School Song

Written (and performed here) by Gerda Stevenson.

Notes on the school song, Come Wander By The Winding Lyne

As a former pupil of West Linton Primary School, I’m delighted to have written a song for my old school, in this its centenary year. My brother, my sister, and my son were all educated there, and my daughter Galina is currently in Primary 6.

I've written the melody in a pentatonic scale, (five note scale - i.e. you can play it all on the black keys of the piano), because I remember my father, the composer Ronald Stevenson, telling me that children sing naturally in the pentatonic mode. (Lots of Scots fiddle tunes are pentatonic too.) I wanted the tune to sound like a Scots folk song, appropriate to our beautiful Scottish Borders landscape, rather than something redolent of the last days of the British Empire!

I have based the song on the school's four houses, each one relating to the local geography, and its history: the Lyne and West Water being two rivers, Mendick and Castle Law two hills. The verses of the song take us chronologically from pre-history to the 20th Century:

West Water, where two necklaces, with beads made from the oldest worked lead ever found in Europe, were discovered in an ancient child's burial cist (coffin);

The Lyne, which the Romans crossed as they marched Eastward to the Forth;

Mendick, one of the Pentland Hills, close to West Linton, beneath which the young Mary Queen of Scots travelled, on a trip from Edinburgh to Biggar, as part of her wedding celebrations;

Castle Law, which was West Linton’s look-out post during the 2nd World War.

I was born and brought up in West Linton, and have happy memories of all these places. Mendick was my house when I was a pupil at West Linton P.S., and I have climbed that lovely hill many times. I have fished for minnows in the Lyne, picked primroses and fried sausages on the banks of the West Water, and have sledged down Castle Law.

In the melody of the chorus, I’ve tried to create an aural image of winding rivers, and climbing, note by note, uphill. The highest note of the whole song comes after we reach the musical summit, on the word ‘sing.’

My idea is that the verses will be sung by the children of each respective house, and they will all sing the first verse and the chorus. Each house will be motivated, I hope, to sing out their own verse as well as they possibly can - a little bit of healthy competition!

This song is not specifically a centenary song, although it has been written in the centenary year. I hope it will be a perennial song, one which can be sung at the school assembly on a regular basis, for example, so that it will be second nature to the children, their own song that they will all know, handed down through generations, like a folk song.

Gerda Stevenson, summer, 2009.
www.gerdastevenson.co.uk