of Fine Art at Oxford University. John was the first person to introduce me to the great Victorian architects and, together with my increasingly inseparable friend Gray Watson, I began combing Britain for Victorian churches.
By my second year in College there were few parts of London I didn’t know. My architectural crawls took me to parts of Britain’s cities that I suspect very few of my Westminster contemporaries saw. Most of the finest Victorian churches were built as mission bases from which to scupper Satan’s enticements to the defenceless poor. So I got into some near misses with local youths who did not take kindly to an effeminate boy in a smart school suit clutching poncy architectural guidebooks. As a result I discovered I wasn’t totally unathletic. I could run.
By the time I left school I had a pretty fair knowledge of at least a dozen British cities. This was the era of mass demolition of housing deemed uninhabitable, for which read housing of a human scale. It was the 1960s that saw the brutal creation of urban roads that swathed through Britain’s town centres thanks to the new planning mantra that separated pedestrians from God the car. Everywhere there was an orgy of government-inspired destruction that ripped the heart out of Britain’s cities far more effectively than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever did. Of course Victorian buildings, being considered the runt of all architecture, were top of the list for the wrecker’s ball, theatres being particular targets. I remember lying down in Pall Mall with a group of my aunt’s friends in vain protest at the demolition of London’s gorgeous St James Theatre. The preservation of Britain’s most vulnerable architecture became a lifelong passion.
The other plus was the arguments with Granny. Gray Watson and a group of us College boys salivated over hopping on the underground to Harrington Court where we berated the co-founder of the Christian Communist Party with our ever more right-wing, ludicrously politically incorrect views. She secretly loved it, of course. I began to discover increasing depths to this remarkable woman. She confided about her bohemian open house in Harrow and that her sister Ella’s greasy spoon for truck drivers was called Jock’s Box. Was she beginning to see in me a glimmer of her own son so tragically taken from her when he had barely left school?
However there was one thing she didn’t notice. Harrington Court was becoming so dirty and scruffy that it was becoming embarrassing to ask friends home.
IN THE WINTER OF 1963 my new-found role as ace pop songwriter paid off big time. Or so I thought. A publisher at United Artists Music had sent a fistful of my efforts to an A&R chief at Decca Records called Charles Blackwell. Blackwell was a big cheese who steered top artists like P.J. Proby, the singer who provocatively split his trousers whilst performing in a cinema in Walthamstow to much tabloid shock horror. I witnessed this minor piece of rock history, having sneaked out of school one Saturday night. Unfortunately a photo of Proby, split trousers and audience with me in it (now lost), got into one of the rags but thankfully nobody at school saw it.
Blackwell decided to record one of my songs with a singer called Wes Sands. Wesley (real name Clive Sarstedt) was the brother of pre-Beatles-era singer Eden Kane (Richard Sarstedt) and of Peter Sarstedt who one day was to have a huge hit with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?,” a song Tim Rice at the time rechristened “Where Do You Go to My Ugly,” but now says he rather likes. Sarstedt, rather than Kane/Sands, was the real family name. The song Blackwell chose was called “Make Believe Love.” To top it all, I had written the lyrics. Modesty and common sense prohibit my reproducing the lyrics here. Suffice it to say I was certain that my career was off and running. I acquired a new agent, a thirtyish very camp publisher called Desmond Elliott. I was invited to the recording session. I could oversee the creation of my first runaway hit!
Unfortunately the new commander of the Westminster School Combined Cadet Force had other ideas. In those days kids at schools like Westminster were forced to become cadets in the army, navy or airforce. My military career started inauspiciously when I failed the army basic test. I was hauled up in front of the commander for sowing the seeds of mutiny. The basis for this false accusation was my answer to a question about what you did when under enemy fire and confronted by a closed gate. I opined that I would open it and proceed through it asap. This was apparently not what a cadet was supposed to do. It seemed you either burrowed underneath or vaulted over said gate. I pointed out that neither option would work in my case. In reply to the suggestion that I was unpatriotic and disloyal to Her Majesty the Queen, School and Country, I countered by suggesting that I composed a school cadet corps march that would kick “Land of Hope and Glory” into the long grass.
The commander either believed me or feared that my presence on the parade ground was fatally disruptive, even if hard to prove. For a year I got permission to swan around listening to military bands and inadvertently learned a lot about writing for brass instruments in the process. However the new school year yielded a new CCF commander and he was having none of this. Having heard, I think, on the school grapevine that I was having a song recorded, he ordered me away on an army field trip. I pleaded with him that this recording session was my big chance and he replied that school was not about being a pop songwriter. A taste of the army assault course at Aldershot was what I needed.
I was totally distraught. I was – I still am – paranoiac about the army and I was terrified out of my skull. I found my stock of aspirin and took an overdose. I woke to find a doctor’s face pressed close to mine demanding what the hell was I doing frightening my parents like this. I can’t tell you if it was a cry for help or whether I meant it. I don’t know.
A psychiatrist concluded that my paranoia about the army was genuine and, if not exactly an illness, mirrored a problem that also bedevilled my father. Apparently he had frozen during a military assessment when he was conscripted in the war. I will never know what else the report about me said but I do know it found that I had vertigo. I could have told them that. I once seized up completely when I was very small and made to stand on a box as a punishment. These days I get vertigo if I just stand up.
So my army days came to an inglorious halt. I got a dire warning from the Commanding Officer that the incident would go on my permanent record at MI5, thus scuppering any chance of a career in public life. But my wonderful housemaster Jim Woodhouse was sympathetic. So the end of 1963 saw me still hanging on to Westminster life, not kicked out as a misfit as a lot of schools would have done. The year end was a yawn. Robin Barrow had left so there was no Christmas show to compose. I got a few offers to be a pretty boy pianist at Desmond Elliott’s publisher friends’ Christmas parties and earned a few quid and the sort of tweak of the bottom that might aggravate Taylor Swift. 1963 may well have been the year The Beatles saw and conquered, but for me it was like the French wine vintage. A whiter shade of something that didn’t taste very nice in the first place.
IT WAS WINE THAT ushered in my 1964 with a cock-up that could have put paid to my Westminster career big time. Auntie Vi knew a wine merchant and I was allowed to coat-tail onto a tasting of 1961 clarets. 1963 may have been for both French wine growers and myself an “année de pissoir” but 1961 was hailed as the reason people bother to grow grapes. The wine tasted and looked like ink to me, but I was firmly told that in 50 years’ time things would be different and that the ink would probably outlive me. So with my Christmas party earnings I forked out on a couple of cases of Château Palmer. This apparently was the bargain of the vintage, a wine from a lesser-known château that had punched beyond its weight. Wine bores will confirm that Vi’s wine merchant knew what he was salivating about.
The snag was that instead of delivering the stuff to my parents’ flat it somehow got delivered to Westminster School. Since alcohol and smoking were offences punishable by expulsion, I assumed that my teatime summons to the study of John Carleton the headmaster meant the end was nigh. I explained what had happened: that no sane person would drink this wine for decades and it had simply gone to the wrong place. The headmaster asked me rather too pointedly if I liked wine. I couldn’t lie. I simply said that my uncle collected Italian wine and, yes, I had tasted the odd glass of his best and, yes, I did like it. The headmaster thought for a moment and then ordered me to come back and see him
