Authors: Paul Potts
Christmas was one of my favourite times of the year at Christ Church. The smallness of the church meant the smell of incense filled it quickly. Carols by candlelight meant that the soft light shimmered from our white surplices and made our blue cassocks contrast with the stark whiteness of the walls.
I enjoyed singing the descants and being allowed to sing high and loud without getting into trouble for it. My favourite descant of them all was the one for “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” because it was fairly long and pretty high.
The most special service of all was midnight mass on Christmas Eve. It wasn't just because this service was held so late at
night and in the centre of Bristol, very close to the main clubbing area. (This resulted in plenty of drunks walking in; most of them harmless, happy drunks who overenthusiastically joined in the carols.) There was always a special atmosphere in the church on Christmas Eve. The smell of incense was particularly pungent, but it was balanced with the smell and light of the candles and the soft tones of the priest singing the responses. It was the only time of the year when the priest encouraged everyone to shake hands and wish each other “Happy Christmas.” In this service, we would have
all
the best carols with
all
the best descants.
My other favourite time of year was around Easter. Passion-tide, the approach to Good Friday and Easter, was always very poignant. On Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, the candles were extinguished and the altar stripped. It made things very eerie and made me feel quite alone. In contrast, Good Friday was a busy singing day at the church, so it was always one of my favourites.
On alternate years, we would perform John Stainer's
Crucifixion
and Theodore Dubois's
Seven Last Words of Christ
. Each had its own attraction. Stainer's work was fairly typical Victorian English music, with rousing choruses and a few good solos for the adults (alas, nothing for the boy trebles), whereas Dubois's work, which I preferred, was more emotional.
I enjoyed my time at Christ Church. I more or less got on with the other boys in the choir, which felt like a dream come true. This helped reassure me that my voice was my friend. It was only when I was singing that I felt I had no enemies, so I embraced it. The only problem was that I'd get so caught up in the music that I forgot about the rest of the choir. It didn't matter
how many there were, be it the twenty-five others at Christ Church (including adult singers) or a massed choir at Bristol's Colston Hall. I could always be heard.
This would often get me into trouble with our choirmaster, Mr. Bussell. Sometimes I would come into the church for evensong and find myself summoned to Mr. Bussell in the organ loft. I'd have to spend the whole of evensong sitting in a chair by the huge historic organ. While it was fascinating to watch Mr. Bussell playing Widor's Toccata at the end of the service, I much preferred singing back on the ground level. I was told to listen to the choir without me to hear how united it was. I would try to contain myself, but would find myself back up in the organ loft every six weeks or so, being given exactly the same lesson.
Mr. Bussell was a jovial man with a good heart, though he wasn't afraid of showing his displeasure. You could sometimes tell his mood by what he played as the recessional voluntary as we returned to the choir vestry. If it was Widor's Toccata (one of my favourites), then it usually meant he was in a good mood. If it was J. S. Bach's Toccata (which always sounded like something from a horror movie), then we knew we were in line for a telling-off.
Mr. Bussell very rarely raised his voice, but you always knew when he was unhappy. When he got really cross, he'd use a tactic that was effective to the nth degree: he would threaten us with the prospect of introducing girls into the choir. We were bright enough to know what this would mean. There was only space for fifteen or sixteen boys at most in the front pew of the choir stalls. Having girls in the choir meant redundancy for some of us, so it was a very effective threat indeed.
Despite spending a considerable amount of time banished to the organ loft, I got on well with Mr. Bussell. He was usually funny and pleasant, and towards the end of my time with the choir, he told me that I was one of the best choristers he had ever had the pleasure of working with. For me this was very high praise indeed, and made me feel very happy.
The money I earned from being in the choir paid for me to have singing and piano lessons. My teacher Miss Wilcox taught in her home in the Soundwell area of Kingswood, an affluent area on the edge of Bristol. I had to get a bus to and from lessons twice a week. She had many talented pupils, some of whom I remained friends with years later. Miss Wilcox was advanced in years and had a reputation for having a bad temper. She was so scary that she filled even her pupils' parents with fear. She was in her eighties and spoke with very authoritarian tones. She didn't suffer fools gladly, and though largely immobile in her seat, could certainly move her arms very well.
One Monday evening, for example, I had left late after my singing lesson and there was a risk of missing the bus. Fortunately, that was running late, too, and I ran to the bus stop just in time to catch it. I was getting on the bus when I was grabbed by the father of one of the other pupils, Chris Gammon.
“Come on,” said Mr. Gammon. “I've got to give you a lift home.”
“Don't be silly,” I replied. “The bus is here now, and you only live round the corner.”
“Oi!” the bus driver shouted. “Are you getting on or not?”
“He's not,” said Mr. Gammon, pulling me back onto the
street. “Miss Wilcox,” he explained, as the bus drove away, “told me I had to drive you home.”
His face was as white as a sheet: he was petrified.
This wasn't a rare emotion in Miss Wilcox's presence; she was mistress of all she purveyed.
Miss Wilcox was a hard taskmaster. My singing was far better than my piano playing, and I was always a little lazy with my piano practising. It generally showed when Miss Wilcox asked me to play the pieces she had given me to practise. She would get more and more frustrated with me, and wasn't afraid of showing it. I tried to make excuses, saying that our piano at home was out of tune. Rather than just accepting that, Miss Wilcox sent her piano tuner to our house to test our piano.
