Listen To The Voice. Iain Crichton Smith

he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.

      How extraordinarily curious it all was.

      The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.

      ‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.

      ‘What is it?’

      But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realized that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.

      By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3a class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.

      Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.

      ‘What do you want?’

      ‘I want to sing, sir.’

      ‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’

      Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3a and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.

      ‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’

      ‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’

      Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted commas.

      ‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.

      ‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’

      Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them turning a dirty white.

      The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.

      My heart, dear, is aching;

      I’m feeling so blue.

      Don’t give me more heartaches,

      I’m pleading with you.

      It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.

      ‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’

      ‘We feel a sense of waste.’

      ‘And yet triumph.’

      Tracy’s voice, youthful and yearning and vulnerable, soared to the cracked ceiling. It was as if her frustrations were released in the song.

      Don’t give me more heartaches,

      I’m pleading with you.

      The voice soared on and then after a long silence the bell rang.

      The boys from 3a began to chatter and he thought, ‘You don’t even try. You wouldn’t have the nerve to sing like that, to be so naked.’ But another voice said to him, ‘You’re wrong. They’re the same. It is we who have made them different.’ But were they in fact the same, those who had been reduced to the nakedness, and those others who were the protected ones. He stood there trembling as if visited by a revelation which was only broken when Miss Stewart said,

      ‘Not quite Old Vic standard.’ And then she was gone with her own superior brood. You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you Observer-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked anything in your life till some critic made it respectable, who wouldn’t recognize a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at Shakespeare on your own till you were given the crutches.

      And he knew as he watched her walking, so seemingly self-sufficient, in her black gown across the hall that she was as he had been and would be no longer. He had taken a journey with his class, a pilgrimage across the wooden boards, the poor abject furnitureless room which was like their vision of life, and from that journey he and they had learned in spite of everything. In spite of everything, he shouted in his mind, we have put a flag out there and it is there even during the plague, even if Miss Stewart visits it. It is there in spite of Miss Stewart, in spite of her shelter and her glasses, in spite of her very vulnerable armour, in spite of her, in spite of everything.