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Classical Primer

 

I WAS woken by the sound of a bell ringing demandingly in my ear. It didn’t seem the best way to start the day, any day. For a moment, I wondered where on earth I was, then recalled that it was a bedroom in a Paris hotel, and it wasn’t morning, but the middle of the night.

 

The immediate problem was to stop that infernal ringing, and reaching for the phone I whispered a sleepy and dubious ‘Hallo’ in its general direction.

 

‘George, I’m sorry to wake you, but I just had to tell you the news.’

 

Brian Epstein’s voice sounded very excited, and just a little drunk. It seemed early to be in that condition. I soon knew why he was.

 

‘I’ve just left the boys celebrating, and they’re as thrilled as I am,’ he said, pausing for a moment to build up the suspense. I said nothing. It was too early in the morning or too late at night to formulate sentences. Then he said it.

 

‘We’re number one in America on next week’s charts. It’s quite definite. I’ve

just been on the phone to New York.’

 

So that was it. At last we had made it, through the medium of a song called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. After a year of really hard graft we had finally breached the walls of the biggest record market in the world.

 

I forgot any idea of more sleep. That was no hardship. For the past year, sleep had been a rare enough commodity. I just lay there, thinking of what had been, and what might be to come.

 

But what mattered immediately were the two reasons why I had come to Paris with the Beatles. The first was that they were due to make their French debut at the Paris Olympia, and I wanted to be there. The second was to make a quick record with them at EMI’s Paris studio. By the end of 1963, we had conquered England, musi-cally at any rate. Now, as well as America, we were trying to make it big on the Continent. The EMI people in Germany, fired - who knows? - by some patriotic fervour, had insisted that the Beatles would get no big sales there unless they had a record sung in German. The boys thought this was nonsense, and I didn’t believe a word of it myself, but equally I did not want to give the German EMI people any excuse for not selling Beatles records.

 

So, after some argument, I had persuaded -John and Paul to re-record “She Loves You’ and T Want to Hold Your Hand’ in German. The lyrics were provided by a German, who turned up at the recording to make sure their accents were all right. I didn’t know about the accents, but I could see that the words were almost literal translations. ‘Sie liebt clich, ja, ja, ja’ sounded just like the sort of send-up Peter Sellers would have done.

 

The recording was set for a day that the boys had free from their rehearsals at the Olympia, and when I arrived at the studio I didn’t really expect them to be there on time. Even in those early days they were not renowned for their punctuality. But after an hour had gone by I decided to ring their hotel.



 

None of them would come to the phone. Neil Aspinall, their road manager, had been deputed to do the talking, and he informed me that they had decided that, after all, they did not want to do the record and wouldn’t be coming.

 

To describe my reaction as angry would be like calling Everest a good-sized hill. ‘You tell them,’ I yelled at Neil down a blushing Paris phone line, ‘you just tell them I’m coming right over to let them know exactly what I think of them.’

 

I slammed the phone down. This was the first time that the boys had stood me up; and I was particularly irritated that they hadn’t had the guts to speak to me themselves. I raced back to the Hotel Georges Cinq, where they had an extravagant suite, and burst in on them in their draw-ing-room. The scene was straight out of Lewis Carroll. All that was missing was the White Rabbit. Around a longtable sat John, Paul, George, Ringo, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, his assistant. In the centre, pouring tea, was Jane Asher, a beautiful Alice with long golden hair. At my appearance, the whole tableau exploded. Beatles ran in all directions, hiding behind sofas, cushions, the piano anything that gave them cover.

 

‘You bastards,’ I yelled. T don’t care if you record or not, but I do care about your rudeness!’

 

One by one, Beatle faces appeared from Beatle hiding-places, looking like naughty schoolboys, with sheepish smiles. There was a murmured chorus of “Sorry, George’. If they wanted to be charming, as they did then, it was impossible to maintain anger for very long, and within a few minutes I had calmed down and joined the tea party - though in what guise it’s hard for me to say: the Mad Hatter perhaps.

