Growing Up In a War (35 page)

Once the Proms had come into my life they never left it. One year my father gave me a season ticket for the second half of the Proms, and a season ticket for the tube, so that I could go every night. Later, during the forty years when I lived within walking distance of the Albert Hall, not a summer went by without my going to some of the Proms. By the late 1990s I was taking a teenage granddaughter to them.

London’s concert life was transfigured by the ending of the war. It meant that foreign artists could again visit Britain. Beecham returned from the USA and founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I saw conductors such as Furtwängler and de Sabata (whom I still think of as the most exciting to watch of all conductors), and legendary pianists and violinists. Claudio Arrau’s playing of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto came as a revelation to me, not only of the work itself but of what piano-playing could be. Life in Britain crawled out of the imposed provincialism of wartime on to an international scene. I had been more than happy with concert-going as it had been before, but now I was introduced to standards I had never experienced, and a new kind of excitement came into my life. For years past the supreme thrill had been to hear the greatest works for the first time, but now that I had heard most of the central repertoire I was experiencing the quite different thrill of hearing those works played better than before, sometimes better than I would have imagined possible. In some ways it was like hearing them again for the first time.

As the years went by, London established the richest, most extensive concert life of any of the world’s great cities. This went
on
for most of my adult life, and I lived through the development as one of its most avid beneficiaries: the whole experience, from the beginning, was part of the inner framework of my life. London was also, during the same period, the city of the world that was most richly endowed with theatre. For someone whose greatest passions were music and theatre it was an incomparable place to live in during the second half of the twentieth century. I became a Londoner in a special sense, in that the life I lived there could not have been lived anywhere else, not even in New York, which was the city that came closest to it. When I emerged from the education system, I would not have considered living anywhere else. Whatever the career advantages, I would never have taken a job that involved living out of central London. Nothing mattered more to me than music and theatre. The deep foundations of all this were laid in the 1940s.

If I were asked to single out one especially formative set of theatre experiences it would be the run of seasons by the Old Vic Company between 1944 and 1947. Laurence Olivier had just returned from the United States,
¹
and ran the company in harness with Ralph Richardson. Its own theatre had been bombed, so the seasons were played at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward). They launched themselves in the late summer of 1944 with three plays in repertoire: Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
, Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
, and Shakespeare’s
Richard III
. The supporting company consisted of people who were major actors in their own right. Richardson’s
Peer
and Olivier’s Richard were among the supreme theatrical experiences of anyone who saw them. Audiences reacted with something akin to shock. There had never, not even before the war, been theatre like this. We had seen stellar performances – Valk’s Othello, Wolfit’s Lear, Gielgud’s Hamlet – but not two performers of that standard in one play with the entire production at a comparable level – and then two or more such productions running together in repertoire. It was as if every aspect of them was of the highest quality. For instance, Tyrone Guthrie as director brought a kind of genius to
Peer Gynt
, and even the tiny part of the Button Moulder in its last act was played by Laurence Olivier.

The following year the same company achieved the same levels in both parts of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
, Sheridan’s
The Critic
, and Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
. If anything, Richardson’s Falstaff and Olivier’s Oedipus out-topped their Peer and Richard. And again there were twenty-four-carat performances in supporting roles – Justice Shallow in
Henry IV, Part 2
was played by Olivier. For years afterwards I thought of this
Oedipus Rex
as the best production of any play I had seen. It was with this run of performances that Olivier became, in most people’s estimation, the supreme actor of the age – a position that had been occupied hitherto by John Gielgud – and he continued to be thought so for the rest of his life. The following year, 1946, he played King Lear, with Alec Guinness as the Fool, while Ralph Richardson starred in
Cyrano de Bergerac;
and only a couple of months after that, in January 1947, Richardson and Guinness gave us Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist
. It was pure magic, all of it. Richardson’s performances were to my mind as good as Olivier’s, though he was less charismatic. He was great, but in a different way, full of inwardness, while with Olivier everything was externalised. Each was a perfect foil for the other. For me the experience ran parallel to the one I was having at concerts: here were
supremely
great works being performed better than they could have been even in my imagination, unpossessed as that was of the combined genius of, shall we say, Ralph Richardson and Tyrone Guthrie.

There has been nothing like it since. I have seen single productions which are as good, but not year after year of whole seasons of them in repertory. And there have not been better actors since. It caught me at just the right age. It is all sixty years ago now, but it provided me with a touchstone of theatrical excellence throughout my life. I have found that others who lived through those seasons are at one with me on this – Kenneth Tynan once said that whenever two such people meet they start reminiscing like First World War veterans who shared a trench on the Somme.

The same theatre was used by the Sadler’s Wells opera and ballet companies for their London seasons (they spent most of their time touring), so going to the New became the high point of my life in most respects. We as a family always bought the cheapest seats, those in the gallery, price one shilling and sixpence, unreserved. To save enthusiasts from having to queue all day, this theatre and some others operated a system of marking places in the queue with little camp-stools. At the New Theatre this was run by a wily old dear called Winnie. On the morning of the performance you found Winnie somewhere near the theatre (possibly in a pub), showed her your tickets, and she sold you numbered slips for your places in the queue, sixpence a time, first come, first served. A couple of hours before the performance she set out as many camp-stools as there were seats in the gallery, each with a slip number attached, several abreast in a long queue up against the theatre wall. If you did not claim yours by a certain time you forfeited it, and with it your place in the queue, which would be allowed to go into the theatre half an hour before the performance. For an hour or more, then, there would be this queue of hundreds of people squatting on little camp-stools in
the
open air alongside the theatre – chattering to one another, reading newspapers and books, eating food out of paper bags – while the normal occupants of the street walked past them. If it rained they sat on their diminutive stools holding up umbrellas, a sight that was touchingly English. They were a captive audience for buskers, who performed there one after another. These could be musicians, dancers, jugglers, acrobats. One young man declaimed speeches from whatever play we were about to see. He did it rather well, I thought, and I assumed he was an aspiring actor, but I never heard of him in any other connection.

