Growing Up In a War (34 page)

His special gift as a speaker was to be dramatic without being phoney. He pictorialised: whatever he was talking about, he gave you a picture of it, painted in clear, bold colours, though not unsubtle. His wording was economical, so his thoughts must have moved fast. And the logic was good – it was rare for him to say something that was not reasonably arguable. But as with all truly great speakers, the key to his success lay in a highly distinctive personality which conveyed itself to his audience in everything he said, but is not itself conveyable in words. He was charismatic. Instinctively, he had all the gifts of timing and phrasing, pausing and pacing, contrast. He would play his speeches off his audience, perceptive of their reactions, responding to them instant by instant. What he said had plenty of substance always: his comments on current affairs, about which he was well informed, rested on an additional foundation of reflection and reading, solidly acquired. The whole was pervaded by sharp humour, so that although serious in argument it was entertaining, and one
stood
listening in a state of chuckling delight. It was normal for him to have an audience of some hundreds, always the biggest in the park.

As I came more fully to understand years later, when I acquired his library and read through the comments he had written in the margins of his books over many years, he had slowly formed a classical socialist outlook, pondered with unusual intelligence, thus equipping himself with an ideology that could explain everything. This meant he could apply it to anything that happened; and he did this with great brilliance, making clever and illuminating comments about whatever occurred – comments which always, however spontaneous, fitted in with his larger world view. These practical applications of an underlying outlook were the speeches I was hearing on Sunday after Sunday. Their staple consisted of criticisms of existing society and its current affairs. But of special interest to me were his attacks on other left-wing viewpoints that put themselves forward as alternatives to his own. He saw the Labour Party and the trade unions as too complicitly involved in the society they were claiming to be critics of, always running with the hare while hunting with the hounds, compromised at every turn. On the communists he was both withering and devastating: the gulf between the Marxist theory which they espoused and the nightmare social reality of Soviet Russia, which they invariably and abjectly defended, was unbridgeable, and all the evidence of their behaviour ought to warn us that if communists were to come to power in any other country they would implement not Marx’s theory but Stalin’s practice. Their conduct in non-communist countries was marked by a breathtaking lack of principle: for instance the Communist Party of Great Britain here at Speakers’ Corner had passionately opposed the war against Hitler – in reality, of course, because Hitler was an ally of Stalin, but ostensibly because the war was between capitalist states, and therefore one in which the workers had no
interest
– until the Germans invaded Russia, whereupon they somersaulted overnight and became passionate supporters of the war, saying it was a people’s crusade against fascism. The consistent cynicism with which they conducted all their affairs provided him with endless material for his savage but wonderful humour. And he had equally little difficulty picking off the remaining leftwing parties – the Trotskyists, the anarchists and the rest. His words had a cutting edge all the sharper for the fact that speakers for those parties, and crowds of their supporters, were only a few yards away.

His positive message was milk-of-the-word socialism, such as the other left-wing parties claimed to believe in but showed by their actions that they did not. The underlying theory was a fusion of Marxism and democracy, arrived at from the writings of Marx himself as a starting point but then as criticised by the philosophical anarchists, and after that reconstructed by the so-called revisionists. There is a body of literature there that constitutes a rich tradition of political thought, one that has had a much greater influence on the continent of Europe than in the English-speaking world. For me at that age it was the perfect brew. I did not, needless to say, read any of the books on which it was based, but through Tony Turner their influence fed into a political outlook that was forming itself from different sources – of which the most important was my father. And to hear it articulated week after week with such charismatic brilliance came close to being an orgastic experience for me. I continued to believe something like it until disenchantment set in at university. Until then I too found, as I thought, that it enabled me to understand everything, and gave me clever answers to all the criticisms I encountered. Being outside the Labour Party and to its left I could easily be mistaken unthinkingly for a communist, but in fact I was fiercely anticommunist. At that time there were a number of anti-communist socialists who were more famous than Tony Turner, but I did not
as
yet have the same acquaintance with them – people like Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler.

