Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  But that was not the end of it. Invitations to speak poured in from all over Scotland. During the next year I spoke to dozens of youth groups on a variety of subjects, censorship always being the most popular. The sales of my books undoubtedly benefited. I came to know a great many ministers, but also Catholic priests. Even Jewish groups invited me to speak to them. For some reason, many such ministers and priests thought of me as a person to whom they could confide their deepest secret thoughts. I have always kept those confidences, but what I can say here was that many had lost their faith in God but could not see their way to leaving a fairly pleasant paid occupation without too many worries, especially if they had a family to support. Many of them were basically social workers who found the Church a convenient umbrella for their activities. A considerable number were homosexual, but dared not tell anyone, let alone practice, and if they did occasionally have a relationship, it was fleeting, guilt-ridden and the source of much misery. Others were in love with a woman other than their own wife and did not know what to do or how to hide it. Many of those who invited me were more interested in talking about themselves and asking my advice than in hearing me speak. And what advice could I give other than general comfort, saying that they were not alone? Just meeting someone who did not judge them was in itself a relief to them most of the time.

  I was to see more of Ian Fraser. Whenever I did something in Edinburgh – mount a play, do something for the Festival or became involved in a public event – he was often there in the audience. He was deeply involved in the Ecumenical Movement and ran United Churches House in Dunblane as warden, and sometimes organized conferences there to which I was invited. Most of them were on secular subjects that interested open-minded churchmen, and the attendees were a mixture of academics, artists, media people and a few ministers. I enjoyed these occasions, where I felt I was both teacher and pupil, and I always met interesting people.

  On the day after my piece appeared in the Scotsman, Alastair Dunnett, the editor, rang me and invited me to lunch. He was full of praise, and when we met in Edinburgh two days later, he was still chuckling over the things he had liked most, such as a quotation from ‘Tam O’Shanter’, where I compared the “warmed-up wrath” of Tam’s wife to that of certain puritans. It was a good lunch, with the best wine available, and thereafter we remained on excellent terms. I was in the future to write his obituary. Alastair was a surprising man, much of him Scottish conservative, some of him having an impish sense of humour. He never suffered fools gladly, and liked to see hypocrites exposed. He was an excellent editor and gave the Scotsman its golden era.

  * * *

  To return to Ledlanet, Sheila had left me during 1965 to become secretary and manager of the Traverse Theatre. It was not an easy or an enviable task, because there was a fairly large and rancorous committee, which included me, and some of the members were very critical of either the plays, the catering, the finances, the general atmosphere or the management. Audrey Langford then imposed her daughter Ann on me to replace Sheila. She was only interested in assisting Ande Anderson, then producing Una cosa rara, and I thought she was neglecting her duties My exasperation with her grew and finally exploded on the last night of Una cosa rara.

  It was a celebratory last night of a successful production, and everyone was happy, the audience mixing with the orchestra and the principals in the bar after the performance had ended. Then Audrey Langford handed me a piece of paper. It was her invoice for the production, and at a glance I could see that it was greatly in excess of the budget and the quotation she had given me. “I’d like a cheque right now,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “I have to go over it in the morning, and I’ll settle it then.” She was insistent, but I was firm and moved to the kitchen. There Ann Langford followed me in and said I had been rude to her mother. I let her have it back. In cold, biting words, feeling absolutely stone-cold sober in spite of several drinks a little earlier, I told her what I thought of her, the way her family was trying to cheat me, of how I intended to pay what I had agreed and not a penny more, and added other home truths for good measure.

  The next morning I took out my estimates and budgets. Audrey had inflated everything and thrown in any number of unjustified extras. I worked out what was due, made some allowances in favour of Kent Opera and gave her a cheque. She took it, but said she would sue for the balance. There were of course threats from her chairman and her solicitors, but my obligations were clear from the correspondence, and the matter was eventually dropped. She revived Una cosa rara in London some months later with an inferior cast, and a year after that performed another opera by the same composer, L’arbore di Diana, to which of course I went, never having heard it. But I never used Kent Opera again, and thereafter packaged all Ledlanet productions myself.