Miss Wilcox had another tactic, too. She decided that corporal punishment would make me perform better. After several weeks of playing badly and not really making progress, she picked up a garden cane and started rapping my fingers with it whenever I made a mistake. The more mistakes I made, the harder she hit me. I can see now that having sent a piano tuner at her own expense to look at my piano meant she was very passionate about music and wanted to ensure that we played as well as we could. Unfortunately, her plan had the opposite effect: the caning on the fingers was too much for me and made me give up studying the piano. I didn't tell my parents about the caning. I just told them I didn't want to play any longer. I felt that if I told the truth, I would just get into trouble for not practising. I cut my losses, as I knew I would never be a great pianist.
I can say one thing: I am very happy that Miss Wilcox didn't use the same tactics to correct my mistakes in singing! I did
practise more and made fewer errors, but my singing was always more natural, and at times completely effortless. If I hadn't been doing well, I know she would have told me. My younger brother, Tony, was put off from having lessons with her, as she constantly told him off for sounding like he was chewing gum while he was singing. Miss Wilcox certainly didn't hold back!
My first crush was on one of Miss Wilcox's pupils. Her name was Angela Huggins, and she was everything a pre-pubescent boy wanted in a girl: tall (which I most definitely wasn't), pretty with wavy curls of blonde hair, and she lived in a fairly well-to-do area. I tried to sing like her, which got her to giggle at me.
What was to end any hope of a relationship with Angela (apart from her being a few years older than me) was my pretending we had got engaged (at my tender age of ten, this would have been a little extreme). Alex, my friend at school, and I went off for the day without telling our parents where we were going.
Alex had told his mum we were going to meet up with Angela, when in fact we did nothing of the sort. We were away from home much longer than I had told my mum. Worried, Mum phoned Angela's mum to find out where we were, and our cover was blown. I was too embarrassed to even speak to Angela after that.
I made good progress with my singing and was selected to represent the class at local music competitions. I performed with some success at Staple Hill Eisteddfod, Longwell Green Festival, and Kingswood, as well as taking part once or twice at the Bristol Eisteddfod, which was seen as the pinnacle of local competition. These competitions were cold, calculated affairs, and I didn't
always enjoy them. The audience was usually made up of your competitors and their families, and there was a panel of three people who would listen and tell you what they thought. It was sterile and difficult, not to mention nerve inducing.
Mum would always come with me to the competitions to give me her support, and often Jane and Tony would come, too. Tony also tried a few competitions but found nerves difficult to deal with. Dad was rarely available to watch me perform, although he would come when he could. He made a point of watching me at the prize-giving concerts that followed the competitions. He would make up for missing these competitions in years to come.
I struggled to get anywhere at the Bristol Eisteddfod, usually scoring enough to get honours, but the best I ever did was to finish third. I generally did better at Staple Hill, where I won a couple of medals. At one eisteddfod there, I caught the eye of the master of choristers for the Bristol Cathedral, who told my mum and me that he was very keen to have me in the choir.
To be a chorister at Bristol Cathedral you had to go to the cathedral school. In fact, I had taken the entrance examination for the chorister's scholarship the year before, but it required me to go into secondary school a year early. I did reasonably well in all subjects, particularly English (as reflected from my advanced reading comprehension), but was not quite good enough at mathematics, so I wasn't selected. I was offered the opportunity to progress if my parents paid my fees, but since we didn't have the money for this, it was not to be. The master of choristers expressed his disappointment that I would be unable to join. I was disappointed, too. Singing at your local cathedral was the pinnacle for any chorister.
As much as I enjoyed singing, I hated competing. The competitive element made me feel terrible. Usually, I was fine until it was my turn to be called forward. At these sorts of events, you didn't have a waiting room. Instead, you were just called from the audience, watching every other singer before and after your own performance.
Everyone else sounded pitch perfect to me. I only had to waver a little to end up finishing last, and I always saw this as inevitable. I generally did better in the duet classes of the competition, where I usually competed with a boy my age named Craig. Craig was from a fairly well-to-do background and spoke and sang proper English, whereas my accent was always far more Bristolian. He would usually come away with a brace of trophies and medals, whereas despite being told by others that I was a better singer, I would come away empty-handed except for my duet with him.
Nerves often got the better of me. This was less of an issue at Staple Hill, which took place in the Methodist church. The large Victorian-style building had good acoustics, and was always pretty full during competitions. It had two levels, stalls, and a balcony, so it was not unlike a small theatre. My problem was when I was performing at smaller venues with fewer people attending, like at Longwell Green. I regularly failed to get even a merit there. I'd become nervous, and as a result my mind would go blank: I would forget the words in the middle of a song, even though I knew it backwards.
It was as if I feared singing to empty seats, since you cannot get feedback if no one is there. Singing was something I knew I was pretty good at, and as other parts of my life were less than
ideal, I looked for approval. When I couldn't feel that approval, it left me feeling exposed and vulnerable. Under that pressure, I collapsed and my performance suffered.
It was around this time that I embraced classical music in a big way. This was largely thanks to watching the Steven Spielberg film
ET
. There was something about the music in the movie, alongside the scenes featuring a boy who wasn't fully accepted by his peers, that struck a chord, if you'll excuse the pun. I loved the feeling of the music washing over me, and I managed to get hold of an LP vinyl record of the London Symphony Orchestra playing the highlights of the soundtracks from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars
, and
ET
, all written by John Williams.
Listening to the record filled me with joyâso much so that I wanted to participate in the music, not just listen to it. Making sure no one could see me, I grabbed one of my mum's knitting needles and imagined it was a conductor's baton. This made me feel powerful, and I wanted to feel the emotion from the music more and more.
For my twelfth birthday, Mum and Dad bought me an inexpensive personal stereo. I got hold of some cassette tapes, and while one or two of them were pop, most of them were classical. I would invariably listen to them at full volume and would often be asked on the bus, “Would you mind turning your violins down, please?” This would usually get a few giggles from those around me.