The Booths were obsessed by music. Everyone played an instrument and they could perform complex chamber pieces without the help of musicians from outside the family. Aunt Margie looked down the table one Sunday lunch and said, ‘Oh good. This afternoon we can play the Trout.’ This, to my mother, was incredible luxury – and she was right! Who today can play Schubert’s Trout Quintet, and the performers are all related? Beyond their music, the Booths enjoyed what my mother calls ‘a democratic radical classlessness going back to Bright and Bentham’. I’m not sure whether ‘classlessness’ is the right word, but the Booths stood at the head of a strong tradition of English socialism. And they were rich.
Little Natasha grew up in three worlds: that of her foster-mother Mrs Busby, that of the powerful self-appointed aunts, and that of everyday life at school. She learned to speak in three different accents and she was proud of the fact that she could alter these voices instantaneously. ‘As I grew, so did my ability for chameleon changes of manner to suit the ambience in which I might find myself. Yet at the centre of this changing stream of consciousness and easy, reliable adaptation to frequent changes of scene, there was a certain unequivocal sense of unity, an intact sense of self.’
Until she was twelve years old, Mum hadn’t even known that she had a father. By that time she was in secondary school and doing well. She loved her foster-mother and the Booth family stood in the background to give her a sense of security. Then suddenly my grandmother told her that she’d be leaving Mrs Busby and coming back to London to live with her; and that the following day she’d have to visit the person Ray had never married and ask him for money.
The next day Mum boarded the 74 bus from Primrose Hill to Earls Court to meet the unknown man who happened to be her father. A housekeeper opened the door and she found herself in front of a large bearded gentleman in a pair of carpet slippers. He neither hugged her nor shook her hand, but he was a musician, so he could talk about that. He showed her his scores stacked from floor to ceiling, talked about French composers she’d never heard of and took her to the piano and played a bright little sonata by Scarlatti.
‘His speaking voice was rather flat, the accent indeterminate, his laughter rather ponderous, and much of his musical talk was above my head. Somehow the occasion was lifeless, for although his kindness was apparent, dutiful, impersonal, it was difficult to feel anything at all.’ Then, sitting side by side at the piano, he improvised a theme and invited her to join in. Her earliest love for the piano had come from improvising for hours on end, so she added a second subject. And that was the closest she remembered ever getting to her father. An old man and a young girl at a keyboard, tapping at the notes.
My mother aged fifteen, photographed at the Booth country house near Funtington.
Edwin Evans had no intention of marrying Ray Litvin, or even of seeing her again. He’d give her an allowance of some kind but, as he told his daughter when they said goodbye, he’d arrange everything through a solicitor. There was no need for her to come again.
Years later, Mum happened to perform in a concert conducted by Eugene Goossens. He looked at her speculatively across a dining-room table while he ran through a mental list of Edwin Evans’ mistresses. Finally: ‘Oh, now I remember! You must be the daughter of the Russian woman!’ One of the many was the implication.
My grandfather died ten days before I was born, so I never knew him.
Mum told me years later that she felt very little when her father died, and she’d had to piece together everything she knew about him after his death by talking to composers who felt indebted to him. Francis Poulenc, for instance, whom she met in Paris in the late Forties. He told her many stories about Evans, but she did not write them down, and when I asked her about them, she’d forgotten. Igor Stravinsky told her that Evans was the critic who in 1913 had insisted on the first performance of The Rite of Spring in London, for which he was very grateful. He gave Mum a copy of a photo from his family album showing her father standing on a veranda in the South of France with Diaghilev and Picasso.
Stravinsky told her that Evans had been with him in a taxi in Paris when he’d found the solution to the last pages of Les Noces. He’d been working at it for months and he couldn’t think of a way of ending it – four soloists, four pianos and a choir, a devastating piece. Then he and Evans happened to be travelling past the cathedral of Notre-Dame one Sunday morning when all the bells started ringing. Stravinsky stopped the cab and wrote down the deafening notes as dictation.
Among the photographs that my sister Lizzie and I inherited is a yellowed newspaper clipping showing our mother with Stravinsky in the streets of Salzburg in the late Sixties. Stravinsky walks with difficulty and she’s helping him. It’s a moving image, but it took me a long time to see why. Stravinsky is cheerfully tottering, and that’s understandable, because he’s ancient. Then I saw it. Mum’s body-language was unfamiliar. It was the affectionate willowy bending of a daughter towards a father.
On Saturday 7 September 1940, Natasha had lunch with a group of young architects in a flat overlooking the Thames somewhere to the east of the Houses of Parliament. They came out and walked along the Embankment. The air-raid siren started. They checked the nearest bomb shelter but it seemed dank and dirty. ‘Returning to lean on the parapet of the river, we gazed around us, when we suddenly caught sight in the east of a vast number of planes flying upstream from the estuary, and glinting in the sky like a shoal of silvery fish.’ They stared upwards without moving. In spite of warnings in the newspapers that the bombings were about to start, they had no fear. ‘One could not readily imagine at first that this was, as anticipated, the start of lethal enemy action on London, for in our leisured mood, the beauty of the day and of the gleaming, steadily advancing planes was almost hypnotic.’
Stephen at that time was living with his younger brother in the country. He rushed up to London to take charge. He decided she should move out. He took her to Oxford and called on Nevill Coghill, Auden’s former tutor. Coghill was an amateur musician and Natasha had already given a concert in Oxford, so he knew how she fitted in. Word went round. Within a few days Natasha was installed. The old Bechstein her father had given her was moved to a room above the Church of St Mary, opposite the Radcliffe Camera. It was a beautiful room to practise in, though the choir occasionally took it over for their own rehearsals.
In the early days of their courtship Stephen and Natasha did not live together, because my father did not want her to become roped into the divorce proceedings with Inez. They met once a week in London. Natasha would hitch a ride at the Headington roundabout outside Oxford. That roundabout became a symbol of the war: officers and soldiers and mechanics and students and professors – you never knew who’d be standing next to you or who’d offer you a lift. For twenty years after the war it was remembered with nostalgia as a moment when class faded, everyone was in it together, no place to sleep was a good place because all places could be bombed, so travel light.
The Blitz, at least in this early phase, was met with bravado. Once, under a bombardment, caught among a group of partygoers who refused to troop off to the shelter, Natasha was told, ‘play something lyrical’. So she played some Chopin waltzes – ‘Chopin, for heaven’s sake, which I almost never played!’ A couple of distinguished guests lurked under the piano, giggling and passing a bottle of champagne to each another, wondering if a grand piano would give them any protection if a bomb came through the roof.
Over the winter of 1940–1, Stephen and Natasha stayed for a fortnight with friends in an eighteenth-century house south-east from London, near Romney Marsh. Wooden poles had been raised against the German gliders that would come over in the expected invasion. The winter had turned cold and a heavy snowfall smothered the countryside. Everyone in the neighbourhood had relatives in the armed forces, but the snow had lightened the mood, for the enemy bombers were grounded. The house had a warm kitchen and a warm workroom and they ran from one to the other through freezing