FOUND MYSELF at a picnic the other day discussing the subject of singsongs. I was never much of Girl Guide – too disorganised and too untidy – but the bit I enjoyed was around the campfire, with all that ‘gin gang gooly gooly watcha’ stuff. Loved it, and I realised recently how much I missed singing. So I was delighted when a mate told me about a website called Singshot, a DIY karaoke, where you can sing away to your heart’s content, record your best effort and then listen to other folk sing the same song ten times better than you.
The trouble with growing up is that a lot of the fun things that you did uninhibitedly as a child seem harder. As we become more self-conscious and self-critical, we learn to worry about what people will say.
It was absolutely normal for my grandparents to sing all day: even putting the kettle on would be a cue for a croon. Usually cockney favourites like “Down at the Old Bull and Bush” or “Knees up Mother Brown”. I can’t remember a day of my childhood that did not have singing as part of it. Not good singing – it was rarely in tune and had improvised words, quite often rude ones – but singing nevertheless.
Lullabies to go to bed with; endless verses of, “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain” to wile away car journeys; soppy sentimental ballads around the piano after supper. It is still comforting to hear a workman whistling, reminding me of my mother who always whistled “Big Spender” while cleaning her clapped out Mini.
We weren’t a churchgoing family, so the only person who got sent out on a Sunday morning was me (mostly, I believed to get me out of the way so that they could read the papers in peace) but as I got older I was told it had been to learn some really good tunes and even better lyrics. Our cultural legacy: Blake, Donne and Rosetti.
So songs and events have always melded in my mind. My first trip to London Zoo musters up a special musical memory. Early in the evening, head full of the weird and the wonderful, my Granddad somehow got a whole carriage of sober-suited commuters on the 6.20am out of Waterloo to sing a Flanders and Swan song. It was, as he explained, the first time my cousin Maggie and I had ever seen a hippo and it needed celebrating:
‘Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood,
So follow me follow, down to the hollow,
And there let me wallow in glorious mud ‘
They dropped their Times and like a scene from Mary Poppins sang in unison. So now I find myself reading about the Congo this week, where 400 hippos were killed in the last fortnight by a militia group who are eating them and selling on their teeth. Twenty years ago there were 22,000 hippos in Virunga National Park; now there are just a few hundred. London Zoo has said they will be extinct by Christmas if nothing is done. Poached out of existence: somehow the crimes of humanity towards animals seem to be all our crimes. Of course, it’s sentimental but who will ever be able to sing again?
‘They dived all at once with an ear-splitting splosh,
Then rose to the surface again,
A regular army of hippopotami,
All singing this haunting refrain’
Not I, for one…
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