Going For A Song: Early Days 10

One day when I was ten years old, I was reading an old copy of the Daily Chronicle, Guyana's main news paper... actually,
the sports page and the comic section, to be more specific. I finished reading the cricket scores as I was a cricket fanatic in
those days. I then turned to see how the Phantom and Secret Agent X-9, were doing. The Phantom was good that day. In
four frames the villain got powed and whammed about for his ill deeds. Secret agent Phil Corrigan was next. Boring...he was
romancing this blonde lady. I put the paper down in disgust. Who were these comics for anyway. My sisters had enough dog eared copies of Screen Romance that had somehow slipped through into their possession, that were full of that stuff...but a
secret agent wasting his time like this?...that was definitely out of line. Then...something made me pick up the paper to look
at the last box of the strip again. No...it wasn't the "first stirrings" that pulled me back...it was a few musical notes around the words in the bubble. I loved music...any kind of music. After my altar boy duties were over in the wooden church,,,my reward
would be thirty to forty minutes at the old wind-up gramophone, in the nearby presbytery...listening to "Humouresque",
"Spring Song", Schubert's Serenade", or Richard Tauber singing "Long ago and Far Away". Maybe it was on one of those old 78's that I'd seen my first musical notes, so I knew what they were. Also...I figured that Phil couldn't have been talking to the lady...saying "When shadows come stealing...my heart goes reeling...I'm shedding those blue tears for you"...no self respecting secret agent would speak mushy words like that...so...he had to be singing instead!. I looked at the words again...
drippy or not...I began to sing them softly to myself. Like magic...out of nowhere...a melody had come that fitted with those
words! I walked around all day long, my mind blown, singing my new song, with borrowed words and all. I was very proud of
what I'd done, but I can't remember singing it for anyone else then. Maybe they'd laugh. Maybe they'd think I was acting
beyond my years because of the subject matter. I must have repeated it to myself, over and over again, those first few days
after it had come, because I can stll remember that melody to this day...the first "tune"...I ever "wrote"...............Quester.