Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath.
FRANKLY I WAS FALSELY CITED as the cause of Mimi the monkey’s behavioural setbacks. Surely 10 Harrington Court was no place for a simian bent on swinging around the community? However, my mother stood by her initial stance. Ten years later she took brother Julian and me to Chessington Zoo. On entering the monkey house she let out a great cry of “Mimi!” more than worthy of her limping tenor. The simian turned its head, puzzled.
“Look, she recognizes me. It’s Mimi,” said Mum triumphantly as the monkey leapt across its cage and climbed the wire in aggressive fashion uttering the most fearsome sounds.
“I told you it was Mimi.” Mum looked at me pointedly. “She always hated the thought of you, now she’s seeing you for real.” The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.
I was born on March 22, 1948 in Westminster Hospital with a huge birthmark on my forehead that Mum said was cured courtesy of a faith healer. Others said it faded of its own accord, but Mum’s graphic details had me convinced that it might recur at any time if I was a bad child. My first memory is of being in hospital aged three with acute appendicitis. This Mother told me was undiagnosed until it was just about to burst. My case was presided over by Uncle George, now Auntie Vi’s “partner” (they hadn’t married yet) who had undiagnosed the appendicitis in the first place. As my relationship with dearest Auntie Vi bloomed whilst I staggered into my teens, the saga of the undiagnosed appendicitis would be often recounted to me in increasingly distended detail. Mother also had a serious footnote about my being chucked out of hospital way too early due to my screaming which Uncle George found embarrassing to his standing in the medical profession. Mother was seriously pregnant with Julian at the time, so the saga must have been a pain to her to put it mildly.
Being told that I had a brother is memory number two. It was a bright spring day and I was playing in Thurloe Square gardens, to which my family had a key. I remember not quite understanding what having a brother meant, but here my memory goes blank. I can’t remember anything about Julian as a baby at all, perhaps because Julian’s popping onto the planet also saw the arrival of Perseus the cat. Perseus was a wonderful square faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy, not one of those angular faced jobs so beloved of today’s breeders. I fell in love with Perseus instantly. Dad was also completely devoted to him. But I realize now that the family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that cooped up in a flat. His incessant cries to get out still give me nightmares.
Such was Perseus’s deafening low Siamese miaowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square when I wasn’t at school. Both Mum and Granny said yes. How trusting parents were in those days. You wouldn’t let a kid loose with a cat on a lead around South Kensington today – unless you were after a million hits on YouTube. So I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog across the old zebra crossing that led to the train station and the only bit of greenery Julian and I knew, at least in school termtime. One day Perseus escaped. Five hours later he was found among the pedestrians on the zebra crossing returning from the only piece of greenery that he, too, knew. Percy’s kerb drill was impeccable.
Years later I had the job of looking after Percy when he was dying. The old cat raised himself tortuously from his basket and started miaowing in a manner all too reminiscent of his incarcerated cries. The poor old boy scrabbled at the front door as if there were a rabbit to catch outside. So I put his lead on. He didn’t want to walk so he sat on my shoulder, a mode of transport which he always liked.
A year or two earlier the traffic at South Kensington had been reorganized into a fearsome one-way system. At the time it was claimed to feature the most complicated set of traffic lights in Europe. Perseus never mastered the new system but it was clear that the old cat wanted to pad back to the gardens that he used to freely wander to before its advent.
We got to the site of the old zebra crossing. Percy tried to get off my shoulder and I put him down. He sat for a few seconds, looked out at the new traffic lights and hissed. Then on his own he turned, lead trailing behind him, back to our flat. Next day he died. I owe Cats not only to Mummy’s bedtime reading of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, but also to Perseus.
My third memory of 1951 is so shocking that it might also account for my not remembering anything of baby Julian. It concerns my appearance on the cover of a magazine called Nursery World. Mum hired a photographer, thrust a violin and a bow upon my person and thus created a nauseous picture on the front of the grisly publication that haunts me still. It speaks volumes about Mother. For Mum was so ambitious for her offspring that she would have given Gypsy Rose Lee’s famous showbiz mum a fair old run in the Great Child Prodigy Handicap Stakes. Sadly I was no such thing. Pushy mothers of the world beware. Offsprings rebel. Just as Gypsy Rose Lee took a career path her mother hadn’t intended for her, so did I. Not as a stripper, though, at least not in public.
Mum was an ace children’s piano teacher. Although she died in 1994 she is still a bit of legend among the great and the not so good who inhabit the leafier parts of southwest London. In 1950 Mother co-founded a pre-prep school called the Wetherby with a couple called Mr and Mrs Russell, the former being interested in bare bottom spanking. I was one of the first tots through the door. The place was a roaring success. Over the years luminaries from Princes William and Harry to Hugh Grant have joined the ranks of short-trousered ones who crossed Wetherby’s threshold.
My mother had a big hand in the school’s birth pangs. In those days parents from most walks of life wanted their kids to learn the piano. My mother’s brilliance and patience in that department assured the Wetherby’s swift ascendancy. Anyone who has ever sat beside a child while it plonks away at ghastly ditties with titles like “El Wiggly” or “Honk That Horn” will bear out that to do so you either need to be a saint or tone deaf, or most probably both. Mum’s patience might well redefine canonization. I reckon she must have given at least 100,000 piano lessons to beginners in her lifetime. Further, she really cared about her charges. There was a time when this confirmed, yet confused, socialist claimed to have taught a fair wedge of the Tory party.
I confess that her piano lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. The trouble was that there were so many of them. And there was that wretched violin. Mum’s general idea was that I would emerge on the international concert stage as some Yehudi Menuhin-style violin toting child prodigy. Her hopes didn’t last long.
The next instrument out of the closet was the french horn. I was rather better at blowing than scratching. Indeed I rather enjoyed playing this overdeveloped hunting instrument until I was twelve. It was then that a crisis occurred. Mum’s quest to have me garner serious music grades brought me full frontal with Hindemith’s horn sonata. I have read somewhere that Hindemith developed a load of theories about the importance of amateurs to music. My theory is that some of his compositions were designed to make average instrumentalists like me abandon music for once and for all. He achieved a resounding success in my case. After attempting to play his epic I chucked my french horn in its case where it remains to this day.
Clearly Mum was transferring her ambitions from my father to me but to grasp why you have to know something about him. Billy Lloyd Webber was a mild man who feared authority in any form. He once hid in a cupboard because he had mistakenly called