The Importance of Music to Girls Read online

  I don’t remember the songs to which we danced these circles. We were not interested in what the words might mean and they were so familiar that they had become abstracted into a rhythm and a set of cues, like conversation. Being in the circle was a perfect state. I was invisible but component, moving but held. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, no one was looking at me but I was at the heart of things. The faster we went, the tighter we held on to one another until we knew that if we let go, we would all fall down but while we kept hold, we might be flying. The song lost shape or wore itself out through sheer repetition. We grew lighter as our breath grew heavier until we were just that, breath – released, ecstatic.

  For the first time I understood that belonging was a way of escaping myself and of finding a place in the world: the blur of the round-and-round, the speed at which each member of the ring becomes indistinct, where nothing can be seen any more so all is felt, and difference flattens into figures on a vase.*

  I could keep up, but I did not belong because I had not learned to contain myself within the figure I was making. Nervous, furious and barely aware of myself, I drove other people away. I was tolerated on the edge of the circle until one day the leader announced that I was not to be included any more. She proposed this as she might a new game: ‘I know, let’s …’ and the other girls followed her to the opposite side of the playground. Usually, something like that would send me into a rage of rejection. I once hit someone for not wanting to be my friend. But something came to me that day in the playground and as the ring closed without me, I made to step outside it and took myself off and made myself busy within a ring of my own imagining. Quickly, the girls returned and invited me back. I accepted and the whole thing was passed off as nothing more than a dance.

  School was a series of rings: friends, gender, class and year as well as classroom, building, playground, grounds. The doors and gates were always unlocked, but it seemed inconceivable to pass through them at other than the permitted times. One day I made a paper lion. For once it looked like what I had hoped for and the teacher was pleased. The bell rang and I rushed out to the school gates clutching the lion, desperate to show my mother what I had done. She wasn’t there so I waited, with such intentness that I didn’t take in the fact that no one else was around. When I eventually realised this, panic soared – where was my mother? Then I looked about and the thought became Where is everyone? I looked and looked and it became Where am I? The building and playground behind me were quiet. In front of me was a weekday grown-up London I did not know. Eventually I understood that the bell I’d heard had only been for break and that the rest of the morning’s lessons were now taking place.

  In my hurtling excitement, I had compressed the day. I was on the edge of school and no one appeared to have noticed. I looked back at the school and it seemed as impenetrable and remote as the city in front of me. I was nowhere, a point from which I could step in or out, forwards or back.

  I don’t remember how I returned to my classroom that day but know that I must have done so. The experience, though, had offered a possibility I could not let go. Not long afterwards, I decided, aged six, that I wanted to go home. I walked out of the gates, along the road, across Hampstead Heath, up the hill, and rang the front-door bell. It was so simple that when my mother opened the door I could not understand what hit her, and it was as if something had hit her – as if by stepping out of place, I had stepped into her.

  * This is what Homer described as khoreia (which gives us choreography), the dance in a ring in which everyone is equally component and the thing is its own momentum like the wheel set to run downhill. Homer is describing a detail on a vase, so the ring is doubly a ring – fixed in itself and fixed in the circle of clay.

  5

  Plaine and easie rules

  The lines, which a number of people together form, in country or figure dancing, make a delightful play upon the eye, especially when the whole figure is to be seen at one view, as at the playhouse from a gallery … [T]he dances of barbarians are always represented without these movements, being only composed of wild skipping, jumping, and turning around, or running backward and forward with convulsive shrugs, and distorted gestures.

  WILLIAM HOGARTH, Analysis of Beauty

  ‘I don’t know what’s become of Hampstead,’ my great-grandmother once remarked. ‘It’s full of Turks and infidels.’ She lived (and is buried) on the city’s rim, at the top of the hill on which Hampstead is built. I was almost born round the corner but at the last minute my parents moved down the other side of the hill into a flat in a house that had been built by Evelyn Waugh’s father. Unlovely, it sat bang on the line between the postcodes NW3 and NW11, bohemian Hampstead and suburban Golders Green, or what Robert Lowell’s mother called, in terms of her own Boston geography, ‘barely perched on the outer rim of the hub of decency’.*

  Our address was one of several aspects of our lives which resisted the expectations of our class and through which we stepped out of line. The general rule was that you could live in the wrong place so long as your house had charm. My parents were more gung-ho, and my mother somewhat resistant to the aesthetics she had been born into. We grew up in a confusion of shabbiness and beauty, thinking of possessions as there to be worn out or given away, and found ourselves lighter but emptier than we might have expected.

  Our lives faced into the city where my father’s medical practice was in Camden Town. My father was most alive in that landscape, a place so various and full of things for a doctor to do. He looked after the homeless alcoholics who slept at Arlington House as well as young actors, architects and writers, some of whom became famous. We ate croissants, dolmades and rollmops, and brewed Turkish coffee in a brass pot. One of the handsome young brothers from Trattoria Lucca opposite the surgery brought over cappuccino on a tray held high on the tips of his fingers above the traffic; his mother, Mrs Boggi, gave me chocolate and pinched my cheek. The local baker took us into his kitchens where I was made delirious by the warm and sugary air. We bought paper twists of blue-tinged North Sea shrimps from a man who sold them in Flask Walk outside the (by then very smart) house in which he’d been born.

