My Mother's Records

One

There are some places that live on in your mind. Long after you have walked out of them for the last time you find yourself back inside them in your dreams. It has been many years since I walked though the rooms of my grandmother’s house, but it remains an important place to me; not as it is now, in other people’s hands, but as it was when I was a child.

While each room of my grandmother’s house has a set of details that I can vividly recall, the centre of that house, its heart, was at the back, off the kitchen. It was the room we came to for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the room we sat in to watch Coronation Street or play card games like Happy Families. Every meal had a ritual. At lunchtime part of the ritual was Gran turning on the radiogram. It was a large piece of oblong furniture made of wood that sat in the corner of the room. To turn it on Gran lifted the lid and propped it up like the bonnet of a car and then turned one of the chunky dials inside until it clicked. After the radio had been turned on you had to wait awhile in silence for it to warm up. Gran would be in the kitchen preparing sandwiches while I sat at the table and slowly the sombre voice of the National Radio news announcer would fade into the room calmly stating the catastrophes of the day.

When I stayed with Gran in the holidays I sat in Grandpa’s chair at the dining table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Behind me there was a large cabinet. The cabinet had cupboards at the bottom, a bench in the middle, and cupboards above. On the bench space were piles of papers and books: Grandpa’s papers and books. It was a jumble of things all crammed in a row, and a huge edition of Webster’s dictionary sitting un-consulted amid the jumble. It was Grandpa’s side of the table. Gran’s side had the toaster and a chair for the cat. It was on Grandpa’s side of the table that I can remember being swung and dropped through his hands, and given horsey rides on his knee, and the giggling fear of it.

I hear from my mother that her father was a man of dark clouds and bursts of light. In the days of light he was a man of great charm. In the days of bruised clouds and thunder he could be mean. He died when I was five; the same year as my Dad. I never really knew him. A heart attack. It came in a massive bolt at the table one lunchtime and he was gone.

There are only three things I remember about him: the horsey ride; a curiously lonely looking figure out in the middle of a field at the back of his house; and a bike ride on the Taieri Plain.

On this bike ride Grandpa sat me on the handlebars of his heavy, black bicycle between his arms, and pedalled out into the long, deserted back roads behind Mosgiel. Here you can find the fields, and ditches overrun by weeds, the high holly hedges and the hills off in the distance lying like a woman on her side. Here is the old landing strip and hangers used for the reserves in World War Two. Everything silent and shrunk against the largeness of the sky, filled with the heat and the rasping of crickets. I have no memory of Grandpa talking on this bike ride. What would he have said if he had known this was our last time together? What parts of him are parts of me?

Quite sometime after that trip my mother gave away a pile of 78s. She gave them to a kid I knew that had a wind up gramophone and collected 78s to play on it. I didn't know what 78s were at that time, or why she had them or what they meant.

They were her father's records.

Grandpa liked opera arias and he bought 78s of Bjoerling, Caruso and crooners such as Lanza. He was a decent tenor himself and liked to sing at church or embarrass my Gran by serenading her while she scrubbed potatoes or shelled peas at the kitchen sink. My mother has some tapes that have Grandpa singing on them. He sings a lot of hymns. There is a kind of plodding melancholy to many hymns which can be comforting or depressing depending on how well they are sung. On these tapes he sometimes sings them well, and sometimes without much enthusiasm. He was quite old then, although he was never really old, and his voice wavers a bit, especially as the recording goes on. I think he was attracted to the emotional weight of certain hymns and sang them well. A hymn with a decent melody, and a reasonable lyric or two gets a better treatment than a dirge with noble protestations of faith. He also sang the odd Italian tune: O Sole Mio, that kind of thing.

Buffalo 66 is one of my favourite movies. In it the anti-hero’s father sings a song. He sings it in the spare room of the suburban family home. It has been clear from the scenes before that he is not a good father. That he is a bitter and angry man. The son remains at the kitchen table, upset, while the father takes the girls he believes is his son’s wife down to the spare room to hear him sing. He’s made tapes. He finds a Nelson Riddle record. It’s a record of orchestral arrangements that you can sing a long to. He sings Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread). As he sings it the lighting changes in the room: it goes dark, there is a soft spot light on the father, he is standing in front of red drapes, and he spreads out his arms. It is magic. All anger and bitterness is gone, the accumulated muddle of the room has disappeared, he is alone with himself, made better by song.

I think that The Great Caruso must have been a very influential movie. It certainly made the reputation of its star, Mario Lanza. While Lanza was often criticised for being an amateur without the stamina to learn an operatic role, in truth this was probably part of his appeal to all the men around the world who could sing a nice song at parties, or in churches and dream of other things. Lanza, like Caruso, was also a bit of a ham. Technicians tend to forget, when they criticise tenors and sopranos who are hams, that opera is also about drama. It is not sufficient simply to hit all the notes, you have to sell the song as well. Caruso could sell a song. Even though it is going too far to take a big sobbing intake of breath in an opera aria as Caruso does in Pagliacci I still love it because he seems to be swept away by the drama itself.

I have never much liked art that is realistic. Art for me has always been about escape. Realistic art is false. If you want realism just open your eyes: it's a toddler reaching for food at the table; it's a mother with rollers in her hair; it's breakfast tables and net curtains. Do you think Grandpa sang Italian arias in Mosgiel in the 1960s because he wanted realism?

If you read closely between the lines of this story I think you can see what I am saying: that music comes to me from my Grandpa through my mother; that I inherit opera from him and perhaps the urge to perform; perhaps also some of my dark clouds and my desire for escape. But then what do I really know of him?

It's a nice story.