Multiple-choice reading

For most of my life, I have believed two things about myself: that I am reasonably good at cooking, and that I cannot sing. The first was confirmed by years of grateful friends. The second was decided for me at the age of nine, when a music teacher asked me to “just move your lips, dear” during the school concert. I took her advice so seriously that I spent the next fifteen years doing exactly that, at birthday parties, at weddings and once, memorably, at a football match.

So when my flatmate Kofi announced that he had joined a community choir and that I was coming with him, I laughed. He was not joking. The choir, he explained, had no auditions, met on Thursday evenings in a church hall ten minutes from our flat, and was “desperately short of men”. I agreed to go once, mainly so that I could tell him I had tried.

The hall was colder than I expected, and fuller. About forty people of all ages stood around drinking tea from mismatched cups. The conductor, a retired music teacher called Margaret, made us start with breathing exercises, which I could manage, and then with something she called “sirens”, sliding our voices from low to high and back again. Everyone sounded ridiculous. That, I later realised, was the point. It is hard to feel embarrassed about your voice when the person next to you is making noises like a broken car alarm.

Then we sang an actual song, and I discovered the strange thing about choirs: you cannot really hear yourself. Your voice disappears into the sound around you, and for the first time in my adult life I sang out loud without anyone turning round to stare. I was almost certainly singing some wrong notes. Nobody seemed to care, and gradually neither did I.

I went back the following week, and the week after that. Margaret moved me from the tenors to the basses, explaining that my voice was lower than I thought, and suddenly songs that had felt like climbing a mountain became manageable. She never told me I was good. She told me what to fix: “You’re breathing in the middle of the word,” or “Listen to the person on your left.” I found this far more encouraging than praise would have been, because it suggested that improvement was possible.

Not everything was easy. Learning the bass line of a song while everyone around me sang a different tune required more concentration than anything I do at work. I practised on the bus with headphones, quietly humming, until a woman across the aisle asked if I was all right. And there were evenings when I arrived tired and irritable and wanted nothing more than to go home. I rarely did, partly out of loyalty to Kofi, but mostly because I always left feeling lighter than when I arrived.

Six months after that first Thursday, we gave a concert in the same church hall. My parents came, and my mother cried during the second song, which she claims was because of the music. I would like to say I sang every note perfectly. I didn’t. But I sang all of them out loud.

I still don’t think I have a beautiful voice. What has changed is that I no longer believe the question matters very much. A nine-year-old was told to stay quiet, and he listened for fifteen years. I am a little annoyed that it took me so long to stop.