7.11.69 - an intruder, a concert, and working in Soho

7.11.69 [handwritten ˗ three letters sent at the same time] 

This letter belongs before this one, dated around the 10th Nov. 

Hullo, hullo, hullo, how are things going with you, then? Hope you’ve settled in quite well back at work etc, and that you’re still feeling okay ˗ and looking after yourself. I wrote to Fred [the cat] a little while back and she assured me she was keeping at least one eye on you, but I know what a lazy wee soul she is. Anyway I received your latest letter listing everyone else’s troubles and none of your own problems, so I can only presume you are okay. Good heavens! I didn’t realise Auntie Rose was still alive ˗ that is presuming it is one of the dwarf group, is it? What made me think she had died I wonder? [By the ‘dwarf group’ I meant the fact that my three great-aunts on my grandfather’s side were all tiny, and got tinier as the years went on.] I hate to think of such an old person having an operation ˗ you always assume that old people aren’t nearly as tough as young ones ˗ and while they don’t look it, they seem to come through some pretty hard knockings-around. [She was actually only 77 at the time, if my records are correct.]

....Last night I got home to find that just a short while before Cathy had

[second handwritten letter]

Arrived home and apparently surprised an intruder. According to her, she was going round the back of the flat to put the bike away, when she saw that ‘Ian’ was standing in his room, with the light on, and her light had been on as well. She didn’t do anything but fiddled around putting the bike to rest. Whoever it was in the house vanished because when she got back inside again (she has to go all the way round the front again) she was alone. The funny thing is how he got out our front door (if he did) because to anyone who doesn’t know it, it plays a trick by first apparently refusing to open more than halfway, and then shutting with a sudden bang when you least expect it. Perhaps he got out the window again ˗ someone had knocked over a little table in Ian’s room, and something else, so he presumably did exist, but it’s all pretty odd. Nothing was missing. We called the police about it, and two friendly young East End-accented boys (no older than any of us) arrived and just sort of took a few notes in case it was tried again. The whole thing was just rather funny really.

On Wednesday David accompanied Alan Opie at the Purcell Room in a ‘solo’ concert. Alan sang a Vaughan Williams cycle (one that I remember rehearsing with Graham Gorton at home), three Wolf Lieder, and then after the interval a Schubert cycle of fourteen songs. [The Vaughan Williams was The House of Life; ; the Wolf, Drei Harfenspieler, and the Schubert, Schwanengesang. Graham Gorton had been one of the cast in the piano tours I did with the NZ Opera Company.] Quite a programme really. The first half was tremendously exciting ˗ it makes a whale of a difference if you know the people involved and have taken notes at a rehearsal (they did one at the flat the other night ˗ with Alan’s fiancee [Kathleen] and me taking notes: means finding out the faults made during rehearsals and endeavouring to find out why they’re made) ˗ and the second half had exciting individual songs, but wasn’t quite so good. I was a bit like a mother hen ˗ though why I should be I don’t really know! ˗ and yet I haven’t enjoyed a concert so much for a good time either. The programme he sang would have taxed a much older and [more] experienced artist, and yet to hear someone comparatively young doing them and occasionally letting himself go completely is a rather fabulous feeling. [Alan was 24 in 1969.] And anyway, both the Schubert and V Williams must have been written when they [the composers] were fairly young, so the feeling is in a way the right one.

Dave’s parents came up, and it was very nice to see them again, and also a lot of familiar faces came to the concert, so it was a very friendly affair. Dave and I arrived home not quite on top of the weather, but awake (just!) at about 1.00 in the morning, and fell into bed.

I went to Die Frau Ohne Schatten again last Monday and it is still terribly exciting.

What a place for all sorts of people London is! At one point today we had in here the male cashier from our sister cinema, the Dilly [also known as the Dilly Cineclub; later it became the Cannon Dilly], and one of the soho ‘locals’. The latter is either in a drunken fury with everyone, or else goes around blessing all, with flowers in his hair, and decorations. He knows all that is to be known about Soho and the people, and for some obscure reason is called ‘Phyllis’! The other guy wears the most modern outrageous clothes, and perfumes! and today had on a white coat with white fur trimmings ˗ about mini-skirt length! Ugh!

I’ll put in some other comments at the beginning of another letter but won't send it yet. Have sent it - see III!

[third handwritten letter]

To continue about the people: have I told you about the buskers around here? (I have a funny feeling that I have): one group comes on a Friday ˗ a flautist (and what a fabulous sound he makes) and his accompanist, a banjo player. The latter is so terrible it’s not true. And he rather spoils the flautist’s music! The other group I see on a Friday morning at Oxford Circus ˗ one plays clarinet, another banjo and another a drummer and they are the swingingest group in London. It’s quite refreshing to come out after a tube ride and hear them echoing up and down Argyll St ˗ the Palladium’s street, incidentally.

Going home on a bus at night can be interesting too: I had two Welshmen sitting behind me one night and one was dead drunk ˗ but all the same insisted on holding a very involved conversation about a crane with his mate. This would have been okay except that he hiccupped every thirty seconds on the dot, and was quite upset in his train of thought each time. The conductress on the bus turned up again the next night going home and said she thought this guy was going to be sick all over me any minute.

About two or three nights later I was reaching my stop on the way home, when the man behind me sneezed and was sick all over ˗ including some of my suit! Poor guy. I didn’t know what to do about him ˗ whether to just leave him there with the conductor or what! There wasn’t much I could do really, short of inviting him to come and clean himself up at home.

Did I tell you about the night there was a fight upstairs on the bus? Yes, I think now that I did (the flute player and his mate were outside just now ˗ they play Elizabethan Serenade when they come to a certain corner of the piece they go in different directions ˗ it’s very funny really. And they also just played Eton Boating Song and at one stage the banjo player went shooting off in a completely different key!