 

The following day we made the record. But of course they were right. Beatles records, in English, were to sell in their millions in every country, Germany included. Never again did they make a record in a foreign language.

 

And now, especially, there was no need to, because America had fallen. For me, it was a world away from the moment when I first placed a tentative forefinger upon middle C.

 

I guess I was six when we got the piano. I fell in love with it straight away, and went and made noises on it.

 

A piano then was what the television set has become now, not simply a piece of furniture but a focus for family gatherings, and we managed to acquire one through the good offices of Uncle Cyril, who was in the piano trade. He was the one who always played the piano at parties.

 

At Christmas there were family get-togethers of maybe thirty people at my grandmother’s home in Holloway, London. At these gatherings she would recite ghastly poems - ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’ and that sort of thing. To match her performance, my uncles would sing excerpts from The Desert Song and the like. All the grandchildren were expected to do something, a little dance or a poem, and my “thing’ soon became a tune on the piano.

 

My sister Irene, who is three years older than I, had started taking piano lessons from an ‘aunt’ - an uncle’s wife’s sister, actually - and I decided I wanted them too. By the time I was eight, I had persuaded my family that I was fairly musical, though none of them were, and I finally got my lessons: eight of them, to be exact. After eight weeks my mother had a row with the teacher, and I never had another lesson until I was in my teens.

 

So I just picked it up by myself. It was a rather jerky start to a life in music.

 

I was born in 1926, just before the Depression, and the first home I remember was a flat in Drayton Park, opposite the Sunlight Laundry. I call it a flat, but it was just two rooms on a top floor, with an attic room above. There was no electricity: we had gas lights on either side of the mantelpiece. There was no kitchen: my mother cooked on a gas stove on the landing. There was no bathroom: we had our baths in a tin tub.

 

The only water supply was a rounded corner sink on the half-landing, and the one lavatory on the ground floor was shared with the other three families in the house, but at least we didn’t go short of furniture. My father was a carpenter, and he made us tables, and sideboards, and cabinets, and beds, and toys for Irene and me. But never chairs. For some reason he never made chairs.

 

He was a marvellous craftsman, and he loved wood. His life was a sensuous love affair with wood. He could see a piece of wood, pick it up, and spend ages just stroking it, just enjoying the feel of it. He was a very simple man, but he had huge talent in his hands. He was the most honest person I have ever known. During the Depression he was out of work for eighteen months. Eventually he got a job selling newspapers in Cheapside, in the City of London, and I remember going to see him, standing there in the freezing cold, and feeling very sorry for him.

 

I think he may have got that job through my mother’s side of the family, which we always regarded as somehow the grander side. The men, my uncles and my grandfather, used to run the Evening Standard vans round London, and they earned quite good money for those days. I always regarded them as my rich relations.

 

I was the apple of my mother’s eye. She was a Roman Catholic, and when 1 was five I was sent to join my sister at a convent school in Holloway. Three years later, I moved to St Joseph’s elementary school in Highgate, which meant taking the number 11 tram from Drayton Park all the way up the hill to Highgate. That was probably the best part of it. Then, in 1937, when I was eleven, I won a scholarship to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill. It was run by Jesuits, and boasted Charles Laughton as its most famous

old boy.

 

Two years later war broke out. My school was to be evacuated to Welwyn Garden City, a place I had never heard of, but which I understood to be in the wastelands of the far north. My father was by then working as a wood machinist in east London. My sister had left school and gone to work as a clerk with the Sun Life of Canada insurance company, and they in turn were being evacuated to Bromley, in Kent. It looked as though the whole family would disintegrate, so my parents decided to remove me from the care of the Jesuits and follow my sister down to Bromley. There I was installed at Bromley Grammar School, which many years later was the school to which Peter Frampton went.

 

But if my education was proving a pretty movable feast, my interest in music continued uninterrupted. I had carried on with the piano on my own; once you are interested in something like that, you can find out about it without even going to the library and looking things up. A piano is a great tool for h’nding out about music, about the relationships between one note and another. I remember getting very excited when I discovered a new chord, and especially so when one day I realised that there was a natural cycle of chords. I found out how to get right through the whole lot and back again to where I started. 1 didn’t realise it then, but I was lucky enough to have the gift of perfect pitch, and that must have helped. I was also able to work out, for example, that there were only three diminished chords in the whole range, and that they had different inversions.

