by Peter Hall
In spite of the war, life developed a stately rhythm at Blinco Grove. The diet was predictable because of rationing. There were very few sweets and no toys. My model railway was not what it might have been in peacetime. I cycled to and from school each day down the wet and windy Hills Road. I worked hard at my lessons, and enjoyed cricket, tennis, athletics and swimming. I was becoming more of a sportsman. I liked the summer sports. I did not enjoy rugby, which seemed to me to involve either standing around in the cold, longing for some action or, if I finally got the ball, being violently and painfully attacked by a mob of opponents.
A family of evacuees, bombed out in London, moved into the house directly opposite. Edith was the daughter of the family and I fell passionately in love with her. I kissed and kissed her in the darkness of the autumn garden. She tired of the activity but I wanted to go on and on. Sexual passion is agony before we have the means to assuage it.
My mother was delighted to discover that our next-door neighbour, Mr Spink, gave piano lessons at 6d a time. By very careful management, she and my father purchased a second-hand piano. I was then introduced to Mr Spink and began work. I had a great facility for the piano, and by the time I was twelve was playing Mozart and Beethoven with an ease I find frustratingly impossible now. On my tenth birthday I was taken to Mozart’s Requiem. The following week, I stood at the back at the Arts Theatre with my mother and heard Sadler’s Wells perform The Marriage of Figaro. It was my first Figaro, I loved the music, but I thought the drama sugary and affected. Perhaps the production wasn’t very sexy.
Life is largely about luck – and, when you are young, the luck of having the right stimulus at the right time. Long before my adolescence, Shakespeare and Mozart were firmly lodged in my heart.
I loved jazz as much as I loved classical music. I still do. The average classical musician (and I stress average) is not allowed to make music in the committed way of a jazz musician. He too often just plays the notes – accurately no doubt, but without personal inflection. The style of the great jazz-man is uniquely his own.
A group of boys shared this interest. We listened to the radio and passed the rare record from hand to hand. I had to listen at other people’s homes because we had no gramophone. Out of these enthusiasms came, in the early years of the war, Peter Hall and His Band: I played the piano, and my friends supported me with trumpet, accordion, drums and clarinet. We played our repertoire in village halls around Cambridge in aid of the Red Cross.
This was the first time that life cast me as a leader. Being an only child can make you shy or assertive; I was by turns both. I hadn’t had many friends in my early years. Friends began at Blinco Grove – and particularly when I reached the Perse. The old grammar schools were very clear in their system. Leaders – to be captain of cricket or a prefect or (the ultimate accolade) head of school – emerged by talent. Often a fledgling talent was encouraged by the staff. I was a maverick but the system could still use me. I always felt an outsider, by birth and position. But my confidence grew as more and more responsibility was given to me. I don’t think I was ambitious – but by my early teens I knew that I could lead a group, and that people seemed to accept me. As I prospered, won prizes, performed this and was appointed to that, my mother’s pride swelled. It was her view that, provided I didn’t do something silly, I was on my way to being somebody. She already saw me as a grammar-school teacher with a suitable wife and family, security and a pension. ‘It’s better to be born lucky than rich,’ she would say, smiling in approval. I didn’t like that: I didn’t feel particularly lucky. But I was of course wrong. I was lucky to have her unswerving belief, and her courage and support.
Chapter Eight
About half-way through my time at the Perse, my father gave up his peripatetic life as a relief stationmaster. I regretted this. I had travelled all over East Anglia with him during my school holidays. I had seen Ely Cathedral, the endless blackness of the Fens and the rich textures of Constable country. It was an area of great variety and it was where I belonged.
He now moved up a class, and became stationmaster at Shelford, some four or five miles outside Cambridge. Once more we lived over the shop; but now forty or fifty trains went thundering past the bedrooms every night. This was a busy line – Cambridge to Liverpool Street.
Shelford was already virtually a suburb of Cambridge, but you could still see the village. There were a few shops, a post office and a church; and fields where I could fly the model aeroplanes I built. The rabbits were no more, but we kept a goat, and it was my daily responsibility to milk it. Our home, brown and dark and airless, was attached to the station booking hall and office on one of the two platforms. The plumbing in the house was basic. There was the usual outside loo, but because it was part of the station building, it was mercifully not as cold. I associate defecation in my youth with being chilled to the bone. There was a bath, but it was in the kitchen and covered by a wooden top which my mother used as a working surface for her cooking. Once a week, this top was cleared and lifted, kettles were heated and poured, and we all took a bath. This was a luxury. When I first went to Russia in the late Fifties, I was struck by a familiar smell – fusty, heavy and woollen. It belonged to my childhood. It was body odour – something we all lived with before bathing became a daily habit.
The garden at Shelford butted straight on to the back of the platform and ran practically the length of it. It was full of flowers. My father grew his vegetables across the road in a plot just opposite the signal box. It was a time of shortages, so we cultivated and reared everything we could. In addition to the goat, we had a flock of Rhode Island Red chickens led by one proud cock. They ran wild in the tiny goods shed. As one of the main commodities brought to the station was grain for the local mill, they waxed very fat and laid many eggs. My father was delighted. He always remained a peasant, despite his reasonable education. He could make things grow anywhere, and would have kept chickens on the moon. He was the perfect father for a country boy. I would tag along happily behind him, collecting the eggs, picking wild mushrooms, counting the ducks. But my other self, the grammar-school boy with artistic pretensions, was finding it harder and harder to talk to him.
