in manner, tentative and fey, was having some success in London with his painting and was working towards an exhibition: ‘I have to finish many paintings to let the Grosvenor Gallery choose in September for the November exhibition. Unfortunately they take a long time to dry and I will need to have them finished,’ he wrote to me (on 9 August 1966). His sister, Saxon, who had never been to Europe before, was about to arrive from Australia: she would be accompanied by a girlfriend, who I think was called Diana. They arrived, Saxon a rollicking, large, good-looking blonde and Diana, petite and more mysterious. They immediately bought a Jaguar car and drove around London in whichever gear they managed to find: accustomed only to automatic transmission, they did not know, until I showed them, that you had to change gear. Without meaning to be, they were both in their own way completely and bombastically outrageous, and they had not been very long in London before they found themselves – on account of a mishap in an antique shop – in Marylebone Magistrates Court. Michael was offered the loan of a flat in Paris (84 Boulevard Rochechouart – my mother wrote to me there) and a plan was made for Saxon and Diana to drive over to stay with him, bringing me with them. And that is what happened.
On the trip over, when I mentioned that I hoped to go to Morocco, they thought that a wonderful idea and immediately offered to drive me there. They had no notion where any place was but, in the event, they returned to London in their Jaguar and I set off for Morocco on my own. A year later, Michael being away, his friend Peter Feuchtwanger invited me to stay in Rutland Mews until I found some place of my own. Peter was German, and a classical pianist and composer. He was obsessively devoted to the memory of the great Romanian pianist Clara Haskill (d.1960), and had composed a work for violin and sitar for Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. At the time I was staying with him he was composing the music for a ballet to be staged at Covent Garden and, by way of preparation, had been allocated complimentary seats for every ballet performance. This meant ballet two or three nights a week; and on several nights, he took me with him: a car collected us and we sat in the stalls. I saw Monica Mason, Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley in new ballets by Kenneth MacMillan but alas, I did not see Fonteyn and Nureyev. But the real treat came after the performances. Peter, taking me with him, went backstage to chat with the dancers in their dressing rooms, as they removed all those bandages from their exhausted feet. At Trinity, I hardly dared enter the doors of the Players Theatre, much less talk to any of the student-actors; but backstage at Covent Garden with Peter I managed to take it in my stride. A year or so after I wrote this memory, I came upon Peter’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph (28 June 2016). He had recently died aged 85. He was described as ‘the go-to teacher for many of the world’s leading concert pianists, among them Shura Cherkassky, Martha Argerich, and David Helfgott; but he himself had given up performing when he was only 20’. With sadness, and regret that I had not revived my friendship with him in my adult life, I read with some surprise ‘he is survived by his partner, the artist, Michael Garady’.
After about two months of working long hours, I would set off on my travels with the money I had saved. Hitchhiking was quite normal in those days before motorways, and some well-publicised incidents – murder, mainly – made it less attractive. Youth hostels were popular. Students from all over Europe criss-crossed France, Spain and Italy, eating sparsely, dossing down and making friendships along the way. I never encountered drugs or even excessive drinking, and my most threatening experiences (at least that I remember) involved a short-haired young woman in a Renault Dauphine who gave me a lift near Besançon, and a plump baker doing his deliveries in a van among the hills above Nice. Using the French verb profiter, they both immediately made it clear that, as they had never met an Irishman before, they would very much like to ‘profit’ by meeting one then.
I would generally stay for a week or so in Paris – finding a cheap hotel in the hinterland of St Michel – and then set off. The first year, my goal was Switzerland, where a friend from school and Trinity, Walter Lewis, was working in an hotel. I hitchhiked there, seeing the Romanesque Abbey church at Vézelay and the Well of Moses at Dijon – as well as getting sunstroke by the lake in Lausanne – on the way. Walter’s boss gave him very little time off, so I did not stay long, and then hitchhiked down to Milan. I don’t recall going to see Leonardo’s Last Supper but I do remember a Jehovah’s Witness who tried to interest me as I lingered in front of the Duomo. I got to Florence, which I was determined to do. A postcard to my mother: ‘At last, I got here. It is absolutely beautiful & mad hot. I have got rid of the friend, thank goodness’ (presumably someone I had been hitch-hiking with) ‘and am thoroughly enjoying it all now. The youth hostel here is like a mansion, with beautiful ceilings and frescoes.’ My Aunt Isa1 had told me about Michelangelo’s David: she had been reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, the biography of Michelangelo by Irving Stone, and she made her description of the carving of the David so vivid that I absolutely had to see it.
I hitchhiked back by way of Pisa – ‘eating lots of spaghetti & enjoying myself’, according to a postcard to my mother (1 August 1963) – and the French Riviera, in Nice sleeping in an abandoned car that I found somewhere to the east of the port, and then it was back to Paris, staying for a few days with the Chassines on the way.
The following year, I went directly to Nice. I sent my mother a postcard from Vichy:
I am hitchhiking to Nice. I got one lift last night to here – 150 miles and very good. I arrived at 12 midnight having left Paris at 5.30. Altogether about 250 miles. This is a spa town like Bath only not as beautiful. My address in Nice is c/o Cooks, 5 Promenade des Anglais.
In Paris I had made friends with a very droll Swedish student of psychology who was touring by car with his uncle; but, in a very Swedish way, the uncle was three years younger than the nephew, Lars. This is a friendship that has lasted to this day, almost fifty years. Lars and I still keep in contact and over the decades he has visited me many times and in many places, and I have stayed with him on several occasions in Stockholm. Lars Fimmerstad became a noted humorous columnist on the leading Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet. Two years after meeting, we decided to combine our student summer travels and met in Rome. We stayed there for about two or three weeks, ravenously visiting every museum and church, studying the stones in the Forum and on the Appian Way, eating frugally, going to Aïda at the Baths of Caracalla, and generally having a lot of fun.
Of the relatively few of my letters which my mother saved, I have one or two from this time. ‘We went to the opera one night in the open air,' I wrote (29 July 1967). ‘It was just fantastic. Absolutely huge, with almost a thousand people on stage at any one time. They also had carriages drawn by four white horses. In another scene, there were camels. It really was a marvellous night.’
Lars is someone who sees humour in almost any situation, interpreting things with the eye of a psychologist – and a Swedish psychologist at that – so that events which on the surface appear dull become immediately entertaining. He deploys a similar approach with people. To my young Irish eyes and ears – he speaks with a perfect Oxford accent, with only occasional lapses of grammar and syntax – he often seemed totally absurd but that – as a general rule – made him very amusing company indeed. I wrote to my mother (19 July 1967): ‘Lars, the Swede, is getting a bit on my nerves – but then who wouldn’t? He tends to be a bit old-fashioned and refuses to sit beside people on the buses. Another thing, he wants to talk all the time, and I get fed up of that.’ After Rome, we hitchhiked to Naples, saw the sights and visited Pompeii, and then took the overnight ferry – sleeping on the deck – to Palermo in Sicily, where we stayed, mainly in the seaside town of Cefalù but also in Taormina.
‘It really is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in,’ I informed my mother (27 July 1967). ‘Yesterday we saw smoke coming out of Etna. The village is high up, built into a cliff, and you get a bus down the cliff to the sea – which is very, very clear and deep. We will probably stay here until early next week and then go back to Rome. We have seen a tremendous amount.’
From Sicily, we went back to Rome. A postcard (dated 2 August 1967) of the Temple of Aesculapius in the Borghese Gardens to my mother:
