and the Harrington Pavilion was soon ablaze with rock shows.
BY THE TIME I hit double figures my brother Julian was becoming a star on his half-size cello. The word “prodigy” was bellowed above the traffic din at 10 Harrington Court and unsurprisingly Mum’s main interest switched to my younger sibling. Notwithstanding this, we both entered the Saturday morning junior school at the Royal College of Music, me toting my shiny french horn.
But, as far as Mum was concerned, I was at best a conundrum and so she gave up on my academic career and, buoyed by events at the school concert, I gave up on it too. Thoughts of my being the youngest ever Queen’s Scholar at Westminster Great (i.e. senior) School evaporated. I wasn’t even entered for the scholarship exam called “the Challenge.” Mum’s sole consolation prize was that I entered Westminster aged twelve, a full year earlier than usual. Meantime I was getting closer and closer to my deliciously naughty Aunt Vi.
1. A uniquely British theatre entertainment for families that goes back to the nineteenth century, its appeal is wholly inexplicable to non-Brits.
2. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Williamson Music was represented by Teddy Holmes at Chappell’s. As well as being Rodgers and Hammerstein’s publisher, he was also my father’s.
A quick reminder. Auntie Vi was mother Jean’s elder sister. She married Dr George Crosby, the dumpy somewhat pompous doctor for whom Granny Molly had once worked as a secretary. Vi called him “Potto” which was really rather appropriate. That glorious word “panjandrum” could have been invented for him. Vi and George plus a marmalade cat named Cooper lived in a top-floor flat in Weymouth Street above his medical practice, close enough to the centre of London’s medical hub Harley Street, but the location was cheaper and actually rather nicer. I used to escape there as often as possible. The flat or maisonette, as George puffed it up – seemed impossibly glamorous (my aunt would have said “chi-chi”) after the seldom cleaned haven for traffic noise addicts that was Harrington Court.
There was an upstairs drawing room which had been knocked into the room next door by means of an ever so “chi-chi” arch. Therein lurked a stereo record player on which Auntie played those Fifties Latin American records which showed off the marvels of stereo with question-and- answer bongo solos panned left and right only. There was a dining room with a bar underneath and a wine rack containing George’s collection of Barolo. Up to that time the only wine bottles I had seen had candles in them. There was Vi’s kitchen where there were herbs, onions, garlic and wine and where she cooked her recipes for the modern woman. In 1956 she had written and had published a hit recipe book The Hostess Cooks, under her maiden name Viola Johnstone. Its premise was that in the Fifties no one could afford home help any more. The recipes were designed so that our hostess could emerge from the stoves, mascara intact, to entertain out front as if an army of sous chefs had been slaving since dawn and she had had a decent post-lunch siesta. It was a far cry from the over-boiled brussels sprouts of Harrington Court.
Then there were Vi’s friends. There was Tony Hancock of TV’s iconic Hancock’s Half Hour sitcom. Vi introduced me to him in his flat where he was teaching a parrot to say “Fuck Mrs Warren.” Mrs Warren was his cleaner – whom he loathed – so he had embarked on a strategy to get her to quit. She didn’t. Auntie told me that one day the parrot mysteriously cried, “Hancock has no bollocks.”
There was film director Ronald Neame who had been David Lean’s legendary cameraman on classic British movies like Great Expectations. One day I was to work with him on The Odessa File. There was Val Guest and his glamorous actress wife Yolande Donlan. I was in total awe of her as she was the lead in the movie Expresso Bongo with Cliff Richard. Ballet nuts might be intrigued to know that the rock’n’roll sequences in this epic were choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, another name who would cross my professional path. A few years later, Val discovered Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C. It was Val who created the iconic image of Miss Welch in a doe-skin bikini which he used as his Christmas card. I’ve still got mine.
Finally there was Vida Hope, the theatre director who had a huge hit with The Boy Friend, one of the few Fifties British musicals to hoof it to Broadway. Julie Andrews was the young lead and it was in The Boy Friend that she was headhunted for My Fair Lady. I remember Vida railing passionately against a Broadway musical she had just seen. “A nauseating show with a fifty-five-year-old woman pretending to be an eighteen-year-old nun, plus a load of saccharin cute children.” She was referring, of course, to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music.
It’s hard today to understand just how low the reputation of Rodgers and Hammerstein had sunk in the eyes of the British intelligentsia. I still remember the father of a school friend thinking I was a congenital idiot for loving the “sentimental twaddle” called Carousel. He collected cuttings of ghastly reviews and with great pleasure showed me one by John Barber describing the show as “treacle.” Of course I was taken to The Boy Friend and frankly I’m still agnostic about it. It was yet another nostalgic British musical burying itself in the sand against the tide of rock’n’roll. However it was a lot better than Salad Days. I was dragged to this concoction by my godmother Mabel, who disowned me after Perseus the cat destroyed a fox fur stole she left in my care when she was dining with Granny. I remember thinking that if ever I worked in the theatre Salad Days was the sort of show I had to eliminate.
THE ATMOSPHERE AT 28 Weymouth Street was everything home wasn’t. Aunt Vi had a real eye for interior design, two words my parents hadn’t heard of. And it was Vi who taught me to cook. In the process I learned a few choice bon mots that hardly any boys of my age knew, let alone understood. However what really forced me into Auntie Vi’s not inconsiderable bosom was Mum’s latest obsession which affected the family deeply. Certainly the family was never the same again. Its name was John Lill.
John Lill was sixteen years old and Julian only nine when they met at the Saturday junior school of the Royal College of Music. John Lill was the school’s star concert pianist and destined to be the first Brit to win the Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow. Although Julian was seven years John’s junior, somehow they had become friendly enough for Julian to ask him back to Harrington Court where John met Mum. It was a meeting that was to change all our lives. It’s easy to understand why John plus his back story so grabbed Mum. John Lill was born into a working-class family who lived in the then run-down deprived northeast London suburb of Leyton in one of those slum houses that today sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, such is London’s housing crisis. John was selected for the local grammar school but it was at the piano that he excelled. He won a scholarship to the junior Royal College and scraped together his train fares there by playing pub piano in one of the East End’s tougher bars. The owner would introduce John with gems like:
“Do you know your balls are hanging out?”
To which John would reply, “No, but sing the tune and I’ll vamp.”
At last here was the young musical genius Mum had been looking for. Better still, from a background that salved Mum’s conscience big time about hours spent teaching privileged brats at the Wetherby School. Soon Mum was driving John back to Leyton from college and had befriended his parents. Before long Julian and I found ourselves in Leyton to see for ourselves John’s family terraced house “in the slums” as Mum unmincingly chose her words.
There was another life-changing consequence to all this. Whilst Mum was up to good deeds, Julian and I were let loose on the streets of Leyton and we soon discovered the local football team, London’s “Cinderella” soccer club Leyton Orient. Although for one brief season the O’s did reach English soccer’s top flight, we Orient supporters are a small bunch unsullied by
