a table looking at a photo of a beautiful woman and sang to it:

If those lips could only speak

And those eyes could only see

And those beautiful golden tresses

Were there in realitee, 

Could I only take your hand,

As I did when you took my name,

But it's only a beautiful picture

In a beautiful golden frame!

Liza thought it was lovely.  I said, "He's a turd!"

I liked the 'Marseillaise'.  It was the only one of the national anthems I liked to listen to during the War.  It made you want to go and fight.

'God Save the King' was a funeral march.

She thought the Pictures was real. Pictures was only pictures to me, and half the time I didn't know what they was about; and when I did I didn't believe they was real: but I liked to sit and listen to music.  

The Santangelo's quartet was good.

My old head is full of tunes.  Sometimes of a Sunday evening when I light the lamp and sit down to write my book, for it is mostly Sunday evenings I write my book, not a word of sense will come into my head, but tunes, tunes, tunes.  I may remember the words, a few of the words; but they are words I had forgotten, or never knew I'd known.  Hymn tunes come back; and I haven't been inside a chapel for fifty years.  'The day Thou gravest Lord has ended. 'It's a good tune.  I hear again, as I once heard, Christine Mahy sing 'O Love, that will not let go!' and all the angels in heaven sang in her glorious voice that night; and I hear the heavy tramping of soldiers along the roads and rough voices singing:

Madamemoiselle from Armentieres Hasn't been fucked for forty years,

and 'Bollicky Bill, the Sailor.'

Tunes, tunes, tunes: I cannot get them out of my head!  This island down the years have been a singing rock.  When in my father's day the boys went to war, they was singing:

Good-bye Dolly, I must leave you, Though it breaks my heart to go.

... and when conscription came in the First World War and the English boys came over to make up the number in our Second Battalion, they was singing: 

Good-bye-ee, don't sigh-ee, don't cry-ee, 

Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee

Hetty had bought Raymond a piano from Fuzzy's in High Street for him to practice on.  ... They said , after all the money they had spent for him to learn, he couldn't play a piece with a tune in it.  That wasn't true.  He used to play 'The Death of Nelson' for his father , and 'Home Sweet Home' with Variations for his mother; and then he would play a piece by Beethoven for me. 

The one I liked best was the slow middle part of a sonata 

Raymond said was called The Pathetic.

It wasn't so much as if he was playing the fiddle as if the fiddle was playing him. ... He played 'It's a long way to Tipperary' and 'There's a long, long, trail of winding' and 'Way down in Tennessee'; but from the way he slammed his old violin, you could tell he felt nothing but contempt for what he was playing and for the fellows he was playing it to; 

yet he roused them to singing and roaring and cheering and, 

when they gave him encore after encore, he just smiled.

Way down in Tennessee

She bought a gramophone, and night after night you would hear the 'Destiny Waltz' and the young people dancing and laughing: while all around outside, the tombstones that hadn't been sold was standing 

like ghosts and the cherubs climbing up the crosses.