Nell Vetch

The Cinder Lark, Sarrum’s most famous living performer: a large, rough voice singing of broken engines, bad foremen and London incompetence, heard at the Red Shed and in rooms as far off as the capital.

Nell Vetch was born in a Candlewick room and first paid in ale for singing shift songs from the steps of a truck house. She is now famous far beyond the county, in ways the Mayor of Sarrum is not. Her voice is large rather than refined, and her ballads concern broken engines, bad foremen, girls at the dye vats, men who vanish below ground and the comic incompetence of people from London. She has sung at the Red Shed in Fleecegate, at the Weavers’ yard, and once at Vexley Hall in London, where the audience applauded the tune and misunderstood the joke.

In Sarrum songs function as newspapers. A fatal boiler accident may have a chorus before the inquest opens, and a bad foreman’s name can be made into a rhyme so sticky that moving him to another compound does not free him from it. Vetch is the acknowledged master of the form because she can write a song specific enough to wound and broad enough that everybody believes it belongs to them. ‘Four Shillings Short’ has been banned in three company compounds and played by their own guards in two of them. Broadsheet versions of her work circulate as far as the capital, usually cleaned of the verses Sarrum actually sings.

She is often set beside Eleanor Cresset, Oxford’s Deep Bell, as proof that a recovered realm now shares its references: both can fill a London room while representing almost opposite ideas of respectable performance. Cresset travels by reputation into good houses; Vetch’s rougher fame moves the other way, through ballads, workers and cheap copies. She is not troubled by the comparison.

Companies meet the Cinder Lark at the Red Shed, where the drinking, the speeches and the prize-fights share a single roof, or discover some weeks after leaving Sarrum that they have been met already. Whatever a company does in the county, well or badly, may acquire a verse, and a verse by Nell Vetch will be sung in the pit villages long after the facts have been forgotten.

In person

Nell Vetch is slim and restless, with messy hair somewhere between copper-red and dirty auburn, green-hazel eyes and a sharp, expressive, rough-edged face with the complexion of a soot city. She looks like a working-city singer rather than a salon vocalist, and dresses the part in leather and patched velvet, boots, cheap jewellery and the small charms workers carry. On stage, under green-coal light and beside a battered brass horn, she sings as though the back of the hall were a pit shaft.