Around this time last year I had what I'd call a fun-sized stroke: not dramatic enough for an Emmerdale storyline but still no walk in the park, except in a literal sense ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first sign that something was wrong came one morning in a local cafe when I couldn't seem to frame a simple request for a croissant. This was a little puzzling but I didn't realise that I was incomprehensible to others until a little later, when a friend on a zoom call noticed that something was seriously wrong. My Babbling Period was mercifully shortlived but some words and phrases remained stubbornly elusive, even when I could hear them in my head: reading a book of Sherlock Holmes short stories in between bouts of being examined, I found it impossible to say the name of the great detective or his creator aloud.
I could still carry on conversations despite those intermittent breaks in transmission, however, and because the outlook seemed generally positive and improving each day it took a while before it suddenly occurred to me that one ability seemed to have deserted me: poems and song lyrics which I'd previously been able to summon whole now came to me as rickety, unsafe structures: a verse missing here, half a chorus there, a vital couplet vanished without a trace.
Not good.
A
while after that disturbing discovery I went out with a friend to a
park where skylarks were known to nest. I hadn't chosen our destination
but it was a sunny day, the park was fairly empty, and it was relaxing
and pleasant to lie on the grass and obligingly look up into an almost cloudless blue
sky for sightings of these birds.
At some point I began
tentatively singing the lyrics of Skylark to myself and as I went on, fearful of the lines I might miss, I began to feel a profound sense of
gratitude: both for the fact that at least I seemed able to piece this song together without any gaping holes and for the sudden reminder of
how much that Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer number had meant to me over
the years. Peter Skellern's first recording of it, on the Still
Magic album, had accompanied me on those late-night walks described in a
recent post, the soaring brass at the end the perfect soundtrack to a
brief moment of happiness when studies had been finished and the
prospect of a more exciting future stretched ahead.
More vaguely, but
still potently, I had heard various versions of the song on Benny
Green's radio shows in the early 1980s, including one which seemed, in
memory, acapella, and as I called the song to mind in the park that recording seemed to dominate and to stand for so much more: not only all the other versions of Skylark but all the titles in the Great American Songbook to which I'd been
introduced by Green on those long-ago Sunday afternoons. It wasn't the
only song I tried to reclaim during that time but it was undoubtedly the
one which moved me the most, the yearning in Mercer's lyrics so
perfectly married to to Carmichael's music.
I couldn't remember the group who sang the version on Benny Green's
programme; the impression I retained was that it was rather a rather
cheesy easy listening kind of take but, even so, it was undoubtedly that
version above all others which insisted on being heard across fifty-odd
years.
As Benny Green fans may have already realised - and as I recently discovered for myself - the recording in question was made by a group called Singers Unlimited. It doesn't come from one of their purely acapella
albums but the jazz-tinged backing isn't obtrusive. In memory I had
seemed to hear it through whatever the aural equivalent might be of a
heat-haze, or perhaps the mist mentioned in the lyrics - by which I mean
that without a star vocalist or instrumentalist to claim the attention
it was the essence of the song which came over. And hearing it via an AM
radio back in the day may well have contributed to the "hazy" effect:
something heard as though from a great distance.
My experience
in the park prompted me to contact the veteran cabaret singer Steve
Ross, who had once told me how grateful he was for still being able to
transmit those wonderful songs from the Great American Songbook. He told
me that Skylark has one of the most unexpected and lovely bridges: you
feel the lift into that other key and wonder how the composer is going
to get back to the original key - but he does.
I don't have the
vocabulary to talk about music in a technical way, but I think I get
what he means: despite the diversion the song isn't derailed.
And it was just what I needed at that moment: a reassurance that, whatever the implications of what had happened to me, I could still look forward to pleasure and consolation from the source which had already given so much to me over the years.
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