Sites of memory, sites of mourning

For the Sandy Denny fan, sites of pilgrimage are few, and disappearing. Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea, with its distinctive oak-aged acoustic, where so many of her greatest recordings were laid down, is long gone: replaced by flats. The apartment she shared in Stanhope Mews West in 1967-68, where Richard Thompson first heard her play ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, is likewise no more. After forty years in the ownership of one person, the house in Parson’s Green with the William Morris wallpaper, scene of some of the cosiest domestic photos of Sandy and Trevor, was sold in May; its new owners are gutting the place. Visitors to Arthur Road, Wimbledon, report they have trouble finding the spot where Mr and Mrs Denny stand forever on the cover of Unhalfbricking while their daughter and her bandmates romp on the lawn behind them. Remote from London’s constant rebuilding, only the cottage in Byfield remains. And the grave, of course. Where is that? Not in the country churchyard at Shipton-on-Cherwell that inspired her to write ‘Bushes and Briars’ but back where she started: in the suburbs.

I’ve been twice to Putney Vale Cemetery, a sprawling outer-city necropolis. Best approached by car, it’s a tedious journey from central London by tube and bus. The first time, I had to ask directions in the cemetery office. A helpful woman said: ‘Oh yes – the Fairport Convention singer?’ No place to lecture a total stranger on how that description does less than justice to a lifetime achievement, so I bit my tongue, thanked her for the map and made my way to the grave. Cemeteries turn your thoughts inwards: meaning to think about the deceased, you find you’re thinking about yourself. As I arranged some carnations into what I imagined was a tribute, it struck me that there was something invasive about tending the grave of someone you never knew. I was performing an office which I had previously only done at family graves. What right did I have? It was a question that ate away at the proper feelings of reverence and regret I had brought to her graveside. I like the Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a grave; since the Dianafication of Britain, the carpets of supermarket flowers marking every site of mourning embarrass me. On my second visit I merely stood quietly and looked – no flowers this time, no stones – remembering those lines sung in defiance which now sounded like a valediction forbidding mourning:

‘I won’t linger over any tragedies that were
And I won’t be singing any more sad refrains.’

Several years ago, courtesy of Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas and her London-based parents, I was kindly given access to Denny’s notebooks. Laying them out on the big dining table, I couldn’t disguise a certain disappointment. As a fan, I had expected, handling objects that had once belonged to her, to get a sense of magical aura. Instead, the papers had a musty smell – as is to be expected of material kept in attics and cupboards for 25 years and shipped to Australia and back again – and a disconcerting familiarity. I recognised the stationery: those exercise books you used to buy in newsagents in the Seventies. Sandy’s cardboard box full of notebooks looked spookily like my carboard box full of notebooks, safely stowed in the attic of the parental home. But where my notebooks were filled with childhood plans for epic novels, artificial languages to promote world peace, absurd efforts to compose ‘symphonies’, hers were song lyrics, frolicsome cartoons and a deal too much of what can best be called ‘nature poetry’. Some of this material has now been published in the Live at the BBC boxset, and I have misgivings about encountering it once more. Simply, I don’t think it does her any favours. Self-critical to a nicety and gifted with good judgement, she published what was worth publishing and held back the rest. The notebooks are undoubted evidence of a chaotic intelligence and a restless creativity, but the secrets remain untold.

To my infinite regret, I never actually saw Sandy live, much less begged for an autograph or shook her hand after a concert to thank her for a job well done. Though I owned a couple of her records as a schoolboy in the Seventies, I was more into classical music in those days (it was that sort of school) and failed to separate her out from the other girl singers with long blonde hair and folky voices. In the years since, she has been a siren voice in my head; often I would hear another voice and think that it reminded me of something very precious from the past. Quite recently I yielded to that siren voice, immersed myself in her entire recorded output and realised what the schoolboy should have known: that she was the greatest British female singer of her generation. But she never realised it herself, so perhaps my oversight is excusable. The Emperor Tiberius asked his bemused savants ‘what song the Sirens sang’. I know the answer. When I read Homer’s account of the Sirens’ ‘liquid song’, it’s her voice I hear. A female voice, not trained but all the more beautiful for it; a voice rich in experience, mournful yet consoling, suggestive of the ‘foreknowledge of all that is going to happen on this fruitful earth’ Homer ascribes to the Sirens but stripped of their destructive power. Clinical studies show that one effect of amnesia is an inability to imagine the future. If you can’t remember, you can’t use use past experiences to construct a possible future. No memory, no foreknowledge.

As a voice she becomes a repository for an obscure, multiform sense of loss. In my case, the sense of loss arises from having been alive in the 1960s but too young and too fixed on my own childhood concerns to register the exciting things happening in the wider, adult world. Writing about that period is a way of recreating what passed me by. Then, in the Seventies, when I was mature enough to swim in the ambient culture, I unaccountably swam away from this sort of music. And in turning away from the music, I lost sight of Sandy, failed to follow her career to its premature end, failed to ‘save’ her. Not that there’s anything I or any other fan could have done, of course; but these avoidable early deaths always inspire ‘rescue’ fantasies, especially in dreamy young men. In later years I would listen to recordings of her I’d never heard before, and it was as if I had heard them before. The sense of ‘coming home’ was palpable.

So what I write here is an act of anamnesis, of unforgetting.