by Bryan Magee
To this day, when I read about people’s suburban childhoods, it conjures up the world I came to know in Potters Bar: teenagers on bikes, little front gardens, local cinema, open-air swimming pool, the shopping centre and the railway station, a sense of being in a lesser community outside a greater world. Norman’s mother, Beattie, stayed at home with him when he was there, instead of going to Hoxton to help in the shop. She mothered the two of us unobtrusively, caring for us happily without getting in the way. She was a person I liked enormously – affectionate, easy-going, generous-hearted, non-judgemental: the direct opposite of my own mother – and I came to feel almost like a member of the Tillson family. At first Norman and I would do the things we had always done together, chiefly roaming the streets and playing games. Sometimes we went to the cinema. Sometimes I borrowed a bike and we went off cycling together. In summer we went to an open-air swimming pool called the Watersplash, which I especially liked. When the weather was bad we had to content ourselves with indoor pursuits, and these would usually be card games. Both of our families were keen on cards – our parents had been playing together since before we were born – so we had grown up with card games. Norman taught me cribbage, the best of all games for two. I taught him chess, but neither of us enjoyed that as much as crib.
His two grandmothers were on the scene a lot, Nan Tillson and Nan Luff, and both were demon card-players who welcomed having us there to play with. They were wicked old women, both of them, in their different ways, and highly diverting. Nan Tillson had kept a pub in Bermondsey, and possessed the right sort of personality to go with that – ready to get on with anyone but not standing for any nonsense: bawdy and outspoken, extrovert, hard-drinking, capable, funny and likeable. This made her ideal company for boys. She was never without a cigarette in her mouth, and somehow managed to cough round it perpetually without moving it. She was a tough old party altogether, not someone to get on the wrong side of. Nan Luff presented a complete contrast to this: diminutive, quiet, devious, manipulative. Nan Tillson was hilariously rude to her, but in fact the two of them were so evenly matched that watching how they behaved was an entertainment in itself, like successive rounds between a cunning little boxer and a tearaway. Without realising it at the time, I was learning from both of them. From Nan Tillson I picked up quite a lot of worldly wisdom, while Nan Luff alerted me to some of the invisible patterns of deceit: I found her deviousness so intriguing that it was sometimes I who suggested to Norman that we visit her.
Occasionally Norman would come to me in Arnos Grove. But since I was the only person there during the day, and there was nothing for us to do in the surrounding streets, we would then have to go either to Southgate or into the West End; so he came only rarely. I tried to have sessions at home with him playing records, but this was of no interest to him. Our interests were beginning to diverge. We had always been a contrasting pair. We looked different: he was stocky, barrel-chested, with a round freckled face and thin, flat ginger hair, whereas I was tall and stringy, with a long white face and piles of wiry, wavy hair of so dark a brown as to be almost black. Our personalities contrasted too: he was serene, sure-footed, practical, ready to talk but not running off at the mouth, while I was high-strung and gabby; and although I talked too much, I lived more inside myself, and was less good at practical things. In most of the indoor games we played we were an even match. But now, for the first time, each of us was beginning to develop along a path that the other did not want to pursue. Norman was acquiring a passion for sport, many sports, and was good at them all, whereas I, who had compulsory sport at school, was no good at any of it and disliked it intensely – and certainly did not want to have anything to do with it during school holidays.
However, I do remember one fête that we went to together, in which we both entered for all the events we were eligible for. Norman won nearly all of them, and I came nowhere. By the end he was cradling both arms full of prizes. I offered to help him carry them, but naturally he wanted to go on holding them. As we made to leave, people gathered round him to congratulate him and ask who he was. The little crowd became so thick that as we walked away I had to fall behind to make space for them to talk to him. I walked along a few paces in the rear, looking at him surrounded by these admiring people all trying to talk to him at once, and felt that I was being separated from him not only physically but in a more important sense – it was as if he was being airlifted away from me by those people. The conscious realisation entered my mind for the first time that from now on, as we grew up into our lives, we were going to move in different directions, and grow further apart. But there were still some years to go – we shall come to it later – before he and I became obsessional billiard players, and the dozens of afternoons we spent together at the billiard table were the happiest of our friendship.
Norman went to Hoxton every Saturday with his mother to help out in their main shop (the other had been put out of action by the bombing). But there was no point in my going with him; he would be too busy to spend time with me. On a Saturday he and his parents would be on the go all day without respite. Being a sweetshop, they sold their goods over the counter in ha’p’orths and penn’orths, weighing out each purchase on the scales; and this meant that at the end of their longest, busiest day they would have grossed something like fifty pounds – of which, of course, their profit would be only a portion. My family’s clothes shop would be at its busiest on Saturdays too, and they would not want me there either, because I was too young to help with the services required; and in any case they would need to make only a fraction of the sales to earn the same amount of money.
