And No Birds Sang

I was awakened at dawn by exultant birdsong over the weekend, and the shocking realisation that it is not thus where I live. The boisterous cacophany outside my bedroom window at 4am was one I haven't heard for years, and the sheer volume of jubilant singing was overwhelming. I was staying in the village of Rodmell which nestles under the Sussex Downs and is famous for being Virginia Woolf's home and featuring in a book called To The River. It's a far cry from coastal Suffolk, though both are beautiful in their own distinctive ways. Suffolk is less hilly, and more agricultural, while Sussex is far more verdant and arboreal. As I lay in bed, feeling distressed about the now even more obvious decline in the number of song birds in my home county, I realised that the presence of so many trees, and unfertilised and unpesticided cow and sheep fields makes a haven for them. Of course there are song birds around me: a blackbirds serenades me throughout the day, and ends my evenings with his pure, poignant tune. But the sheer number of singers has vanished here as it has in so many parts of the country. What have we done? And where will it end?

Another voice thrilled me this weekend as my hostess played me a recording of her son, then aged 10, singing the solo in his church choir a few decades ago. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted and I felt tears spring to my eyes, it was so beautiful, so sweet and earnest. Listening to this little boy soar above the body of the choir, singing his heart out, was such an uplifting experience that I felt purged of all tension and cares, and almost reborn in a state of perfection. This is what music does.

Again on the subject of voices I was enthralled by Colm Toibin at the Charleston Festival on Friday, talking about loss in his latest novel, Nora Webster. Modest, self-deprecating and funny, he told us that he was the model for Donal, one of the two brothers traumatised by the absence of their mother who left them for many months unvisited in the care of an elderly aunt while she stayed with her sick husband in hospital. When he died she got her boys back, but they were now changed. Donal had a terrible stutter, and so does Colm, though nowadays he has mostly learned to hide it. Speech impediment or not his discourse and memories flowed, and they had a strange effect on me. The easy poetry of the Irish voice, lilting, musical, convivial was mine once, because that was how I learned to speak. Until I was eight I lived in Ireland, and with the abrupt removal back to England the accent had to go, to be replaced by a harsher sound, words annunciated clearly and coldly, at least to my protesting ears. But his voice is my voice, my natural voice, and listening to him I thought that other things can traumatise too, and lead to a conflicted identity. To me my voice never sounds quite right, but lapsing back into Irish wouldn't either. Something has been lost, and I'm the worse for it.