Ian McMillan: The sound of silence that can speak volumes

There are lots of different kinds of silence, though, which is odd for something that doesn’t exist, that’s merely a hole in the air. You could take any silent situation and detect lots of gradations of noiselessness, some more satisfying than others, some as tense as a rubber band just before it twangs.

Look at this middle-aged couple sitting on the settee at home. They aren’t talking, but their silence is nuanced and many-layered. It could be companionable silence; they’re just sitting there because they like being in the room together at the same time. They aren’t talking because there’s nothing much to say and they’re enjoying the fact that they haven’t got to blab or gas or chunter. It could be a thinking silence, because they’ve been doing a crossword and one of the clues has stumped them temporarily and they’re cogitating silently. It could be an icy silence because they’ve just had a row, probably about something trivial like whose turn it is to wash up or who’s been using a bit of old bacon rind as a bookmark. Soon the ice of the silence will shatter, or perhaps it’ll just melt away into small-talk and laughter. The other kind of icy silence is the pre-argument sort, blowing into a room like a cloud in a blue sky, building up like pressure in a boiler, like a balloon which is about to pop into shouting and gesturing. That kind of silence isn’t merely icy, it’s glacial. It’s permafrost. Until the storm comes.

Come to think of it, a lot of silences are silences before something, which makes them less than complete in themselves. There’s the tight and tense silence before the starting gun in a race; the small silence before a baby’s first cry; the silence after the pounding music in a show like The X Factor, which is designed to increase tension and get your heart racing, and the silence in a concert hall just before a piece of music begins, or before somebody coughs.

Then you get the after silence, which is rarer but somehow more satisfying; the silence after the applause has died away but just before the audience starts getting up and putting its coat on; the silence when you’ve told a joke and the people you’ve told it to are digesting it and in a moment or two they’ll laugh but not yet; the silence when you try your new coat in and the other person in the shop looks at you and doesn’t say a word for a second or two before they tell you that you look great.

You can tell that I’m that rarest of hobbyists, the silence collector. It’s like being a stamp collector – but you don’t need hinges or an album. What you do need, though, is time. Lots of time. You have to lie in wait for silence like you might lie in wait for a rare frog. You become adept at snatching silences from the most unpromising of situations: those couple of seconds in the lift before the doors open and everybody else gets in; the moment on the morning walk just after the motorbike has zoomed past and just before the dawn chorus gets into gear; the time you spend standing at the kitchen window when there’s nobody else in the house and the telly’s off and the clock’s battery has run out. More silences to add to the haul!

These are, on the whole, benign and personal silences. What about the scarier silences? The official silence that you come up against when you’re trying to find out some facts and those in charge say nothing at all. The wall of silence that politicians build rapidly (without planning permission) when you ask them awkward questions that hang in the air. The silenced millions that you never hear a squeak from in history lessons, by which I mean the ones who worked in the fields or in the mills or in the mines or who fell in forgotten wars or disasters that happened long ago and far away. Like I said a few loud paragraphs ago, I’m thinking deeply and continually about silence.

Maybe I should take a vow and join a non-speaking monastic order. Some people might say that wouldn’t be a bad thing. But I couldn’t do it: I don’t mind silence as long as I don’t have to contribute to it too much.

I’ll stop writing now. My keyboard is making a heck of rattle, disturbing the air. “The rest is silence” as The Bard said. That’s Shakespeare, not me.