Sing. Sing a song

For reasons unknown, quite regularly in the morning I wake up with the song ‘Think of a world without any flowers’ stuck in my head. I sing it to myself as I clean my teeth, finding myself hilarious as I sing it in a terrible mournful voice before leaping in to a lively falsetto for the chorus. I seriously need either a boyfriend or a flatmate. I am turning in to Su Pollard. Equally I find it amusing to sing to (selected) friends when I am cold or tired ‘I was cold I was naked, were you there? Were you there?’ There is only one thing to blame for this – the Come and Praise hymn book from Primary School Assemblies. Featuring a lurid blue, 70s tastic cover of a load of hippy kids with their mouths agape (presumably “praising”) it was full of some of the strangest, left over from the drug addled 1960s bunch of hymns imaginably. We sung them with gusto as we started our mornings in an act of communal worship.

Not one of us had a clue what we were singing.

Such gems as ‘Carpenter, Carpenter make me a tree – that’s the work of somebody far greater than me, Electrician won’t you light me a star, that’s the work of somebody who’s greater by far’. I don’t think any of us realised it was about God, I personally assumed they’d need to refer the job to their boss. My particular favourite was ‘The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write to read and write.’. I had no idea it was a blistering attack on racism (one of the strangest). We also sang a salutation to Autumn (Autumn Days) all year round.

As if the songs included in the book weren’t odd enough they were supplemented with photocopied bits of paper with some extras on them. We sang an ode to disarmament ‘Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before, I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war’. For some reason we also had a bash at ‘There is a castle on a cloud’. Which must have been unspeakable. Our choice of hymns was recently usurped by a memory of another woman who could remember singing about ‘Ticky tacky boxes and dry martinis’.

Come secondary school and we had all got over our sheer enthusiasm for singing in public and so simply stood and mumbled through five verses of music before being told we could sit down. The one time we all decided on mass to hit the top note in our school song we were all screamed at for the unearthly racket we produced. The lack of effort and lack of singing didn’t put our school off. Not only were we required to mumble/sing pretty much every morning we were required to have a hymn practice before the arrival of our headmistress to ensure we knew the song before ruining it for her. Given that we only sang five songs on rotation in the seven years I was there this was utterly pointless. It also meant that we put no effort in twice rather than just the once. It did mean we were treated to a woman in her fifties skipping around and clapping her hands trying to get us to sing ‘Jubilate’ twice a week. Her attempts to get us to shout ‘OI’ at the end of ‘In the Presence of your people’ was woefully unsuccessful.

However even as an adult I can remember all the words. If called upon (which I never am) I could sing you most of ‘Light up the fire and let the flame burn’. I also rarely let a harvest festival go by without singing about ‘the broad beans sleeping in their blankety beds’ (yeahhhhhh). The only other song that I have remembered for so long is one that was featured on the BBC1 programme ‘The Lowdown’ and was about someone recording their own song. I know all the lyrics. It was called ‘Bye bye Baby Bye bye’. Looking back I must have only seen this programme once as it was pre-video. It makes me worry for my childhood self.