He still sang occasionally while I accompanied him on the piano. His repertoire was the Savoy operas and ballads such as Until and The Road to Mandalay. My mother also sang, in a reedy, tremulous voice. She was particularly fond of Because:
Because I come to you with accents sweet
I feel the roses growing round my feet
Because …
I COME TO YOU
I became more and more condescending about their Edwardian songs and about Gilbert and Sullivan. I found the operas sentimental and winsome, and the years have not converted me. The flippancy and sexlessness of Gilbert and Sullivan has done much to inhibit British taste. Facetiousness breaks in every few bars, and they seem to me a form of arrested development, prep school opera, full of jolly tunes, but without sex or ambiguity.
When I was thirteen, I supplemented my pocket money by hand-pumping the organ in the village church at Stapleford, a short bicycle ride from Shelford. It was a strenuous occupation if the hymns were long, especially if the organist became over-excited in the last verse and pulled out all the stops. The wind required then was alarming and needed double-quick action with the wooden handle. I was soon trying to play the primitive but sweet-toned instrument myself. One of my friends pumped for me; not very willingly and not for very long. After a few lessons, I was allowed to practise alone at Little Shelford Church. The organ there boasted an electric pump.
Each practice terrified me. Twice a week, on cold, dark winter evenings in the half-light, my cycle lamp bobbing, I pedalled my way along the lanes to the church, stood my bicycle against the wall, and walked across the graveyard to the church door, closing it behind me with a crash that seemed to reverberate all round the village. I was not permitted to turn on the lights. I picked my way down the aisle, my torch beam jumping among the
pews, before climbing up the spiral staircase to the organ. All the time, I was aware of creaks and groans, sudden cracks, and hisses that seemed like distant whisperings. An empty church at night is a very noisy place. And every noise has an echo.
After unlocking the keyboard, and turning on the one small light on the music stand, I tried to thaw my hands. They were by now so frozen they were incapable of feeling the keys. The first note of the organ was a violation of the silence. It seemed it must wake the village, if not the dead: organ notes from an empty church in the middle of the night. In fact, it was about 7 p.m. and I was a frightened teenage boy sitting in the organ loft with one tiny bulb illuminating me in a sea of darkness.
As I practised and the sound of the organ rolled on, I felt safer. I loved mixing sounds, combining the stops. And I loved the loud grumble of the deep bass notes. The pedal keys quivered under my feet as I played and the sound went right up through my body. The trouble always was the final climactic chord. As it echoed away into the church, I was left with a deafening silence. And then the church noises began again. The only solution was to start another piece as quickly as possible.
I continued my organ practices doggedly, was confirmed, and at sixteen became, for a year or more, the organist for the weekly children’s service. Then, in my last two years at school, reason consumed me and obliterated my faith. Ten of Bernard Shaw’s plays had been issued in a collected Penguin edition; also ten books by H. G. Wells, including his History of the World. I read all these, and The Life of Christ, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. With a feeling of enormous relief, I gave up religion. It has worried me ever since. I stopped playing the organ too. I haven’t played in a church for forty-five years.
I came to man’s estate at Shelford. The outward signs were pimples, razor cuts, and worrying stiff patches of dried semen on my pyjama trousers. My mother sympathised delicately over these constant night emissions, not realising (or so I hoped) that they were largely self-induced. I worried about masturbation, of course. School was always rife with rumours about the madness, disease and death that it brought on. But I didn’t worry enough to stop. I was completely obsessed by dreams of women and sex – the unknown mystery. There was no talk of the facts of life in my family. I remember my mother once dealing with the subject of contraception; it had come unexpectedly into the conversation because of an item in the newspaper. ‘I don’t think we need talk about it,’ she said. ‘I always think that if you’ve been brought up properly, you know what to do.’ I was baffled. She would say no more.
Now I was grown-up, my father asked me each weekend to join him for a half of bitter or a half of cider at the Railway Tavern by the level crossing. I went out of duty, but I hated it. The English pub in those days provided drink cheerlessly. There were few women, and of course no children.
I’m afraid that my lack of enthusiasm for the chilly cordiality of the English pub must have disappointed my father. We still shared a few activities. We turned a room which had once been part of the station into a small workshop for us both, full of tools. We listened to the wireless together. But my father and mother still deferred to me, gladly giving up Old Mother Riley if I wanted to hear a Promenade Concert. Selfishly, I always took advantage of their generosity.