  Jim Fraser had three sons, and the youngest, Stephen, was the same age as my daughter Jamie. He suggested that she might like to spend a weekend at his house in Broughty Ferry near Dundee, and I drove her there from Ledlanet on the Friday, bringing with me Bill Colleran, who was staying that same weekend at Ledlanet. I dropped Bill off in Perth on the way at the Salutation Hotel, as he wanted to look around the town, and picked him up again two hours later. During that time, he had discovered malt whisky and had sampled several different brands.

  On the way back to Ledlanet, I took the picturesque Path of Condie road in order to have a look at Ardargie, my grandfather’s old house, which was now a hotel. I did not enjoy the experience. The house, which had earlier possessed great charm, was now totally wrecked in my eyes, and we did not stay long after walking through what had once been stately and comfortable rooms. Bill was a little wild. “Why don’t we beat the man up?” he suggested, and really wanted to assault the new proprietor. I hastily took him back to Ledlanet, which we had to leave soon after, as we were going to dinner with William Mostyn-Owen, who had a house and estate at Comrie, a forty-five-minute drive away. Willie was an appraiser of Italian paintings at Christie’s in London, and his glamorous wife, Gaia, had been much in evidence around my Drama Conference, meeting the participants and covering it for an Italian newspaper, because she was also a journalist, mostly concerned with fashion. Other guests that night, all staying with the Mostyn-Owens, were Mary McCarthy and Mr West, her diplomat husband, George Weidenfeld, with his daughter from his first marriage, and one or two others. Jim Haynes, staying with me, was part of the group of four who had come from Ledlanet. It was a pleasant meal, ending with port. Jim, who did not drink, excused himself for a minute. Then Willie threw open the large double doors into the drawing room, and there, in the middle of a brilliantly lighted room, were Gaia and Jim Haynes in a passionate embrace. For a second or two Mostyn-Owen looked at his wife in the arms of Jim, then closed the doors again, saying: “I think we’ll have coffee in the dining room.” Aristocratic sang-froid! The evening was not made better when Bill Colleran, who had imbibed a tremendous amount of spirits and wine that day, threw up while we were drinking our coffee, all of us saying little. We returned to Ledlanet in a chastened mood.

  It may have been that summer that we all decided to visit Dugi Otok, from where Bettina’s family came. She was still related to many people on this island, which is off the Croatian coast near Zadar. Bettina had arranged to borrow two or three of the cottages that belonged to relatives. I left with Bettina, Anastasia, Jamie and Anne Fletcher, a friend from Edinburgh who had been much around the Traverse – this must have been Jim Haynes’s last year there – in the car. Anne’s current boyfriend, Joe Roeber, who worked at the Financial Times was to join us later. It was a long drive to Zadar, and it took two days through Germany, Austria, northern Italy and down the narrow Adriatic coast road which runs from the Italian border to Greece. There we formed a little colony, which included Rosemary Reuben, who had found her own way to Božava, the only little village on the island. When I arrived with several bottles of gin and whisky, she instantly began pouring for us all, so th
at my first memories are of sitting in the glorious sunset, watching the first satellite sputniks sailing past us in the clear sky and getting quietly sloshed.

  Rosemary had started an affair with a German staying at the only hotel in the village, who went out with his speargun to catch fish, but only managed to spear himself in the leg. The man, who was on his honeymoon, eventually left his wife on the island and departed with Rosemary. There was, however, one day when Rosemary and I swam around a bend and found ourselves alone in a cove. We instantly took advantage of the solitude to make love in shallow water, and had just finished when a fishing boat rounded the bend; we managed to separate and look natural without attracting attention. I have few other memories of that week or two in Božava. While there, we recruited a young cousin of Bettina’s, Dosia, to be a nanny for Anastasia. She came back with us, stayed two years and learnt English, which eventually qualified her to hold a good job in a Yugoslav hotel.

