208. Zee, Zed, Go to Bed

inhabitots.com

There is a famous song for learning your ABC’s, to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (You can listen to Mozart’s virtuoso variations on it here.) When I first came to the United States, American children used to sing the ABC song like this:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
QRS
TUV
WX
Y & Zee

Now I know my ABC
Tell me what you think of me.

But sometime in the 1970’s or 1980’s, or so I imagine, my generation of New Age parents felt that this version was too evaluative and could place an unacceptable degree of performance anxiety on their children. Their new version, now the dominant one, ended like this:

Now I know my ABC
Next time won’t you sing with me?

This child-friendly version presented the teacher and the children as equals, joining together in a shared learning enterprise.

The British version of ABCD that I was raised on was altogether different, so I searched YouTube for it. Aha! Surely the ABCD song on the British Council website would be the traditional version. But no, it was the new America version trying pathetically and disappointingly to preserve a thin veneer of Englishness:
 nothing but the American version with the British Zed tacked on.

In my childhood, children were taught their place in no uncertain terms:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
LMNOPQ
RST
UVW
XY Zed


XY Zed
Sugar on your bread
All good children go to bed.

No nonsense about sharing or equality. After reciting their lessons, good children will go off to bed as they are told to do, and without a fuss. No ifs, ands, or buts. Still, unlike the saccharine-sweet American version that now seems to have gained near-universal status, English children were compensated with bread, butter, and sugar. Delicious, and right before bed, too.  So crunchy and calming. So good for the teeth.

I searched the entire Internet in vain for my childhood version. The closest I could come was this bossy-pants of a little Indian girl who recited, sing-song style:

XY Zed
Sugar on the bread
If you don’t like it you can go to bed.

In India, as in Canada and many other ex-colonial countries, many people still say Zed, although Zee is gaining ground.

(from billcasselman.com)

In regard to the pronunciation of the last letter of the English alphabet, take your pick, but I know what I like. Zed is the older form, apparently derived from the Greek Zeta (which is the sixth letter of its alphabet, far from holding pride of place at the end), in its turn taken from the Phoenician Zayid. The U.S. Zee, it seems, is a late- 17^th Century English dialectal form brought over by early English colonists.

While I was looking all this up, I discovered that Izzard is an old form of Zed. This gives me an entirely gratuitous excuse to include Eddie Izzard, one of my favorite stand-up comedians, discoursing here on British and American English.

And while I’m on the subject of British comedians, what better way to close out the 2013 April A-to-Z Challenge than with the A-to-Zed of Monty Python?

CODA: In the The Apple Pie ABC, the alphabet doesn’t end with Z, but with ampersand. Taking its cue, as the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge comes to an end, I will do the same, and hope thereby to be granted a continuance. Thanks to the organizers and to all the bloggers I visited, and who visited me in turn. Do come again.

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205. Weeping Willow

There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

[Chorus] Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
Do not let the parting grieve thee,
And remember that the best of friends must part, must part
Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you,
I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.
— F. J. Adams, 1891

I don’t remember having seen any weeping willows in my childhood in India, and knew of them only through There’s a Tavern in the Town, a song my mother used to sing. Although she would never have said so to us children, she was probably homesick for England when she sang these old songs. That hidden emotion and the longtime association of the weeping willow with parted lovers imbued my image of the tree with sentiment, deep, but non-specific.

It was not until we immigrated to the United States that weeping willows became a common feature of the cultivated landscape, and not until we moved out to the farm in Winchendon and started homesteading ourselves that we learned of the practical dangers of planting them anywhere near a house.  Although the tree is beautiful—one of the first to turn a delicate yellow, then green, in the early spring—and useful for preventing erosion, it craves water, and its large, thirsty roots gravitate toward septic pipes and storm drains, work their way in through cracks and crevices, and soon block them.

When my parents moved into their current house, there was a small weeping willow down in the far corner of their back field, in the lowest-lying part of their property. It was well away from the house and its roots would be likely to gravitate down and ever farther away, so they let it be. It thrived there, and now, twenty years later, it has filled out the entire corner and grown up to its full, mature height.

