I was silenced for decades - by my best friends. There we were, in a school music lesson, at an age where any random thing could set us off into helpless fits of snorting, leg-crossing giggling. And that day, my voice was the trigger.
Joining in with whatever turgid English folk ditty we were labouring through, I had my pals shrieking. “You must be tone deaf!” “It’s horrible!” “Shut up!” So that became part of how we defined ourselves - Stella was the clever one, Sally was the flat-chested one, I was the one with the rubbish voice. I couldn’t hear it myself, but from then on “crap at singing” became part of who I was and my warbling was never heard again outside the