  The following year, I went back there with Jim Fraser, his son Stephen and Jamie, this time not driving, but taking a morning flight to Venice and after a day there catching the evening boat to Rijeka. From there we were expected to catch the bus that only left once a day and go down the coast. But the boat arrived late, and the customs were slow and officious. Getting through first, I told Jim Fraser to assemble the others and our luggage on the dock and to wait on the main street next to the boat, while I raced down to where I was told the bus stop was. Sure enough, before I got there, I saw the bus coming towards me and made it stop by standing in its way. I explained to the driver in my halting Serbo-Croat that there were four people who had to catch this bus, and that the others should by now be off the boat and waiting further down the road. They were just coming off the boat as we got there, but the bus did wait and we all got on it. It was now eleven in the morning, and the ferry we had to catch left at three from Zadar. I was told we would be there in time, and the bus was if anything too fast, careening down the two-lane Adriatic Highway alongside precipices that fell away to the sea. Every time we came to a bend, the conductor would lean right out to see past it, and then tell the driver the way was clear, which it seemed to me was often before he could be quite sure. When they stopped for lunch, the other passengers got out to lunch as well, and the driver and conductor seemed in no hurry to get going again. As the hour for the ferry’s departure got nearer, it seemed to me we were still many miles away. The conductor told me not to worry. But a lorry slowed us down, and as we came onto the dockside the ferry had already cast off the ropes and pulled in the gangplank. The driver and the conductor threw our bags onto a boat that was already moving, and we were pulled onto it by the sailors. Jim promptly declared that he would never travel with me again.

  The highlight of that stay on Dugi Otok was the final dinner at the hotel, at which we were presented an enormous lobster that, we were told, might be a thousand years old. It was more than a yard in length, fed eight people and was enough for several more. The presence of Jamie and Stephen makes me think that the year was 1966, when they were both twelve years old, but I could be a year out either way. If so, I must have driven down earlier, left the car and returned with Jim and the two children via Venice and the hair-raising race on the bus. On the way back we stopped in Salzburg for one night and heard the Alban Berg Quartet, which must have been newly formed, and the next day we were all in Munich, where we sent the two children to a children’s opera while Bettina, Jim and I went to the State Opera to see Tristan und Isolde. We got out later than anticipated and we were worried about Jamie and Stephen, who had been given precise instructions how to get to a restaurant to wait for us. But the restaurant was closed, and we found two frightened and shivering children standing outside it, trying to shelter from the rain that had started. I am sure they still remember it.

  My last memory of Munich that during trip is meeting Monica von Zallinger the next morning before leaving. I knew her from the past, the very beautiful daughter of the conductor Mainhard von Zallinger, who had been a principal music director at the Munich State Opera since the Thirties. Monica was a producer for both the theatrical and operatic stage, and I encountered her fairly frequently in those days and probably first met her in Munich in 1955, in connection with the making of The Pool, when I visited her father. Jim Fraser also took a big shine to her. “She’s sending you messages, John,” he said enviously. But I’m sure she wasn’t.

  Thinking of her brings back another occasion, some time in the mid-Sixties. After seeing Sam Beckett shortly after he had returned from Ulm and the world premiere of Play, I decided to go there myself to see the production. On that occasion, Monica drove to Ulm with Bettina and me. The production was brilliant and Derrick Mendel, the English producer, told me many anecdotes about Sam’s visit. In Ulm he had made many changes to his original play, deciding to repeat the action a second time. Derrick suggested that as the play was so short, it might be repeated more often still – indeed, why not go on until the last member of the audience had left? Sam thought for a minute. “No,” he said finally. “This is Germany. They’ll still be here at breakfast.”