The weeping willow (salix babylonica) is native to northern China. Being highly desirable, it was traded along the Silk Route to south-west Asia and Europe, and has now spread worldwide. The tree at my parents’ is now so large that it can be seen from the other side of the world. Here’s how we found out:

My nephew Pinakin came to the U.S. from India for his doctoral studies. When he visited us for the first time and I was driving him over to meet my parents, he asked me excitedly if he could navigate. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve looked you all up on Google Earth.” Sure enough, Pinakin gave me flawless directions across town. When we drew up at the house, he exclaimed with satisfaction, “It’s all here: the house, the fields, and the big tree in the corner!” That weeping willow can now be spotted from India via satellite! I can’t quite describe what that made me feel: the tree that has so long been a symbol of parting and loss is now a landmark that our distant loved ones can seek out, zoom in on, and find us by.

Earlier this evening, in the gathering dusk, when I gazed on that tree clothed in its delicate Spring green, with the last rays of the setting sun lighting the adjacent clouds on fire, I thought of my mother in India half a century ago, long before the days of satellites, singing of her distant loved ones.  When I was a child, I thought that the woman in “There’s a Tavern in the Town” was singing, “I’ll hang my heart [not harp] on a weeping willow tree.” I still think that my version describes best what we have hung on that tree, that continues to seek water and light wherever it is transplanted, regardless of the human heart.

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202. Tennessee Stud

For years my love of country music was a bit of a guilty secret in a group of friends who listened mostly to rock-n-roll, punk, blues, and reggae. I remember once in my twenties, while I was playing Hank Williams in our group house in Somerville, my housemate Charlie going up into his room and playing his saxophone at full blast to register his displeasure. I listened to real country, country blues, folk, and bluegrass. Besides Hank Williams (whom I had loved ever since 1970, when I had heard a nameless musician sing Jambalaya at the Nameless Coffee House in Harvard Square), my favorites were Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs; and my favorite, Doc Watson.

In December 1970, when I was sixteen and had been in the States for less than a year, Andrew took me to the Boston Tea Party on Lansdowne Street near the Fenway. The line-up that night was the Incredible String Band (pretty, but for me at least, forgettable), Mimi Fariña, who had a lovely voice and sang Pack Up Your Sorrows (though sadly, without Richard Fariña, who had died four years earlier); and Doc Watson, with his son Merle, whose performance that night instilled in me a lifelong love of his music.

Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) would have been in his late 40s when I saw him in 1970, Born and raised in Deep Gap, North Carolina, near the border of Eastern Tennessee, he was like no other American I had ever yet met. I did not know at the time that he had been involved in the American folk music revival and had played at the Newport Folk Festival back in 1963: he seemed to me to be the down-home authentic article, uncontaminated by outside influences—although I was to learn that he was eclectic and experimental, drawing from traditional and modern folk, country, bluegrass, and blues, and even throwing in the occasional rockabilly performance. His virtuoso flat-picking was so fast that it boggled the mind, and his voice was true and clear—I could listen forever and never tire, to Deep River Blues, Shady Grove, Banks of the Ohio (performed here with Bill Monroe), and so many more.

It was on that night in 1970 when I heard him play Tennessee Stud for the first time. I was to learn later that it was his most popular song, a big crowd-pleaser. Although it clearly wasn’t one of Doc Watson’s own favorites, he seemed to be resigned to delivering to the audience what they wanted. Immediately after his first song someone yelled out, “Tennessee Stud,” and although Doc seemed a little annoyed, he eventually obliged, hamming it up just a little (I whupped her brother and I whupped her paw), and, after the last There never was a hoss like the Tennessee Stud, there was such a cacophony of heehaws you would have thought that we were in a barnyard. If there’s anything more irritating than a down-home country boy saying heehaw!, it’s a highly-educated Bostonian saying hee haw! the way he imagines a country boy would; but Doc just maintained his enigmatic expression, nodded quietly to Merle, and went on with the show.

A few years later, probably in the late 1970s, we went to see Doc and Merle Watson again, at the Paradise on Commonwealth Avenue. Again those irritating young men started calling out “Tennessee Stud” from the very outset. As if Doc didn’t have a massive repertoire and a line-up of songs ready to perform. But those who didn’t know anything else by him, knew “Tennessee Stud” from the popular album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972). (Andrew, by the way, had no patience for the song. He found it intensely irritating that these country singers all seemed to love their guns and their horses more than anything or anyone else; much more, he said, than any woman.)

The whistles, interruptions, heehaws, and yells of “Tennessee Stud!” continued. Finally Doc Watson stopped playing and addressed the crowd in stern, admonitory tones.

“Since y’all seem to want it so much, I will play the song, but on one condition: you must keep completely quiet through the whole performance. Not one heehaw, d’you hear?”

Silenced, the callow youths nodded their heads dumbly, like chastened schoolboys. Having received the desired promise, Doc was as good as his word, and he and Merle gave the crowd a rousing rendition.

I was able to see Doc Watson three or four times more, twice in the late 1980s/early 1990s with Nikhil when he was little. The first time was in Memorial Hall in Wilmington, VT, the only venue on the tour that allowed children, and was Nikhil’s very first concert. In the intermission I asked Nikhil which songs he’d like Doc to play, and we took them up to the stage on a piece of paper. Someone must have read it out to Doc or else Nikhil’s favorites were Doc’s own, because he sang every single one of them, including, as I recall, Mama Don’t ‘Low No Musical Played Around Here. The second time was outdoors at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and was supposed to be Doc’s last concert before he retired. (Thankfully, he went on doing those “last concerts” for nearly 20 more years.) The line-up featured Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, not long before Bill Monroe passed away, with Doc Watson singing no more than a handful of songs. I asked Nikhil which songs he would like Doc to sing if he could choose, and he replied, “He’s in the Jailhouse Now and The Last Thing on My Mind.” I’ll be darned if Doc didn’t sing both of them!

The last time I got to see Doc Watson in concert was in November, 2006 at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. A living legend at 83 years old, he took us on a musical journey back to his roots and brought down the house. No one asked for “Tennessee Stud,” but he sang it for us anyway.

Rest In Peace, Doc Watson.

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200. Roots, Rock, Reggae

My first encounter with Reggae music was with Jimmy Cliff’s Wonderful World, Beautiful People in 1969, during lunch-hour at the all-girls Parliament Hill School in London. It was an incongruous setting: in a school community polarized between hippies and skinheads (with the hippie girls wearing long hair and black tights and the skinhead girls wearing very short hair and white tights), it was the skinheads who played the Reggae, while the hippies were playing the newly discovered Led Zeppelin. I was an outsider to both groups since I attended that school for only a few months, though if I had belonged to any group it would have been the hippies. The skinhead philosophy (if you can call it that) was a racist one, so it was odd that they liked Jimmy Cliff. Gangs of skinheads would lie in wait for Asians (“Pakis,” they called them all) and beat them up, kicking them with their Doc Martens, which they called bovver boots. According to their racial stereotypes, Asians were weak and passive, while the Afro-Caribbeans were masculine and liable to  fight back. Hence they left them alone, gave them grudging respect, and listened to their music.

While my sympathies were with the hippies, I thought that Jimmy Cliff’s was unquestionably the better sound; Led Zeppelin left me cold. The previous year, when I had first arrived in England, Desmond Dekker topped the charts with his hit single, Israelites, and I loved that too.

After moving to the United States I lost touch with Reggae music for a couple of years, but when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come (1972) came to the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (for what was to be a ten-year run) I fell in love with it all over again. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that movie and, of course, played the album many times more, over and over again, as was our wont in those days. Every song on it was a winner, from the hard-hitting title track to the achingly sweet Many Rivers to Cross and Sitting in Limbo.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970’s that I discovered the Wailers, but when I did, I became a complete and total fan of Reggae, which seemed to combine the best of rhythm & blues, Third World politics, a voice for the working poor and the dispossessed, and messianic liberation theology with Caribbean syncopation, positive vibrations, and a truly global vision. It was slower and less frenetic than rock-n-roll; it had the beat, but it also had soul. We went to see Bob Marley & the Wailers three times, in 1976 at the Music Hall in Boston, 1978 at the Music Inn outdoors in Lenox, Western Massachusetts, and in 1979 at the Harvard Stadium. In 1979 we saw Peter Tosh in Sanders Theatre at Harvard on his first solo tour. It was around that time, too, that we first got to see Toots and the Maytals, and I accompanied my friend Geno backstage to interview Toots after the show.

When Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, only thirty-six years old, it felt like the end of an era. Peter Tosh was killed a few short years afterwards, in 1987, at age forty-two. The harsh realities of the unequal, war-torn world he sang of in songs like Equal Rights and Rumors of War caught up to him in his own home. We were entering the Reagan era, and we needed all the inspiration, the Redemption Songs, we could get, but we had lost our prophets and bards. Listening to Bob Marley singing Three Little Birds, we sang along:

Baby don’t worry,
’bout a thing

Cos every little thing’s
Gonna be all right

And tried to believe it.

To this day, I far prefer a reggae version of just about any song to the original. If you want proof of the truth of this, listen to Toots and the Maytals sing Country Roads and follow it up with the John Denver original. I guarantee that thereafter the latter will be insipid by comparison.

Listen: Roots, Rock, Reggae: this a reggae music.

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196. Never No More

When you are a little girl and you quarrel with your best friend, one or the other of you storms out of the room, crying, “I’m never going to talk to you again—never, ever!” Fortunately, most of these storms give way to sunshine before long and you are soon arm-in-arm again, all forgiven and forgotten.

Adults have longer memories; they bear grudges, grudges that they hold on to like grim death even though in the process they hurt themselves more than anyone else.  For them, how long “Never” is may depend on how obstinate they are, how long they’re willing to deny themselves the possibility of forgiveness.

One of my favorite Jimmie Rodgers songs is the Never No Mo’ Blues. The singer has lost his lover and he is inconsolable. He declares that his life is a failure, because:

She won’t be my gal no mo’ no mo’ no mo

His last yodeled no mo-o’ is drawn out like a hound howling at the moon. He closes:

Now whether I’m right or wrong
I’m gonna be gone before long
And then I’ll hush this crazy song
And I never will sing
No mo’, no mo-o’ 

It is a devastating thought to me that someone could forever deny himself the joy of singing, one of the chief means by which he might be able to find consolation.

In the aftermath of a really tragic event like yesterday’s blasts at the Boston Marathon,  it is too soon to speak of forgiveness. In the face of  so much pain, people must draw together protectively. But while I am hearing deep sorrow, disbelief, determination to keep strong and to see justice done, I’m not hearing talk of vengeance or the drum-beat for a scapegoat. We won’t forget this soon. But Never is a long time.

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194. London, My London

(from http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk)

I was born in London, a London of the 1950s just emerging from the ravages of the Second World War and the era of British colonialism, a new London with more educational opportunities and better health care and social services for the poor and working classes, greater cultural diversity as immigrants from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies came to find work in the “Mother Country,” a London where my Indian father and English mother met and married. Although I have actually lived in the city of my birth for only 5-6 years in total, they include periods in my infancy, in my nursery, elementary, and secondary school years, and while I was a university student. London, birthplace of my mother, will always be dear to me and, as cities go, is perhaps the only one where I could imagine myself feeling completely at home.

London from Parliament Hill (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

the Heath in Autumn (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

But my London is not the home of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace—in fact, after all these years I have yet to visit the Tower of London. “My” London is a city of neighborhoods, and specifically, of the neighborhoods of North London where my mother grew up, where my father lived as a student, where I was born, and where in turn I lived as a student—Kentish Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead, and Camden Town. When I return, I go straight to my family, infinitely more important to me than any monument. When my mother returns, she and her sister Bette head straight out to Castle’s pie and mash shop (not my cup of tea—I’m squeamish about eels) and then for a ramble over Hampstead Heath, ending up at Kenwood House for tea and a bite to eat.

