Like the rest of the congregation at Dowanhill United Free Church, Alice had been nervous at the news of Frederick Hervey’s taking up the position of choirmaster on Mr Somerville’s retirement. Hervey’s reputation as a severe taskmaster preceded him. According to an article about him in the Musical Herald, Mr Hervey was a teaching member of the Tonic Sol-fa College, Singing Master of Renfrew School Board, a lecturer and music master at the Bible Training Institute of Glasgow, Music Master of Girls’ Orphan Homes at Whiteinch, Conductor of the Scotstoun Male Voice Choir, and Musical Director of Windsor Halls Church in Glasgow. Alice marvelled at how one man could hold down so many jobs, but her mother was dismissive. ‘He’s in everything but a bath,’ she said.
Now that Alice had left school and was working full-time in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery, she could afford both piano and voice lessons. Under Mr Somerville’s choir leadership, she had flourished into a key member of the soprano section and an occasional soloist. Mr Hervey offered her a discounted rate for private singing lessons with him in return for her help in leading the rehearsals. It became her responsibility to plan them, to ensure the choristers had the music they needed when they needed it, and to liaise with Gardner Street and Windsor Halls, the other major Glaswegian churches at which the Dowanhill choir performed in the major concerts of each year. Alice considered the responsibility a pleasure, reflecting the esteem in which she hoped she was held.
Even so, she chafed at the constraints her teacher placed on her vocal technique. During her first lesson, Alice—quietly proud of her God-given tone and her lung capacity—sang her warm-up arpeggios as if she were performing them. After she finished, Mr Hervey looked at her for a long moment. In the silence Alice heard her hubris. ‘You have great natural talent,’ he said, finally. ‘A good ear, a good range, and a lovely rich tone,’ he added. ‘But you’re in a hurry, and musicianship is not a race.’
While she enjoyed playing the piano at church, Alice had come to find practising the instrument repetitive and, though she would never have admitted it to dear old Mrs Ramsay, horribly dull. Alice wondered now whether her feelings for the piano were like the love a mother might have for a child who was adopted rather than born of her own flesh, which is how she now thought of her voice. And yet here was Mr Hervey, taking her back to the beginning, to the most rudimentary aspects of singing. He drilled her with exercises in basic voice production and building lung capacity. He paid inordinate attention to her posture, and his approach to phrasing was nothing short of painstaking.
‘A singer is in the unique position of being both the instrument and the performer,’ he would say. ‘We need to get you singing from the inside out, singing with your whole body.’ Alice, intimidated at the very idea of her body’s involvement in the sounds she sang, did not understand what he meant but trusted that in time she would. Despite her impatience, the brief hour that she spent each week with Mr Hervey studying melody and harmony, phrasing and pitch, was what she looked forward to most.
Mr Hervey’s working life, immersed in music, seemed a magical existence to Alice when contrasted with the oil and grime of her father’s lot, and her grim tenement home where there was love but little music. She drank in her teacher’s stories of his time as a student at the Royal Academy in London, of attending several concerts each week, and of the talented women who were now training at the Guildhall School to conduct small choirs.
Sometimes, in her more extravagant daydreams, Alice pictured herself walking the streets of London and attending the Guildhall, but the idea was as far-fetched as some of the novels she had read. Fictional young ladies travelled to Europe to study music as if it were the most normal thing for a girl to do. Having never heard of such impossible extravagance outside the pages of these novels, Alice quickly tired of them. Just once she wanted to read the story of a plain girl from a working-class family who made a life for herself using her musical talent that didn’t involve marrying or being born into the right family. In too many books all roads led to weddings—unions that produced babies and turned the mother from her piano (it was always a piano) into an exhausted slave.
Nance couldn’t understand Alice’s heretical views, but then Alice always had been the practical sister. Just as she could read instantly the shape of the songs she sang, Alice could see the landscape of relationships between men and women, even if her only experience of such relationships was that of the observer. She preferred the routines of piano practice and choir rehearsal to her mundane domestic duties. How she and Nance could have been raised in the same household and drawn such different conclusions about the realities of married life, Alice did not know.
‘You just wait. You’ll feel differently when you meet the right one,’ her sister would say.
Everyone was always telling her to wait. It was too easy to remind Nance that as a pretty girl she could pick and choose among her admirers, and had been doing just that for several years before Richard turned up at church one day like the answer to a redundant prayer. Other girls thought about putting things into a glory box, but Alice couldn’t see the point if she was to dedicate herself to music: glory boxes were for the girls to whom young men paid attention and who looked forward to marriage.
Nance and Richard’s decision to emigrate to Australia came as a disappointing surprise to their parents, who had been looking forward to tripping over a brood of grandchildren. ‘I wish