Cambridge was awash with the arts during the war. Many institutions performed regularly out of London: symphony concerts from the BBC; opera productions from Sadler’s Wells and the Guildhall School. The university showed classic films from Russia, France and Germany. And there was constant drama – whether from the Marlowe or other university societies, or the perpetual stream of plays on tour. I saw John Gielgud’s Hamlet at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. I also saw William Devlin’s Lear and Robert Eddison’s Hamlet; and all the repertory of Donald Wolfit’s company. His Volpone and Lear are still vivid in my memory. I went to the Arts and stood at the back each Monday night for 6d. It was a sizeable bite out of my 2s 6d a week pocket money but my appetite for theatre, music and film was voracious. I bullied my parents into taking The Sunday Times so that I could keep up with events in the arts. I read James Agate on the theatre and Ernest Newman on music. Newman taught me about The Ring long before I heard a note of it. I saw the Ballet Rambert and the Ballet Joos. One afternoon, after a concert, I chased a surprised Sir Adrian Boult all the way up Petty Curie. He was trying to catch a train back to London. I was eager for his autograph.
I wasn’t at home much. If I weren’t attending a performance, I was earning money doing odd-jobs to help me buy tickets. I did a paper round; I was a part-time postman at Christmas; I picked cherries, strawberries and apples in the fruit fields of the fens; and my back ached with picking up potatoes. My parents gave me not only the time to be myself, but all that they could spare in the way of money. My development and enthusiasms were what mattered. Yet inevitably I was growing apart from them. My tastes, my reading, even my understanding, were becoming different. I talked to them less and less. They had less and less to say to me. It was a problem with no solution.
My father’s sister, Aunt Mahala, lived in Lewisham. With a free bed from her, and usually a free railway ticket from my father, I could afford every school holiday to hurl myself into the London theatre. I often saw six or seven plays in one week, combining them with art galleries and films in the mornings and afternoons. The tram from Westminster to Lewisham was extraordinarily cheap. So was the theatre. I could stand at the back or perch in the gallery for next to nothing. If funds were not too short, I could buy a seat in the pit – known grandly today as the back stalls – having reserved my place with a camp stool, placed in a queue of stools outside the theatre in the early morning. Thus I was able to see Richardson’s Vanya, Falstaff and Cyrano; Olivier’s Richard III, Hotspur and Astrov; Peggy Ashcroft as the Duchess of Malfi; and John Gielgud as Hamlet for the second time. It was still wartime and there was the danger of bombs, sometimes buzz-bombs or V2s. Nobody seemed to take much notice of them. There was a determination that life must go on. London was outwardly grey and boarded up, with deserted streets and a few noisy cars; but inside the buildings there was a sense of an immense party in full swing. The variety of entertainment expressed a great desire to go on living. My mother occasionally accompanied me on my jaunts to the theatre. But mostly I was on my own and glad of it, taking in a quantity of theatre and film and art that only someone truly obsessed could assimilate. I would return to Shelford with my head ringing. What drove me? Why did I fill my life with performances? I loved fantasies, images, metaphors, whether expressed by words, or music, by colour or by form. They excited me more than anything in life.
There were also occasional school outings either by bus or by train. I went in a party to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw a ravishingly beautiful production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by a twenty-year-old genius from the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Peter Brook.
I was furious and envious. How could he have done this at such an early age? I decided that somehow or other I would work at the Stratford theatre. I vowed that one day I would run it. I was sixteen, and not at all hopeful that I would realise my ambitions.
A more urgent need was to pass my school examinations. Exams had always been the way on, the way out. They had also been times of terror, because I was well aware that I only needed to fail once. I couldn’t afford to slip on this particular greasy pole.
My aim was to win a scholarship to university. I knew it would need a great deal of hard work and not a little good luck. Education is not so much a matter of which schools you go to; it is more whether you have the good fortune to meet two or three special teachers who light up your mind and encourage your spirit. The Perse, perhaps because it was in an agreeable university town, or perhaps because of the war, had collected a group of brilliant eccentrics among its staff.
In my very early years at the school, my history master was Vivien Richards. He had been a close friend of T. E. Lawrence and his stories about him were like episodes from the Boy’s Own Paper. Th
ey excited at the time, but then palled. I disliked Lawrence. I didn’t believe in him. There was something about him that wasn’t real. Vivien Richards, however, instilled in me a lasting passion for architecture. He took groups of boys round the Cambridge colleges and taught us how to read a building as a piece of history. Medieval buildings at last stopped threatening me. He also asked us to his lodgings to listen to records. He had a collection of classical music which he played through an enormous black horn. He used fibre needles, of which he was very proud, and the gramophone itself was clockwork, wound by hand. No electricity for him. Four or five boys would group around the mouth of the horn and listen to the music, sipping cocoa in an untidy room that was stacked with 78 r.p.m. records and books.
I realise now that Vivien Richards was homosexual and I suppose had been in love with Lawrence. It is curious to realise how many of my school teachers must have been homosexual. It was, of course, a hidden matter in those days – a criminal offence that could destroy a career. Several of my teachers lived solid bourgeois lives, sharing a house with a companion who was a business man or a local authority official. They were good men who just got on with their jobs. And though my mother would designate one or other of them as ‘not a ladies’ man’ with a meaningful look, she clearly never felt the need to warn me. I have a vague guilty memory that we boys would giggle and mock these men like flirtatious young women. We did it by instinct. We certainly felt no danger.