The Soundtrack to my Life: There Was a Girl That Sang Like The Chime of a Bell
Songs can come at you in different ways and at different times, and mean different things. The good news is that you can decide these for yourself, so that's what I've done.
In the autumn of 1985, having just turned 13 years of age, I started falling asleep at school. I remember a Technology lesson in which I was woken up by a teacher singling me out for laughter from the rest of the class on account of it.
I wasn’t doing this on purpose. I couldn’t stay awake, and the only reason I wasn't scared by this was that I had so much else going on at the same time. I started getting terrible eczema on the soles of my feet, the skin just growing and dying, making it unbearably tender if I so much as put either of them to the ground, particularly my right one. Creams, potions and unguents were applied, all unsuccessfully. They looked like the surface of Venus.
Not that it made any difference to my physical education, because I couldn’t do that regardless. At roughly the same time as the falling asleep thing, I developed another party trick for the classroom. If I so much as grazed my left knee against anything it was the most excruciating pain of my life, so much so that I involuntarily yowled out loud every time it happened. I did feel rather as though I might be starting to get a bit of a reputation.
This turned out to be Osgood-Schlatter’s Disease, a common enough condition in adolescents involving a swelling of the knee. But my case was a particularly acute one, and the doctor essentially said, “You need to stay off any physical activity in which it might get hit, not because you’ll damage it, but because the pain will be unbearable and there’s nothing we can do for that. Running will be fine, if you can tolerate it, but I wouldn’t recommend, say, football.” This outcome was the one that I was fixated on. I was a limited, if enthusiastic, young footballer with ideas of being a goalkeeper, even though I was a shrimp who did indeed end up just 5’8” tall.
But my parents had other concerns, concerns that I didn’t find out about until I was in my late 20s. The falling asleep in class thing was causing them far more concern. I’d been taken to the hospital for blood tests, and when the results came back in about the middle of December, they showed an abnormally high white blood cell count. I had to be tested for leukaemia, but the results would take three weeks to get back, on account of Christmas. They’d find out in the first week of January.
I say “they”, because I had no idea about any of this. I knew, obviously, that there had been a second set of blood tests. But nobody mentioned leukaemia to me at the time. It was such a long time ago that I don’t remember how many hushed conversations out of my earshot or in a separate room there may have been.
My mum only told me this in around 2001 or so, by the time I was about 29. They went through Christmas 1985 seriously believing that their son might have leukaemia. How they kept that from me, and how they managed to hold it together, I’ll never fully know. I’d had vague memories of that Christmas being an especially loving one, and I'd never been able to quite put my finger on why. I think I found out when my mum told me that.
The tests came back negative. At least it wasn’t leukaemia. But the health issues continued. On one occasion, I threw up so much that something that looked like a half-digested toad in the hole started to come up. Turned out it was the lining of my stomach. On another occasion I had to be taken to the hospital with suspected appendicitis, though this turned out to be an abdominal migraine.
As if throwing their arms in the air, some time towards the end of April 1986 I was diagnosed with ME, taken to the QE2 Hospital in Welwyn Garden City, and just told to rest. ME was mis-diagnosed a lot in the 1980s.
I can only be certain of the time that this happened because I was lucky enough to have a portable colour TV and a pair of earphones next to my bed, and one morning when they woke us up, as they did every morning, at the frankly alarming time of six in the morning (wasn’t I supposed to be resting?), I switched on TV-AM and there were overhead camera shots of what turned out to be what was left of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
I was in hospital for something like a fortnight, and I vividly remember thinking how strange the world looked as I came out. In my mind’s eye, the first four months of 1986 are mostly about sunrises. The hospital ward had long, large windows and every morning the sun would be rising away to the east as I awoke. Not infrequently there’d be a mist hanging in front of the sky, turning from cyan to russet as it approached the horizon.
They never found out what it was, but it wasn’t ME and it wasn’t its sibling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, because it wasn’t bloody chronic. Whatever it was, that spell in hospital seemed to do the trick, and by the summer of 1986, I was getting back to normal. The knee was mended (although I still have a lump there, be gentle with it) and I was even able to get back to playing football when the soles of my feet started to get back to normal.
***
Now, I know what you’re thinking. We’re more than 900 words in, and I’ve said nothing about music. Is this going to be about Rock me Amadeus or A Kind of Magic, both of which were in the top ten while I was in hospital? Just Say No, perhaps? Am I going to start warbling on about how the Smiths saved my life? (Hell no, I had Morrissey clocked as a wrong ‘un well before it was fashionable.)
To get to where this ends up, we need to jump forward in time a few decades.