  We loafed around market stalls and canal locks, and walked the dog on Primrose Hill at dusk just as the wolves in the zoo began to howl. The dog would howl back. I stood there in the dark with my father, in silence, and knew that we were both sad, that we could not speak of it and that we each drew something from the dark. I looked down onto a lit city that could not be tidied into circles or lines, and felt at home.

  It seems strange now that in such a place as Camden Town I could have been taught English country dancing. My lessons took place at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This kind of dancing was like gambling for matchsticks rather than money. It had no charge and I felt no flight or spring or joy but trailed around in a swill of children, learning patterns and steps which seemed even less interesting than the playground games I was beginning to grow out of. I was no longer prepared to jump and clap whenever music presented itself but needed to be persuaded.

  We fumbled along, trying to master the reel or ‘hey’ in which two lines or circles of people move past each other in opposite directions in a kind of plait. The music sagged (where did the music come from? A gramophone?) as we children made flabby circles and limp lines, and bumped into one another as one pair set off with a spurt into ‘Heel and Toe’, only to crash immediately into their neighbours who were still trying to work out which foot to put down when and where.

  Cecil Sharp drew heavily upon John Playford’s 1651 publication, The English Dancing Master, or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances with the Tunes to each Dance. Playford claimed that ‘Plato, that Famous Philosopher thought it meet, that yong Ingenious Children be taught to dance.’ His dances sound passionate and complicated: ‘Every Lad his Lass’ – a triple-minor-set; ‘The Friar in the Well, or The Maid Peeped Out at the Window’ – longways
for as many as will; ‘Dissembling Heart, or The Lost Love’ – longways for six; ‘Fain I Would’ – square for eight; ‘The Collier’s Daughter, or, The Duke of Rutland’s Delight’ – triple-minor-set.

  Later, I would do some fierce country dancing at ceilidhs and weddings, and would see what it could be used for. At seven, I was impatient and unimpressed. We were taught to ‘honour’ our partner at the beginning and end of each dance with a brief curtsey or bow, and did so drearily. I remember the passing impassive faces of the other children as we lined up, linked arms, clapped hands, skipped. There were no intricate steps or flamboyant gestures and you had to submit to your partner, to a four or an eight. We bumbled along while someone somewhere shouted instructions. The moves were homely – the cast or the basket. Even the promenade was only a measured stroll. Scottish, Irish and Welsh country dancing involved costumes, stamping, rigid posture and fine details. They danced among swords.

  I gave up on Cecil Sharp and tried country dancing at a local school, where I had to wear a skirt covered with tiny green sprigs and a lacy white blouse with puff sleeves. The skirt stuck out from a crudely elasticated waist and the shirt scratched. There was something helplessly staid about the effect. I looked more like a great-aunt than a country maid, and not remotely frothy or verdant.

  If this English dancing had any virtue, it was that it tried to be nice. It might have been dancing for people embarrassed about dancing. This was my national dance? Other people’s involved smashing glasses or plates; they wore sashes, hats, tassels, scarves and swirling skirts; they made noise. We were simply being conditioned, as in our sports days and Brownie troops, to join in.

  My parents had both been miserably if well educated at boarding school and wanted for us a kind of social ease and equipment they felt they did not get: they wanted us to be able to join in the broader world. Joining in at my north London primary school was complicated by the fact that it had pupils from thirty or so different nationalities. There were automatic and visible allegiances as well as shared languages, food and observances. My Jewish friends stayed in on Friday evenings and kept the Sabbath on Saturdays. They could speak Hebrew, Yiddish and German. They had a separate assembly and weren’t allowed to write the word ‘God’. My Spanish friend was Catholic and crossed herself elaborately. My other friends were Mauritian, Indian and Japanese. I wasn’t even Catholic. We had a parade each year in national dress and I didn’t have one so couldn’t take part. I wasn’t going to wear my lace blouse and flowery skirt.

  For a while I declared myself ‘half Scottish, quarter Irish and quarter Welsh’. My grandfathers were Scottish, one by birth, the other by descent. I had a kilt in my mother’s Mackintosh tartan and my brother a pair of Mackintosh shorts. That grandfather married a woman who brought into the family the wide face and eyes of, it was dancingly said, a ‘Mary Kelly of County Cork’. My Greenlaw grandfather joined the Gordon Highlanders in the First World War, had his lip shot off and endured some of the first plastic surgery. He had been training to be a classics teacher in Aberdeen and was one of only two in his class who returned from the war. Both gave up teaching and became doctors. His wife was the daughter of a Welsh Methodist minister.

  This all-round Celticness gave me colour; Englishness seemed to have no colour at all. Only I wasn’t Scottish, I was English. There was so much difference around me that I wanted my own whereas my friends’ parents, especially the Jews who had fled Europe, wanted their children to belong. Surnames were anglicised: Silberstein became Silver, Rosenkranz, Rose. My Spanish friend was restricted to one of her four or five surnames and her first name toned down from Maria to Mary. I, on the other hand, was taught how to dance a reel, to promenade and do-si-do, to heel and toe. Instead of Hogarth’s barbaric wildness, I was learning through dance to be contained and regulated, and to have that great English form of beauty – to look nice.

