Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth! Six parts gin to one part vermouth!

In the words of the glorious Tom Lehrer, the air has been ‘soggy with nostalgia’ in my neck of the woods recently. My old secondary school, Regent House, has its centenary this year and as part of The Occasion, past singers in the school’s senior choir were invited to take part in the annual Easter concert as members of an alumni choir.

I’d describe my relationship with my school days as complicated; I had to put up with a lot of bullying (including, particularly distastefully, by a teacher in fourth and fifth form) and these days, I am still in touch with the people that I want to be in touch with - fundamentally my group of friends from sixth form, when life evened out and which were probably the only unequivocally enjoyable years in the school - and I am not massively bothered about school otherwise. And yet... I felt a tug on the sentiment strings and I sought out choir chums to sign up. Toni and Tanya from my year bit the bullet and joined me. Toni sings soprano, but Tanya was alto like me, so she and I gravitated to our usual spot at the back of the section and restrained ourselves from passing notes.

Our first rehearsal was in the school assembly hall, and afterwards we got to take a wander down to visit the music department. There’s been a lot of building work at the school in recent years, so there was a bit of geography bamboozlement (maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so confused if I’d continued with geography past third year; though my memories of that subject are sketching drumlins from up Scrabo Hill and the city planning of Dar-Es-Salaam, so I’m not sure how helpful it actually would have been) before we found ourselves back in the Promised Land, Newtownards-style. It’s an odd experience to stand in a room that was such a vivid part of your past, see that it is still alive with the music of today’s students and you know that it is vastly different, and yet somehow also the same, to your own experience.

It’s not a new story to say that the music department provided community and refuge when things elsewhere in school were pretty horrible; I suspect that there were plenty of people on the stage on the night of the concert, both current and former pupils, who found their home and found respite in that corner of the school in the same way I did. Making music with other people is something I genuinely believe has incredible potency and power so looking back, its no surprise that it had such a profound, confidence-instilling effect on those of us who felt lost and beaten down elsewhere.

The memories and anecdotes are, of course, a part of a night like this, and we cackled delightedly at a million ‘do you remembers…?’. Toni was relating the incident at a school Easter concert when she had a gap in pieces she was involved in while the school recorder group performed. So did her boyfriend, so they disappeared into the bowels of the school and got so… distracted they almost created chaos on stage by not turning up in time for their next number. I was in the recorder group and also the next piece; I remember amusedly waiting for them both to reappear! While I initially pondered the fact that maybe the reason why I had precisely zero interest from boys at school was not just about the wonky teeth and terrible Deirdre Barlow glasses - ‘enthusiastic member of the school recorder group’ holds niche appeal for the average 16 year old, I suspect - I realised that I didn’t really mind (much) that I was on stage with the recorder group and not kissing a boy somewhere near the history classrooms.

The community and the refuge of the music department were incredibly important to me, but I also see that just as important was the music itself, and the glorious combination of teachers I had at that school gave me an amazing music education. Eight Beatles songs (not all obvious - Mother Nature’s Son, Lady Madonna and Fool on the Hill featured), arranged for school choir, orchestra and various soloists? Thanks Mr Bolton for an introduction that was definitely a factor in my choosing to move to Liverpool for university. You want to write your own musical? Go ahead! Mr Bolton again and Mr Halliday, giving far more artistic licence and freedom than anyone would ever expect (or possibly countenance) to a bunch of 14 year olds **. You’re going to study music at university? You’ll regularly accompany school choir rehearsals, take the first 15 minutes or so of school band rehearsal and I’ll teach you how to write an essay. Thank you Mr McQueen, for making sure I had the widest possible skill set when I went to university, which allowed me to choose the path that spoke loudest to me. And above all, I am so grateful for the musical curiosity engendered in me by the Head of Music for my first five years at school, Keith Rogers.

Keith Rogers was a delightful eccentric who also made recorders and early musical instruments. When not supplying His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts with their cornetts, he made the most beautiful recorders and if you timed it right and arrived for recorder group practice late enough, a massive black wooden box would appear out of the store room and you’d get to play one of his hand-made stunners ***. He made a setting of one of the Psalms that used 5 differently pitched natural ox horns played by our brass section and the almost primal sound that echoed when we performed the piece I can still feel reverberate in my bones. We opened the school Spring concert in his final year before retirement by singing Sumer Is Icumen In, a medieval round that’s also - I discovered to my surprise, years later - the song that is sung by the residents of Summerisle as they burn Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man, which gives me to wonder whether he was quietly hoping we’d undertake some pagan construction work on the rugby pitch. We performed medieval Christmas carols for the school carol service (I still talk about ‘Candles by Carol-light’ thanks to Keith), an entirely spoken piece for choir called the Geographical Fugue which I think I still know by heart, and all in all, he took me into music sound worlds that I would never have encountered through the curriculum.

Curiosity is a powerful motivator - curiosity for music takes you to emotional spaces that help you meet and understand yourself and curiosity for other people paves the way for better, deeper, more engaged relationships and a bigger understanding of the world. I have both and whether that started in my music department or it just was fanned into flame there, I’m incredibly grateful. Thanks, sirs; you’ve given me something very, very special.

(This is one of my favourite discoveries at school; I remember being moved to tears when we were played this in class. Though given I was about 15 at the time, let’s not rule out the impact of hormones - the tears mightn’t all have been about the music…)

Side note: Musical curiosity cropped up in the last week as a chat with a work pal introduced me to Arooj Aftab; gorgeous music that had me swooning and I’m now excited about her upcoming concert as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, which I’m going to with said pal. As a thank you for a new rabbit hole for me to explore, I passed on Susheela Raman for her to do likewise. The best sort of exchange.

* I have no definitive proof of this and I’m not a betting woman, but I’d put money on Keith Rogers having been a fan of Tom Lehrer. In fact, I’m only surprised that he didn’t arrange The Elements for the Senior Choir.

** In Mr Bolton’s case, two third years, when we were in first year, wrote a ‘love across the barricades’ musical with a Troubles theme called Out of The Dark Zone. Tanya had a featured role, fondly remembered by everyone who saw it for the moment she got to break the fourth wall and bellow “WE’RE GONNA KICK THEIR LIGHTS IN” at the unsuspecting audience. Tanya is very much not a ‘lights kicking in’ kind of person; it was an award-worthy performance. Mr Halliday oversaw my own writing exploits and I am profoundly relieved that no record of the results has survived. It was doggerel of the highest order.

*** There was one occasion when we all tried to arrive late enough and everyone arrived about 5 minutes before the end of the lunch break rehearsal, which was not hugely appreciated.