Queen’s Crescent market (kentishtowner.co.uk)

“My” London is plaice, haddock, or cod-‘n-chips in newspaper, the thick, soggy chips salted and liberally doused with malt vinegar; crowded street markets with stalls where half the goods seem to have fallen off the back of  a lorry; corner shops run by British Asians selling fresh coriander and green chillies along with English sweets and tabloids; bakeries full of fresh crusty  loaves and squashy jam doughnuts; the Tube, double-decker busses, and black cabs (my Uncle Bill drove one–see Get Me To the Church on Time); and, of course, pubs, which can still be found on just about every street corner.

The Flask, Hampstead (tigergrowl.files.wordpress.com)

In my London, Cockney accents emerge quite naturally from the mouths of British Asian youth whose grandparents immigrated there from the former Empire—after the sun set on it. (See Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But…) Visiting a friend in Hackney back in the 1980s, I found the adult education booklet carrying night-class listings in eight languages, including Bengali, Punjabi, Greek, and Turkish.

My London is the London of Brick Lane and Southall, of the Royal Free Hospital and aging public housing estates; of pub food that features samosas as well as Cornish pasties and traditional English Sunday dinners; of the Bank Holiday fairs on Hampstead Heath and the Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival every August Bank Holiday weekend (by the way, given the importance of Notting Hill to Britain’s history of race relations, it infuriated me that they managed to make the movie Notting Hill without a single black character in it).

Notting Hill Carnival (demotix.com)

My mother married for love and had to leave her beloved city for most of the rest of her life; yet it has never left her heart and therefore it can never leave mine. Every seven years, when I watch the latest edition of  Michael Apted’s 7 Up series (Here’s the late Roger Ebert interviewing Apted in 2006), I wonder fleetingly what my life might have been like had my parents decided to stay there. But if they had, I wouldn’t be who I am now.

I leave you with the British Asian band Cornershop’s 1990’s hit, Brimful of Asha, and a rendition of Hubert Gregg’s sentimental 1940’s favorite, Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner.

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189. Goodness Gracious Me!

By the 1990s, there was a sizeable population of Asian—specifically, South Asian—origin in Britain. In 1948, needing labor power to rebuild the country after the Second World War, Britain had opened its doors to all subjects of the Empire, or former Empire. In 1962, after the economy started slowing down, immigration was restricted, and that process continued with still more restrictive legislation going into effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, by the 1980s and 1990s, the mostly British-born children of the post-war immigrants were making their presence felt in the culture, and the BBC Two television skit comedy series Goodness Gracious Me (1998-2001) was a hilarious and influential example. The show started out on BBC Radio 4 (1996-1998), and the television series was a huge crossover success, followed avidly by Asians and non-Asians alike.

The show’s title came from a song of the same name in the Peter Sellers-Sophia Loren comedy, The Millionnairess (1960), in which Sellers, playing an Indian doctor, created a parodic Indian accent that was to become the definitive, almost the “authentic” accent required for anyone playing the part of an Indian on stage or screen, even if they were actually Indian themselves. The brilliant young ensemble cast, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, and Nina Wadia played on this irony, parodying the parody.

Written as they were by young British Asians, the skits’ irreverent humor more-or-less equally targetted white British stereotyping of Asians, and their parents’ generation of Asian immigrants. Many of them turned the tables on British ignorance or racism (see Jonathan, Going for an English, Authentic, and the fake Guru), while others comedically reinforced the stereotypes of Asian parents (see Muslim Boy Converts to Judaism, Typical Asian Parents, and the skits of The Coopers (Kapoors), who try to be more English than the English). I adored the show, because there was nothing nearly as clever or sophisticated in the U.S. at the time (the South Asian population being largely made up of post-1965 immigrants and their children). Still, I winced now and then when the jokes were at the expense of the immigrant parents, since, as a 1.5 generation immigrant born and raised outside of the U.S., I identified with the parents’ generation at least as much as that of the children.

