by Bryan Magee
I did this journey in one direction or the other four times a day, and each time it was crammed with incident. In or alongside the central flow of events all sorts of other things would be going on – two boys would be playing a running game of conkers, or swapping cigarette pictures, or telling dirty jokes, or one would nip across to the other side of the road to barge into somebody else’s game of hopscotch. These four journeys were often the best things in the day, and still bulk huge in my memory, like sea voyages. Among the most disconcerting experiences I have ever had was returning to Market Harborough as an adult and finding that each such journey covered only a few hundred yards, and is now no more than ten minutes’ walk, if that.
I remember boasting to one of the local children, on the pavement outside the Catholic church, how much bigger London was than Market Harborough. ‘It’s not just twice as big, or even three times as big, it’s twenty times as big.’ While I was saying this I thought: I’m overdoing things here. This isn’t true. He won’t believe it. And he did not believe it. But the truth is that London was several hundred times bigger than Market Harborough, and I myself had not the remotest conception of the fact.
I had little idea where Harborough was. On my daily way to school, when living with the Burgesses, I had passed signposts with names like Kettering, Wellingborough and Corby, but I had never heard of any of them, and had no idea what sort of places they were, or where they were. I never went to any of them. London, of course, was unmanageably distant. It was the common experience among us evacuees that almost no one in any of the families we lived with had been to London. Apart from Mr Toombs’s journey between St Pancras and Waterloo, none of the Toombs family had – nor, so far as I discovered, had any of their neighbours or friends. What they thought of as the big city was the county town, Leicester. Once a year the Toombs family organised a day outing there, a mammoth and magical shopping expedition which was preceded by weeks of planning and discussion, and great excitement. Because it was such a special occasion they returned home loaded with presents for those of the family who had not been with them. It was the nearest thing they ever had to a holiday. All this caused me to think of Leicester as so far away as to be beyond my ken. There was never any question of my going there myself, and indeed I never did. It was fourteen miles away.
The only places I went to outside Harborough during the year and a half I was there were some of the nearby villages, and not even many of those. While I was with the Burgesses, Joey and I had walked a couple of times to Braybrooke, three miles away. On one of these walks we had carried on to the little town of Desborough, a couple of miles further. Night began to fall as we were walking back, and we were afraid it would get pitch-dark while we were on the road and in open country. By the last stretch of the way we were jogging. When we got home we were angrily told off for being so late; and naturally, when we were asked where we had been, we said, ‘Desborough.’ We were not believed. It was considered too far away for us to have been there.
From the Toombses’, the village I went to more than any other was Lubenham, two miles away. I liked the walk that took you there, over the hill. It was on Lubenham Hill one night that I first registered that some of the stars were in patterns. It was a lucidly clear night, the sky amazingly full, and I tried to trace some of the patterns. I knew that stars, like aeroplanes, were actually big, and looked small only because they were a long way away. In fact I knew that they were bigger than the world, but looked even smaller than aeroplanes because they were zillions of miles away. And I stood there transfixed, gazing at hundreds of them, lost in wonderment at them for the first time. I felt an unspecifiable, disturbing intimation that since there were all that many of them, and they were all that big, our earth and we people on it could not really be what we …
Harborough was my whole world while I lived there, except for brief trips to London during some of the school holidays. In my letters to my parents I told them how much happier I was at the Toombses’ than I had been with the Burgesses, and they arranged to come and see me. I looked forward to showing my father off to the Toombses, but I puffed him up in such extravagant terms that Auntie began to wonder whether my parents might not be too grand for them. She became quite agitated about this. ‘Are you sure they ain’t swanky?’ she said more than once. ‘I can’t bear swanky folks. I do hope they ain’t swanky.’ I did not know what swanky meant, and although I asked her I could not get out of her any explanation that I could understand. To me now it is fairly obvious that she was afraid of being patronised, perhaps because my family owned a shop, and had a car, but above all because they were Londoners. She would have found it intolerable; and it could have ruined her relationship with me. But she need not have worried. When my parents arrived she found my father delightful – full of charm, but unassuming and likeable. It commended him especially to the Toombs family that he was good at both cards and snooker. It is so much easier to play snooker on a miniature table than on a full-sized one that he made enormous breaks, breaks of which they had never seen the like. They were as excited as I was. They were impressed, too, by his sight-reading at the piano. Knowing from me that he liked opera, they had dug out from their collection the score of The Merry Widow, which Kath rarely played because parts of it were difficult. The rest of us stood round the piano while he sight-read it with ease. I was ravished by ‘Vilya’s Song’, and the way his right hand floated up the keyboard with the tune: I thought I had never heard anything more beautiful. The hair on the nape of my neck bristled up harshly, and my skin went cold all over my body, and then stood out in goose pimples. I was transported to a degree I do not think I had ever been before, not even by other music.
