Mrs Growbeck's Armchair

I think this has been my favourite song, ever since I wrote it in March 1980. Essentially it is a reminiscence about my grandma and great aunt who used to take a nap in the afternoons. I remember especially the dark winter days when they would have had a coal fire burning in my grandma's sitting room upstairs (we lived in an extended family household). As a boy, I used to make them a cup of tea around the time they usually woke up, if I was at home and in the house, and I would take it up to them on a tray. The room would be in darkness except for the glowing embers of the coal fire and that is how they liked to wake up from their nap; there was light enough for drinking tea and sometimes it was not quite dark outside anyway. They inevitably told each other about their dreams and that sparked them into talking about the old days, when they were young girls. I loved to sit and listen to them and hear about their adventures. It was a world without electricity and transport on special occasions was a ride in a pony and trap.

I am writing these notes in November 2003 and my Mum is 101 years old, so that gives you some idea of the times that my grandma must have been talking about. And the conversations meandered from hilarious episodes with their various boy friends in the late Nineteenth century, to chilling recollections of hard times experienced in both of the world wars in the twentieth. Often my grandma would recall things that happened to her children, my uncles and aunts. There was always a poignancy about this since one of my uncles and one of my aunts emigrated to Australia and in those days emigration meant that for all practical purposes, for ordinary folk, the person was gone away for ever.

I loved my grandma and my great aunt dearly. The latter had the most wonderful sense of humour and I was very close to her. Indeed, I have dedicated one of my academic books to her. I have very few photographs of them and in anycase what I wanted to capture could not be caught through the lens of a camera. I turned instead to song.

Let me move on, then, to the construction of this song. It occurred to me that I had better watch out or a song of this nature could so easily degenerate into the most sentimental rubbish imaginable. To guard against this, I decided to emphasise the scene, as I remembered it, of the sitting room and the chairs arranged before the fireplace. I picked a fictitious name, Mrs Growbeck and focused the chorus on a simple description of her armchair:

Mrs Growbeck's armchair
Pretty solid, somewhat square
Mrs Growbeck's armchair

Not an emotional word in sight! After this, I gingerly develop a description of the chair and it is not until the second verse that I build some information into the song about Mrs Growbeck's life, indicating that she is a war widow. Perhaps I should mention that at this point I leave the inspiration of my own grandma (she was not a war widow) and let the fiction of the song take itself where it wants to go. I find that there are many points in common between writing song and writing fiction, by the way (I have dabbled in the latter but have not published). Be that as it may, the final verse implies that Mrs Growbeck has mixed emotions about the way her life has turned out:

Schoolgirl days and plaited hair
Country lanes and love affairs
Favourite games her children played
They all grew up and moved away
Dying embers in the grate
Firing flames of love and hate

In terms of the musical composition, its structure is a bit irregular. On the other hand, the key is straightforward. I play it in E major so that I can get a lot of rising and falling 6ths on the first and third string, played against the open E on the 6th. I also use a lot of paired down chords played just on the 3rd and 4th strings with the bass note in the 6th string. I guess my motivation was to make it sound as different from a pop song as I could and I like to think I may have succeeded on that count. It's a very gentle song.

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