 

I started playing things like ‘Liebestraum’, and various Chopin pieces, by ear. Where that gift came from, I don’t know. There were certainly no professional musicians anywhere in the family. They just assumed ‘George is the musical one ... let him get on with it’.

 

Not that I was in a musical desert. At school we used to have concerts by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Adrian Boult, and Bromley itself had a very large music society. They used to run dances, and I remember one in particular when the Squadronaires band came to play, I hung around the stage, and when one of them asked if I was a musician myself, I seized my chance and said airily, if brashly, ‘Oh yes, I play piano, the sort of thing you’re doing.’

 

I suppose they thought it was just adolescent bravado, and that they could always chuck me off again, but anyway they said: ‘O.K., if you think you can do it, come up and try.’ That was the only invitation I needed, and it was an unbelievable feeling to be sitting up there playing ‘One O’Clock Jump’ with them.

 

Music was pretty well my whole life. My only other outlet was a little tinpot amateur dramatic society called The Quavers, which was one of the Church’s lay activities in Bromley. It was all good fun, performing in plays by Noel Coward and so on, and no one except the players took much notice. It didn’t teach me much about drama; but The Quavers too used to run little dances, and some friends and I said that we would organise a band for them.

 

We called ourselves The Four Tune Tellers, and then we expanded and became George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. Fame! My father made us a set of music stands with a double-T design, and we played the standards by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and so on, things like ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. Quicksteps were always the most popular, and we always ended up with ‘The Good-night Waltz’. Our saxophonist was a boy called Terry Hyland, whom I met years later at London’s Astoria. He was still playing saxophone.

 

We found one or two outlets for our talents other than The Quavers’ hops, and got to playing one or two nights a week; with the money I earned I paid for piano lessons in Bromley with a Scot named Urquhart.

 

I was fifteen or sixteen. Mr Urquhart had a marvellous Bosendorfer piano, and it was then that I really woke up to music. I suddenly realised that I had talent - though, to he honest, the realisation was a mite unconfined: I used to romance about how, if I’d had the proper training, I would have been another Rachmaninov. I got that sorted out rather later, when it dawned on me that Rachmaninov’s reputation was under no threat from G. Martin, but at the time I really fancied myself as a classical writer. The supreme achievement, I thought, would be to write music for films. Little did I realise what bloody hard work it really is.

 

But if those were my fantasies, the time had arrived for me to decide what to do in fact. End of school. Start of big wide world. While I had been at school, my parents were always trying to impress on me the importance of a job with security. I had always been good at mathematics and drawing, so now my mother suggested: ‘Why don’t you go in for architecture?’

 

My father said: ‘Why don’t you go in for the Civil Service? You’ll never get chucked out of a job then.’ To him that was, understandably, paramount, having suffered so much unemployment, but in both of them there was the feeling that they wanted me to do better than they had, an ‘Our George is going places’ mixture of parental pride and ambition.

 

But I was mad about aircraft, and what I, and a friend of mine, wanted to do was to become aircraft designers. He made it, I didn’t. I tried to get into de Havilland, but they wanted £250 cash from anyone joining their apprenticeship scheme. It was 1942, and the aircraft companies were too busy trying to churn out the planes they already had. Their interest in aspiring young designers was, to say the least, minimal. In spite of that, I was accepted by one firm, Short & Harland in Belfast. But that would have meant leaving home to work in Northern Ireland, and I didn’t fancy it.

 

So I didn’t become an architect, and I didn’t join the Civil Service, and I didn’t become an aircraft designer. Instead, I went to work for Mr Coffin, in Victoria Street. Mr Coffin was a quantity surveyor, and the funereal quality of the work certainly lived up to his name. After six weeks, boredom got the better of my handsome remuneration of £2 5,s a week, and I announced that I was leaving. Mr Coffin wanted me to stay. He even offered to up the ante, but I replied, in such tones of regret as I could muster: ‘No, sir, I’m afraid it’s not my cup of tea at all.’