Tony lost his faith in socialism during the post-war years, and by the end of the 1950s had ceased to believe in it altogether. The whole belief system, he then told me, came to seem to him like a gigantic work of art, or like a religion: glitteringly attractive to contemplate, inspirational, huge in scale, seriously thought through, full of good ideas and penetrating insights which all connected up with one another, marvellous in its ability to meet our emotional needs, brimming with life – and the whole thing an illusion. Although he had thought of himself as anti-religious when he believed in socialism, it now seemed to him a religion substitute, and he sometimes referred to that period of his life as his religious period.

My father would often come to Speakers’ Corner with me. He and I were close companions now. He delighted in introducing me to new things of every kind – new venues of art and entertainment, new sports and games, new cafés, restaurants, shops. ‘Don’t you know this one? Oh, you must have a look at this one. Let’s go in, shall we?’ He would wander into men’s clothing shops and examine their wares with professional interest, explaining their points to me as he did so. Even if he came out without buying anything he had usually charmed one of the staff in the process. We watched billiards and snooker at Thurston’s Hall in Leicester Square, and cricket at Lord’s. Those were years of legendary English cricket players, against equally legendary visitors from Australia, and it gave me warm, huggy pleasure to watch them. All sorts of things that are boring to me now, from cricket to ballet, excited me in my teens, when they were part of a new world opening up around me. One way in which my father’s policy of introducing me to as many different things as possible paid off was that not only did I discover and pursue those interests that were to become lifelong passions, I also found out about a lot of
other
things too, with a curiosity which, although it turned out to be more short-lived, was genuine as far as it went, and extended my horizons.

He taught me things about the life of the streets that I would not have known at that age – how to deal with traders of all kinds without being taken in, and what the commonest deceptions were. He explained to me how pickpockets operated – Hoxton had always been the best-known base of the whizz mob, as they were called, and he must have known some of them personally. He explained not only these low-level scams, but also the stings used by confidence men, and these fascinated me. At the races we stood watching the three-card trick, and he pointed out in whispers how it was being worked not only by the man with the cards but by associates of his in the crowd – he would identify them and explain what they were doing. His normal phrase for a truly silly fellow, a ninny, a gull, was: ‘He’d fall for the three-card trick.’ One of his lessons to me was: ‘Never, ever assume you can get the better of any of these people just because you know what they’re up to. Those who think like that are the biggest mugs of all. [‘Mug’ here meant victim or target, not fool.] If you imagine the whizz mob can’t whizz you because you know their tricks, you’re a sitting duck. Mugs are set up by their own complacency.’

One of the most useful things he taught me was how to get in to public events that were full up, or at any rate sold out. ‘If you’re turned away at the door, find another door – there has to be one, like a stage door or a players’ entrance, that people use who work there. There’ll probably be a bloke on duty there. Talk to him nicely, and tell him you’ve tried to buy a ticket, and give him a couple of bob. Usually he’ll let you in, and show you where you can stand. Often he’ll show you to an empty seat. If there’s no one at that door, walk through it as if it’s normal for you to be there – as if you’re somebody’s son who works there, say, and you’re used to coming. You won’t be challenged, normally. If you
are,
just pretend you’ve made a mistake. But be nice about it, as if you really have made a mistake. Don’t bluster. Half the time they’ll say: “Oh, all right then, go on through.” And you’re in.’ I did these things many times, for a long while only with him, but later, when I had gained confidence, by myself. He never encouraged me to try to get in to things for nothing. It was a point of honour with him to try first to buy tickets. But if he could not get them, it became equally a point of honour to get in regardless of that fact. He would always tip whoever helped him, and was prepared to pay as much as he would have paid for tickets. I never knew him fail. This goes a long way to explain how it is that so many of the outstanding events of those years in London, by way of championships and star performances, were part of my experience of growing up.

