After some preliminary stamping and walking about, the choir burst forth into what sounded in the empty church to be the most glorious singing in the world. It was a well-known chorus from the Messiah, and the singers let themselves go with complete certainty. But every few bars, this joyous abandon was interrupted by the organist taking his hands off the keys and clapping them smartly. The basses were always enjoying themselves with such tremendous force, that they sang on for several bars before they realized that they had been left in the air without support from the organ. When they stopped, at last, there came an angry shouting voice from the side of the chancel. From where we heard it, it had a doubled, echoing sound. Mr. Ridley, the organist, was expressing his horror at the discords which had sounded to us so magnificent; and the choir had to ‘ Go back to Letter A’. There was a flutter of paper, and then they sang again. No music has ever had for me quite the same quality as those Handel choruses, swinging boldly along, sharply interrupted, and then gradually falling to pieces, one voice breaking off after another, till a solitary tenor was left suspended on a high note, quite out of his reach, from which he suddenly came down in panic.
When I taught the choir at Netherhampton, our practices were far more primitive. We met in the very small school of this little hamlet, and the members of the choir doubled their legs under them, and squatted on the Infants’ benches. There were no lamps, and as it grew dark, each man lit his own candle and held it near his book. It made an enchanting scene. There was old Dimmer the Ploughman, with his grandly carved face, his grey beard and thick grey hair, and the patient humorous eyes which are often seen in men who spend their lives in watching the earth and the sky. Dimmer could read a few words, but no music. He learnt the words of the hymns at the practice, while he extemporized a perfectly harmonious bass which he sang in a full musical voice. Toomer, a gentle furtive man with a black beard, said he liked to ‘sing air’ but he stammered so badly that he had hardly ever begun to sing before the hymn was over. Mr. Cox was a very grand musician, who had sung in a town choir, and who looked on us all as rather despicable amateurs, while Mrs. Terrill, with her pretty complexion and fair hair, did not make much noise, but always came because she liked to support the Church. Then there was Dorothy Hayden, who could easily have carried the service on her own shoulders if no one else came at all. She was our only real singer; and she was a rock in the midst of the usual little group of shuffling children which completed our choir.
If I was away, Mr. Tutt, the churchwarden, sometimes took charge with such enterprise as to disconcert the rest of the choir completely. Old Dimmer came to me one day in tears because Mr. Tutt had changed the music on Sunday, so that he ‘knew no more about it than that tree, and couldn’t sing all through the service, but just stood up there looking silly’.
Candles are the perfect light for choirs, as anyone will agree who remembers a service in Magdalen Chapel at Oxford, or in King’s College, Cambridge. There is a week in the year when Evensong begins by daylight, the rich colours of the medieval glass glowing behind the heads of the choristers. Then darkness creeps up, those colours turn to ashes, and there springs to life, beside each singer, a thin white flame which has really been lit all the time. Those lines of surpliced figures, and the row of pointed flames have a very chaste beauty.
Never can I forget a Choral Festival in Salisbury Cathedral when great clusters of banners—thirty or forty at once—were grouped together at intervals in the procession of choirs. They appeared from the light outside the West Door, and surged up and down over the steps into the nave, swaying and bending as they came under the porch, and making a confused and moving sea of colour. Their restless shadows fell upon the faces of choirboys who moved along, their eyes on their books, singing very earnestly. Every time those banners moved under the high austere pointed arches, the effect was miraculous. Then came a moment when they were all held rigid and aloft, while the massed choirs stood before the altar to sing ‘Ein Feste Burg’. Far away at the east end, Bishop Ridgeway stood like a small statue in his mitre and cope of cloth of gold. My father, who saw things vividly, said that he looked like a chess bishop, and he did.
Chapter Eleven
MORE WILTON CHARACTERS
I suppose that in those old days my father was the most outstanding character in Wilton, and he is very difficult to describe. He was like a force of nature, moulding one’s life, and yet never a part of it. He was too important to be that. The immense force and impetus of his personality came largely