 

From cups of tea metaphorical, I moved to cups of tea actual. I applied to join the War Office, who, after making me take an exam, accepted me into their non-uniformed ranks as ‘Temporary Clerk Grade Three’. And that meant tea-boy. It was in Eaton Square. They were very nice people, and allowed me to file a few things as well as making the tea. The department was concerned with the financial side of the war machine, such matters as equipping a regiment with new field artillery, or authorising the spending of fifteen quid on a new canteen for the mess.

 

My work fell short of the heroic, but I lasted there for about eight months, until the day in summer 1943 when I walked into the recruiting office at Hither Green, near Bromley, and told them I wanted to join the Fleet Air Arm. They asked my name, and I got that right, so they said: ‘Right, you’re in.’ I was seventeen.

 

I went home to Mother and announced: ‘I’ve joined the Fleet Air Arm.’ She was pale-faced and obviously upset. ‘You haven’t!’ she said. But I had. I was sent first of all to HMS St Vincent, the training station at Gosport, and for the first eighteen months had no real leave, because we were getting ready to invade France and the whole of the south coast was sealed off. I couldn’t go home, and my parents couldn’t come to Gosport, but for some reason both they and I were allowed to go to Winchester. There, every three months or so, we would meet and have tea and cakes.

 

After a radio course at Eastleigh, I was suddenly, with what appeared unseemly haste, removed to Glasgow, and thence, without pause, on to a Dutch liner-turned-troop-ship, the Nieuw Amsterdam, bound for New York. The vessel was, to put it mildly, crowded. It was a cruise ship designed to take fifteen hundred passengers, and we numbered eight thousand. Three thousand of those were uer-man prisoners being taken to Canada; they served us in the mess halls, which, like the kitchens, were going round the clock, with four sittings for every meal. Even sleeping was organised on a rota system, and we, being sailors, were given the night watch. We slung our hammocks on deck and ‘slept’ in the open-not that we got much sleep, because night was the time for cleaning the ship. From midnight to dawn we cleaned the decks and corridors. I discovered that two bars of soap on a wet deck made an excellent pair of skates, and we had races down the gang-ways until we were caught.

 

Two weeks in this floating dormitory-diner brought us to New York, from where, after a week of being amazed by skyscrapers, we went to Trinidad to do our flying training. By now I was a Leading Naval Airman, having started life as a Naval Airman Second Class - which in turn was, 1 suppose, a cut above Temporary Clerk Grade Three. At any rate, we stayed in Trinidad until we got our wings, which meant our promotion to Petty Officer.

 

The first flight I ever made was in a Vickers Supermarine Walrus, a biplane amphibian which shook like mad. I was, I confess it, a degree scared, especially since it seemed to confirm all the worst of my anticipation. Something about my appearance, rather lean and pallid, had made me the butt of all the mickey-taking at Gosport, tactful stuff like: ‘You’re keen on aeroplanes! Never been up in one, have you? Cor, you’ll be sick as a dog when you get up there! Terrible things!’

 

But I soon got to enjoy it, and it was certainly exciting, especially considering the wide assortment of aerial hard-ware to which we entrusted our lives. It was all quite zoological really. Apart from the Stinson Reliants, which were high-winged single-engined monoplanes, there was the Walrus, the Grumman Goose (also an amphibian), the Fairey Albacore, and the Fairey Swordh’sh, which carried one torpedo, and one Lewis machine-gun mounted at the back.

 

I was an observer, and in Trinidad we were taught air gunnery amongst other things, because the observer was not only captain of the aircraft, but was also supposed to be able to do everything else: radio, radio-telegraphy, navigation, and all the gunnery and torpedo-dropping. Actually, in a real battle we weren’t supposed to do the gunnery, because there was a telegraphist-gunner who was supposed to look after that, but we had to be able to do it all the same, just in case he got shot; than which no thought could have been more sobering.