There was one day, unforgettable, when I did go back to Hoxton. It came about in the following way. I had been a couple of years younger than most of my pre-war classmates, and this meant that when they left school in Market Harborough at fourteen or fifteen, and came back to London to live with their families again, I was thirteen or fourteen, and had been at Christ’s Hospital for two or three years. Suddenly, after the years of Hoxton’s emptiness, I once more had a lot of former schoolmates who were living there. One Saturday in the West End I bumped into one of them, and we arranged that I should come to Hoxton the following Saturday afternoon, when most of them did not have to work, and meet some of the others. He would fix it up, he said. I arrived at the meeting place full of excitement, and there they were, a wonderful collection of the old faces. We all started talking at once. As I was greeting them, there were new ones still arriving behind me, chattering as they came in, so I was conscious of people and voices behind me as well as in front. So when those in front burst into a laughing, jovial chorus of ‘Blimey, ’ark at ’im!’ and ‘Don’ ’e talk posh!’ and ‘Cor, listen to ’im, talkin’ all la-di-da!’ I looked round to see who the new arrival was that they were greeting with this friendly derision, my ears pricking up for the voice they were describing. There was nobody there, the new arrivals having melted in. I turned back, and saw that they were laughing at me. My first reaction was disorientation: for a moment I stood bewildered. It was a long time now since anyone had talked about how I spoke, and I had long ceased to think about it myself. The chorus went on, and people were nudging one another, winking, laughing incredulously as if they could scarcely believe their ears. Then one of them said: ‘It’s no good you talking like that to us, you know. We know where you come from.’ The idea that I would put on an accent to differentiate myself from them was so alien to me, and so hurtful, that I brushed their reactions impatiently aside and went on greeting people. But the damage had been done. They saw me as different. I was put out by it. For a long time they interrogated me about my school – none of them was at school now – and my life there, and how it had made me different. To them almost everything I said sounded like something out of a comic, and they said so: housemasters, rugger, Latin, chapel, the incredible uniform that they had all seen on the streets, none of this had any counterpart in their experience of life, and the whole caboodle seemed to them lik
e a Never-Never Land that existed in comics alone – Lord Snooty and his Pals, said one (a strip cartoon in the Beano). They were cheerful about it, and warmed towards me in a friendly way, but they regarded what I was talking about as simply not real life, some sort of enacted entertainment, as it might be a street pageant or play. And it was the actuality of my life, the reality of it now, that they were dismissing. It was a while before I could get them away from all this and on to the subject of their own lives – their jobs, what Hoxton was like now after the bombing, and so on. I was deeply interested in that; but when I left, I would not have wanted to repeat the experience.
Just as when you encounter a new word, you immediately start coming across it in other places, so I soon encountered other comments on the way I spoke. Norman and I were playing cards with Nan Luff, and he made some cockney crack at her that reminded her of the way Nan Tillson insulted her, and she said: ‘Why joo aff ter talk like that, Norm? Why doncher talk nice, like Bryan do?’ And again I felt mortified. The way I talked was being used as a stick to beat Norman with. From time to time others commented, usually approvingly. (‘Don’ ’e talk nice?’) Since I talked spontaneously, however it came out, I felt helpless about it. But – exactly as had happened at Christ’s Hospital a couple of years before, only the other way round now – people got used to it, and stopped remarking on it, and it became one more aspect of the way they were used to seeing me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MY FATHER HAD kept his promise, and let me start learning the piano in my second year. The lessons were with the handsome young clergyman ‘Corks’ Cochrane, in his study at the other end of the Avenue. As a musician he was a talented all-rounder. More at home on the organ than the piano, he could not only sight-read anything but transpose it into any key, or put a full orchestral score on the music rest and play it. He was an outstanding choral conductor, and a good singer. He had perfect pitch, which means (contrary to what many people seem to imagine) that if, without sounding a note of any kind, you asked him to sing, shall we say, a B flat, he would do so. Perfect pitch is a form of memory, the ability to remember pitches, and most professional musicians, including singers and composers (indeed most great composers), do not have it – it develops in early infancy if it develops at all. Corks, so gifted and so attractive, was fated to deteriorate catastrophically in his later years, when he became bloated with drink and almost disgustingly gross. I am pretty sure repressed homosexuality played a role in that development.
He decided to teach me differently from the way he had taught his pupils hitherto. Usually, after learning to read the notes, they went on to learn the different keys, and used these in the most elementary way possible at first, by playing scales, and then learnt how to move from one to another. After that they graduated to short and simple pieces, and developed steadily upwards from there. Notoriously, though, beginners found playing scales boring. Scales are not music. The pupil might be learning the relationships between the keys, and their written signatures, and developing the requisite suppleness in his hands, and being introduced to the basics of fingering – and all this was essential – but he was not getting any music. This made the endless repetition of scales mind-numbing, and many people were so put off at this early stage that they dropped out altogether. This now led Corks to decide, without having thought it through, that scales could be dispensed with. He saw no reason why a pupil should not begin straight away on simple pieces, and learn to read music – and familiarise himself with the different keys – through playing those. Such a pupil would proceed slowly, of course, and it would take time, but the process as a whole would be much more interesting, because he would be playing music, real music, from the beginning.
