10.1.70 - a clothes-shopping spree!

10.1.70 Already!

Dear Mum, I don’t know why I always reserve the tattiest-looking air letters for you, but I don’t really do it intentionally! Possibly by the time they get to you anyway, they’ve flattened themselves out again a bit.

I haven’t yet got back to doing my ‘study’ as I was before Christmas, but at least this week I’ve achieved some other things: notably, the restocking of my wardrobe. In a mad burst of enthusiasm  I finally took those trousers up that I’ve had since I left home, and have never worn, and early this week set about getting a jacket to go with them ˗ apart from the fact that my present jacket is wearing badly round the cuffs, it so goes with the pants that they look like a suit ˗ not quite what was intended. I really didn’t have any idea of what I was looking for and since I couldn’t wear the trousers to the shops to compare, because of the aforementioned problem, it was a bit difficult. Fortunately the first place I went to suggested a corduroy jacket, but the only one they had was too big. Obviously a brown jacket of some shade would be the best thing to go with the trousers (which are a sort of slightly tweedy green, you may recall) and I’m now unlikely to get any more trendy than I am, and won’t be wearing red or purple or yellow with the trousers! The next shop was itself a very tweedy place, and I finished up there with them saying they’d get a jacket from their warehouse that seemed to be as close to what I wanted.

Next day, I went further down the road (this is all in Stoke Newington) and walked into a shop, and walked into a - perhaps - chocolaty-coloured corduroy jacket that was only a touch too big, but not worth letting slip out of my hands. It fits everywhere except around me middel (Jewish spelling) where it is built for someone who hasn’t lost quite as much weight as I have. But I think it’s fine otherwise. It doesn’t look awkward, you know.

Remember my other green trousers ˗ that I altered the crease line on? How long have I had those? At least eighteen months, I suppose, and do you know it was only this week that I discovered they do have a fob pocket in them! It’s built right into the top of the trouser, not just a little below as usual!

Anyway, I wore my new ‘outfit’ to the opera the other night and felt quite comfortable and at home in it.

Yesterday, quite by accident, I came through Oxford St on my way to Soho, and noticed a suit sale on -two, in fact, right opposite each other, but I went into the second of them, which looked a little less expensive. I had actually stood outside for some time before deciding to go in ˗ I hate buying clothes really, though if the end result is good, I can’t say I’m too much put out. But yesterday it was pouring and I was all wet, and it was only by steeling myself a bit, and saying For Heaven’s sake get on with it, Crowl, that I went in. (We’ve had snow and rain and sleet for days; each of them is attractive in their own way, but enough is enough is enough!) Anyway after much humming and hawing around (I no longer, at least, worry about whether the assistant is getting fed up with my indecision) I bought myself a suit (about £2-10 cheaper ˗ everyone has sales on just now); a neat-fitting, for-a-change-, brown-basically, but capable-of-looking-merely-dark-when-the-mood-takes-it, type of suit (!) ˗ and two ties! (These latter were going at one for 13/6 with a free one thrown in, which sounded a bit absurd until I realised it was possible only to choose one tie that you really liked from the selection on sale.) 

So I now have two sets of clothes that look as though they fit me and not me slightly bigger brother! When I got home yesterday the people who had arranged to order the jacket from the warehouse had phoned to say it was there and to have a look at it. So I’ve been down this morning, and while the one they’d got down was really too dark for my present taste, though a very nice jacket all the same, I finished up ordering another one! ˗ a sort of bluey-green tweedy type, which manages to look a nice bluey-grey from a distance ˗ I think! They have to get a size down that will actually fit me more exactly, (I nearly drove this poor young assistant up the wall, because if the sleeves fitted I thought the coat was too big, chest-wise, or too long, or if they didn’t fit, I couldn’t move my shoulders, even if it was the right length!) This will cost (aagh!) £8-9, I think, and probably doesn’t even go with anything I have (aagh, again) but will last for ages ˗ even if I leave it hanging in the cupboard until I can get some pants one day ˗ next year, perhaps.

So no money has been wasted, I feel. (Suit was £16-10, though I did start off at £12-10, and the other coat was just short of £6.) Still, I shouldn’t now have to buy anything more for a while. And I’m still the richest man in London (and certainly better off than you, I’m sure!), because I can’t be bothered letting money make trouble for me. I really went mad yesterday: I also bought six books! I’m sure you’re gasping for breath over there. But three were secondhand and the others were cheap-enough paperbacks. And I had me first decent hair-cut in ages ˗ I told the barber he’d have to put back anything he’d taken off that he oughtn’t! So I should feel a new man.

Will you thank the T Hannagans for their Postal Orders and, oh dear ˗ I think the Stokes sent me some too. And I got a card form the Leslies! [Neighbours who lived opposite my mother] And Jeff from the old flat wrote to say he will yet pay me the £20 he owes me ˗ obviously you should never prejudge anyone! Love, Mike

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! 

4.9.69 - my new and not very salubrious career

4.9.69 (midnight)

Billy Graham preaching outside
the Compton in the early 60s

Dear Mum, I’d better write now, because I haven’t really the time during the day at the moment. I’m trying to organise myself fairly thoroughly, and so far things are going quite smoothly. I’m just home from work, of course; six hours of selling tickets to men who obviously haven’t much else to do with their time. This club as I think I told you shows pretty grotty films: what they call X films here (which is why the cinema is licensed as a club, and must function according to police regulations) and which they wouldn’t bother showing at home. [In NZ, I assume I meant.] Quite why men want to come and see them I don’t know ˗ for the same reasons that striptease clubs make a nice profit I guess. [As far as I knew at this time, pornography, in NZ, was barely visible, though it presumably existed in some form.] Old Compton St, where I work (it’s just off Wardour St, which is very famous as the English film industry’s street, as you no doubt know) has two or three strip clubs in it ˗ one practically opposite the cinema, and a variety of restaurants of greatly differing quality, a Cinerama theatre, several clothes stores ˗ the ones who can’t make Carnaby St, which is also not far from there ˗ and the usual number of pubs. (The Soho average is slightly higher than elsewhere in London, about three a street I should think!)

The Compton [Cinema] is nearly all underground; I’m in the only bit that isn’t, and I shouldn’t think it holds more than 200, if that. The people who come have to join first, at 15/- a head! ˗ then they pay 12/6 on top of that. No wonder they make money there. The film runs continuously from ten in the morning till (this week anyway) 11.47 at night. There are shorts, but the point is that the place never closes once it’s open. Only men can become members (!) but since they can take a ‘guest’ in, some of them take their wives or girlfriends in. God alone knows what they think of it! We had one man last night who wanted to take both his wife and his dog in. Tonight I had a Czech who spoke no English at all, and as little German as I do, so though he wasn’t keen on the idea, I finally let him in for £1-7-6 (he wanted to go in for 12/6, like some of the English people who can read the signs do), but it was only after innumerable gesticulations on my part that we got anywhere.

Compton Cinema in the late 60s

Lots of the men come in without their cards, and at present the filing system is in a complete state of chaos, so that it’s well nigh impossible to find anything. There is an old set of names with thin strips of cardboard stuck in metal plates that are detachable from their main stand and which should be on the wall but isn’t. The strips fall out whenever you try to find anything, and anyway they aren’t in order except that they’re under A or B or such. There’s a new card filing system which is in perfect order, but lots of the cards haven’t yet been filed, and there’s a list being typed (again not strictly alphabetically) into a book. This will soon be stopped, I think. Or at worst you can look in the daily records book where each name is entered against its membership number. This may only take a good half-hour, depending on whether the guy can remember when he came in before or not!

What amuses me about the place is that nobody [who works there], as far as I can make out, and I think I’ve met most of the staff at one time or another who work there, ever watches the films that are shown! Even the management. Mr Neilson, who as I said is not much than older than me, is going on holiday tomorrow, and Mike ? is taking over. He’s from Jersey, and is filling in time till he can get the right sort of union card to be able to work in the floor management side of TV. He’s done it before, but apparently can’t do it just now. Anyway, I may yet get another job out of it all. There’s a new cinema being opened in Tottenham Court Rd, on the same sort of system, so I may be lucky enough to get the same sort of job. It would suit me fine, because I’m starting to make some headway with what I’m doing in the daytime.

Remember how my foot was damaged? Well, it’s now getting to the repaired stage, and somewhere along the line, I’ve now been bitten (I think) on the other foot, and it all swelled up! I’ve put the Englishman’s favourite antiseptic on it (TCP) and I haven’t yet looked at it since I’ve been home.