 

Happily, flying didn’t entirely shut out my music. We organised a pantomime for the local theatre, for which I took care of the music, although the Trinidadian weather was hardly what one associates with pantomime time. And if there was a sing-song in the mess, it was always ‘Give us a tune, Pincher’, and I would duly oblige on what passed for a Joanna. 1 didn’t realise why Martins were always called ‘Pincher’, just as Clarkes are always ‘Nobby’, until I was told the tradition which says that it goes back to a certain Commander Martin, a naval officer of Nelson’s era, who had somewhat cheekily ‘pinched a few vessels from the opposing fleet, thus augmenting the Royal Navy at a stroke.

 

From Trinidad, we returned to Greenwich for a fort-night’s commissioning course, during which we were filled in on important military details like how to hold a knife and fork correctly. At formal dinners in the beautiful Painted Hall we were put through our paces in this vital contribution to the war effort.

The actual business of teaching us to be gentlemen was entrusted to an old officer who had a colonic obsession. He was forever telling us how important it was to go to the lavatory regularly and get one’s bowels working properly. That, he insisted, was the basis of good health (the presumption being, 1 suppose, that one could not be an officer and gentleman and be unhealthy), and he lectured us on the subject incessantly. ‘If your bowels are straight, your mind is straight.’ Luckily, I had never had any trouble in that department, so I was able to feel secure.

 

Thus equipped with the manners of gentlemen, we were commissioned, and I immediately suffered. All my mates, with whom I had gone through all that training, were made Sub-Lieutenants. But I was still too young for that exalted rank, so was made a Midshipman. Unfortunately, a Mid-shipman got less pay than a Pretty Officer, which I had been, and since they had back-dated our commissions to the time we had got our wings out in Trinidad, 1 actually had to refund them the difference. It seemed to me hard, to say the least, that I should have to contribute to the war effort financially as well as physically.

 

But it was typical of many points in my life; I always seem to lose out on deals like that. And even when, three months later, I eventually got my stripe, it still rankled.

 

From Greenwich we went to Burscough, in Lancashire, to learn the new wonder of radar, flying Barracudas (more zoology). It was a relief. In Trinidad there was no radar, and when you took off from an aircraft carrier you were on your own. Two and a half hours later you had to find the ship again, relying on your own navigational sense, and on the winds. You found your own winds, worked out what they were doing to the aircraft, and then navigated by dead reckoning. The result of failure in this enterprise was obvious, and we became extremely good at navigation!

 

As things turned out, I nearly didn’t go to sample the delights of Burscough at all. My pianistic ramblings in the West Indies had been noted by the Entertainments Officer, with the result that when I came back to England I was invited to appear on a BBC programme called ‘Navy Mixture’.

 

So along went Midshipman Martin to do his thing. 1 played a piece I had composed for piano, a little three-minute item with the imaginative title ‘Prelude’. Never mind, it was my first real ‘guest spot’. Stanley Black conducted the orchestra, and the compare was a certain Petty Officer Jack Watson. The show was actually run by people in the Navy; they belonged to the DNE, the Department of Naval Entertainments, whose CO was the playwright Anthony Kimmins, adorned with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. Also performing was a Lieutenant Jon Pertwee, who came up to me after the show and said: ‘We liked what you did. Have you ever thought of joining DNE?’

 

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m just going up to my operational squadron, I’m a flyer, you see.’

 

‘Yes, 1 know all about that,’ he said, ‘but I can offer you a job on the entertainments side of the Navy.’

 

‘O.K., what is it?’ I asked.

 

‘It’s a ship that’s going to tour the Pacific in all the fighting zones, bringing succour to the wretched lads who have to fight. It’s called the SS Agamemnon, and it’s sailing from Vancouver. It’s an amenity ship.’

‘What’, I asked in some disbelief, ‘is an amenity ship?’

 

‘Well, for a start it’s got the capability of making three thousand gallons of beer a day. And it carries an entertainments party. The idea is that it goes around giving goodies to all the chaps, and entertaining them. You’d fit very well into one of our concert parties.’

