FROM THEN ONWARDS VI’S house became my second home. It’s not surprising therefore that pitching up to board at Westminster on a grey autumn afternoon was a shock to the system. Worse, because of the way boys in my new house were grouped by age, I lost a whole year of privileges. Because I was so young when I had arrived at the school I had been at the school for two years, the same length of time as the boys grouped above me. I protested to deaf ears. It seemed terribly unfair. All this paled into total insignificance a few weeks later. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For several nights we would look out of our dormitory window onto the Houses of Parliament and wonder whether that would be the last time we’d see them. There wasn’t one of us who truthfully didn’t want a hug from our parents at thirteen successive bedtimes. The one thing that consoled us was that our Westminster address meant our end would be swift.
My demotion caused a big problem with rehearsals. The first consequent crisis erupted over rehearsals for my old house’s Christmas pantomime. This had already become a musical called Socrates Swings and the partnership of Robin Barrow and Lloyd Webber had much to live up to. Just because I’d changed houses, I couldn’t let the old side down. The issue was that rehearsals mainly took place after junior boys’ bedtime and I was now a junior again. Robin, being a prefect himself, sorted matters out with his opposite number in my new house who reluctantly went along with my extended bedtime but subsequently got the opportunity to make me pay for it by beating me horrendously hard for something I didn’t do. Thus I accompanied our Socrates Swings atop a three-inch cushion. Mum and Dad came to a performance and I think it was then the penny dropped that I was not going to be a model history scholar.
A couple of weeks before the world premiere of Socrates Swings, the London premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was given at Westminster Abbey. A few Queen’s Scholars were chosen to be ushers and I was one of them. It was a thick “peasouper” foggy night and it was impossible to see more than a few feet, even inside the Abbey, so how the performers followed the conductor was a miracle. How anyone got to the Abbey was even more so, proving how in those pre-air-pollution-control days Londoners were inured to massive fogs.
The performance made a profound impression on me. The War Requiem is a piece of breathtaking theatricality with its juxtaposition of Wilfred Owen war poems and the Latin Requiem Mass. As ever with Britten his orchestrations are a master class, perhaps never more so than here since he uses three elements – a full orchestra, a chamber orchestra and a “positive” organ (an organ used by early Baroque composers like Purcell with a very particular sound) to accompany his detached, ethereal boys’ choir. It was that performance that led me to Britten’s operas, Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. Britten’s use of a single brushstroke on a snare drum to describe the sound of a tug in Death in Venice is genius personified.
AT THE END OF the same week as the War Requiem’s London premiere, another debut occurred. That Christmas a song called “Love Me Do” by a relatively unknown Liverpool band named The Beatles entered the pop charts. It only got to No. 17 but it was the harbinger of 1963, the year when The Beatles had the first of their seemingly infinite run of No. 1 hits and pop music was changed forever. Liverpool’s Mersey Sound erupted and Swinging London was born. Westminster was right in London’s epicentre, only a walk away from the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley1 and the clubs and concert venues where everything was happening. All I wanted was to be a part of this new music scene and there it was, a mere hop and a skip from my enforced cloistered doorstep via a short cut through the Abbey. I was desperate to prove that I too, not just John Lill, could be a success.
Maybe because my father had seen my Christmas 1962 two-performance smash Socrates Swings and thought I needed help, or perhaps because we had found something in common re La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the spring of 1963 he decided to send me part-time to a specialist music college in the school holidays. The “college” actually was a place that taught musically illiterate songwriters how to put their efforts on paper. It was run by a guy who, it transpired, Dad had known in student days called Eric Gilder and Dad thought I’d pick up a few practical tips. Indeed Mr Gilder did show me a rather nifty key change trick which I occasionally still use. It makes a change from the usual half-step upwards. The most valuable thing Gilder taught me was how to prepare the piano score of a musical. The guinea pig was a show I had started based upon one of the worst ideas ever conceived for the stage short of a musical about the humanitarian work of Genghis Khan. It was called Westonia! and was a sort of send-up of the Ruritanian concoctions much beloved by Ivor Novello. Nearly 60 years later my embarrassment is such that nobody – not even my dearest or closest – knows where I have hidden the score.
Westonia! came about because I was desperate. Robin Barrow was now university bound and there were no other budding lyricists lurking in the Westminster cloisters. The meteoric rise of the Fab Four had sent my contemporaries’ interest in musicals plummeting from zero to minus ratings. The only person I could find to write lyrics to my juvenilia was a brassy Australian ex-actress friend of my aunt’s called Joan Colmore. Thus Westonia! was born.
Thanks to Mr Gilder, the score of this horror was presented in a rather professional way. So when I sent it to the top West End producer Harold Fielding, accompanied by a letter stressing I was fourteen, it got noticed. The producer of Half a Sixpence and Ziegfeld let it be known that he thought the music was promising. Somehow word spread enough for a couple of agents to enquire of Dad whether I needed representing. Naturally I thought a West End opening was imminent and my skiving off school to meet publishers and the like reached fever pitch.
Eventually I got a sweet letter from Harold Fielding saying that I should press on with the music but in no way was Westonia! headed for the West End any time soon. Along the way I had a short stint represented by a top agency the Noel Gay Organisation, who promptly dropped me once Fielding put me back in my box. I came down to earth with a mega bump. Musicals, I decided, were dead ducks – especially if top producers couldn’t see the obvious quality of cutting-edge works like Westonia! It was time to be a pop songwriter. But firmly in the way was the inescapable fact that I was stuck in a boarding school that I was less than partial to and the Lill saga dominated home life.
Towards the close of the Easter holidays I was deeply depressed. Mum’s John Lill obsession was making her increasingly moody and erratic. Home was a cauldron of overwrought emotion and jealousy, fuelled increasingly in Dad’s case by alcohol. Another term at boarding school loomed like a grey sledgehammer. My adolescent hormones told me I’d had enough.
One morning I stole some Veganin tablets out of the bathroom cupboard, went to the post office and withdrew my savings – all £7 of them. Then I bought aspirin from two different South Ken chemists and headed for the underground station. In those days the “underground” penetrated as far as Ongar in the then deep Essex countryside. I bought a one-way ticket. When I hit the end of the line I wandered into the town, bought some more aspirin and a bottle of Lucozade and headed for the bus station. I planned to take the first bus, get off somewhere remote and swallow my arsenal of pills behind a convenient hedgerow.
I saw a bus with “Lavenham” on its front. Something told me to take it – the name rang an architectural bell. The ancient bus trundled through the Essex countryside and as we hit Suffolk the sun came out. By the time we arrived at Lavenham an overcast morning had turned into a glorious spring day.
Lavenham! I’d never seen such an unspoilt English village before. But it was the church that did it. All I remember now is sitting inside for what must have been two hours and saying “thank God for Lavenham.” I headed back to the bus stop and London thinking things weren’t so bad after all. But I kept the pills.
It would be elasticating the truth if I claimed that my Westminster days didn’t have plusses. First, Westminster kicked off my burgeoning love of Victorian architecture. One of the College prefects was a guy called John House, who sadly died in 2014, having had a distinguished career as an art curator and becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford