‘His speaking voice was rather flat, the accent indeterminate, his laughter rather ponderous, and much of his musical talk was above my head. Somehow the occasion was lifeless, for although his kindness was apparent, dutiful, impersonal, it was difficult to feel anything at all.’ Then, sitting side by side at the piano, he improvised a theme and invited her to join in. Her earliest love for the piano had come from improvising for hours on end, so she added a second subject. And that was the closest she remembered ever getting to her father. An old man and a young girl at a keyboard, tapping at the notes.
My mother aged fifteen, photographed at the Booth country house near Funtington.
Edwin Evans had no intention of marrying Ray Litvin, or even of seeing her again. He’d give her an allowance of some kind but, as he told his daughter when they said goodbye, he’d arrange everything through a solicitor. There was no need for her to come again.
Years later, Mum happened to perform in a concert conducted by Eugene Goossens. He looked at her speculatively across a dining-room table while he ran through a mental list of Edwin Evans’ mistresses. Finally: ‘Oh, now I remember! You must be the daughter of the Russian woman!’ One of the many was the implication.
My grandfather died ten days before I was born, so I never knew him.
Mum told me years later that she felt very little when her father died, and she’d had to piece together everything she knew about him after his death by talking to composers who felt indebted to him. Francis Poulenc, for instance, whom she met in Paris in the late Forties. He told her many stories about Evans, but she did not write them down, and when I asked her about them, she’d forgotten. Igor Stravinsky told her that Evans was the critic who in 1913 had insisted on the first performance of The Rite of Spring in London, for which he was very grateful. He gave Mum a copy of a photo from his family album showing her father standing on a veranda in the South of France with Diaghilev and Picasso.
Stravinsky told her that Evans had been with him in a taxi in Paris when he’d found the solution to the last pages of Les Noces. He’d been working at it for months and he couldn’t think of a way of ending it – four soloists, four pianos and a choir, a devastating piece. Then he and Evans happened to be travelling past the cathedral of Notre-Dame one Sunday morning when all the bells started ringing. Stravinsky stopped the cab and wrote down the deafening notes as dictation.
Among the photographs that my sister Lizzie and I inherited is a yellowed newspaper clipping showing our mother with Stravinsky in the streets of Salzburg in the late Sixties. Stravinsky walks with difficulty and she’s helping him. It’s a moving image, but it took me a long time to see why. Stravinsky is cheerfully tottering, and that’s understandable, because he’s ancient. Then I saw it. Mum’s body-language was unfamiliar. It was the affectionate willowy bending of a daughter towards a father.
On Saturday 7 September 1940, Natasha had lunch with a group of young architects in a flat overlooking the Thames somewhere to the east of the Houses of Parliament. They came out and walked along the Embankment. The air-raid siren started. They checked the nearest bomb shelter but it seemed dank and dirty. ‘Returning to lean on the parapet of the river, we gazed around us, when we suddenly caught sight in the east of a vast number of planes flying upstream from the estuary, and glinting in the sky like a shoal of silvery fish.’ They stared upwards without moving. In spite of warnings in the newspapers that the bombings were about to start, they had no fear. ‘One could not readily imagine at first that this was, as anticipated, the start of lethal enemy action on London, for in our leisured mood, the beauty of the day and of the gleaming, steadily advancing planes was almost hypnotic.’
Stephen at that time was living with his younger brother in the country. He rushed up to London to take charge. He decided she should move out. He took her to Oxford and called on Nevill Coghill, Auden’s former tutor. Coghill was an amateur musician and Natasha had already given a concert in Oxford, so he knew how she fitted in. Word went round. Within a few days Natasha was installed. The old Bechstein her father had given her was moved to a room above the Church of St Mary, opposite the Radcliffe Camera. It was a beautiful room to practise in, though the choir occasionally took it over for their own rehearsals.
In the early days of their courtship Stephen and Natasha did not live together, because my father did not want her to become roped into the divorce proceedings with Inez. They met once a week in London. Natasha would hitch a ride at the Headington roundabout outside Oxford. That roundabout became a symbol of the war: officers and soldiers and mechanics and students and professors – you never knew who’d be standing next to you or who’d offer you a lift. For twenty years after the war it was remembered with nostalgia as a moment when class faded, everyone was in it together, no place to sleep was a good place because all places could be bombed, so travel light.
The Blitz, at least in this early phase, was met with bravado. Once, under a bombardment, caught among a group of partygoers who refused to troop off to the shelter, Natasha was told, ‘play something lyrical’. So she played some Chopin waltzes – ‘Chopin, for heaven’s sake, which I almost never played!’ A couple of distinguished guests lurked under the piano, giggling and passing a bottle of champagne to each another, wondering if a grand piano would give them any protection if a bomb came through the roof.
Over the winter of 1940–1, Stephen and Natasha stayed for a fortnight with friends in an eighteenth-century house south-east from London, near Romney Marsh. Wooden poles had been raised against the German gliders that would come over in the expected invasion. The winter had turned cold and a heavy snowfall smothered the countryside. Everyone in the neighbourhood had relatives in the armed forces, but the snow had lightened the mood, for the enemy bombers were grounded. The house had a warm kitchen and a warm workroom and they ran from one to the other through freezing corridors. The whiteness was reflected on the ceilings; and outside, the shadows of low clouds skittered over undulating snow.
This was the first time that Stephen and Natasha had spent more than a day together. Stephen worked in the attic in his overcoat while Natasha studied the Schubert B flat posthumous sonata, ‘with its devout quality reflecting an atmosphere of laudate adoremus, in tune with the advent of Christmas’. After a few days, their hosts disappeared and they were left alone. The ‘Wittersham Interlude’, as my mother calls it in her memoir where it occupies a whole chapter, was an important moment in my parents’ lives. Each laid out the past for the benefit of the other.
Stephen kept thinking of the tattered members of the International Brigade who’d fought in Spain, friendless and badly equipped. He compared them with the British forces in North Africa, well trained, well armed and backed this time by an entire nation. This war was for England; but it was also a moral cause. ‘Stephen’s conviction [was] that all repressive despotism had to be opposed by decency and insisting on truth. He had seemed so mild when we first met, that coming to know his strong-minded refusal to acquiesce in any political coercion and lies was to recognise a centre which was steady, even steely, in his peaceable nature.’
My mother practising the Schubert B-Flat Sonata in the early years of the war.
They discovered that they both had feelings of guilt about the First World War. As she puts it in her memoir: ‘So many of our generation had felt guilty for having missed the first war and for our existence as burdensome, as somehow responsible for the sadness and privations of our parents.’ Natasha’s guilt perhaps had more to do with the fact that she was illegitimate, but she resisted this thought.
Although at the age of twenty-one on the Wittersham holiday I had long since found a robust, even amused acceptance, of such relics of childhood, there remained a lifelong, lingering feeling of apology towards my mother for her lonely years of adversity. I had never entertained untoward feelings about illegitimacy, for it was clear that there was no reason for me to feel responsible for that, despite my sympathy for her moments of embarrassment. But
I continued to feel a sorrowful indebtedness for the struggle she had bravely faced to support us both.
Stephen told her: ‘As very young children they had been appalled to feel their noisy play to be responsible for their mother’s bouts of illness, when she appeared looking over the banisters and declaiming, as Stephen said like Medea, “Now I know the sorrow of having borne children.” After her early death at the age of 42 they felt partly responsible for their father’s unhappiness, a burden they could not alleviate, and perhaps that they even had had a share in its origins.’ Stephen felt he’d rejected his father, towards whom he’d shown no sympathy after Violet died; but this took time to emerge. Years later, after I was born, Stephen told Natasha: ‘Our father must have been desolate after the death of our mother, and I don’t believe we gave him any comfort.’
At Wittersham, Stephen spoke openly about Tony and Inez. My mother summed up what he said in a simplification which has a certain truth, though I don’t believe it covers everything. He felt they’d failed, because he’d spent too much time working. ‘His devotion to his vocation in poetry was an unforgivable distraction – a sort of infidelity – for he was a transparently monogamous temperament.’ My mother cannot have found it easy to accept Tony and Inez, standing invisibly offstage throughout the Wittersham Interlude. But ‘monogamy’ was an admirable virtue. So was work.
He told her about his early years in Berlin with Christopher Isherwood and with his younger brother, Humphrey. She was prepared to forgive him. ‘He had lived his life in phases, and the earliest one of juvenile wild oats shared with Humphrey and with Christopher had in a few years been discarded like an animal shedding its skin. His monogamous devotion to Tony had foundered for reasons I well understood, and his latest disaster with Inez was to a union which had never been properly joined.’
Natasha told Stephen that his unsuccessful relationships with Tony and Inez were not his fault. ‘His assuming total responsibility for these failures was a far from wise interpretation, for Inez had been in a whirl of indecision, even on her wedding day, when she was still at Oxford.’ So, exit Inez. As for Tony: ‘The pattern of Tony’s restlessness had been lifelong.’
She told him: ‘From now on there is no question of blame. There is only us.’
‘I look back on that brief holiday as a time of exceptional élan in the feeling that we had dropped our childhood like unwanted luggage.’ They loved each other. Their guilts could be discarded. ‘The resolve I shared with Stephen to banish both self-blame and, in the future, any projecting of it upon each other, and to replace it with serene understanding of its origins, was to enhance the feelings of release from the past and rejoicing in the present which pervaded those happy snowbound days.’ He’d told her everything about himself. He was turning over a new leaf – or so she thought. But he might also have been giving her a warning: Don’t expect from me more than I can give.
They were married at St Pancras registry office on 9 April 1941.
‘As we made the responses, it was, as we later described it to each other, as if we were alone in some high place – a water-shed where our pasts flowed away into one ocean, and our future together was a stream flowing away to another great sea, as we stood there at its source.’ Together, they would descend the other side of this mountain, leaving the past behind. ‘Meeting in forgiveness and the miracle of marriage, I realised that it had been this acceptance of whole histories, reaching back into previous generations, which had been distilled into that one present moment, (almost a knife-edge), of the vow.’
Stephen wrote to Julian Huxley: ‘being married to Natasha will be quite different from just living with her, as she is really a very remarkable person’. Her character was in its way deeply religious. ‘“Being married” means something to her. This has a revolutionary effect on me, because nothing alters me so much as someone expecting something real from me, and the desire not to disappoint her in any way.’ This was part of his idea that he had no will of his own. He would try to live up to her hopes, because they were stronger than his.
My parents soon after their wedding.
For their honeymoon they went to Cornwall. There, he showed her the many versions of a poem on which he was working. She had no idea that it required so many revisions and restarts, but when he explained to her the idea of fidelity to an event, it related to what she was trying to do with her music. ‘For the poet or the composer there is fidelity to some original subjective experience, which is private and ultimately beyond the interpreter, however inspiring a reading there may be.’
She thought that Stephen’s creativity provided her with limitless support. ‘This rich vitality struck me like the liberation of entering another country, another climate, for apart from the Funtington circle, my not unlively musical world had been much narrower in focus.’ His world renewed her optimism. ‘Overtaken by this sudden upsurge in vitality and sensibility, music was once more intoxicating, the capacity to realise the beauty of phrasing that one intended or imagined seemed limitless … For me, the vast repertoire of masterpieces for the piano waiting to be mastered was no longer a daunting proposition, and one could set about wholeheartedly learning each single sonata.’
Walking in the countryside, there would be occasions when Stephen would become distracted. My mother read these as moments when he’d entered his interior world and she should not cross that boundary. ‘We would be chatting, in the way of friends or lovers, of an acquaintance or a landscape and yet – at a certain moment one could feel his need of silence and guess that some analogy with a dramatic or poetic theme had seized him, and he wished to chase after it in peace.’
