When ever we went anywhere further than a couple of miles in a car as kids, my sisters and I used to get very "car sick". Unfortunately , my mother was also a very poor traveller, so all kinds of (mostly ineffective!) travel sickness "remedies" were tried in order to get us to and from various places without spending more time stopped at the side of the road while some kid, or my mother, was being dreadfully sick than actually making any forward progress! It must have been a nightmare for my poor father. My mother finally hit on a mostly effective solution to the problem by encouraging us all to sing !! So, every time we travelled by car, we sang all the way there and all the way back. We sang songs we'd learned in school, songs we'd heard on the radio, songs my mother taught us in an effort to expand the repertoir for long journeys, advertising jingles, hymns, Christmas songs, nursery rhyme songs...in fact anything that COULD be sung !! So to try and list them all now would take forever!! Suffice it to say that we grew out of our car sickness tendencies as time moved on and the singing helped enormously, but my poor mother remained a life long "bad traveller".

She had a lovely singing voice, in contrast with my father who couldn't hold a note, much less a tune ! However, he was a wonderful story teller, but the only time he told stories outside of our immediate family was on Hallow Eve, when the neighbouring kids would all gather in to hear his scarey stories ! This often resulted in me having to escort spooked kids back to their houses at the end of the night, 'cos they were too scared to go the short distance home in the dark on their own.

Looking back on the songs my mother used to sing, they were a delightful mixture of traditional Irish songs (in English and Irish), and songs off the radio such as "Mack The Knife", Green Door", "High Hopes", calypsos like "Island in the Sun" and "Stone Cold Dead in De Market", Gilbert and Sullivan light operatic songs, Burl Ives' songs, and even some simple French language songs she'd remembered from her own schooldays.

Thanks for starting this tread, mousethief. It has revived long forgotten but very pleasant memories for me of all those happy car journeys, singing all the way.
Anne XX.