The weather today suddenly went mad and shot back up to the 70s, just as we were all putting our winter wooly vests back on. Crazy. Monday was August Bank Holiday, though as usual it fell in September (!), and Hazel and Ian (who is an old friend of Hazel’s) and I went out in Ian’s car for the day. We didn’t go far, only to Epping Forest, where we walked (and picnicked, rather unsatisfactorily on biscuits and apples), and then when we finally found the car again, we went to Hampstead Heath, and had a look at the fair. Actually there were three fairs, but all of them were pretty dull. We went to see Some Like It Hot in Hampstead, at 4.00, [this would have been the second time I’d seen it] and then when we found all the restaurants we wanted to go to were closed we went to a singularly ‘caff’ type place in Soho, and then went to a pub next door to Hazel’s present abode (she’s rented out her own flat, as she leaves London for some time soon), then went to Hazel’s present abode and listened to The Rite of Spring! Very curious day, but also very relaxing. Ian and I got to know each other considerably better too. [Hazel was due to go off as stage manager in another part of the country.]

[Handwritten on the back] Next day. Other foot this morning seems to be calming down somewhat, and is back to its normal size. Call me YS029399C!! from now on. That’s the National Insurance. I wrote to the Post Office about Postmen’s work, and you should see the rigamarole of forms they sent back to fill in ! I was only asking ˗ you’d think they thought I was already joining!

P.S. And I’d have to take a test!! [I’d worked as a Postman in Dunedin, for a couple of months.]

26.8.69 - possibility of a job

26.8.69

Dear Mum, just got a letter from you and am very pleased to hear that all your insides are sorting themselves out. What a nuisance that you’ve got to go back in again; didn’t you tell them that you weren’t going to be treated like this? It’s not every day they get somebody with double kidneys or whatever the particular speciality you have is! (Plus being an unusually blooded person!) [My mother had a somewhat unusual blood type.]

I went to Mass on Friday at midday at St Pat's in Soho Square. Have I ever told you about that church? I keep finishing every letter and realising that I haven’t said what I intend. And yet at the same time I have the funny suspicion that I have mentioned it, and the church near Leicester Square ˗ the French one. Would you let me know if I have or haven’t as the case may be? Anyway, today I was in town again (see why below) and popped into the French church ˗ I think it’s called Our Lady of Lourdes or something like that. [Notre Dame de France,in fact, ie, Our Lady of France.] And the priest was just in the middle of the Offertory, so I thought I’d stay, you see. I couldn’t make out a minute or two later why no one was standing up for the bit before the Sanctus. I didn’t stand alone (being unlike my wealthy uncle John ˗ they must have been through more cars than clothes! That’s transgressing somewhat.) [No idea what this is about, nor who this particular uncle could have been.] and then suddenly realised that the bit he was saying was the end of the Mass! And here was I calculating if I would be able to go to Communion etc!

I stayed on a bit later trying to get what I should do about getting a job sorted out in my mind. Whether I should go back to the agency near Leicester Square (again) where they employ people for cinemas and such, or whether I should try another place that would probably give me an office job. (I’ve given up trying to get one from the paper, though there have been a few possibles, and the job that Reg suggested of working for the Post Office as a night telephonist is proving to be more trouble than its worth. They just don’t seem to want anyone even though they advertise continually, and when I saw the wages that they offer part-timers I can’t understand how they keep staff. Anyway my name’s down on the list. I thought that it would be a possibility but it’s taking so long to get anything out of them that I thought I’d be better to try something else out.)

There’s no doubt the Good Lord is a fast worker. I only need tell him I’m depressed while walking along the street because there are so many unfamiliar faces, and somebody will smile at me, or talk, or give me something to smile about. (I really must get a new ribbon for the typewriter.) Anyway I headed for this office agency, and then started thinking about perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to try as a trainee projectionist as was suggested the other day. But it’s a full-time job ˗ however I thought the hours might have suited, so after sitting down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and thinking about it, I decided to go back to this cinema employment place. The lady then told me that I was wrong about the hours they work and I realised that they would be of no use at all. I told her again that I wanted the day-time free if poss, and she pipes up with a job as cashier (night one) from 5˗11, five nights a week and alternate Sundays (ye gods!). but the pay is £14 basic! Plus two guineas extra for the Sunday. What could be better? So I went round to this cinema to see about it, and though the actual manager wasn’t there, the relief manager seemed to think I would be quite satisfactory, so I’m to go back on Thursday and make sure. Isn’t that fantastic?