***
I have a Belle & Sebastian playlist. It is among my absolute favourites, which is somewhat surprising, since I don’t really like too much of their output. They’ve recorded twelve studio albums, and my playlist numbers 14 songs, which is every single song of theirs that I like, though strangely I really love them all. When Belle & Sebastian land, they land hard.
By summer 2018, I had been through the wringer. I had gotten married, separated and had two kids over the previous four and a half years. In many ways, I was still trying to process what the hell had actually happened. It had been a head-spinning time, and because she couldn’t afford to move out and get a place of her own, we still had to live together. At least moving to this flat had been a boon because I had a bedroom of my own, after having slept on a sofa for the previous three and a half-odd years.
I would do a lot of the work that I needed to do on myself in the garden. Late at night, I would sit out the back of our ground floor flat with a drink or a smoke and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I would sit with a notebook, jotting down thoughts or writing lists. Other times, I would just listen to music while gazing up at the stars.
On one of these summer’s evenings, there were no stars to see. It was warm, but living by the coast can do strange things to the weather so there was also a mist in the air which felt like half mist from the sea and half rain. It felt glorious, and I sat in a deck chair letting these tiny droplets land on me and disappear while I sat back in a deck chair and listened to my Belle & Sebastian playlist.
People with ME/CFS and Belle & Sebastian fans will already know where I’m going with this. They will have done the moment I mentioned teenage illness, quite likely. A song came on this playlist, nowhere near the start of it, which I’d heard dozens of times before. Only this time, in the still and quiet peace of my garden at 1 in the morning, I listened.
Big, fat, fluffy tears started falling down my face, and I didn’t even know why. The song didn't so much speak to me as drag me in. I felt like I was a child again. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about it, but it absolutely absorbed me; it filled me up. In a way that I’d never experienced before and I don’t think I’ve felt since, I was consumed by it. By the end—and it’s over five minutes long—I felt as though I’d been trampled underfoot. It had been an emotionally exhausting 310 seconds.
What the hell just happened?
It turned out that this song, called Nobody’s Empire, was about singer and guitarist Stuart Murdoch’s struggles with ME/CFS as a teenager. Now, to be clear, I never had ME or CFS. But I had a year when I was pushed and prodded, when my blood was taken and unguents applied, and when it really did feel as though “my body was floating in thin air”. I’d barely processed it at the time, and in all honesty I’d barely thought about it at all since.
There was a girl that sang like the chime of a bell
And she put out her arm and she touched me when I was in hell
But it wasn’t only about that. My marriage had been a disaster from start to finish, and I had to reconcile that with the plain fact that my two greatest achievements, my children, could have emerged from that particular smoking crater.
Furthermore, this was 2018. Brexit was still rumbling on. Donald Trump was the president of the USA. The idea of living by books being sufficient to make you targets for gunfire felt, if still remote, closer than it ever had in my lifetime before, though I do have to admit that it feels even closer today.
But I sometimes think in abstraction, and two particular verses caught my attention:
Lying on my side you were half awake, and your face was tired and crumpled
If I had a camera I’d snap you now, ‘cos there’s beauty in every stumble
We are out of practice, we're out of sight, on the edge of nobody’s empire
And if we live by books and we live by hope, does that make us targets for gunfire?
Now I look at you you’re a mother of two, you’re a quiet revolution
Marching with the crowd singing dirty and loud, for the people’s emancipation
Did I do okay, did I pave the way? Was I strong when you were wanting?
I was tied to the yoke with a decent bloke, who was stern but never daunting.
This part of the song felt like an aspiration, to me. It is the song I want to ascribe to the woman I love. She doesn’t have to be a biological mother. She doesn’t even have to really want anything to do with them. I’d never demand that of someone. But I wanted, and want now, that joie de vivre in my life. I want her singing dirty and loud for the people’s emancipation. I want that passion. I want to see the beauty of her stumble, and I want her to see mine.
And I want… them to feel proud of me, even though I know fully well that’s pathetic. I want to know that I did do okay, and that I was strong when they were wanting. In the years since then, this has come to feel like a hole in my life.
I know fully well that, out there in the real world, in which practicalities get in the way, the feeling that you’ll find that person just becomes so remote, especially as we get older. Truth is, they’ll look at you, see the two kids in tow, and realise that they can get involved with somebody who doesn’t come with this baggage. And I have to understand and respect that.
But these aspirations remain with me. Did I do okay? Did I pave the way? Was I strong when you were wanting? These lines have somehow become the values by which I have come to both live and love. This song connected three parts of my life, one in the past, one in the present and one, I most fervently hope, the future. Sometimes, all you need is for one person to feel proud of you. Sometimes, all you need is for someone to reach out and touch you when you are in hell.
He told me to push and he made me feel well
He told me to leave that vision of hell to the dying.