Occasional shows his softer side

(from 2013)

I pride myself on having a nice, cynical, protective shell against the vicissitudes of life.

But the older I get, the more emotional certain things make me. The family laugh at me – with kindness I trust – but they would, wouldn’t they? But there are certain snippets of film and certain pieces of music that cause me to sniff, which of course I immediately have to put down to the apparent onset of a cold.

Motion pictures first.

One of the first ever posts I did on this blog was about the original version of The Miracle Worker, the story of Helen Keller, blind, deaf and dumb and how she was reached by teacher Annie Sullivan. I first saw the film with a bunch of macho lads, and wham – we were not prepared for the impact of the final moments. Gulp! It was really most embarrassing...

Then there was the old film The Snake Pit about Olivia de Haviland being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. There is a scene there of a large room filled with people, faces filled with both hope and hopelessness and an indefinable longing, as the camera travelled over their heads while a resident sang Going Home. It’s an old spiritual, known to many as the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. I was probably a little fragile at the time I first saw the film on TV – in fact, I know I was for reasons I will not disclose here, but I disgraced myself good and proper in company when I first saw that. My self-image of the day suffered drastically. I was actually human.

It is strange things that can set me off with at least a mild lump in the throat. The building a barn sequence in Witness. Goodness knows why – it is a happy scene, illustrating the seemingly idyllic existence of the Amish in contrast with the harsh realities outside from whence the fugitive has come – but when you know the film, there is a sting in the tail. Eden don’t actually exist in this world.

And any film that has a death of a sympathetic character...  I only have to see Robert Donat as old Mr Chips telling those at his bedside that he’d had lots of children and they were all boys... and I’m away. Even the British TV series Inspector Morse (or as we tend to call him here, Inspector Grumpy) has an effect when Morse’s unhealthy lifestyle eventually finishes him off.

That’s films – but – aaagh - when you get to music...

When my daughter first got into music, it was folk music – traditional from me and more modern folk-oriented material from her favorite teachers in school. We used to play the Waterboys’ Stolen Child again and again in the car taking her to school. It’s from a poem by W.B. Yeats. Several people have put it to music, but this was our version. Mike Scott sings the chorus and an Irish actor recites the poem. Again, like the barn sequence in Witness, it is not directly sad. The poem talks of the child being caught away by the faeries – but it’s the line “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand” that gets me. Is it escaping misery? Is it embracing folly? Is it loss of innocence? Is it holding onto innocence? Is it just an oblique way of talking about growing up, or not growing up – a case of lost boys Peter Pan syndrome? Whatever, it made me buy a slim volume of Yeats poems. (Strangely, Mrs O who knows far more about real poetry than I do, dislikes the “song” and finds it boring.)

Then there is Eric Bogle. Bogle is a great writer of humorous songs. I really like humorous songs. You can perform humorous songs and get away with it even with a rubbish voice. But Bogle’s songs have a bit of an edge to them, and some are really quite cruel. But it is his anti-war songs based on the First World War that are something else. My favourite is Gallipoli (also known as: The Band Played Waltzing Matilda).

There’s a verse in the middle:

But the band played Waltzing Matilda,

when we stopped to bury our slain.

We buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs,

(pause)

then we started all over again.

It is the pause – just slight, almost imperceptible, that makes it. That’s the killer. I learned the song and was all set to do it at the local folk club – because the chords are dead easy. But I got to that bit and could never complete it in practice, and then Mrs O sternly forbade me to try.

And my final choice for now – the Miner’s Lullaby by American Bruce “Utah” Phillips.

My favourite version of this was actually sung by my daughter at the Shrewsbury folk festival a couple of years ago. I know, I know – proud father syndrome – but you could hear a pin drop when she did it.

It’s all about miners, mainly European immigrants from a Catholic background, who worked in terrible conditions underground. If there was an accident and the miners were trapped, there was rarely hope of rescue. Although the singer (wife of a miner) is Roman by faith – so for a Catholic, suicide is a mortal sin – her man still always goes down the shaft with a tin of morphine. In the event of being trapped by a roof fall, the men can ease their passing.

The chorus goes:

Husband, sleep, lay your head back and dream.
A slow fallen leaf borne down to the stream.
Then carried away on the wings of morphine,
Homeward far over the sea.

Every time she has sung that – and I always nag her to do so whenever we visit somewhere new – it has the same effect – grizzled old folkies wiping their faces over their beer, and pretending they’ve just got something in their eye.

Well, writing all this has cheered me up no end.

Pass the Kleenex will you.