 

I thought about the offer, and I must say it was quite appealing. But it would have meant leaving all my friends in the squadron, and chucking up the Fleet Air Arm altogether. So I refused it. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d accepted, because in retrospect it obviously had much more to do with my future career than flying bits of metal and wire round the sky.

 

The decision to remain an airman rather than become an amenity took me next to Ronaldsway, in the Isle of Man, where we did advanced exercises and formed into an operational squadron. We were going to be shipped out east, since the war was over in Europe. But while I was still in Ronaldsway the Bomb was dropped on Japan, and I knew that my little war was over, without my ever having had to fire a shot in anger. I was not, I confess, too disappointed. Our squadron was disbanded, we held a glorious and drunken farewell party and I was sent on indefinite leave - and went home to Mum.

 

But I was still in the Fleet Air Arm, and some time later a great chum of mine, who was on the Navy Appointments Board, asked if I would like to go up to Scotland to become a Resettlement Officer, hardly the most demanding of jobs. I accepted, and took the train north to Donibristle, in Fife, just above Edinburgh and hard by the Forth Bridge. There I was to spend fifteen months.

 

The squadron was 782, Royal Naval Air Service, and my job was to make sure that the ratings, as they were being demobilised, had jobs to go to. Failing that, I had to try to give them help in that direction, telling them about all the training schemes available to prepare them for the rude shock of entering the real world again.

 

I too, of course, now that the war was over, would have preferred to rejoin humanity straight away, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I had to make the best of a bad job, consoled by the comfortable wardroom life and the many good friends I made among the Wrens and my fellow-officers.

 

There was a choral society on the station, for whom I wrote little bits and pieces, and in whose choir I sang -without, I’m afraid, any great deal of accomplishment. Amongst the Wrens in the choir was a girl, their leading soprano, who had a very fine, Isobel Bailey type of voice. Her name was Sheena Chisholm, and our common ground of music led to a wider range of mutual interests.

 

It was just as well, because my job was by its very essence a self-eliminating one. So, as the number of men to be demobbed dwindled, I was given other jobs as well. I became the Transport Officer, and then the Release Officer as well. Thus it was that, in early 1947, I came to release myself from His Majesty’s Forces.

 

But of what I was going to do with myself I had absolutely no idea. It was a case of ‘physician heal thyself. I had no education to speak of. I wasn’t trained for anything. It was too late to become an aircraft designer. So there seemed only one possibility, and in what was really desperation I turned to music.

 

That was where my fairy godfather came into it. Back in Bromley, when I had had the band and still considered that Rachmaninov and I were neck and neck, I had tried to improve myself by learning to read music. It was a very painful business, because I hadn’t done it properly when I was young. In addition to the reading, I had been trying to write bits of music and put them down on paper.

 

Then, about three months after I’d joined the Fleet Air Arm, 1 went to a concert in Portsmouth given by a pianist called Eric Harrison. It was held in a hall in one of the Union Jack Clubs. After a pleasant evening listening to Chopin and Beethoven, I hung around until everyone had gone and then sat down to enjoy myself playing the piano, for which I hadn’t had many opportunities. After about half an hour of this, I was suddenly aware that there was someone else in the room. It was Eric Harrison.

 

‘What was that you were playing?’ he asked.

 

‘One of the things I’ve been writing myself.’

 

‘Oh, you compose, do you?’

 

‘Well, I try to,’ I said, ‘though I haven’t had much training.’

 

‘I think you should do something about it,’ he said.

 

Somewhat taken aback, I asked him: ‘Like what, for example?’

 

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you should send some of your compositions to the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.’

 

‘I’m afraid I didn’t even know there was such a thing.’

 

‘It’s a little non-profit-making organisation,’ he told me. ‘They hold monthly meetings. My namesake, Sidney Harrison, is on the committee. He’s a very nice man, and I’m sure he’d help you.’

