A full day

Flooded fields near York, seen from the morning train

Trains 25 and 26 brought me to Darlington and back on the Trans-Pennine line, to see my cousin Wendy and a relation I hadn't met before, Meg, our 2nd cousin, who drove all the way down from the snow covered Northumberland hills to Wendy's house for the occasion. Meg is the same age as my sister and her children are scientists, like mine, so we felt comfortable together. Wendy regaled us with tale after tale of family history including long-hidden family scandals. She can trace the Mitochondrial DNA line back to the early part of the 18th century, so we learned about our distant mother's mother's mother's mother and such people. Families were large in those days and some ancestors had more than one family. For us, the most interesting ancestral family is the one that Meg's grandfather and my / Wendy's grandmother belonged to (as fond older brother and youngest sister) which even in their day already spread to three continents, their extraordinary early 20th century lives being lived in northern England, southern Ireland, Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia), Australia and New Zealand. Our grandparents' sister Marie was married to James (Jim) Wilkinson, famous for having restored the library at Cork after the fire that destroyed it during the unrest of 1920. There's a picture of him on this page.

After my visit I carried away the manuscripts of original compositions for organ and piano etc. by my Uncle Frank (Francis Bishop) and a heavily framed certificate from the Chinese authorities of the 1940s in honour of my mother's cousin Douglas Hardy who had died during his service in the Friends' Ambulance Unit in wartime China. It is covered in vertically written Chinese calligraphy, which I must ask a native speaker to translate for me. I was handed some meaningful old letters and photos as well.

A Northern backstreet behind Darlington station

Sally met me off the return train; she'd parked at the station and drove me straight to her house from there, where I chatted to Rob as well and was served a most welcome supper. Sally particularly wanted me to share an experience she's been enjoying for the past three years or so. Not having performed music before, never realising that she could even sing at all, she bravely joined a local Community Choir and is now thoroughly involved, going to weekly rehearsals and singing in concerts: standing 2nd from left in the outdoor picture linked above. When she invited me along this week, I knew this would be a chance to satisfy my curiosity (I have another British friend who takes part in a choir of this sort) and to find out how it works. In spite of the relaxed atmosphere at the choir practice and the fact that many of the participants never learned how to sightread from sheet music, I was flabbergasted by the high standard of the singing and the discipline of this choir! It's directed by a musician called Jon Hughes, a post-doc of York University who is a gifted composer, conductor and teacher. He teaches Yoga as well and refers to himself a Sound Artist.

The warm-up exercises lost me when the others started on a rhythmic count, with claps for 3 and finger clicks for 6 on a rapidly rising scale: one-two-one-two-clap-one-two-clap-four-one-two-clap-four-five-one-two-clap-four-five-click, etc. Then we launched into a 4-part song with words handed out but no notes to read: The Grey Funnel Line. (The Grey Funnel stands for the Navy.) To remind each part-group of the line of music they were meant to sing, the conductor used hand gestures to indicate "up" or "down" (interval not specified) or "stay on the same note", while mouthing the words at us or singing along with the various parts. To my amazement, it worked. The choir had sung this before, mind. The next item was Mr. Hughes own, 3-part composition entitled Shell Prayer. This was a mysterious enough title, but the words were even more mysterious, being in odd, incomprehensible Latin. After much puzzlement on my part, someone explained to me that the lyrics simply consisted of a list of the botanical names of seashells found around the British coast, all strung together and sung at different pitches. He had written this as part of a musical project for singers and dancers in Cornwall, Shoreline, in 2016. We were instructed to work on the final four bar section of this piece, going "ru-di-ta-pes de-cu-ssa-tus" which is the Latin name for "carpet clam shell". It wouldn't have sounded as good in the vernacular. Some of the singers complained about the melody lines clashing, but this was deliberate, of course. "You can't have consonance without dissonance!" insisted Mr. Hughes.

After this peculiarity we proceeded to a more folksy-popular, sentimental number by Peggy Seeger: Love Call Me Home, and then it was time for the tea break. After tea and biscuits came the African songs: Shosholoza (which comes in the film Invictus) from S. Africa and a Zulu wedding song that's meant to "comfort a new bride" --- one of my fellow sopranos commented that this was probably the African equivalent of "Close your eyes and think of England!" The speculation got rather out of hand and had to be curtailed. I wrote down the words that I wouldn't have managed to memorise:

Hamba Lulu. hamba Lulu. hamba Lulu. hamba Lulu!

O Thula Thula animamele

I zinto zonke

O hamba Lulu, o hamba Lulu!

It was all off the beat in 5/4 rhythm, a call and response song. We sopranos had to come in on beat 5.

After that, the last two songs seemed relatively easy: a sea shanty that went Lowlands, my lowlands away ..., and the Essex song Bushes and Briars, that the British composer Vaughan Williams apparently heard sung by a folksinger called Charles Pottipher in 1903, inspiring him to make a study of English folk music.