If Kate Howard had an accompaniment to her song of life it would be played by a full orchestra … with bells on.
The trained singer is immersed in music – leading the Cairn Chorus in her home village of Moniaive, the Songwave Choir in Castle Douglas and the CatStrand Singers in New Galloway, the last formerly led by the much-loved Nicola Black from Kirkpatrick Durham, who passed away suddenly in March last year, to the great grief of all who knew her.
Kate’s accent is overlain with soft Scots tones and is as varied as the places she’s stayed – on both sides of the Atlantic.
Something else is immediately clear – she is possessed of a certain restless energy, perhaps a legacy of her mother, I suggest, who was of the travelling folk.
“I was born in Wallasey on Merseyside but I only stayed there two weeks,” the irrepressible 55-year-old begins.
“My mum Janet Eardley was a traveller from a travelling family who lived in a caravan for a short time. She met my dad John Howard when she was an au pair in Liverpool.
“I have four younger brothers who have all moved up here.
Kate tells me she – the eldest of five – moved with her mum and dad to Goosnargh near Preston, then to near Skipton and later to near Settle in North Yorkshire.
“We moved around quite a bit – it was kind of in the blood,” she laughs.
“My dad would buy a wreck of a house and do it up – we moved from one building site to another.
“My mum with all the babies kept everything going.
“My family was not musical but my parents knew that I loved music and my dad bought me an old honky-tonk piano at an auction. At high school in Settle I sang all the time and my music teacher encouraged me.”
Soon, Kate recalls, the visit of a big stage performer changed the melody of her life.
“At the school Christmas musical there was a lady in the audience, Valerie Baulard, who said she really liked my voice and suggested I get proper training.
“She was an opera singer who had a holiday cottage there and she got me singing lessons.
“I was from a very working class family – my dad worked with Crown wallpapers for some years – and Valerie had great designs for me of being an opera singer.
“She’d bring instrumentalists from Opera North to Settle – her friends would be the orchestra and her fellow soloists would take the lead singing roles while the students – including me – would be the chorus.
“So from a really early age I got to sing in these big productions – it was life changing.”
Kate remembers the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher as a time pock-marked by the Falklands War, nuclear weapons deployment and the miners’ strike and she, like many other young people from a socialist background, were radical in their views.
“I left home at 15 and got involved with CND,” she tells me.
“We’d go on political long walks – one from the US early warning station at Menwith Hill near Harrogate was two or three months.
“We went through all these different towns and villages collecting old tools to be sent out to Eritrea, where a civil war was going on, so families could support themselves.
“My mum did not want me to leave home but I was passionate and aged 15 I ended up staying at Greenham Common for a few months.
“We cut through the wire and broke into the base because the cruise missiles with nuclear warheads were going to be sited there.
“Our protest was always non-violent and absolutely pacifist.
“We did it to make a point.”
Apart from taking on the might of the US military, it turns out the Greenham Common Peace Camp gave Kate her first link to Galloway.
“One of the women there was a member of the Laurieston Hall community,” she explains.
“I’d be 16 and we hitched back all the way back from Greenham Common to Laurieston.
“There was a music and dance week there – and instead of doing classical stuff I collected a repertoire of political songs.
“I met a bunch of people who were living in Sheffield, – I had nowhere to stay and I ended up going down to Sheffield and sharing a house with them.
“We got involved with the miners’ strike – my then partner Dickie was an artist with the NUM.
“He did sketches of police violence against the miners that was used as court evidence.
“Dickie was in the Benghazi Blues Band and played at the Leadmill Club in Sheffield.
“A group of us wanted to keep singing and started Sheffield Socialst Choir and would collect socialist songs from all over the world and sing them at demonstrations – at that time the anti-poll tax campaign had become a huge political movement.
“I began to run an event called Choirs Week and would get all the socialist choirs together and we’d travel up together to Laurieston.
“I started a women’s singing week too – so I had a connection to this area for a really long time.”
That bond, Kate tells me, grew stronger after her mum separated from her dad and moved with Kate’s siblings to a house in Shinnel Glen near Tynron in 1992.
“It was a little run-down cottage – she was on her own with my four wee brothers,” she says.
“I had a son by this time – I was 18 when Sam was born – and I would be 22 when mum moved up here.
“Some folk were anti-English but the vast majority in the village were really supportive and really took care of her.
“She lived up there for a good few years.
“Dickie – Sam’s dad – and I had split up but remained good friends.
“Shortly after that I moved to Hebdon Bridge in West Yorkshire.”
Listening to Kate, it seems that if her life was a musical score it would be allegro – fast paced.
“There was another music week at Laurieston and my mum looked after Sam for the week,” she continues.
“One of the bands was Northern Harmony from Vermont in the USA run by a guy called Larry Gordon.
“I was wanting a holiday for myself and when Larry asked ‘I really like your voice, do you fancy coming on tour sometime?’ I said yes and in 1992 we did a tour of the British Isles.
“From that Larry asked if I wanted to do more and come abroad.
“I was still living in Hebdon Bridge at the time and had set up two community choirs, a women’s choir and a big socialist choir.
“I thought ‘I don’t know if I can leave them or not’ but a friend took them over. So I went out to Vermont and lived in a big log cabin in the woods with other musicians for three years.
“In summer I ran these music camps and in autumn and winter we went on these long-haul tours.
“There were 12 to 18 of us and we pretty much did every single US state.”
It was during a European tour, Kate tells me, that her life’s journey follwed another fork in the road.
“While on tour I got headhunted for a job at a Steiner school in Dartington in Devon,” she recalls.
“Steiner school have a very-much child-centred educational philosophy where music plays a prominent role – the school takes a holistic approach to the child as an individual to deliver learning in harmony with the child’s development.
“I had met another partner when I came back from the States and had three more kids by this time – all girls, Hannah, Sarah and Esther. I ran the large music department at Dartington and I would put the baby Esther in a basket under the piano when I was teaching!”
Kate is nothing if not full of surprises, and is open about a chapter in her life where her health took precedence over everything.
“I taught there for six years and got breast cancer 15 years ago. I’m now fully recovered,” she says simply. I tried working through all my treatment and it was too much.
“Then our house got flooded in 2011 and we lost pretty much everything.
“We took that as a sign and a dear friend who was living with my mum said take the money and run and come back to Galloway.
“He put a notice up in Moniaive shop and 11 years ago, in 2013, we ended up in an old farmhouse in Dunscore.
“But we knew we wanted to be in Moniaive.”
“A local musician in Moniaive, Pete Garnett, had grown up in Rathmell near Settle and knew my mum from those days,” she adds.
“What a tiny world we’re all in!
“Sam was living on his own by now so me and the three girls ended up moving to Moniaive.”
Kate laughs when I mention Moniaive is actually a few miles from the Galloway border, replying that her work with the choirs means she spends a great deal of time in the province.
Moving to Moniaive, she says, was a happy event and it was soon followed by another – a full-time music post.
Kate explains that local clarsach maestro Wendy Stewart was helping to set up Fèis an Iar Dheas (Festival of the West and South) – Scotland’s southernmost festival of traditional music, arts and Gaelic song – through Fèis Rois in the Highlands and the Scottish Government’s Youth Music Initiative (YMI)
“The bulk of my work was to develop a traditional singing/instrument programme in primary schools across the region, which focuses on building a school repertoire of Gaelic and Scots song.”