 

So I thought about it and finally plucked up my courage and sent him a Debussy-like composition I’d written, called ‘Fantasy’. But I had no real hopes of hearing very much as a result, so I was amazed and delighted when I got a very long letter from Sidney Harrison in reply. It must have run to three foolscap pages. He thanked me for sending him the piece, and then went into a detailed criticism and analysis of it. Not that he tore it to shreds. He simply told me what was wrong with it, that it was very derivative, that I must try to do something a little more original, and so on. At the same time, he was very encouraging. ‘You must go on doing more of this,’ he wrote. ‘Go on writing more music, and keep sending it to me, and we’ll correspond.’

 

That is exactly what happened. Sidney Harrison became my fairy godfather by post. I would send him a piece of music, and he would write back saying things like: ‘Good idea. Try and get to know your marine band, and write pieces for them to play.’ We never met, but the correspondence went on throughout my Fleet Air Arm career.

 

He always wrote somewhere in his letters to the effect that ‘You really must try to take up music seriously’. So now, with the decision almost taken for me by lack of an alternative, 1 thought it was about time to go to see Sidney Harrison in the flesh. I told him about my doubts, but he was adamant. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you really must study music as a career, because you’ve got talent.’

 

‘But look, I’m twenty-one,’ I said. ‘Can I really take up music now?’

 

‘Of course you can,’ said Sidney, who was a professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music in London. ‘You can go and study for three years at a music college. I’ll tell you what to do. You come along to the Guildhall, and play your compositions to the principal, and if he likes them as much as I do, you’re in.’

 

My interview with the principal, Edric Cundell arranged of course by Sidney - took place in February 1947. I played my bits and pieces to him. He asked me a few questions. Then he said ‘Very well. Come and start next year.’ By that he meant the next scholastic year, beginning in September.

 

I thanked him, of course, but I also gave voice to my fundamental worry. ‘It’s fine to be coming to study at the Guildhall, but how on earth do I pay for it?’

 

‘You should know, being a Resettlement Officer. As a man serving in the Navy, you’re entitled to further education. We’ll apply for a grant for you.’

 

So, with my government grant in the offing, 1 released myself from the Navy and looked around for a job to fill the months until September. The ‘job’ which turned up was with the Iron and Steel Federation in Park Lane, and was of such total boredom that my stint with Mr Coffin seemed almost sparkling in retrospect. It was an exercise in patience, checking over the fascinating details of wage sheets and hours worked. The only way that I could keep my mind alive was by trying to do it as efficiently as possible. Silly me. I had forgotten that the New Order was upon us.

 

One day I managed to check seventy-two of these sheets, and at 5.30 I duly stacked them all on my desk. Immediately, an irate colleague rushed up to me.

 

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ he asked.

 

‘What do you mean?’ I said, finding little that was comical about the place, let alone me.

 

‘Do you know that the average in this place is about thirty of those? Are you trying to make us look like idiots?’

 

I bit my tongue back from the obvious retort and said simply: ‘No. I was just trying to keep my mind alive, that’s all.’

 

He stared at me hard and disbelieving, and then uttered the awful threat: ‘You’d better watch it, mate.’

 

It was my first real introduction to the complexities of labour relations, and I duly slowed my pace down to match my fellow-workers. After all. I might aspire one day to the awesome task of a certain senior member of the office staff. This individual’s taxing responsibility was to separate pink, white and blue slips into piles. There was only one snag to this, as far as he was concerned. He was colour-blind. So every now and again the tedium was relieved when the wretched man held a pink slip aloft and shouted, ‘Blue!’, to which we would respond, ‘No!’; and again until he got it right.

 

I was living at home with my parents during this period of high intellectual activity, but sadly things started to go terribly wrong between my mother and myself. We had always been very close, and my absence in the Navy had been a great strain on her. It was over my friendship with Sheena, an ex-Wren by now. My mother took great exception to her, saying that she was only after me for the wrong reasons, which was rather silly considering the little that 1 had to offer anybody at that time. But it became an obsession with my mother, who was obviously only doing what she thought best for me. Then, one day, I found that she had been opening my letters. A furious row ensued, and with the impetuosity of youth I promptly left home. I went to stay with some friends at Winnersh in Berkshire.