The whole visit was a success. It created bonds between the two families, and made me all the happier to be where I was. After my parents had left, Auntie said to me: ‘I like your dad. He ain’t at all swanky, is he? Funny, you’d’ve thought he’d be swanky. But he ain’t.’
I am not sure about the sequence of events, but I know that after going to Market Harborough in January 1940 I made a couple of visits to London during the remainder of that year. On the first I went for the first time to an opera. It must have been during the school Easter holidays, because it was a birthday treat for me, and the performance was at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which closed in the spring of 1940 for the rest of the war.
The opera, in this case operetta, was Die Fledermaus. As people did in those days when they went to the theatre, I wore my best suit, whose conker colour I still remember. I was with my father, mother and sister. We sat in the upper circle on the same level as the chandelier that hung in the centre of the auditorium. I remember my father saying to me: ‘Each sheet of glass in that chandelier is as tall as you are,’ which was his way of getting me to look at it with interest and curiosity. He had told me beforehand what the story was going to be, and already I knew the overture from his recording of it; but nothing could have prepared me for my reaction after curtain-up. It was as if the music was taking the cover off the stage action and letting me see the real thoughts and feelings that were going on inside the characters. It was what a play or film would have been if you had seen the characters’ insides instead of their outsides. And I knew it was the music doing this. It was telling you what was really going on. And what music! Occasionally a character would sing a bit from the overture that I recognised, but most of the time they were singing other things; but either way, it was one super tune after another.
In the first interval I asked my father: ‘Are other operas like this?’
‘Yes. Only a lot of them are better.’
‘Better?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Well, there’s no talking. In this one there’s lots of talking. But in most of the others it’s music all the time. And with some of them it’s better music.’
Gosh. In spite of all the listening I had done to his records, I had not realised that opera was like this. I had heard it as music
only. I knew there were stories and characters, because he had told me about them, but I had not understood how basic they were to the whole thing, or how connected they were with the music. I had, I suppose, unthinkingly assumed that opera was like what a film would be like if it were all soundtrack music. A new world opened.
The performance must have been on my last day in London, because in the next few days I was walking around Market Harborough singing bits of Die Fledermaus, and reliving the fact that with this bit three characters each suddenly shoved the same foot forward, and with that bit one tore his wig off and shouted: ‘I am Eisenstein!’ I went through it in my mind over and over, the stage action alongside the music, hugging myself about the way they mingled, not having realised that they could mingle.
From then on I went to opera nearly every time I went to London. After Sadler’s Wells closed, its opera and ballet companies shifted their base to the north of England for a couple of years, but revisited on tour during that time, and then moved back to London. Meanwhile there was a surprising amount of one-off opera in London during the war, even miniature seasons of it. Also there was the Carl Rosa touring company. All of them concentrated on the most popular operas – such as La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, Tosca, La Traviata – so these, luckily for me, were the ones I saw first. My special favourite was La Bohème, which by my mid-teens I had seen three or four times. Puccini was my first love with staged opera. I have particularly sharp memories of seeing my first Tosca at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, with Joan Hammond in the title role and Otakar Kraus as Scarpia. When I saw Madame Butterfly my father described the plot as tawdry (the first time I heard the word, which has ever since been associated in my mind with Pinkerton) and said that as far as the music was concerned we might just as well go home after the first act.
I was older now, and getting to be a better companion for him. Because I was living away from home, and was seldom around, he treated me as if I were on holiday when I was at home, and took me out a great deal, to theatre and concerts as well as opera. It gave him an excuse to see more of the things he wanted to see himself. Like most of the population, he was becoming much better off financially as the war went on. He was also launching me on a way of life that became habitual to me during the school holidays, and which was quite different from the one I lived for the rest of the year – going to live performances in central London once or twice every week. And because I was seeing most things for the first time, they had an impact on me such as few performances have equalled since.
It was either at the end of 1940 or in the following year that my father took me to my first Shakespeare play. This was Richard III, with Donald Wolfit. It affected me in some of the ways Die Fledermaus had: it seemed, somehow, to be all expression. Never had I been so swept up and carried along by a play. The sheer driving force of it was phenomenal. Wolfit’s powerful and explicit style of acting, unsubtle but good, was just right for a child. The play itself came across to me as something like a gangster story set in historical times. What a brilliant idea, I thought, if you were the severalth in line to a throne, to bump off those in between so that you became king. I clamoured to see it again; and the second time I became aware of all sorts of things I had not noticed first time round. About the play as a whole there was something huge as well as marvellous, something that filled every space. It was like seeing the whole world in a play. People had always said that Shakespeare was the best writer of plays, and now I could see what they meant.