  * * *

  Through the rest of the decade, Ledlanet Nights went from strength to strength, now having four seasons a year. Opera for All was back in 1968, and there were many small but good entertainments for all tastes during the year. I mounted two operatic productions in the main autumn season, first a triple bill of Bach’s only operatic work, The Coffee Cantata, put into a Sixties context, Britten’s Abraham and Isaac, and a one-act comic opera by Joseph Horovitz, based on one of W.S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads, entitled Gentleman’s Island. This had Ian Wallace and Stuart Kale in it, and was much enjoyed. The main production was Mozart’s Il re pastore, and this was the first time we sang an opera in Italian, because I could not get a good translation done in time and there was no available one. Jill Gomez, who had sung some small parts at Glyndebourne, was our Aminta and Philip Langridge, whom we had had before as a member of the John Alldis Choir, sang Philip the Great. It was a production of the greatest simplicity, which George Mully, also a regular now, produced. The climax is “L’amerò, sarò costante”, one of Mozart’s most beautiful arias, which Jill Gomez sang on a blackened stage in a white light with perfect intonation and a voice that caught the sentiment of real love in pure affecting melody. There was not a dry eye in the house, and her career, another international one, probably began with that opera, which Peter Gellhorn conducted, becoming from that year our most regular musical director.

  The productions of the previous years had greatly strained our finances, especially the operatic ones, and the figures for Il re pastore, one of the most economic as well as effective Ledlanet productions, has consequently stuck in my mind. We had five superb soloists, an orchestra of sixteen plus harpsichord and minimum decor, and it cost exactly £250 for each of the six performances. With Jim Fraser providing most of what we needed that a building firm could supply, persuasive negotiation with artists of real talent whose careers had not yet taken off and no overhead that was not covered by our own catering or bar profits, we could do artistic wonders with very little money. More events, some of them profitable, helped bring down overheads. Spring and Christmas seasons had been added to the summer and autumn. There were imported plays, and a few of our own such as I have described, many chamber concerts and recitals, and visits by groups such as Opera for All. The Arts Council rang us up and proposed artists and groups with a built-in subsidy attached. John Watt provided the popular folk nights. The catering had become very professional, with Jock Imrie, our barman and a real character, able to serve a bar with a hundred or more thirsty people in it. Sometimes Attewell’s wife helped Jock.

  We had the London Mozart Players in the summer of 1968, and I worked out that it was our hundredth concert, so made an event of it with an enormous cake that could feed both audience and players. The trouble was that the orchestra, which was on a northern tour, was the biggest we had ever had,
and it turned out to be impossible to squeeze them all onto the stage and get their conductor Harry Blech on it as well for the violin concerto, played by György Pauk. Blech was a very stout man. Finally Pauk conducted the concerts from the violin, and it worked out well. I used the very effective photograph of the orchestra, taken from behind the bassoons, for the 1969 motif on the front of all programmes that year.

  I forget how the orchestra for Il re pastore was recruited, but it was a brilliant one, and it included an oboist called Jenny Paull, who later helped me to raise funds with charity concerts for the Last Exit case. She was good-looking, tall and blonde, very outgoing, and was soon to play a small part in the subsequent history of Ledlanet. Peter Gellhorn, who had been one of the rising conductors in pre-war Germany until the Nazis made him leave, was a martinet – strict, punctilious and an extremely good musician. He had total control over orchestra and singers. On one night when a minor singer was not well, he made her act out the part while Hazel Wood, a Ledlanet standby, sang her music from the orchestra pit. She nearly fainted on stage, but did it. Peter was not willing to consider any other compromise. During the last week of the opera (we performed on successive Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays that year), I had brought with me my current girlfriend (Bettina rarely came to Ledlanet in those days). Our affair had gone on for some time – she was a novelist, to whom I have given the name Vera for the purpose of this narrative, and she had gone to bed early. On the last night, Jenny, everyone else having left or gone to bed, said she was interested in sleeping with me. Although staying in the Green Hotel in Kinross, she had spent most nights with Peter Gellhorn, whom she must have known before, because Peter had his own room at Ledlanet. As I remember it, Jenny and I made love somewhere on the premises, probably on a sofa, and I then drove her to Kinross, giving some explanation to Vera on my return. Two days later, Jenny and I drove down to London together, stopping overnight in North Berwick at a hotel, which I remember as one of the most active nights of my life. We stopped to renew our ardours in a graveyard off the road not far from London, and were nearly interrupted by the Vicar. When we stopped at Wimpole Street before Jenny went home, Bettina’s eyes told me that she had taken in the situation, but she said nothing about it.