from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING
Little Velvet Voice
As a child, I was accused of being dreamy and distracted, of not listening when the
grown-ups spoke to me. I was scolded, too, for making too much noise. “Little velvet voice,” my father used to croon, mock-soothingly. As I grew older, he would repeat the description of Cordelia in King Lear. “Her voice was ever soft/ Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.”
“Ha!” I would respond (noisily, emphatically), shutting the door (hard!) and racing off upstairs. Papa might fancy himself in the role of Lear, but I had no interest in playing Cordelia. My voice was never going to be soft, gentle and low. But listening was something else entirely. Listening had always been important.
My own memories began in London, with the pigeons calling from the sill outside the window, and the slap of warmish water in a yellow-painted bath. My mother says I loved being sung to, and would coo and gurgle in appreciation. At eighteen months, I was given a giant teddy bear (always known as Big Teddy), who grunted when you turned him upside down, a wonderfully robust and satisfying sound. I loved Big Teddy, and thought him very funny and impressive. But best of all was when Mama read to me or told me stories. “She was delicious like that, listening,” my mother wrote, in the notes she kept at the time. “And I wished I always had the patience to keep her so.”
The summer I turned three, we moved to Wiltshire, to a square thatched house called Coneybury, not far from Stonehenge. My mother pictures me dancing around the house, “interviewing everyone and collecting all the stones (a shoe stone, a bottle stone, a letter stone),” and bringing her information on “the birds and flowers and spiders and life in general.” But I liked silence too, and solitude, and calm. I remember crouching in the linen cupboard among the soft heaped towels, listening to the slap of the iron in the nursery, the grown-up music floating from downstairs. Often, I’d lie down flat under the piano, letting my whole body fill up with its thunder, watching Mama’s long feet as they pressed the pedals. Or I’d race outside and hide in the tall grass, listening to the bantams squabbling in the hen-house, the harsh cry of the cockerel tearing open the sky.
We lived close to each other in those days, physically close: we heard the intake of each other’s breath; my father shaving, spitting out; the water running for a long hot bath. If “home” is composed in part of such familiar sounds, then Coneybury was made of Nanny’s small transistor radio, always tuned to Radio One, and the Beatles singing,“She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!” It was the glint and crackle of the nursery fire, and our own obedient, fumbling, soft-voiced prayers. It was the board that creaked halfway down the passage, under the thick felt of the McEwen tartan carpet, as someone got up to tend a wailing baby. It was the shrill of Mama’s morning kettle, the blackbird caroling outside my father’s study window, the crunch of yellow gravel as my bike swerved to a stop.
I sped like a minnow through that wide mesh of sound, hardly distinguishing human from non-human. Just as each bird had its own song, so each plant or animal or insect had its own distinctive sound. There was the cool squelch when you pulled a daffodil from between its long green leaves, the rough hee-haw of our donkey, Gypsy, cavorting in the nearby field, the impassioned thrum of a grasshopper in the curl of my closed hand. There were the tall indolent swans sailing down the river Avon, ruffling their feathers, turning their ferocious beaks from side to side. Everything spoke to me and steadied me, showed me how to listen.
Continue to explore:
Bring to mind an early memory of listening. Who or what were you listening to?
List some of your favorite sounds— and then search out opportunities to hear them in reality. Can you find a way to map or draw them too?
You can buy a copy of In Praise of Listening direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including World Enough & Time:
On Creativity and Slowing Down.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.