It is only fair, having discussed the songs my father sang, to record my mother's. It will not take long, for I remember only one, the first verse of one of Sabine Baring-Gould's hymns, Now the Day is Over. Other than that, or on rare occasions when we were taken to church, when staying at my grandfather's house, I never heard her sing, in public or private.
The hymn is sentimental. I can only remember her singing the first stanza which, on its own, could be a secular song:
Now that day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening steal across the sky.
Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep, birds, and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.
Baring-Gould's religiosity becomes explicit in the verses which follow, but the first, on its own, is the lullaby I can remember her singing on summer evenings in my small bedroom in our house on Lensfield Road in Cambridge, as swifts and swallows cried outside. For all its sentimentality, I am not surprised at her choice, for it fitted her deep love of nature well. It worked too, for I can still remember making the intended association between the sleepiness of birds, beasts and flowers, and my own mental state.
The lullabies I would sing my own children, to no great effect, were more varied: Gilbert and Sullivan, folk songs and Papageno's aria from Die Zauberflöte, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, which I would chant repeatedly while walking a baby up and down the landing.