What with opera and Shakespeare, on top of the shows I already loved, I developed a passion for theatre in general – perhaps I had had it from the start – that has given it a special place throughout my life. Already, while the older members of my family had been going to grown-up theatre without me, and talking about it afterwards with lots of ‘you should have seen this’ and ‘what a pity you weren’t there’, I had been revelling in the music halls, the variety shows and pantomimes that I was taken to, and thinking them more fun than anything else I did. When my sister Joan was considered old enough to go to straight plays but I was not, she confirmed my excited imaginings about what I was missing, and I was deeply envious. But now, at last, at long last, here I was, going. I was like a starving man let loose on food. The combination of love and greed was lustful. I went whenever I got the chance, and saw whatever came my way, to some extent indiscriminately, though there was always this special love of opera and Shakespeare. Jonathan Miller has remarked to me that Shakespeare’s plays are in such a different class from everyone else’s that if we call those others ‘plays’ we ought to have a different word for Shakespeare’s; and that is how they came across to me from the beginning. They spoke to me directly in a way that only music did otherwise; and this was not, I think, something primarily to do with the use of language, still less the poetry. It had no more to do with concepts than music does. I was not sitting there listening to people saying words, I was sitting there watching people doing things; I was watching things happen. And for years, whenever I saw a Shakespeare play, for the first few minutes I would have little idea what was going on (or, for that matter, what some of the words meant); but soon it all began to fall into place, and I would be taken up into it in a state of luminous absorption. It became not just clear to me but compellingly interesting who was doing what, and why. I would be lost in it. From then on I would be unaware of not understanding anything, though I am sure that if you had stopped the play at almost any point and said to me: ‘What does this unfamiliar word here mean, or that condensed metaphor?’ I would not have been able to tell you. It was the play itself that had got me, and was sweeping me along; and I would have seen the words as dangling from its outside, with the same sort of relationship to it as a recipe (which I would also not have understood) to a delicious meal (which I would have eaten with joy). A play is not its words, it is something else, something intangible, that stands behind the words – though the language is needed for us to make contact with it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AT SOME TIME in 1940 an offer came for Joan and me to be evacuated to the United States. Quite a lot of British children were sent there during the war. Our offer came from relations so distant that neither Joan nor I knew of their existence. I think one of my grandfather’s siblings, or perhaps a cousin, had emigrated to the United States and eventually acquired a family in the Midwest; and the invitation now came from a younger generation of that family, a couple roughly my parents’ age, with children. None of us had met them.
My mother was for sending us, but my father held back. The war had been going on for nearly a year now, and it had become obvious that it was going to last for some years more; so, if we went, it would be a long time before they saw us again, and before we saw England again. Also, getting to the United States meant crossing the Atlantic on a ship that ran the gauntlet of German submarines, so it was not a risk-free option. In fact, the crossings were stopped after one of the boats was torpedoed and seventy-three children drowned. My father was so undecided that he came to the conclusion that we ourselves should make the decision. Joan was nearly fourteen now, and in a better position than I to make a rational choice, which I think she probably did. I was adamant that I did not want to go. Fortunately, Joan did not want to go either, so that was that. But for the rest of the war our father was prey to a feeling that if either of us should be killed or injured, as so many children he knew were, the fault would be his.
Although I did not have the adventure of going to the United States, I did a lot of very good growing-up in Market Harborough, opening out in all sorts of directions. Some of this had to do with the age I was reaching anyway, but some with living away from my family, and some with being for the first time in a happy home. I began to feel a kind of security I had not felt before. In Hoxton I had always been free to wander outside the home, explore, go my own way, do my own thing; but within the home I had felt unwanted, in the way, a nuisance, always having to watch my step so as not to bring down explo
sions of anger, or get a smack in the face. But the Toombses actually wanted me there, and enjoyed having me, and told me so. Inexplicably, they had chosen to have me. For the first time I felt wanted. And this meant I no longer had to get away from home to be myself.
But my very happiness, combined with a deeply ingrained insecurity, gave me an irrational fear of doing something that would bring it to an end by causing the Toombses to send me away. And there was, I was firmly convinced, such a something. On my first day, Auntie had told me, not once but three times, that if I touched any of the musical instruments I would not be allowed to stay. So I developed what can only be described as a phobic terror of being suspected of having touched a musical instrument. The problem was that music was becoming, if it had not already become, my ruling passion, and I longed to immerse myself in it, and learn to play all the instruments, especially the piano. But I did not dare to reveal this to the family, for fear of being thrown out. It is obvious now that they would have helped me in every way they could, but it was not obvious to me then. I suppose it was itself part of my insecurity that I thought the complete rejection of me was something that could happen at any instant. When I stood beside Kath at the piano, singing, I never, ever touched the piano. I am sure she did not even notice this, and would have laughed me out of the inhibition if she had. When she and I listened to records on the tinny old gramophone, I left her to do everything, I never touched anything myself. And I never allowed myself to be left in the front room alone – until, that is to say, one day.