The Song of Hartgrove Hall (46 page)

The history of Britain isn't just written in books or notched upon the landscape in holloways and long barrows, it's also contained in song. Parents and grandparents passed their songs down the generations, the words, melodies and rhythms shifting with each performance. They were sung on windswept hillsides and in muddy fields, around the fire and in the pubs, along the ice droves and the cattle droves; they were sung by carters and milkmaids, shepherds and shopkeepers, grandmothers and gypsies. Some were published as song sheets and sold at fairs by pedlars, while others survive only in memory. Some are centuries old with strange modal melodies, their origins unknown and mysterious, while others are more recent, recounting events such as the Napoleonic wars, which in time have become absorbed into the broad repertory of songs, their sources mostly forgotten too.

The subjects of folk songs are as varied as life itself: they are about love and death and murder, the passing of the seasons and of youth, of men lost in battle and at sea. Some are downright silly, and others tragic. Often the same tunes are sung to different words and vice versa. These variations are sometimes geographical – the version of ‘The Foggy Dew' sung in the west of Scotland is quite different from that sung down in Somerset. The songs live with each singer and, as they make their journeys across Britain, they grow and change along the way.

By the nineteenth century, folk songs were already fading out of common life. Thomas Hardy complained that within a week of the railway arriving in Dorset, the hillsides and pastures no longer reverberated with traditional West Country songs but with the hits of the music hall. Soon ‘The Lambeth
Walk' was hummed in Langton Matravers and Batcombe, while the older songs started to be forgotten. The era where the singing of folk songs was an everyday pastime was vanishing, and with it many of the songs themselves.

Cecil Sharp was at the forefront of the first folk revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. The legend goes that while he was staying in Headington, a mile or so east of Oxford, a troop of Morris dancers appeared at the cottage on Boxing Day. They were a peculiar snow-covered procession, all the men dressed in white and carrying coloured sticks, with one dressed up as the fool. They danced and leaped to an odd-sounding tune that Sharp had never heard before. He was captivated. He wrote down the melody and declared that he must venture out across England to hunt out more. While staying with friends in Somerset, he overheard the gardener singing ‘The Seeds of Love' as he mowed the lawn.

Sharp's song hunt led him across England and, later, America, accompanied by his devoted assistant, the evocatively named Maud Karpeles. Sharp and his contemporaries, along with almost every song collector since, gathered up folk songs as a way of preserving them from extinction. Yet folk songs have proved to be remarkably resilient. Even in the digital age, where it seems logical to assume that all songs must have been gathered and recorded, or long since lost, more are still coming to light.

Contemporary Song Collectors

The musician and folk singer Sam Lee is at the forefront of song collecting in Britain today. I met Sam one winter's night in a pub in Fitzrovia. He blew in and we huddled by the electric fire as he told me about song collecting – how he's light-footed as he walks through the woods, trying to leave no trace even as he searches for hidden things. Even though, like me, he's Jewish and was born in London, there was something
Puckish about him; he was full of melody and charm. I was sure that, despite being in W1, I caught the scent of the woods.

Until I met Sam, I'd thought that song collectors were a vanished breed, but I was quite mistaken. He mostly gathers songs from the traveller community, the last custodians of ancient songs in the modern world. And he's always searching for one more song.

Benjamin's Book

When I moved house, I learned that our cottage had been occupied during the eighteenth century by a singer, song collector, alehouse keeper and mischief-maker called Benjamin Rose. In 1820, Benjamin sat down to write out all his tunes in a manuscript book. It contains a wonderful repository of tunes from the period – some are traditional West Country songs and dances; others chronicle great events like the Battle of Waterloo – all transcribed in Rose's beautiful, cursive script. Many years later the book found its way into the hands of the folk musicians Tim Laycock and Colin Thompson, who understood the significance of the find.

I'd heard that Tim was performing Rose's music, and so I pursued him, hoping to invite him to come to our cottage to sing it here once again. I finally tracked him down, aptly enough, at Max Gate, Thomas Hardy's Dorchester house, on a soggy autumn day. After issuing my invitation, I ventured into Hardy's rain-soaked orchard and scrumped a few apples, deciding that this must be good fuel for the imagination before embarking upon my new novel,
The Song Collector
.

A few weeks later, Tim came round to our house, bringing Benjamin Rose's book with him. We ate supper and then gathered by the fire to listen as Tim sang. The Rose family had lived in our cottage for several generations. Two of Benjamin's great-grandsons had drowned when their ship HMS
Good
Hope
was sunk in 1914, and there is a small memorial to them in the village church. Tim selected a sailor's lament, ‘The Blackbird', in memory of the two lost boys, and we sat and listened as he sang Ben's songs beside the hearth where they had been transcribed nearly two hundred years before. The boys had been lost, but the songs had been found again and returned home.

—

If you want to try your hand, or ear, at song collecting, Sam Lee runs the Song Collectors Collective, which also contains a repository of folklore and recordings of folk singers: http://songcollectorscollective.co.uk/

Song collecting is not a British phenomenon. Probably the greatest and certainly the most prolific song collector of all was American, the legendary Alan Lomax. He collected songs from all across the USA, recording the nation from the 1920s until the 1990s. He recorded the history of America in song. Lomax also travelled to Europe and recorded extensively in Scotland, close to where Fox, Sal and Marcus stay in the novel. If you want to listen to Alan Lomax's song recordings from the USA or the UK please visit: http://research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp.

The Great British Song Map

I'm still not finished with song collecting and I now want to create a portrait of contemporary Britain in song. Together with some friends in the folk community I have started a communal project to map as many songs as possible, put them up online freely available so that people can both listen to the music of their town, and if they like, learn their own local songs.

If you want to post or listen to a song please go to:

www.songmap.co.uk

I've been overwhelmed by the kindness and enthusiasm of the folk music community while writing and researching this novel. My profound thanks to Tim Laycock for singing lessons, impromptu concerts, friendship and apple cake. I'm indebted to Sam Lee, artist and song collector extraordinaire – this book was written to his music. My friends Hélène Frisby and Lea Simpson have been endlessly supportive, providing patient advice and support, and when all else failed: gin. Huge thanks to my parents, aka Mushki and Bup-Bup, and their unwavering confidence and childcare provision. I'm not sure how I would have managed without you. I realise that it's a gift to be able to sit down and write content in the knowledge that one's small son is happily dangling for tadpoles and hunting for trolls in his grandmother's garden.

Thanks to David Julyan, composer and friend, for checking the manuscript so carefully. I'm glad that in fiction I was able to help you fulfil your true ambitions on the bassoon. I'm extremely grateful to Kearn for sharing his extensive knowledge of vintage explosive techniques. Thank you to Stan for being the best of agents and of friends.

Huge thanks to my fabulous editors, Carole Welch and Tara Singh Carlson, and the respective teams at Sceptre and Plume. Lastly, my gratitude and love to David and Luke for understanding that stories are sometimes more important than unburned suppers or tidy
houses.