Nothing in My Hand I Bring

“Why do we always have to learn the words?”

It was twenty past four on a Sunday afternoon and Mrs Meares was late again. Dorothy, the last member of the choir waiting to be taken home, was sitting in the shade at the front of the church with Mr Gordon, the choir conductor.

Bob Gordon thought about Dorothy’s question. “Well,” he said, “the Junior Choir has learned the words since it started, I think. When Miss Rosie got sick and asked me to take over, that was one of the things she wanted me to keep doing: make you kids learn the words. You must always have learned them in Miss Rosie’s day. Now that I’ve got the job I have to learn them, too, you know! Do you find it hard to learn the words?”

Every edition of Quadrant brings short stories and poetry.
Click here to subscribe

“It’s all right when we do easy songs. But when we do a real hymn that’s got four or five or six verses, it’s hard. It’s like a punishment. There’s a teacher at my school who, when she keeps kids in for playing up, doesn’t let them go till they’ve learned a poem by heart. I once had to learn this huge thing about sitting under a bamboo tree. ‘Under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree.’ Crazy.”

“Don’t you think it looks better in church when the whole choir sings without anyone holding a book or music sheet in front of them?”

“I s’pose,” said Dorothy. A car stopped at the gate and the girl jumped to her feet.

Mrs Meares leaned towards the passenger window. “Sorry to hold you up. Little drama at home.” And to Dorothy as she opened the passenger door: “Have you got all your stuff?”

“Yes, Mum. Bye, Mr Gordon.”

“Bye Dorothy, bye Mrs Meares.”

“Bye, Bob. Thanks for everything.” The busy woman waved, checked her rear vision, and took off across three lanes.

After Junior Choir practice on Sunday afternoons, Bob usually dropped in on Ernie. Ernie was an elderly widower who lived a couple of suburbs away from the church, the doorway of which he would not have darkened in a fit. He was a pensioner, an old bushie, and an anachronism: an accomplished bush balladist who often contributed to the Register. The unfulfilled dream of his life was to win the Bronze Swagman. While there was life there was hope! he often observed. Bob had met Ernie two years earlier at a writers’ festival, liked him, had attended Ethel’s funeral, and had starting visiting shortly afterwards.

“What have you been up to today?” asked Ernie as he led the way to the living room. “As if I don’t know. Leading those kids up the garden path again, I bet.”

“I hope not,” said Bob as he sat down opposite his host. “We started today on ‘Rock of Ages’. It’s the first real hymn I’ve tried with the kids. They sing in the morning service, where we have a lot of older folk, and some older folk have made it known that they prefer traditional hymns. ‘Rock of Ages’ has been ‘requested’. We’re not a radio requests show, but I’m trying to keep the customers satisfied.”

“In my day it was Moody and Sankey hymns. Did you ever hear the one that’s got the chorus, ‘Hallelujah, Thine the glory. Hallelujah, amen. Hallelujah, Thine the glory. Revive us again’? Burl Ives did it, singing for his supper across North America in the Great Depression. I like his version the best. ‘Hallelujah, I’m a bum! Hallelujah, amen! Hallelujah, give me a handout! Revive me again!’ That’s my kind of hymn!”

“Songs can go the other way, you know. We’ve done a few ‘converted’ or ‘baptised’ pop songs. One song I liked as a kid and I’ve taught this choir since taking over is called ‘His Love’. It’s a baptised version of a popular song from the mid-1960s called ‘My Love’. The original was written by Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch and became a big hit for Petula Clark. The original chorus ran: ‘My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine, softer than a sigh, deeper than the deepest ocean, wider than the sky. My love is brighter than the brightest star that shines every night above’ et cetera, et cetera. As I sang it in Fellowship, and as my Junior Choir has now sung it, this becomes, ‘His love is warmer than the warmest sunshine, softer than a sigh, deeper than the deepest ocean, wider than the sky. His love is brighter than the brightest star’ and so on. The verses are similarly fluffy and romantic, but there’s a trace of content: ‘Something happened to my heart the day that I met Him: something that I never knew before; and that something is that He has buried all my sin; and every day I learn to love Him more.’ Hopelessly old-fashioned as pop music; but, again, we’re singing largely for older folk …”

“Buried all my sin, eh?”

“Along similar lines, but a little bit more radical, we’ve done a baptised version of the song ‘Sailor’. This was a big hit for Lolita in the early sixties under the German title, ‘Seemann’: ‘Seemann, lass das Träumen, denk’ nicht an zuhaus; Seemann, Wind und Wellen rufen dich hinaus.’ In the baptised version this becomes a sung prayer: ‘Saviour, be my Master; Saviour, keep me true; Saviour, guide my footsteps; Teach me Your will to do.’ The chorus is excellent: ‘Every moment of the day guide my thoughts and words and actions, that wherever, Lord, I am, I may always know Your plan; every moment of the day guide my thoughts and words and actions; and my will be wholly Yours, dear Lord, I pray …’”

“Thy will be done but see my need and spare to me the rest, eh? Like Holy Dan—and Holy Willie.”