In my first lesson Corks explained to me that this was what he was going to do. He took up the score of Schumann’s Album for the Young and played the first few pieces. Then he played the first again, two or three times, with a running commentary. Then he told me to take it away and practise it for the following week’s lesson. Daily I went to the Music School, which contained a dozen or more practice rooms with pianos, and struggled through the piece. At first I had to locate each printed note on the keyboard. Then I had to make my two hands play together. It was an agonisingly slow process. But because it was so slow, and because the piece was so short, by the time I had struggled through to the end of it I knew it by heart. After that I played it over and over, trying to reduce the number of mistakes, and to achieve an even tempo, and then to get this tempo up to a proper speed; but never again after that first time was I reading the printed music. This was to set the pattern for all my subsequent work with Corks. The pieces got harder and longer, but my capacity to remember them developed with practice, and in every case the process of working my way through a piece for the first time lodged it in my head, and after that I was playing it from memory. The playing itself became quite good, and when I had been learning for three or four years I won a school prize for piano-playing; yet I never became even a minimally good sight-reader; I had no technique, and at that stage I had scarcely any understanding of the relationship between the keys. All I was learning to do was to play from memory the individual pieces: I acquired no other skill. It was something I could have taught myself with no tuition at all. Corks, full of weak good intentions, behaved irresponsibly with me: he had given no systematic consideration either to what he was doing or what the consequences of it would be. In later years, after I left school, I launched into the study of composition, and that was made unnecessarily difficult for me by the fact that I had never learnt properly to sight-read at the keyboard.
Corks and I spent a lot of our time simply talking about music. His interests were wide, but his love of Elgar knew no bounds. Elgar, he asserted, was as great a composer as Beethoven. When I said the polite equivalent of ‘Aw, come off it,’ his reply was that we should judge a composer by his greatest work, and Beethoven never wrote anything better than The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar, said Corks, composed only a handful of things on that level, and Beethoven many, but the level was just as high. This view, coming on top of my father’s love of Elgar (and particularly The Dream of Gerontius), made me familiar with the idea of Elgar as a great composer. I never took the patronising attitude towards his music that was common at that time; in fact from my teens onwards he became a special love of mine.
Corks played piano pieces to me by widely differing composers, pointing out things about them that I would not have noticed for myself. I have remembered some of his performances: the last movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, for instance; and Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Study; in both cases it was the first time I heard them. He gave a hilarious rendition of the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser in which, while his left hand intoned the Pilgrim’s Chorus with po-faced solemnity, his right suddenly darted out and seized a hearth brush lying within reach and started crazily whacking the upper part of the keyboard in simulation of the violin accompaniment. Because of my passion for Wagner he invited me one evening to his study to listen to a broadcast by Kirsten Flagstad. He lent me the first of the innumerable biographies of Wagner that I have read – and also, naturally, a biography of Elgar.
Another music master, Philip Dore, arrived at my house as the junior housemaster, and I saw him constantly. During the holidays he earned large sums of money by playing one of the seafront organs at Blackpool, from which he also broadcast on BBC radio – his signature tune was ‘Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside!’ – and this gave him kudos with the boys. He was a good musician, and was the first to record the complete organ sonatas of Mendelssohn. Short, very fat, very jolly, he was just the right sort of person to have around boys. At that time there was a popular song whose words went (they had to be sung in an old-style black American accent; and I quote them from memory):
Mr Five-by-five
He’s as tall as he’s wide
He don’t measure no more
From his head to the floor
; Than he do from side to side
and this led to Dore being nicknamed Mr Five-by-five. This was then shortened to Five – and then, because of our propensity to say things in German, Fünf. (One of our jokes was: ‘What comes between fear and sex?’ and the answer was ‘Fünf.’)
In Big School there was a beautiful early-nineteenth-century organ that had been brought to Sussex from the school in London, and whenever Five wanted to get into practice for one of his Blackpool appearances he would take a group of us up to its loft and give us a recital of popular songs. He always began with his signature tune, which he would launch into with terrific brio, instant swing that made my skin jump into goose pimples; and while playing it he would turn his face back over his shoulder and beam at us with his great big bespectacled features, just as he was going to do with his audience in Blackpool: he was rehearsing his beaming as well as his playing. I was so transported by these sessions that I was seduced into playing that organ myself when no one else was around. It was a mad thing to do, because it was strictly against the rules for any boy to touch the organ without permission, and sooner or later I was bound to be heard. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time. Unluckily for me, the person who heard me was the one who cared most about the organ, the head of the music department, Dr Lang. He summoned me to his study and gave me six of the best – the only time I was given the full six in all my years at Christ’s Hospital – and it hurt more than I would have believed possible. He was one of the two or three masters who were notorious for perceptibly getting an erection when they beat a boy, and he laid it on with a kind of mad ferociousness.