Easter 1962 found me on my one and only school holiday trip. A bunch of us, including my new-found lyricist Robin Barrow, were taken to Athens and Rome, where we duly marvelled at the antiquities. I added a diet of churches. It was in Rome that the misreading of a street map led me to a building that truly changed me. With hindsight I suspect the essay I wrote when I got home, which cogently argued that the American Church in Rome with its mosaics by the great Victorian artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones was Rome’s finest building, may have been my first written attempt at being provocative. If so, it had its desired effect.
My art master was furious. “How can you write such garbage?” he screamed. “Don’t you realize that church is full of Victorian tat?”
It must have been galling for a 1960s art teacher to think he’d hauled a troop of teenagers around the marvels of ancient Greece and Rome only to find one of them had fallen in love with Victorian art.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER TERM was the occasion for the annual Westminster scholarship exam called the Challenge. Eight boys are chosen to enter College, the house reserved only for scholars. This was the exam that was deemed pointless for me to try when I was at the Under School. However I was still young enough to have a crack at it. So I did. The first few papers, Greek, Maths etc., suggested that my decision to have a go was extremely unwise. History was the last paper and, secure in the knowledge that everything I had done so far reinvented the pig’s ear, there was nothing for it but to let rip. My paper was a eulogy to medieval Britain, with the added thrust that the Gothic Revival improved it. I argued that, superb as the medieval glass in the clerestory of Westminster Abbey is, the glass by a Victorian named Kempe in the south transept eclipses the lot.
I sauntered out of the exam room that bright summer’s day certain that I wouldn’t be hearing more from the powers behind the Challenge. Next day I was summoned to an interview. Behind a desk was the bursar, the headmaster and the senior history teacher, a wonderful man called Charles Keeley. For some reason it was the bursar who asked the questions. Curiously we got onto the subject of the castles of the Welsh borders. Quite why I talked about Clun Castle escapes me but, if ever you find yourself stuck on this subject, the thing to remember is that Oliver Cromwell blew up its “keep” or main tower which duly slipped intact down the hill it stood on. I mentioned this. It transpired the bursar’s family came from Clun.
That night I was told I had won a Queen’s Scholarship to Westminster.
4 A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn’t Taste Very Nice in the First Place
If, like me, you think that a story of adolescent angst, depression, unrequited you-name- it and general hormone imbalance is best consigned to a lovelorn teenager’s chat site, skip the next bit. Frankly I nearly did. In a nutshell I was pretty confused and unhappy for the next two years, partly because I was now away from home at boarding school, even if it was only three stops on the underground from Harrington Court. And yes, as was the case for so many public schools at that time, there was a master whose activities today would result in a medium-scale sojourn in one of Her Majesty’s less salubrious addresses.
But the bottom line, appropriate words in the circumstances, was that I emerged from Westminster wiser in the ways of the world and having encountered some of the finest and kindest teachers any boy could have wished for. Top of the list were my housemaster in College Jim Woodhouse and the history chief Charles Keeley. It was Charles who went out on a limb to get me my scholarship and up until the last minute I singularly failed to repay the faith he showed in me.
The skippable bit starts in the summer of 1962, a summer I shall ever associate with Brian Hyland’s bittersweet “Sealed with a Kiss.” Auntie Vi and George the Panjandrum sold up their Weymouth Street flat and moved to a house they had built on the Italian Riviera just over the French border in a village called La Mortola, famed for the Hanbury Gardens. Even now they remain my favourite spot on the Mediterranean. George had reached retirement age and the promise of sun and cheap booze had proved irresistible. At a stroke I had lost my London escape hole, although I soon found I had gained an outside plus. At La Mortola I got to touch the last golden autumn days of the bohemian Côte d’Azur that has vanished now into a sea of oligarchs and eurotrash.
The family holiday that year was in the north Norfolk village of Burnham Market. I chose it because Norfolk oozes churches. The problem was that John Lill came too and an upright piano was added to our cottage’s rental bill. It was obvious that things were also beginning to weigh on Julian. One afternoon we were on an open-top bus. It was brilliantly sunny and I had forced my brother to join me on a church crawl. I vividly remember him asking me how we were ever going to get Mum to see what she was doing to the family.
Actually we both liked John. That holiday he was learning the fiendishly difficult last movement of Prokofiev’s seventh piano sonata, a bravura tour de force in 7/8 time. I turned the pages for him. I became obsessed with the mesmeric possibilities of that oddball time signature . . . try counting in seven, here’s a tip: count one two three, one two, one two in a row without a break. Next try counting one two, one two three, one two and vary it from there. You’ll be popular in the subway. Every musical I have written has a section in 7/8 time. There’s even a joke about it in Phantom which, so far as I know, has only been laughed at once – by the conductor Lorin Maazel who found it hilarious.
I suspect John would laugh at it too. He and I share a similar sense of musical humour. A few years later we went to a concert of unusual instruments in St Pancras Town Hall. The big draw was Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto. Unfortunately it was preceded by Vivaldi’s Concerto for Sopranino and Orchestra. A huge man with the biggest hands I have ever seen ascended the stage with no visible instrument in sight. The conductor raised his baton. The goliath raised his chubby palms mouthwards from which emanated a sound so piercing and high that every dog and bat in the vicinity must have been begging scalpers for front row seats. To make things worse Vivaldi was, put it this way, not on peak form when he knocked up this particular epic. John and I got the giggles which ended in my getting hiccups when a serious woman with glasses in front of us who was deeply studying a music score turned round and said “It may be funny but it’s not that funny.” When next up a diminutive chap staggered onto the stage dwarfed by an enormous tuba, an usher less than politely suggested that we left. Was this the first and only time a Tchaikovsky Prize winner has been ejected from a classical concert? On another occasion John told me that he once by mistake turned over a page twice when he was premiering a Philip Glass piano epic. After his performance, Glass congratulated him on his fabulous interpretation. In short I grew to like John very much. With hindsight, my problem was never with John. It was with my mother’s obsession with him.
I can’t speak for Dad but I suspect that he felt the same way too. Back in that summer of 1962 things must have become way too much for him. To everyone’s amazement he announced that he was going to stay with Vi and George in Italy. Dad had never been “abroad” in his life. Mum had no intention of tagging on and a plan was hatched that he would spend a week with my aunt and uncle while I was to fly out a few days later.
My first memory of Nice Côte d’Azur Airport is of my father being freighted through the departure lounge, his speech slurred, his pale skin frazzled and peeling, giggling hysterically about girls’ bottoms. Clearly the sun and the local brews had made an impression on him. My first memory of La Promenade des Anglais is that Dad’s argument had a lot going for it. In those days bikinis hadn’t had much of an outing in the dank mists of Britain. Soon we were motoring past the grand villas on the Bas Corniche and past Cap Ferrat through a then low-rise Monaco to the French border and a world of scents and colours, actors and wine, parmigiano and olive oil, famous film directors, David Niven and his pool built in metres when he had specified feet, artists and their partners who were always the same people but in different combinations every holiday, Aunt Vi’s azur-painted piano and her plumbago-covered terrace with the purple bougainvillea etched against the deep blue of the Mediterranean