“Not exactly. Putting Christian words to secular music did not, of course, start in the sixties. It’s long been a strategy, for example, of the Salvation Army. When William Booth thought about how to bring ‘soup, soap and salvation’ to the slums of Victorian London—darker and more dangerous places in those days, it’s said, than the heart of Africa; almost totally neglected by the established church—he decided that colourful uniforms and brass bands, among other things, would help to draw a crowd. Listening one day to a Salvation Army band playing, and a Salvationist choir singing a particularly lively hymn, he asked an officer what the tune was. The officer was very embarrassed to have to tell General Booth that the tune was ‘Champagne Charlie Is My Name’. The original words …”

“You don’t have to tell me. ‘Champagne Charlie is my name, champagne drinking is my game; there’s no drop for me but fizz, fizz, fizz; I’ll drink every drop there is, is, is …’” Ernie yawned.

“But ‘Champagne Charlie’ had been baptised, given Christian words. General Booth’s famous response was, ‘Well, why should the Devil have all the good tunes?’

“The most recent example I know of baptising a secular song is the modern Christmas carol based on Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Hallelujah’. We might do it one year. Admirers of the late Leonard Cohen have been scathing in their ridicule of what they see as the Christmas-card sentimentality of the baptised version; but, as has been pointed out, Cohen was alive when the version was made, so he and Sony Music must have given their permission. Once at my former school some young people who were very new Christians decided to sing ‘Hallelujah’ at chapel, and, not knowing any better, they downloaded, rehearsed and presented the original song. It probably didn’t do much harm, because the lyrics are obscure; but, as I pointed out to colleagues afterwards, it had to be the first time our chapel service featured a song by an agnostic Jewish Buddhist monk.

“Cohen wasn’t anti-Christmas. Sometimes in concert he sang ‘Silent Night’ …”

Bob finally noticed that Ernie had fallen asleep. His chin was on his chest, his heavy bottom lip drooping. As the background babble of the lecture ended, the old man gave a start, slowly opened his eyes, and looked up. He wasn’t smiling.

“Very interesting. I suppose you’d like a cup of tea.”

“Only if you’re having one yourself.”

“Come on, then.” Ernie rocked back and forth, rose stiffly from his armchair, and trudged to the kitchen.

They sat on opposite sides of the Laminex table and didn’t say much. There was tea, milk and sugar, and there were Iced VoVos.

As Bob drove home, he was puzzled. He’d been going out of his way for months to give Ernie company, but his friend had obviously been unhappy and Bob couldn’t tell what the problem was.

There must have been another drama at the Meares home, or a continuation of the previous one, because Mrs Meares was late again. But this Sunday afternoon Bob Gordon was glad, because he had a better answer to Dorothy Meares’s question.

“Last week when we were sitting here you asked me why the Junior Choir learns the songs by heart. Remember? I’ve been thinking about it, and thinking about Miss Rosie, and I think I can tell you.”

“It was so sad that she died. She was so beautiful and kind.”

“Indeed she was.” Bob remembered Rosie in hospital, just a few months before, by which time she’d shrunk down, poor thing, to little more than a bump in the bedclothes, and yet her face had glowed with joy. The impact she’d had on everyone who cared for her and on her visitors! He’d never known anyone more totally assured of the “wonderful words of life” her choir had often sung about.

“I think, Dorothy, Miss Rosie wanted you to learn the words because she wanted you to hide God’s words in your heart. I’ve had the experience, at important times in my life, that a tune has hummed in my head and, when I’ve realised what it was and remembered the words, they’ve reminded me of something I really needed to remember, so that I acted wisely and did the right thing instead of doing something stupid. I think Rosie believed that if you learned the songs by heart, and if the songs were full of Bible truth and God’s promises, there was a chance the Holy Spirit would bring them to your mind at times when they’d make all the difference. I think that was it. And I think Miss Rosie was right.”

“That makes sense,” said Dorothy as the Mearesmobile hove into view.

When Bob drove out of the carpark he cut across three lanes. He was keen to see Ernie because he had a surprise for him on the back seat: two almond cakes from the Café de France to go with their tea. A penny had dropped last week on the drive home from Ernie’s. As Bob had tried to sing right through “Rock of Ages” by heart, he’d repeatedly got stuck at the start of verse three: “Nothing in my hand I bring …”

Robert Handicott lives in Townsville. He has had several books of poetry published, and some of his poems have appeared in Quadrant in recent years. His story “Minimum Maximum” appeared in the July-August 2022 issue