Up from the Downs:An evening in the company of Shirley Collins.

As I walked out one day in the month of May in the London Borough of Hackney I came across a church tower, a lichen covered tomb, and a stack of headstones laid up against a church wall.

It seemed quite apt as I was on my way to see Shirley Collins being interviewed and reading from her new book of memoirs 'All in the Downs'. Hackney may seem some way from the rural idylls of the folk world but the themes that permeate folk music, those of love, death, absence, and hardship ring clear and true in both rural and urban environments.

 



Last March I'd had the good fortune to witness an absolutely wonderful concert by Shirley at the Barbican so when my friend Mark asked me if I'd like to come along to this event I jumped at the chance.

I'd never heard of Sutton House before and I wasn't at all familiar with the Homerton part of Hackney but I realised I could take the Overground to Dalston Junction and walk up there pretty quickly. So quickly, in fact, I had a chance to look round St.John's Churchyard for a good half an hour or so before reaching Sutton House.

If the picturesque churchyard was apt for the evening, then Sutton House was even more so. Built in 1535 (by Sir Ralph Sadler, Principal Secretary of State to Henry VIII), it's the oldest building in Hackney and the second oldest in all of East London (Bromley Hall in Tower Hamlets is half a century older) and although the frontage has been redone in a Georgian style inside it's a Tudor marvel of oak panelled rooms and carved fireplaces. As I couldn't get a good view of Shirley I thought the churchyard, the house, and other assorted sights and sites from the night would make for good pictorial representation of this account.

 

Past the gypsy caravan and the selection of Matchbox cars we were ushered past a small refectory (I had a green tea, my friends a bottle of Corona - I think my drink was the folksiest) into a slightly larger room laid out with chairs as if for a school assembly.

 

Soon both Shirley Collins and the host Frances Morgan were on stage and Shirley began by reading an excerpt from her book about growing up near Hastings. She painted a vivid picture of the boats being hauled on to shore as Hastings was, and still is, unable to support a port, about being sent by her communist parents down to the memorial to sell copies of Communist Worker, and about hearing her parents and their friends constantly discussing 'dialectical materialism'. A term she said she didn't know the meaning of then and still didn't now.

 

She talked about the influence of elder family figures, about long walks to the beach when they couldn't afford the public transport, and about how she and her sister Dolly fostered an early interest in both folk music as well as boogie woogie and jive. It was wonderfully evocative stuff and, at times, Shirley herself got a little emotional and had to stop. Her mention of never learning to jive lead to a sprightly gentleman two years her senior suggesting he take her to his local jive dance group!



 

A story that brought a smile to most of our faces was the one about legendary local folk singer and song collector Bob Copper visiting her and Dolly. When they sung for him they chose a Scottish song and, for reasons teenagers everywhere will recognise, decided to sing it in their impersonation of a Scots accent. They hadn't found their own voice yet but Copper had teenage daughters himself and simply laughed it off.

 

Not all off Shirley's encounters with folk word notables were quite so innocent. Shirley Collins, if you've ever heard her either talk or sing, is not a person who badmouths people (even her philandering and proud of it ex-husband Ashley Hutchings wasn't traduced) but Ewan MacColl was a man she clearly could not warm to. Not many could it seems.

 

She felt both his approach to folk music (don't sing songs that aren't from your direct area but do stick your finger in your ear when you sing them) and his take on politics (a left wing Labour supporter but a very well to do one who thought he knew what was best for the proles and wouldn't brook any argument from the lower orders) were signs of a cocksure arrogance but, and Shirley sketched this anecdote lightly, the story of him inviting her back to his house and starting to remove his clothes before she even got through the door is one that history can't look back kindly on. She thought she was going back to talk about music. He obviously thought they'd be making sweet music. The only sour moment of the night occurred at this point when a grumpy audience member who'd been huffing and puffing up under his breath anyway got up from his seat and stormed out. A huge Ewan MacColl fan or as my friend suggested 'just a cunt'? It's hard to imagine anything Shirley Collins saying offending someone that much!

 

Her encounter with MacColl was far from the only time in her life that she was patronised. Both as a girl (and later a woman) and as a working class person. Cecil Sharp House in Camden, the home of the English Folk, Dance, and Song Society, and a place supposedly open for the betterment of all, wouldn't let her in to scour the books of previous folk collectors and learn new songs.

 

She persevered and eventually, luckily for us, they cracked but she had plenty of other amusing stories about her early days in London. Failing to understand how the Northern Line works (but it breaks in two at Camden?), getting sacked from M&S on Oxford Street, and living on stale buns in Tooting BEC.

 

If the city was, at times, a necessary evil (though I doubt she'd put it like that) it seemed to me that her heart rested very much in the South Downs where she loved, and loves, to go walking. In that landscape she saw not only beauty but history, death, and mystery. She told a story of escaping the downs just as a thunderstorm struck only to reach home in Etchingham as lightning came down her telephone line causing the receiver to explode.

 

If that seemed extraordinary it was nothing next to her visit to a gypsy to have a crystal ball reading not long after she'd initiated divorce proceedings against serial adulterer Hutchings. The 'gypsy' seemed to know everything about Shirley:- her current marital woes, how many children she had, that she loved music, and that she was a keen cyclist. So accurate was the forecast that when the teller warned her that if she cycled home on the same bike she'd have a crash Shirley never rode it again and left it rotting in a hallway where presumably it remains to this day.

 

Alan Lomax, Bob Dylan, Martin Carthy, Davy Graham all popped up in anecdotes as casually as you'd like. There was no element of boastfulness whatsoever. Just a lady telling the story of her life in much the same way as she sings her beloved folk music. Perhaps most tellingly of all she said she believed it was important to sing TO people, not AT them. Perhaps most promisingly of all she also spoke about getting to work on the early stages of a new album. If 2016's Lodestar, her first for thirty-eight years, is anything to go by that's something we should all look forward to.



 

After the talk we retired to the nearby Chesham Arms. An oaky pub with a fine selection of real ales, a large beer garden, and what looked like William Blake drapes adorning the walls. It could hardly have been a better setting for a folk evening debrief and I should very much like to visit again when I'm in more of a mood for some ale supping. When we were done I almost morris danced back through the graveyard and along Graham Road to Dalston Junction. Ain't folk grand?

 

Thanks to Natalie and both Marks for their company, thanks to Pages of Hackney for compering, thanks to Frances Morgan for asking pertinent questions but also, most importantly, listening and thanks to Shirley Collins once again for a springtime treat. What a lovely, civilised, and utterly splendid evening.