Wyn Drabble: I sang what I thought I heard

Writer and musician Wyn Drabble says when he was a child, he sang what he thought he heard.

A century or so ago when I was a young kid, I didn’t have quite the grasp of the English language that I have now.

Of course, I know that there is still plenty more to learn, but I accept that I will never reach a point of complete mastery because of the combination of mortality and constant linguistic change.

So, at primary school, I would lustily sing the national anthem with all the gusto and patriotic fervour that a young kid could muster. Trouble is, I sang what I heard, and the fact what I heard made no sense did not even come into it.

In full-lung mode and with lashings of nationalistic feeling, I would sing “in the bombs of love we meet”. Well, that’s what my young brain heard. The incongruity of it escaped me. What exactly the bombs of love could have been, I never even wondered. I certainly didn’t know what bonds were.

And it was only some decades later that I discovered Shakespeare did a similar thing, but scholars gave it a posh name - ‘oxymoron’. I feel now that my “bombs of love” would not be out of place falling from the lips of Romeo.

“Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,

O anything, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness, serious vanity,

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!”

Surely Shakespeare could have slipped “bombs of love” in there somewhere and got away with it.

As a young kid, I also used to sing in bed before sleep finally blanketed me. One song I used to sing, even though I wasn’t yet partial to the amber fluid, was Slim Dusty’s A Pub With No Beer.

I suppose my young mind could transpose the whole message to the notion of running out of cordial – “What, there’s no 50/50 left!” For younger readers, I should point out that 50/50 was so called because it was half orange and half lemon (though it really tasted of neither).

Anyway, once again I sang what I heard, and I heard:

“Oh, it’s lonesome away from your kindred and all,

By the campfire at night, where the wilding goes call.”

It mattered not that I didn’t know what a wilding was and, at that age, I didn’t have the inquiring mind that would have seen me look it up in a dictionary. I had never heard of wild dingoes, hence the misunderstanding.

But there were obviously stirrings of an interest in language because, even at that age, I felt a little uneasy about the grammatical construction, particularly the form of the verb. Nonetheless, I sang what I heard, and I heard “wilding goes call”.

For the purposes of this column, I looked up ‘wilding’, and it turns out that it is a real noun meaning ‘a wild rampage by a gang of out-of-control youths’. But why that “goes call”, one shudders to think.

My troubles continued into secondary school, but the example I remember most clearly was not mishearing, but not having heard at all. This meant that in a history exam, I could not answer the question: “What were the shortcomings of the Franco-Prussian Alliance?”

I had no idea what shortcomings were, so I probably just wrote a limerick or a short account of what I did in the holidays. I did not pass.

Yes, I am aware that this piece of writing also has shortcomings, but I hope you will accept that I have passed all this on to you with the very best of intentions and in the bombs of love.

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.