The reason it took me so long to discover I was tone deaf was that I had a very avid fan . Nothing was guaranteed to put a smile on my Mum 's face more than my energetic renderings of "Soldier, soldier won't you marry me" or "Rule Britannia". She loved my singing and the more she applauded the louder I sang. At the High School one lunch hour a classmate asked me to join the choir with her, gladly I went along. Off we went with a signal from the teacher, singing our hearts out. "somebody is flat" the teacher said: I sang with even more gusto until 30 pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I quietly let myself out of the classroom as another lonely lunch hour loomed.
We still had to have Music lessons though, whether we had any talent or not. It was awful. One of the songs we had to sing went like this "The hag is astride, this night for to ride, the devil and she together,
Through thick and through thin, now out and the in ..... " the tune was dreary, the words miserable.
Our school song was borrowed from Harrow and had originally been written for boys.
I can still remember it word for word. One of the verses was " Forty years on growing older and older, shorter in wind than in memory long. feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder, what will it help you that once you were young " I really can't imagine how anyone could have thought it would inspire us.
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