 

I was still there with them when I finally said my adieux to the Iron and Steel Federation and its pink slips, and walked through the door of the Guildhall School of Music, armed with my grant of £160 a year. But I was only to stay at Winnersh during my first term, because on 3 January 1948, my twenty-second birthday, Sheena and I got married.

 

In a way we were driven into it by my mother’s attitude. It was almost a statement of defiance. My mother did come to the wedding, but sadly our relationship had become distant. She had had a bad fall the previous year, and had hit her head, and I think she wasn’t really herself, the person to whom I had always been so close. Three weeks after we married, she died in hospital of a cerebral haemorrhage.

 

I was shattered. My grief was compounded with a sense of guilt. It was hardly an auspicious start to our marriage. On top of that, Sheena had nervous dyspepsia, and a kind of agoraphobia - she couldn’t bear to be alone outside, wherever she was. That problem was compounded by the difficulty of finding an inside for her to be in. Houses were impossible to get, and the only way to find a flat was to wait on a council list for ages. In desperation, I put an advertisement in all the London papers in the areas round Willesden. It read: ‘Down to earth with a bump. Fleet Air Arm officer unable to find anywhere to live.’ As luck would have it, the ad was seen by a man whose son was in the Fleet Air Arm, and he offered us a place in Acton. It was cheap, and it was terrible, and it was our first home.

 

I stayed at the Guildhall for three years, studying composition and all that goes with it - conducting and orchestration, musical theory, harmony, counterpoint and so on. I took piano, of course, because that was the natural instrument for me, but one also had to learn a second, and it was suggested that I should take up a wind instrument.

 

So I thought about all of them, and finally settled on the oboe, a decision reached for a variety of reasons. For a start I wasn’t very fond of brass. Then, too, there was the sheer question of economics. After all, my three years would soon be up, and if I was going to get a job quickly I wanted something that I could master well enough to play professionally - and preferably an instrument where there wouldn’t be too much competition! Everybody played the clarinet, so it came down to a choice between the oboe and the bassoon. The oboe was both cheaper and less cumbersome to carry around, and good oboe players were in very short supply, so orchestras were likely to settle for someone like myself. So the oboe it was: one of the most difficult instruments to play, the one they call ‘the ill wind that nobody blows good’.

 

My wife and I were living on a £300 married student’s grant, and I helped to eke that out by writing bits of music and playing the oboe in the evenings. I would never have been a great performer, though. I haven’t the temperament for it. I was always terribly nervous, and still am when I have to perform. I had been frightened enough when I had had to go and play my piano pieces in front of Edric Cundell; but at least I knew them. The oboe exam was something else. It was in front of two of the country’s most eminent oboe players, Terence McDonagh and Peter Graeme. There were just the two of them in the room, and me, and I was terrified. Sheer terror made me sweat so much that it was running down my fingers and they slipped on the keys. There was no controlling it. That oboe became like a live eel in my hands.

 

All the same, when the time came to leave the Guildhall, I had to earn a living somehow, and I did it by playing the oboe. I got various engagements, but it was freelance work and I really wasn’t very good. I used to play with bands in the parks, up on the bandstand confronted by rows of old ladies in their deckchairs, who always seemed to get up when I started playing. I couldn’t really blame them. I was unfamiliar with a lot of the music, arid when it came to something like the overture to The Silken Ladder, with its complicated oboe part, I was pretty well lost. I used to get about two pounds ten shillings for each performance, and you could say that in my musical life it was my stint as jobbing gardener.

 

Fame and fortune as an oboe player lay on no discernible horizon, and it soon became clear that I would have to take a day job as well. So I went to work at the BBC Music Library, at Yalding House in Great Portland Street. It demanded a modicum of musical ability, sorting out scores and so on, but it was still very much a clerk’s job - grade unspecified.

 

Then, in September 1950, after I had served the Corporation for a couple of months, I got a letter from a man asking me whether I would like to consider working for him His name was Oscar Preuss, and the letterhead proclaimed that he was with EMI, at an address in Abbey Road.

 

 


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 839


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