  *Robert Lowell, ‘Revere Street’, Life Studies, 1956.

  6

  Kore

  The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus’s adventures was no longer enough. Things had lost their primordial fluidity, had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without trace.

  ROBERTO CALASSO, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

  I was going to not be, and I would not be for ever. Time spooled on and there I was, trapped on the wrong side of it. I went to wake my mother and she said something about sleep being a rehearsal but as I was not good at sleep and had little sense of what it was for, this was no consolation. Further conversations with my mother opened up a gap between us. She believed in God. He had come to her at the same age as that sense of black time came to me. She spoke of death as if it were something to look forward to.

  By the time I was eight, I was taking on a fixed shape. It was as if for years I had looked for myself and at last I was getting glimpses. This happened most clearly when I placed myself in opposition when arguing, evading or in physical tension: swimming twenty lengths, climbing a tree, doing ballet. Ballet was something undertaken alone and while you did not hold hands, as when dancing in a ring, it made you part of the body, the corps.

  Ballet was tough and it hurt, but it gave me a way of ordering my body. I liked the precision, and the fact that there were always further refinements and tensions to be acquired. Ballet taught me about timing and consequence, and I remember it without music, a physical discipline, as a set of sequences or rites.

  You start by standing still and then you learn how to stand. Next you learn how to move your feet through five positions, and then your arms. Next you learn how to move both simultaneously. Then you learn how to bend, how to rise, how to describe shapes in the air with your toe. Only then do you set off. I launched myself into each movement as precisely as I could and discovered that to remain still was the hardest movement of all.

  Ballet also teaches you that each step or gesture is the outcome of another, a lesson I had already absorbed from Greek myth – the tumble of lover into foe, child into mother, girl into tree, god into swan. The sprawl of metamorphosis is the child state, one in which you can be stone or flower, suitor or captor, boy or girl, ancient or new in the space of a day. You are molten, multiple, perpetual, and so is time.

  We were to perform the story of Persephone, who was first called Kore, ‘girl’,* and, being the essence of girl, was the one that Hades, king of the underworld, wanted for his queen. Her mother Demeter’s grief sent the earth into mourning and nothing grew. In the end Persephone was returned to her but, having eaten six pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, had to go back there for half the year. And so the cycle was fixed: spring and summer while Persephone was above ground, autumn and winter when she disappeared.

  Around this time, I had been walking home down the hill one day when I said aloud to myself that it did not matter where I was or what was going on around me, because I lived in my head. The habit of absenting myself was so strong that I eventually had no control over it. It happened in the midst of conversations, instructions, examinations. My imagined world was more vivid and more felt and I was part of it, no, the centre of it. It felt like the place I belonged to and from where I had come. What was I doing here? Real life was abrasive, brutal, off key. I did not know how to get it in proportion and so every encounter – whether it be with a story, a stranger, an insect, a sweet, the weather – was exhausting. I was exhausting too. My mother later remembered a time when I had food poisoning and the medicine I was given left me sweetly doped up: ‘You were so charming when you were sedated.’

  I knew I was Persephone, but to my astonishment was cast as Demeter. I had been given the role of a grown-up. The performance took place in a
modern studio theatre. I stood on stage in my black leotard with a red chiffon scarf tied round my waist, and set off. The bright light under which I moved amplified the darkness around it. I had no sense of anyone else being out there, either taking part in the dance or watching. As I became the story, it became my own, that of a girl who was becoming fixed and so went in search of a buried self. Just when it seemed that everything would be as it always had been, the tiniest enactment of desire – six pomegranate seeds! – would render me divided and qualified. When the lights went up I was stuck, still performing, still searching. There may have been a lot of noise coming from me but I could neither hear nor understand. A friend’s visit was cancelled. My parents were talking as if wrapping me in a blanket. I was hurried home.

  * As Roberto Calasso observes, Kore also means the pupil of the eye and Socrates pointed out that when you look into someone’s eyes, it is in their pupils that you might see yourself reflected.

  7

  A grope pizzicato

  I’m a child again when I was really miserable, a grope pizzicato …

  FRANK O’HARA, ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’

  I wanted other music, the kind I heard in passing from a car, through an open window, from behind the doors of older children’s rooms. In our last year without television and before we were each given a transistor radio, I started, as I had with books, with what was to hand. This was the late Sixties, a period my mother referred to as ‘the time your father tried to be swinging’. They had acquired a handful of pop records: Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and the soundtracks to West Side Story and Midnight Cowboy. I hadn’t seen these films and I had no idea who anyone was. I read the titles and listened to the lyrics as if deciphering hieroglyphics. To me, Bob Dylan was another form of music box or wind-up toy. There was a box gramophone in the corner of the living room and I would crouch over it, put on Nashville Skyline and close my eyes. If I could, I would have dug a foxhole in the floor or put up a tent.