'There Is A Green Hill Far Away'

My father was a headmaster but also he was a music teacher and he wrote children's plays and musicals and things. One of those plays was a retelling of the nativity story because in junior schools, what are you going to do? You're going to retell the nativity story. He had 'There Is A Green Hill' in there and I assumed for years that the song which was in there was that song, 'There Is A Green Hill'.

A few years later, on one of the occasions when I was forced to go to church, everybody started singing a different version of 'There Is A Green Hill'. It turned out my dad had rewritten the melody of 'There Is A Green Hill'. I remember getting home and saying that I preferred the original and I don't think I have ever seen somebody look so heartbroken in my life. The irony is, as the years go by, obviously my tastes have changed significantly since I was eight. He's not around anymore so now I'm unable to tell him that's the case.

It's a song which means a lot to me. It's a little bit like that moment in Jacob's Ladder where Tim Robbins follows Macaulay Culkin up the stairs. It's got that haunting quality without any of the indulgent melancholia. Whenever I hear the original song, if I'm ever stealing the cladding from a church and they're having a service below me and I hear 'There Is A Green Hill', now what I always think is, "My dad wrote that better".