6
FIRES ALL OVER EUROPE
‘FROM PILLAR TO post.’ I hear my mother’s voice with the expression she always used to describe a life with no fixed abode. For a while they rented rooms outside Oxford from the historian A. J. P. Taylor, whose wife was also a musician. They happened to be sitting in the garden together on Sunday 22 June 1941, the day when Hitler invaded Russia. Taylor tossed his spade in the air and shouted, ‘No! He couldn’t be that stupid!’
Hitler had occupied my father’s thoughts for a decade. Now he realized that Hitler was just as much a prisoner of the war as everyone else. War was a machine that would grind on until one side or the other claimed victory. If England lost, Stephen had a suicide plan. He would swim far out to sea and drown.
During the Blitz the staff of Horizon was evacuated to Devon, where Cyril amused himself by fishing for shrimps with a net, standing in the water with his trousers rolled up. Stephen visited him there and wrote a beautiful poem about watching an air raid over Portsmouth, but otherwise he was absent teaching at Blundell’s School. He’d planned to work as a teacher for a whole year, but he couldn’t stand the conventions of discipline and left after one term – which he seems to have spent trying to persuade one turbulent boy he shouldn’t run away.
Stephen’s elder brother Michael had become an officer in RAF Intelligence early in the war. From this lofty position he could not resist ticking off his younger brother, asking if he was ‘taking the war seriously’. Stephen sent an angry reply insisting his war work was valuable. It consisted of broadcasts, a monthly article for New Writing, his play set in early Nazi Germany, plus his poems, plus his editorial work on Horizon. ‘You may notice that I wrote a considerable part of the last Horizon, which the Min of Inf [Ministry of Information] considers the most valuable propaganda of its kind we have in neutral countries.’
At that point, the most important neutral country was the United States, for England fought Hitler for two years before the US joined in, and any effort to encourage American participation was worth trying. He was going to talk to someone in the Ministry of Labour the following week. ‘I am sorry to hear that if I want a job you won’t recommend me for R.A.F. Intelligence,’ wrote Stephen bitterly. ‘But it is just as well to know to whom one may turn & to whom one may not.’ Michael thought Stephen should join the war, but not in a
ny responsible capacity. His elder brother despised Stephen’s intelligence – a stimulating factor, I think, in my father’s ambition.
A few weeks later, Stephen went through his army medical tests. He failed. By begging the doctors to change the result, he made himself eligible to join non-combatant units stationed in England. Thus in September 1941 Stephen joined the London branch of the National Fire Service. He often used to joke that he became a fireman ten minutes after the Blitz ended and left ten minutes before the first buzz-bomb fell on London.
He and Natasha moved to Cricklewood for his basic training and he did his clumsy best to become a well-trained cog in a vast machine. ‘I had to undergo an extra week of training, owing to a neurotic inability to pass any examination whatever. This has led to my sinking naturally to the bottom of the social scale during the war.’ He was never promoted above the lowest rank and he was only asked to fight a fire twice. The first time, the man next to him took over. The second time, ‘surrounded by a lacquered screen of fire, I felt strangely at peace, settled in the centre of the element, as though rowing in wide circles for hours on end’.
Lucian Freud, Tony Hyndman and John Craxton on the roof of Maresfield Gardens during the war.
He’d never been in a work environment such as this. Too many men in a confined space, the radio perpetually tuned to the Light Programme, chickens in the courtyard, snooker in the back room and a small factory near by assembling bits and bobs of electrical equipment. He was fascinated by the pecking order of the NFS. Professional firemen of low rank had suddenly been put in charge of large numbers of Auxiliaries, many of whom would have far outranked them in civilian life. They gave their orders awkwardly, almost apologetically. In trying to work out why the situation was so charged, Stephen concluded: ‘Working-class people have a somewhat limited view of existence because they are tied to such a limited and narrow situation in the world.’ From this perhaps obvious starting-point, he went on to analyse why social resentments, though they existed, were muted because of the war, although potentially dangerous for the future.
A House in St John's Wood Page 7