Each member of the cast has gone on to even greater accomplishments, especially Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, who married each other after doing the talk-show parody The Kumars at No. 42 together. Meera Syal, MBE, who played Sanjeev’s grandmother in The Kumars, has acted prolifically in theater and film as well as in television, and is the author of two novels, Anita and Me (1996, made into a BBC film, 2002) and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999, made into a BBC mini-series, 2005). Besides acting in Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars, and playing numerous film roles, Sanjeev Bhaskar, OBE, has hosted the documentary series India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, written and starred in the ITV sitcom Mumbai Calling, and most recently, stars in The Indian Doctor (BBC One).

My focus on Syal and Bhaskar should in no way diminish the talent of Nina Wadia and Kulvinder Ghir. Wadia is perfect in her over-the-top parodies of Indian mothers (see Competitive Mothers: Sexual Prowess) and perhaps my favorite sketch of all is Ghir’s Buddhist Pest Control Man. I can’t imagine British culture without Goodness Gracious Me. If you haven’t yet come across it, and have even the tiniest funny bone in your body, you’re in for a treat.

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185. Common Sense

They got mesmerized
By lullabies
And limbo danced
In pairs
Please lock that door
It don’t make much sense
That common sense
Don’t make no sense
No more
—John Prine. Common Sense

We were raised on the common-sense meaning of common sense; that is, “the knowledge and experience which most people already have.” But the definition continues  “. . . or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have.” In fact, common sense is not common at all (in the sense of being universally shared), since it varies over time and from culture to culture. And it was only in graduate school (where you tend to learn that everything you thought you knew is wrong) that I learned that according to the brilliant political thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937—he had a lot of time to think while imprisoned by Mussolini) common sense is often conformist thinking that upholds the status quo. Gramsci credited ordinary people with being intelligent, even philosophers, but he saw “good sense” as making up only part of their thinking. He saw a large part of it, however, as having been “established by a process of consent to ruling class attitudes and interests which are thereby accepted by society at large as being in its own general interests” (Behler). This helps explain, for example, why people so often seem to vote against their own interests.

Common Sense is also one of my favorite songs by John Prine, who understands very well, through his own native common sense, the Gramscian meaning of the term. Although I adore just about everything John Prine writes, this song is particularly dear to my heart, because it talks about the disillusionment that comes along with the American immigrant experience and doesn’t just parrot the common-sensical idea of the American Dream.

They came here by boat
And they came here by plane
They blistered their hands
And they burned out their brain
All dreaming a dream
That’ll never come true
Hey, don’t give me no trouble
Or I’ll call up my double
We’ll play piggy-in-the-middle
With you.

And if I have any common sense at all I’ll bring this to an end now, before I get late for work.

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182. Hot Cross Buns

The Penguin Cookery Book

Mum has two English cookery books which she has carried with her wherever we have moved and has referred to all these years whenever she makes traditional dishes like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, or scones, or cheese straws. The first one dates from the Second World War, when rationing was in effect and essential ingredients like butter and eggs were hard to come by. The second is a battered old edition of The Penguin Cookery Book by Bee Nilson, which was my source when, one Good Friday in my early thirties, I set out to make hot cross buns.

I am a confident cook when working on the stovetop, but baking is a hit-or-miss operation for me, and I always find the prospect of it rather daunting. Still, I copied out the recipe from Mum’s cookery book, gathered all the ingredients together, and found a warm spot in the draughty farm kitchen for the yeast to rise. A few hours later I emerged, covered in flour from head to toe but triumphantly bearing aloft a tray of piping-hot buns, which were almost instantly demolished by my perennially hungry housemates. I promised myself I’d make them again the following year, and that the next time I’d make a double batch while I was going to all that trouble. I can’t remember now whether or not I ever did go to the trouble again, although I like to think that I did.

