‘FROM PILLAR TO post.’ I hear my mother’s voice with the expression she always used to describe a life with no fixed abode. For a while they rented rooms outside Oxford from the historian A. J. P. Taylor, whose wife was also a musician. They happened to be sitting in the garden together on Sunday 22 June 1941, the day when Hitler invaded Russia. Taylor tossed his spade in the air and shouted, ‘No! He couldn’t be that stupid!’
Hitler had occupied my father’s thoughts for a decade. Now he realized that Hitler was just as much a prisoner of the war as everyone else. War was a machine that would grind on until one side or the other claimed victory. If England lost, Stephen had a suicide plan. He would swim far out to sea and drown.
During the Blitz the staff of Horizon was evacuated to Devon, where Cyril amused himself by fishing for shrimps with a net, standing in the water with his trousers rolled up. Stephen visited him there and wrote a beautiful poem about watching an air raid over Portsmouth, but otherwise he was absent teaching at Blundell’s School. He’d planned to work as a teacher for a whole year, but he couldn’t stand the conventions of discipline and left after one term – which he seems to have spent trying to persuade one turbulent boy he shouldn’t run away.
Stephen’s elder brother Michael had become an officer in RAF Intelligence early in the war. From this lofty position he could not resist ticking off his younger brother, asking if he was ‘taking the war seriously’. Stephen sent an angry reply insisting his war work was valuable. It consisted of broadcasts, a monthly article for New Writing, his play set in early Nazi Germany, plus his poems, plus his editorial work on Horizon. ‘You may notice that I wrote a considerable part of the last Horizon, which the Min of Inf [Ministry of Information] considers the most valuable propaganda of its kind we have in neutral countries.’
At that point, the most important neutral country was the United States, for England fought Hitler for two years before the US joined in, and any effort to encourage American participation was worth trying. He was going to talk to someone in the Ministry of Labour the following week. ‘I am sorry to hear that if I want a job you won’t recommend me for R.A.F. Intelligence,’ wrote Stephen bitterly. ‘But it is just as well to know to whom one may turn & to whom one may not.’ Michael thought Stephen should join the war, but not in any responsible capacity. His elder brother despised Stephen’s intelligence – a stimulating factor, I think, in my father’s ambition.
A few weeks later, Stephen went through his army medical tests. He failed. By begging the doctors to change the result, he made himself eligible to join non-combatant units stationed in England. Thus in September 1941 Stephen joined the London branch of the National Fire Service. He often used to joke that he became a fireman ten minutes after the Blitz ended and left ten minutes before the first buzz-bomb fell on London.
He and Natasha moved to Cricklewood for his basic training and he did his clumsy best to become a well-trained cog in a vast machine. ‘I had to undergo an extra week of training, owing to a neurotic inability to pass any examination whatever. This has led to my sinking naturally to the bottom of the social scale during the war.’ He was never promoted above the lowest rank and he was only asked to fight a fire twice. The first time, the man next to him took over. The second time, ‘surrounded by a lacquered screen of fire, I felt strangely at peace, settled in the centre of the element, as though rowing in wide circles for hours on end’.
Lucian Freud, Tony Hyndman and John Craxton on the roof of Maresfield Gardens during the war.
He’d never been in a work environment such as this. Too many men in a confined space, the radio perpetually tuned to the Light Programme, chickens in the courtyard, snooker in the back room and a small factory near by assembling bits and bobs of electrical equipment. He was fascinated by the pecking order of the NFS. Professional firemen of low rank had suddenly been put in charge of large numbers of Auxiliaries, many of whom would have far outranked them in civilian life. They gave their orders awkwardly, almost apologetically. In trying to work out why the situation was so charged, Stephen concluded: ‘Working-class people have a somewhat limited view of existence because they are tied to such a limited and narrow situation in the world.’ From this perhaps obvious starting-point, he went on to analyse why social resentments, though they existed, were muted because of the war, although potentially dangerous for the future.
After he’d completed his training, he was stationed in north London not far from where he’d lived as a child. He rented rooms from Ernst Freud, one of Sigmund Freud’s sons. His connection with the Freuds came through Muriel Gardiner, who’d helped to bring over Freud and his family just before the war. She’d also helped to finance a clinic set up by Freud’s daughter Anna. It took care of refugee children. My mother worked there for a while. She was entrusted with a little boy called Robert. She wanted to have a child herself, but was having difficulty carrying her pregnancies to term.
The house in Maresfield Gardens still kept a student atmosphere. The Bechstein, back from Oxford, was played, and Stephen worked in the attic whenever he could, seeing that he was on duty forty-eight hours out of seventy-two at the fire station around the corner. Ernst’s son Lucian, whom Stephen had met when he was still a schoolboy, painted dead birds in one room. John Craxton, a young painter who’d studied alongside Lucian Freud, lived near by. Tony Hyndman was in and out of the house the whole time.
Tony had a proprietary interest in Stephen’s new marriage, for after all he’d introduced the happy couple. It was cheeky of him to turn up, as he’d behaved very badly towards Muriel. In order to bring her daughter’s nanny to England, Muriel had asked Tony to marry her, which he had, but then he’d blown a large sum of money that Muriel had given his new wife so she could buy herself a house.
By now, my mother had learned everything she needed to know about Tony. Out of respect for Stephen, she refused to be jealous. She merely put Tony on one side on the grounds that she was working. ‘There was in Tony’s nature a deep pool of idleness, even, paradoxically, a militant idleness, he wished to deflect the industry of his companions, to make them feel that their work was a slavish bad habit, an act of unfriendliness, that they were prisoners of discipline whereas it was superior to be free of it, unbuttoned, open to the experiences and the enjoyment that the moment had to offer.’ My mother stunned Tony with music. She played that piano at him for hours on end. She slugged him with Beethoven. After a while, Tony would get bored and slope off.
The huge military mechanism needed to win the war had heightened everyone’s awareness of how fragile life is. As if to satisfy a spiritual need, much larger audiences than normal attended concerts of classical music and the art exhibitions were crowded.
Peggy Ashcroft, an actor who became a close friend of my mother’s, started giving poetry readings in 1941. Two years later Natasha began to be involved with the ENSA concerts, the Entertainments National Service Association. She says primly, ‘My war work concerts demanded a larger repertoire of romantic salon music than I would otherwise have cared to learn.’ Then in May 1943, coming back on a train from Cambridge where they both happened to have performed, Peggy and Natasha decided to pool their resources. Together with Stephen, and several other actors and writers, they founded the Apollo Society, a group of artists who travelled up and down the country performing poetry readings interspersed with music.
A line from T. S. Eliot would be read by Peggy: ‘We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole / Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.’ A Chopin prelude would follow, except the hair and finger-tips would be Mum’s. The group discovered through trial and error that certain poets went well with certain composers. Shelley with Debussy, for instance. Such an unlikely combination. Only by performing them could they have discovered that they worked well together.
My