1: The Start

Time to Play

I am a privileged middle-class white woman with all the advantages that gives me in life. My father was a clergyman and my mother a primary school teacher. Until just before my tenth birthday, I enjoyed an idyllic, carefree, playful childhood in a Norfolk rectory with acres of garden. There was plenty of music. My parents had met as students at Trinity College of Music in London. My father sang, played the guitar and lute, and had a very sophisticated knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. My mother played the piano and was a supremely gifted children's choir director. Dad was an eccentric, liberal-minded and charismatic priest. He wasn't evangelical, though he'd talk with very great enthusiasm about his faith and his many doubts. The rectory had an open door. Parishioners could drop in at any time, and my sister and I were comfortable talking to anyone of any age and background.

It was a well-educated family, yet I somehow managed to hide from my parents that I couldn't read terribly well, and although I sang in the church choir and played the trumpet, I certainly couldn't read music. It was the 1970s, SATS and assessments didn't exist, and my mother taught at another school, so faking it was quite possible.

We cycled around the local villages, played in our large garden and sometimes next door in the creepy graveyard, overlooked by the cavernous, architecturally rich medieval church of St Agnes, Cawston. Classroom time in the local primary school was quite dull, and we lived for playtime in our enormous school playing field. A passionate sailor, my father bought a small dinghy and took us sailing on the Norfolk Broads and the North Sea. We were adventurous with no sense that some things girls just 'can't do'. Those years were very happy and the fact that we were free to roam and feed our imaginations was, I believe, key to our development, and we caught up on the other aspects of education eventually. My sister and I were confident, articulate, happy and healthy children. The salary of a clergyman and a part-time teacher was small, but it was a rich childhood, nonetheless.

On 17 April 1980, my father drowned in a sailing accident off the north Norfolk coast and our lives were turned upside down. My sister and some family friends' children were involved and nearly died too, and I watched the whole thing unfold from the shore. I remember it vividly, and part of my childhood and self-confidence was left on the shore that day. Within months we had to move from the rectory and consequently moved schools. In the following months I used to stop what I was doing and ask myself if I would be doing it if Dad was still alive. By September, almost nothing I did, nowhere I went, was the same.

Clergy and their dependants are not wealthy but there are charities to help keep them in middle-class comfort and education. The archaically named Clergy Orphan Corporation swung into action and offered to pay fees at a nearby prep school, Beeston Hall. I was put into a very academically bright class with children a year younger than me, and I remained a year behind right the way through my school education. Looking back, I can see there were sound, well-meaning reasons for this, though no one thought to explain them to me, or even to tell me that this was going to happen. I found out when on my first day we went round the class saying how old we were and I figured out that I must be very stupid. Probably not the greatest boost in confidence to a little girl who'd just lost her dad, but I was quickly learning resilience and to keep these upsets to myself. Eventually I convinced myself that being given that extra year was just what I needed to realise my musical and intellectual potential, and I still believe that. But it took me many years to get rid of the idea that I was behind and therefore slower than my contemporaries.

St Margaret's

In 1982 I quite happily went as a boarder and a 'foundationer' to St Margaret's School in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Founded in 1749 for the 'fatherless daughters of the clergy', by the 1980s there were just eleven clergy orphans, and the rest were 'normal' fee-paying girls. It sounds like something grim from a Brontë novel, but the reality for me was mostly positive. Some would be surprised to hear this, but going away to school, being taken away from the responsibilities of home for some of the time, was good for me. I felt freer from worry and missed my dad less, yet I never felt unloved, and the holidays with my mother and sister were always the best times of the year. Also, there were other clergy orphans at the school, and we understood each other. I'm still close friends with some of them. At Beeston I felt embarrassed at my dad not being alive. It seems extraordinary, but it was just too hard to deal with the reaction of my peers when I said that my dad was dead - it made me feel 'other'. At St Margaret's I could just say I was a 'foundationer' and everyone knew what that meant, and it didn't bother them.

As in other schools, there was a handful of horrendously cruel members of staff, and, looking back, some bizarrely mean-spirited school rules, but there were many kind and clever people educating and caring for us too. There were eccentric, enlightened, super-bright older women who had dedicated their life to teaching and had some wonderful nuggets of wisdom to impart. The education was overall pretty good, and I did a lot of sport too, which saved me from being too 'square'. 'Alice has indefatigable stick work' was my lacrosse report - perhaps that could be my strapline today. Bushey is near London, so school trips to concerts, theatres and museums were frequent. It was all very wholesome.

There were pupils from Nigeria, Hong Kong, India and even Libya and Iran, as well as a lot of Jewish girls who lived locally and so didn't board. Sadly, we weren't encouraged to learn about their cultures and religions, and I regret that lost opportunity. They were to go to chapel and become 'nice English girls'. It was a church school, but not evangelical; attending chapel was an endurance but they weren't expected to convert to Christianity, and I suppose this was something their parents had chosen for them. It could have been worse, but I feel embarrassed by the endemic unconscious racism.

It was of course music that made me most happy and fulfilled, and I could ignore the less attractive sides of boarding-school life by throwing myself into this. Since Dad's death, music had taken on a great importance. In those few remaining months at Cawston rectory, I sat down with a recorder and Singing Together (that accompanying booklet to the iconic BBC Radio Music Education programme) and played through every tune until I became fluent. I started the piano a year after my father died. That's quite late for someone who ends up becoming a professional musician, but it was the right time for me, and I practised obsessively, rattling through the grades in just a few years. Life was serious and deeper now and like many children who experience loss, music was an outlet for emotions I couldn't put into words.

At St Margaret's I practically lived in the music department and was able to practise the organ, trumpet and piano at every spare moment - day and night. The award-winning chapel choir rehearsed almost daily. We were the rent-a-choir for many boys' schools and joined forces for big choral works. By the time I left the school, I had sung nearly all the giants of the repertoire from Handel's Messiah to Britten's War Requiem.

We had an inspiring music director called Graham Garton. Very much the captain of the ship, he encouraged us to punch above our weight. He wrote a new grace every week, which we sang before Wednesday lunch, and with chapel services, competitions and concerts, we were all good sight-readers. It was as close as you could get to a cathedral choir school, an option still open only to boys. Yet it was nowhere near as immersive, and the fact that we as girls all had to accept this privilege was bestowed only on boys was rarely questioned.

My parents partly jokingly said they had always planned to have two boys and send them to choir school. Both my sister and I could make as nice a noise as the boys, and we were very keen, but in the 1970s there was no questioning the wisdom of the Church of England in ignoring this talent and enthusiasm. My dad ran the church choir, and it was full of very good girls and young women, and a smattering of somewhat reluctant boys. My parents once took us to evensong at King's College, Cambridge, and I think it was the first time I experienced real envy. Watching those little boys all dressed up, so assured (and, let's face it, looking a bit pompous), I wanted that life very badly. There's plenty of examples of excellent singers and conductors in the operatic and symphonic world coming from this background. For some, the aesthetic and technical challenge of moving from cerebral church music to these more visceral forms of expression is not for them. However, there's no doubting the solid musical grounding a cathedral choir training and education can give.

When I was fifteen, I started to attend the Oundle International...