Soon afterwards we moved to Amherst, where, after a few years, The Henion Bakery opened its doors, featuring—among its many specialities—jam doughnuts beyond compare, which sustained me through the long years of dissertation-writing. One year, as springtime came around, I visited Henion’s to find a large batch of hot cross buns on the counter, fresh from the oven and perfect in every way, and compared to which my painstaking attempts seemed pitiful. Then and there I ordered a batch, and have done so every year since, never looking back.

The eating of the buns must be heralded by the nursery rhyme, which we sing with glee as we pour the tea and prepare to tuck in; and since I have no daughters, my son has come into a goodly number of these doughy delicacies over the years.

I’m not generally a national chauvinist, but I insist on singing the English version of this song. Having lived in the States as long as I have, I’ve become accustomed to the American versions of many songs, even starting to prefer some of them. But to my ear the American version of “Hot Cross Buns” sounds heavy and plodding, while the English one springs up and down like a bouncing ball, full of life and energy in keeping with the season.

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179. And he laughing said to me

William Blake, Frontispiece, Songs of Innocence

There has been only one occasion when I have found myself composing a tune, and it was one that seemed to descend all of a piece, perfect in every way.

It happened one afternoon in my second year at university, when, alone and at a loose end, I shut myself into one of the music practice rooms in Currier House, just me and a piano in a sterile, sound-proof cell.

I wasn’t studying the piano anymore, having abandoned it after fhree years of lessons in India and a fourth in England, ending with a fizzle after an intermediate-level Royal Schools of Music examination. The fact was, I had never taken flight as a pianist, just plodded along, heavy and uninspired, “doing”  scales and the endlessly replayed pieces one had to prepare and perform for the exam. After all those lessons I wasn’t even competent enough to be entrusted with accompanying the hymn-singing in morning chapel at Mount Hermon. But although I would never be a pianist, I was musical. I loved singing, and thanks to Mrs. Murray, the Principal’s wife, so did the whole school. Every morning, schoolchildren from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, as well as Christian families opened their lungs to the mountain air and raised their collective voices in song, making a joyful noise that echoes in my ears even today, nearly fifty years later. And we didn’t just sing: we harmonized, reedy descants soaring over smooth altoes, sturdy tenors, and youthful baritones; adjusted the dynamics, now full-throated, now hushed; and alternated lines, first the girls, then the boys in reply.

I may have betaken myself to the practice room that day in search of the youthful spirit I feared I was losing at university (see send my roots rain). At Mount Hermon, a precious side-benefit of learning an instrument was that one got to miss a half-hour of morning or afternoon study to practice, completely alone;  perhaps I just wanted to get away and commune with myself. In any case, I sat desultorily picking out little tunes with one hand, no particular place to go.

I had been reading the Romantic poets, and was taken with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and his idea of organized innocence. My conception of organized innocence is probably highly idiosyncratic, but I remember it as a state one can consciously choose as an adult, having tasted the bitterness of experience.  The innocence of youth is also a state of ignorance, but if one can come through experience without being poisoned, one may return to a new innocence.

Then it came to me, a tune composed expressly for Blake’s Introduction to Songs of Innocence. It came as the child had come to the poet, as the song had sprung to his lips in the poem, and I found myself singing it out loud, utterly unselfconscious in the sound-proof room, then writing it down without any effort whatsoever. It wasn’t even written for me: it had  a portamento in the second repetition of the last line which I did not have the delicacy of touch to execute; and it was always a little high for for my range, as if designed for a boy with an as-yet-unbroken voice. Someday, I tell myself, I will ask such a boy to sing it for me, and make a recording.

A cherub of song visited me that day, as angels had the young Blake; and at a desolate time when I sorely needed it. I had never composed a tune like this before (or rather, one had never offered itself to me in this way) and have never done so since; but now I know that it is possible.

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:



‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again.’

So I piped: he wept to hear.



‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer.’

So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.



‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanished from my sight,

And I plucked a hollow reed,



And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear (x3).

—William Blake
Introduction, Songs of Innocence

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