My daughter grabs the microphone. It sparkles intensely. It’s one of those karaoke mics studded with LED lights that masks its harshness with sheer volume. It’s the kind of thing gifted to children – once – and then hidden by most parents forever after. My sister, Dearbhaile, is not most parents, so it has remained in arm’s reach throughout our trip to West Sussex. We’re visiting her and another sister, Mairead, both of whom live with their families in Worthing. We, our partners and our combined six kids are relaxing after a barbecue when my little chanteuse grips the microphone and shows no intention of letting go.
Emboldened by her audience, she remembers her world-class rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and prods me in the stomach to get her started. She doesn’t perform this song solo, you understand, it is always a call-and-response duet between the two of us, in which I sing Twinkle Twinkle and she continues, couplet by couplet, til song’s end. Her ability to screech the last phrase of each verse to any song does not quite reach the level of musicality, but it would make her an excellent member of the Beastie Boys.
I’m catapulted back to my own childhood, which was spent performing. My dad had an unwavering belief in the power of music, but never had any instruction in it himself. He was adamant we’d get what he missed out on and so we were all signed up for every music class, choir and orchestra in two counties. This may seem a noble idea, but it soon becomes a frothily insane one, when you realise he spent 20 years endlessly ferrying his 11 children to lessons, rehearsals and recitals. More than once he’s intimated he wanted us to be a family band, like the von Trapps, to make stars of us one lesson at a time.
Music lessons, and the instruments to go with them, were at that time subsidised by Derry’s Library Board, so we accumulated them in nearly wholesale quantities. Like all rural Irish bungalow-dwellers, our house had a grandly named ‘dining room’, in which dining never took place under any circumstances. Eating in there would have been as ludicrous as eating on the roof. Instead, it served as an impromptu rehearsal space and storage room, filled with cellos, flutes, violins, violae and guitars. If you stood up too quickly the entire room made a faint twanging, plinking sound, as if you’d startled a small chamber orchestra.
And any time we had visitors over, we’d be bidden to approach the mantelpiece and give a song, in a forced concert of such variable quality, it was hard for me to shake the feeling my dad did it purely to get unwanted guests to leave. But now I’m the proud father, watching my daughter take her moment, strangling two syllables at a time. We come near to the end of our song and I proffer the last Twinkle Twinkle to bring it home. She pauses with a guitar soloist’s elan, savouring the anticipation of her audience every bit as much as I did on that mantelpiece, belting out Irish ballads, before uttering the last two words like a consummate pro. Little Star.
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