The first Promenade concerts he took me to were still being conducted by Sir Henry Wood, their founder – and incidentally the conductor on my recording of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. Nearly all the works I heard at any concert then, I was hearing for the first time. This is an aspect of my life during those years whose magic is unrecapturable, the fact that I was doing so many of the most enjoyable things in life for the first time – hearing the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and other great symphonists; seeing the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen and the rest. If I could live one period again it would be that, the discovery of all those incredible things within such a short space of time. The world was astounding, the discovery of it thrilling. The first time I heard the Brahms Violin Concerto, played at a Prom by Ida Haendel, I was enraptured beyond the power of speech to describe. I had been hearing the violin all my life, but I had never known it could sound like that. When I first heard Brahms’s Third Symphony I was chilled with gooseflesh from the first bars, my hair prickling up all over my scalp. Performance after performance was a seismic shift in my being. And then, always to come,
was
the excitement of hearing these works for a second time. As for the third, that was in some ways the best of all, because you knew the work well enough by now to get more out of it, yet it was not familiar. Often it was during that third performance that a work
became
familiar, was ingested. With many of them – the
Eroica
is an example – it was the third performance that was the blockbusting experience, and remains the memory.

One of the great things about the Proms was the breadth of repertoire, ideal for a newcomer like me. It seemed I could hear everything. Outside the Proms, concert life was narrow. What had been London’s only concert hall, the Queen’s Hall, had been destroyed in the Blitz, so symphony concerts had to take place in ad hoc venues, the chief being the Albert Hall and two of the West End’s theatres, the Cambridge and the Phoenix. Because rehearsal time was expensive, and in order to bring in audiences, the same popular classics were played over and over again – by the same artists, too. No foreign artists were able to come to Britain during the war, so we heard the same handful of conductors and instrumentalists. Since both Beecham and Barbirolli were in the USA, the only ‘great’ conductor on the London scene was Adrian Boult. Luckily, he was a good all-rounder, trained to be so by working as the BBC’s all-purpose conductor – though as good at Brahms as anyone; and Brahms was my favourite symphonic composer. The outstanding pianists were Solomon and Moiseiwitsch: I first heard most of the popular piano concertos played by one or the other. I became a particular fan of Moiseiwitsch. He excelled not only in the classical repertoire but also, indeed especially, in the big romantic concertos. Rachmaninov himself had said that Moiseiwitsch played his piano music better than anyone else. He had a sourpuss demeanour at the keyboard, but his playing was huge in romantic expression. This was true also of Rachmaninov, incidentally, who I used to see on cinema newsreels.

A surprising number of individual concerts remain in my memory. At one, the programme consisted of Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
overture, Liszt’s First Piano Concerto and Sibelius’s First Symphony. I had never heard any of these before, and the first and last made indelible impressions, though in different ways. The Tchaikovsky contained one of the most sumptuously beautiful tunes I had ever heard; yet it was the Sibelius which, as it were, changed my life. It started quietly, as if groping for a tune, but then suddenly pulled the cord tight and started to pour out intense, compelling musical utterance, as if addressing me personally. It was as if I had suddenly discovered my own musical voice. If I had been a great composer, I thought, this was how I would compose. From that day I became an addicted lover of Sibelius’s music. He seems to me among the greatest of composers, and his music has talked to me in this way ever since.

It was at the Proms that I heard most of the core repertoire for the first time – and then again for the second, and the third. There were rarities at the Proms too, and a great many first performances. I saw several of the leading British composers conduct their own music, for instance Vaughan Williams, William Walton and E.J. Moeran (whose neglected G minor Symphony is a beautiful work). Monday night, by tradition, was Wagner night, when bleeding chunks were torn from the carcasses of Wagner’s operas (which were not themselves staged in Britain during the war) and served up as concert items, sometimes for a whole programme, though more often for half of it. I knew by heart those excerpts that my father had recordings of, but the others I had never heard at all. One such concert ended with Eva Turner singing the closing scene of
Götterdämmerung
. I stood enraptured, and afterwards remembered every moment of the performance, hyper-vividly, yet I never knew what happened between the end of the music and finding myself, more than half an hour later, in Piccadilly Circus, nearly two miles away. I must have walked out
of
that concert in a complete daze: gone, sent, zonked: and instead of getting on the tube at Knightsbridge gone on walking – past, unnoticing, additional tube stations at Hyde Park Corner and Green Park. When my awareness of myself returned I was in Piccadilly Circus, gaping round like a man torn from a dream, with no idea why I was there or how I had got there.