The people that come into the cinema are a pretty varied lot: your lonely old men (and lonely young ones, too), your tired businessman (he does exist), the boys out on the town for the night, your country boys, the bully boys who seem to think it’s a necessary part of their living, the young kids who are just curious perhaps, the ones who just don’t know how to get on with their wives, or their lives, or both. Hazel said once that they’re all people who can’t get on with women in their normal lives, but it seems to me that this is too great a generalization for the variety that comes in. Anyway, it gives me an opportunity to cheer up quite a few of them, which may be something at least. It certainly does me good to see their faces break into a smile when I sometimes hadn’t thought it possible. Many of them are mere kids really ˗ I’m beginning to feel like a father figure! 

24.5.69 Peter Grimes and others

24.5.69

Dear Mum, you’ll never guess where I’ve just been. In the ROYAL BOX at Covent Garden. It is a great big box, with a little room behind it where we had iced champagne ˗ and coffee ˗ and which has its own private entrance, and loo. That’s about as close as I’ll ever get to royalty I think! We (the two designers of the mid-term pieces, and David Syrus) were invited to go along by John Kentish, our Director of Studies, and the producer of Manon. Don’t ask me how he happened to have the Royal Box for the occasion ˗ but it was great to see the doormen and ushers etc sort of doing slight double-takes when they realised I wasn’t one of your normal paying people! (Actually the Garden is full of snobs anyway ˗ and I’m not helping by the sound of that last sentence! ˗ especially those who are Friends of the Garden: people who support the Garden by subscriptions and by which they get preferential bookings, etc. They are frequently completely ignorant, and don’t seem to be afraid of showing the fact. God knows what they think about as they sit thru hour upon hour of singing in foreign languages. Some of them came on the last night of the mid-terms and you’d think they own the place.) [Here endeth Crowl’s ongoing inverse snobbery ˗ for the moment.] Mr Kentish couldn’t come in the end but his wife was there with two friends, a Mr and Mrs Michael Dodd, I think, and they were rather charming and not too far above us menials. (We had our own special waiter for the box too!)

Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes

The opera, after all that, was Peter Grimes: Britten, who else? And we could have spat on the conductor (according to Mrs Kentish); it was Colin Davis, one of the most dynamic conductors around, and the tenor was Jon Vickers, who is just unbelievably great. The sort of person I’ll my grandchildren about. [But haven’t yet!] (We were closer to him in the Opera Centre canteen one day than tonight, but it was still very exciting being right on top of the orchestra, and having a close-up view of the stage. Well, of most of it. There is a certain disadvantage about a box ˗ it’s at the side of course, and so you can’t see one side of the stage at all. And all the action happened down on our side, which meant we had to strain a little to see. I don’t know how the Queen gets on! But what a fabulous opera this is. It keeps hitting you time and again, and really is probably the greatest opera Britten has written, so far as sheer drama goes. It has everything (the six big sea pictures for a start, between scene changes) [so overwhelmed, obviously, that I increased the number of the Four Sea Interludes, as they’re actually known], off-stage bands, tremendous chorus sections, storms, kids, a complete scene without orchestra, where Grimes is accompanied only by an off-stage dream chorus and a fog-horn (!) and where he goes quite mad (this was terrific!), riots, drums played by the singers. You name it! [On the night Colin Davis collapsed, in 2011, and fell from the orchestral pit podium at Covent Garden, his job as conductor for that performance was taken over by David Syrus, who had been at the Garden since leaving the Opera Centre.]

On Sunday evening David G and I went to a concert at the Festival Hall, mainly because Jennifer Vyvyan, whom he’s worked with, and likes a lot, and she was singing the solo in Britten’s Les Illuminations. Guilini was conducting, and thought the audience got up on its feet and clapped him at the end; I don’t know that I think he’s all that great. The Britten was fabulous, and but the Schubert Fifth [Symphony] that preceded it was nothing startling. (I was going to say to write home about, but that seems a little contradictory.) The last item was the rather marvellous Romeo and Juliet suite by Berlioz, and being Berlioz it was very exciting and very sentimental and full of lush orchestrations and big tunes and funny odd bits, and generally very interesting.

Yesterday, being Whit (!) Monday, David and Hazel and I went out, first to the Regent’s Park Zoo, tho’ it wasn’t anything startling, and then later to Fiddler on the Roof (which I’d seen, but liked very much, in Sydney). This is a rather marvellous musical but the cast here has been doing it so long (it’s in its third year I think (that the whole thing didn’t quite have the magic of the previous occasion. [The Sydney production had been a real eye-opener, with a brilliant Hayes Gordon in the leading role; Alfie Bass played the lead in London, and was a real disappointment.]

[Handwritten] This is terrible ˗ I started this letter over a week ago and just keep not finishing it, and since then I’ve seen Peter Grimes again. Oh, it is fabulous. I’ve put my name down to usher for the 2 concerts in St Paul’s celebrating the Berlioz anniversary and that is going on in the next 2 nights.

On Saturday last I went to what I thought was a very good production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Old Vic ˗ marvellously costumed and moved (Laurence Olivier producted it). But other opinions have said that it wrecked the play by making it funny in the wrong places.

On Sunday I went to the last Boulez concert at the Festival Hall where they played more Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was a great concert and much more easy to take than the previous one I went to. They were all earlier works and still vaguely in the late Romantic type of sound.

Well, I better close here ˗ I’ve got to get home to do some work ˗ I’m at the Centre at the moment. I’m glad to hear you liked your present ˗ I thought the palette knife (is it?) was the thing you mightn’t use! Give my love to Fred, Mike.