Two incidents dominated Christmas. The first was news from Italy that Auntie Vi had been slung out of Pisa Cathedral for showing her tits to a sacristan who had said her dress showed too much of her shoulders. The second happened on Christmas day. Mum had propelled Julian and me towards the morning Christmas service at the Central Hall, Westminster, unwisely leaving Granny Molly in charge of the Christmas turkey. I suggested that I manned the stoves and that Molly went to hear Dad and his choir strut their stuff, but this suggestion fell on deaf ears. Throughout the service I was gravely concerned about the fate of the turkey and keen to get back to Harrington Court as soon as decently possible. So Mum volunteered to drive me home, leaving Dad and Julian to cadge a lift with a neighbour after the post-service teabag and packet mince-pie party.
Mum turned on the car radio and out of the tinny mono speaker came music that catapulted thought of the turkey into the middle distance. Mum had tuned in five minutes after the start of Puccini’s Tosca. I was completely and utterly captivated. I couldn’t understand a word of it (probably a good thing as the more you understand the plot of Tosca the more unpleasant it is) but I had never heard such theatrical, gloriously melodic music in my life. Mum did explain what was going on when we got to the Act 1 closer, the “Te Deum,” as she parked in the mews by the French Lycée. I realize now why that “Te Deum” hit every nerve in my body. My love of Victorian church architecture equalled an affinity with High Church decadence and if ever a piece of theatre is that, surely it’s the Tosca “Te Deum.” To this day it remains the only piece of theatre I secretly would love to direct. Just that bit though. Sadly, you probably wouldn’t see much of my directorial debut due to excess incense clouds.
Unfortunately Mum clocked Dad and Julian being dropped off home across the road and opined that, Tosca or not, it was time for Christmas presents. I begged her to let me stay in the car. She said something like, “I suppose music is more important than Christmas” and told me to lock the car door after I had finished with the keys which she left in the ignition. With that she ankled towards the family festivities. I listened spellbound to the second act, as the car got colder and colder, and I went as cold as the outside air when I heard what I later discovered to be “Vissi d’arte.” By the time the third-act bells of Rome were chiming I was totally wiped out. This was truly theatre music that I never dreamed possible. And there were no words! It was then that my reverie was interrupted by ferocious banging on the car windscreen.
You have to think of things from the police officer’s point of view. Here was a thirteen-year-old boy in floods of tears at 2 pm on a freezing cold Christmas Day seemingly in charge of a car and listening to opera on the radio at full volume, not everyday stuff for a police officer, let alone on Christmas Day. Furthermore the thirteen-year-old boy seemed extremely indignant, even aggressive at being asked to turn the music off and explain himself. Eventually the policeman sort of accepted my story with an “I suppose I’ll believe you this time because it’s Christmas,” and let me go on condition that he walked me to the flat front door.
A week later Dad gave me a highlights album of Tosca. I resolved to save every penny of my pocket money so that one day I could buy a boxed set of the whole score.
I SAID WORKING ON a musical is when I am happiest, but that Christmas a present proved once again that this isn’t quite true. I was given a book about ruined abbeys and once more I was off into my world of history and architecture. From then onwards every school half term was taken up with a train ride to somewhere I wanted to see. Without this stabilizing passion my life could have been very different.
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.
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 or a current hit musical, 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