Voice

Voice

How to understand one’s inherited voice? For most of my life I have had no clear sense of my own, when and why it settled into what it is now, what part of my ancestry gave it to me. As a child I saw my grandparents only occasionally, and I have only a hazy recollection of how they spoke. When I was a teenager I turned up, from mid-Wales, at my paternal grandparents’ house in Mile End and my grandfather opened the door and said, ‘It’s David, ain’t it?’ in a gravelly sort of Cockney. But growing up in Aberystwyth I don’t recall my father had that voice; perhaps over the years there it softened. My parents went there in their early 20s. I do recall my father not liking my picking up a Welsh accent, so probably I lived a double life of talking one way at home and another with friends. My father’s sister has a Mile End voice I like very much, and I feel I can hear ancestry through her.
I wish I could recall the voices of my mother’s parents and her grandmother, in Leyton. My mother had what I would say now was a neutral kind of voice; her mother had a bit of a rasp (character rather than origin?), her father something softer, but I’m not sure now. He came from the Essex-Suffolk border, was a merchant seaman, then a bus driver. I wonder how they met.
What is it happens to voices? Did university in London change my own? I was the first that I know of, in those recent generations, to go to Grammar School and University.
Of my ancestry never known to me personally, Copelands from Hertfordshire (and originally from Scotland?), Restells probably from Gloucestershire and the Welsh border, Lewis of course possibly Welsh but maybe not, part-Irish in the Harts, farming families from (Stanleys) Staffs/Derbys and (Ponds) Essex. Yelvertons – William a London goldsmith -Browns, and others. How did their voices change through the generations and mixes?
So in the making of poems what voice? What has come through - through generations and through my own life - that has made my poems? Voice and attitude, craft and whim.

ABERYSTWYTH POEM OF THE 1950s

This is how it was
[For Fred Davies]

This is how it was, I said, a long time ago
when I lived in Heol Nanteos in Penparcau next door
to the man who played outside left for Aberystwyth Town,
and Fred had the name then on the tip of his brain
and soon came up with ‘Teddy Thomas',
and I said, ‘There was a tall dark centre forward’,
and Fred said, ‘Eddie Ellis’, and started to name then
the whole team: Teddy Bevan, Stuart Griffiths,
Gareth Hopkins, Jackie Johnson,….

I said I sang in the St Michael’s church choir
and Fred said he did, too – about four or five years
before me – W.R.Allen the choirmaster ‘was strict,’ but I said
I remembered him as benign.
‘Remember Ernie Morgan, the Wintle brothers,
Michael Lewis - big in music in America now, he is’,
and when the name clicked into place I said,
‘I was an altar server with him at St Anne’s, Penparcau’.
‘Remember we got paid 6d for funerals and weddings?
And we had to take our surplice home to be washed.'

I’d not remembered the names of the boats:
Pride of the Midlands (owned by Ben White),
City of Birmingham (‘Spanny’) –
and me now most of my life in that city –

and I said I carried the Scout flag
in the Remembrance Day procession, Fred said he played
in the British Legion band, and so did
Will Nell in the Workhouse (where Bronglais now is,
and a part of the old building still used),
‘and do you remember Happy Agnes with her shopping trolley?’

I didn’t, but when we got on to Ardwyn School
a mixed bag of memories: Mr Ellis the Headmaster –
two Mr Ellises one after the other? - Roy James, Mr Beynon,
Mrs – or was it Miss? – Mainwairing,….
Oh some of that still hurts.

I said I remember playing marbles in the gutter with Dai Young,
and in the yard of his father’s garage – ‘Gwalia’, said Fred,

'below the Infirmary,' I said (where my father worked),
and in between where I went to junior school, North Road,
all three gone now: Hospital, School, Garage,
and not a gutter these days you could play marbles in.

Chapels are closing, too. One, Fred tells me, is a pub,
but the singing continues. Fred sings and with the local choir
has sung in Toronto, Stratford (Ontario),
Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Brittany, Cologne,….

This is a poem you, reader, perhaps, can continue,
the poem me and Fred began, with a chance meeting.


[David Hart: from Running Out (Five Seasons Press 2006]

How did they meet?

I suppose we can only very rarely know how and why and where they met back then. There was Sarah Pond, aged 25, ‘servant’, whose father William was an Essex farmer, and there was Joseph Stanley, 25, ‘carriage fitter E.C.R.’, whose father was Edward, also a farmer, from the borders of Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Sarah and Joseph married at St Leonard’s Shoreditch, on August 24th 1854. Both gave their residence as 5, Edward Street – an address of convenience for one or both? I think Edward Stanley farmed land in Tutbury and/or Scropton, and William Pond in Upminster. I have some census references for them and also what seems an odd one – and one that contributes to wondering how Joseph and Sarah (b.Upminster, Essex) met – that she was in 1851 a servant aged 22 in a Harrison family household in Maidstone, Kent. As to the Stanleys, had there been a connection to the Stanleys, Earls of Derby?

Joseph and Sarah’s daughter, Florence Lilla (or Lilian) Stanley, b.1873 in Hackney, by which time Joseph was a ‘house painter’, married (in the Register Office at West Ham, 1894) George Keen Brown, a railway worker who later became a maker of piano keys. Their daughter, Annie Edith Brown, married George Cole (from Tendring on the Suffolk/Essex border, merchant seaman and when I knew him a London bus driver). Their daughter, Doris Lilian Cole, was my mother; born in Leyton.