That queue was a world in itself, with a life of its own. Many of the people in it were the same all the year round. Friendships formed, love affairs began, marriages ensued. News would pass up and down the queue. ‘Have you heard? The So-and-so’s are going to have a baby.’ It was where one picked up theatrical gossip, too, and news about forthcoming events in the performing arts generally. In the way she manipulated us all, Winnie combined fairness with corruptibility in proportions that were just right for the regulars who knew her and understood how she operated.

My sister Joan was more a part of all this than I was – she was in London all the year round, and during the ballet seasons she would go almost every night – but when I was at home during school holidays I was the only member of the family whose time was free, so it was my job to go up to the New Theatre in the morning and find Winnie, so that with luck we might be in the front row of the gallery. After that I would be on the loose in the West End for the rest of the day, until the performance in the evening.

These were the circumstances in which I started on a way of life that was to be mine, in essence, for most of my adulthood. In subsequent decades I would book my tickets in advance and sit in better seats in the theatre, eat in better restaurants, travel there perhaps by taxi instead of tube; but all those things are
mere
outer wrapping. The point of it all, the essential experience, remained the same: the same performances at the same times in the same venues as I would have gone to in any case, however little money I might have had.

Since that was how a whole way of life began, I think of myself as having received the most worthwhile part of my introduction to it in wartime. When I now see photographs of London as it was then, I am taken aback by the greyness and drabness of it, the run-downness, the in-your-face poverty. That is not how I saw it at the time. My life in wartime London was the most exciting and enjoyable I could imagine for myself, and this made it a glamorous place to be. I was responding to the inwardness of it, and it is the inner experience I remember. Although, for example, I made hundreds of journeys late at night on crowded tube trains in the blackout, I can find within myself only the most generalised memory of them. I must, I suppose, have been lost in thought about what I had just been seeing and listening to.

I carried on spending most of my mornings at home, usually playing records. Only four months after I had acquired the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, my father made me a birthday present of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. This gave me the idea of asking for records as presents. From then on, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted for my birthday or Christmas, I would ask them to give me money so that I could put it together with money from other people to buy a whole symphony or concerto. That way, I could expect to acquire two such works a year. One after another, I bought Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Eighth Symphony, Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, Brahms’s Third, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Sibelius’s Second and Seventh, together with a host of shorter works. Because Sibelius’s Seventh occupied only three discs, I was able to buy that and the so-called ‘love duet’ from
Tristan and Isolde
with money I got for my fourteenth birthday. Deep into Wagner, I acquired several excerpts from his operas, and became
specially
hooked on Isolde’s Narration and the closing scene from
Götterdämmerung
, both sung by Kirsten Flagstad. Goodness knows how many times I played these. Once, sitting alone listening to the historic Lauritz Melchior–Frida Leider duet from
Tristan
for the goodness-knows-how-manyeth time, I burst into tears, overwhelmed by the marvellousness of it and of being conscious and able to hear it, of being in such a world at all. Any description of this will sound squudgy and sentimental, but the experience itself was unselfconscious and profound. Even so, the recording that I played most often – the only one I actually wore out – was not of Wagner, it was Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. There was a period of about two years when I played it at least once every day I was at home.

My fourteenth birthday was a landmark for me in many ways. Because fourteen was the age at which most people left school and started work, that birthday was treated by most of the population as a staging post on the way to adult life, a sort of miniature twenty-first; and in keeping with that it was accompanied by especially good presents. For me, the day itself fell during a weekend spent in the market town of Shaftesbury, in Dorset. My father had taken me there to visit his old friend Fred Griffin, his regular companion for opera and ballet at Covent Garden before the war. Fred was a highly skilled craftsman who made, by hand under a microscope, minute springs that were used in aircraft controls. To ensure that he should not himself be bombed, the authorities had ordered him to leave London, so he was now living in Shaftesbury’s Grosvenor Hotel, with an office and workshop a few yards away in the main street. By our standards he was well-off financially, and he had built up over the years the biggest collection of records I had ever come across. It was his custom to play these all day on a state-of-the-art record player while he was working. He loved Wagner above all, and had almost every Wagner recording that had ever been issued. That weekend I was given
free
run of the collection, and felt I was in paradise – until, that is, my father made an announcement.

He said there was something special he wanted to talk to me about, and that he and I should go for a country walk (a unique occurrence). On this walk he told me, speaking with difficulty, that he and my mother were going to get divorced. He looked straight in front of him while he was talking. I tried to ease things for him by saying: ‘I know.’

His manner turned suddenly to sharpness. ‘How do you know?’ I can still see the expression on his face as he snapped it towards me.

This was unfair. Here was I trying to help him, and his response was to make it impossibly difficult for me.

‘Mum told me,’ I said. It was true. I was acutely embarrassed.

‘What did she say?’

This was terrible, but I had to reply.

‘She said you had someone else.’

He swelled up and went bright red with anger, and I thought he was going to burst. But he subsided again, and said in an unnaturally quiet voice, again looking straight in front: ‘Absurd.’