Now I come to the distaff side of the picture ˗ if that’s the expression I want. The cinema is in Soho (!) so consequently it shows mainly foreign X films, or home-made ones ˗ which means that to show them it’s got to be licensed as a club apparently, and the outfit as a whole may be a bit sleazy. When I say that I don’t mean the actual place as far as working goes, it’s just the thought behind it all that’s a little seedy. However it seems to me that it’s not likely to involve me personally in anything distasteful ˗ if it does we’ll just have to start looking for something else! Anyway it all seems to be convenient otherwise so I guess it was pretty well intended, so I think it should be all right. We’ll soon know if we get the job, won’t we? [Looking back on this I’m not sure if it was sheer naivety on my part, or whether I was trying to justify the possibility of this job to my mother. The cinema was a ‘club’ because it showed blue movies, as I later discovered, and should have realised early on. However, I spent the majority of my time in a caged-in box ˗ locked in to prevent people trying to get at the cash ˗ and when I wasn’t serving customers, which was often, I read lots of books, including, as I recall, a biography of Berlioz. I can laugh at it now, and talk about it freely, but for a long time I felt ashamed, afterwards, at having decided to take the job.]

My foot hurts when I walk without shoes on, but I can almost run again so  no doubt it is improving. 

Everyone’s going to the Little Sisters!, Love Mike. [The Little Sisters is a rest home for the elderly, and sick. I think this probably refers to two of my great-aunts going to live there.]

18.3.69 - Finally feeling better

18.3.69

Dear Mum, I’m going to answer your first question on the letter I received this morning by saying ‘I feel on top of the world!’ ˗ in fact I feel so much like my old self that I’m leaping around. I’d forgotten just how energetic and cheery I normally am. Either that or I’m going Mad! ˗ I’m bouncing around like a two-year-old so much and chatting away to myself about the world in general (I’ve done that for years) that suddenly it doesn’t matter that it’s never anything but winter in England. Actually the weather has been improving ˗ it’s been that much milder lately, so I’m finding it quite pleasant. No one else seems to think it’s getting any better, but they’re a pack of moaners, the English, I think, and they’ve got so much to grumble about they naturally put something very important like the weather first! I’m now three times as busy as I’ve been ˗ must stop exaggerating! I’ve still got a touch of the cough that I had, but it seems to be vanishing slowly, and no longer bothers me.

We’re in the middle of our last week, practically, of rehearsals for our end of term double bill. I’ve actually got the day off, until 5.30, when we have a rehearsal, but George Bamford (who kept me busy all day Saturday with parts for a terrible Irish recording that is being made soon) has some more film music up his sleeve, and with a bit of luck, I’ll be able to go in later this morning and get it, and do it before and after the rehearsal.

I spent Sunday transposing two songs down for one of the students (who may pay me!) and then went off to see a film at our local cinema, on the other side of the Heath. It was ‘If...’ which I’d been trying to see in the West End for ages, but which had always been sold out at the price I was willing to pay. As it turned out it was a very disturbing film, but I don’t feel for the reasons the director intended. It’s all about a public school, and especially three of the sixth formers, who finally gun down the parents and teachers on Parents’ Day, with old 2nd World War machine guns and grenades that have been in store under the school! But this wasn’t what was disturbing; quite honestly I found the end rather silly, but it was the way all sorts of perversions and deviations from the norm were casually accepted within the film that annoyed me. Morals had vanished out the window, somewhere, and much of the film was taking up with telling you, in a roundabout way, that they had.

The previous night, I’d had to take the parts back to Bamford (he must owe me about £13 or £14 now), and this meant a trip all the way up to Kings Cross, and rather a waste of time, unless I was going to stay in the town. So I walked along to David Gorringe’s flat in Portland Place, which is only several stone’s throws away (!), on the hope that he might be interested in going out, or even just sitting round talking. I was almost put off by the fact that the front door of the flats was locked, but I could see a light on in the penthouse, and didn’t think his flatmate was back yet from an Opera for All Tour, so I chance it and rang the bell, and was answered by a voice thru the speaker at the door. It’s a most odd feeling talking to a disembodied voice in the street!

Anyway Dave was home and feeling all miserable because he didn’t know what to do with himself, and so after a bite to eat (I felt a bit awful about that, I always seem to be having snacks up there ˗ I’ll buy him lunch one of these days at the Centre) we went to the pictures ˗ even though it was getting very late, we got into a later showing of the most recent Ingmar Bergman film, called Shame, and about apathy ˗ I think! It concerned, mainly, two married people (to each other for once!) who during a war in the late 1970s, had taken up a farm to fill in the time when they couldn’t be musicians, and how in spite of the fact that the most terrible things were going on around them, they concerned themselves with their own troubles purely, and were of course shocked when the war suddenly took them over. The man, till nearly the end, when he was forced by a guerilla mob to shoot a high official of the other side, and did it because he was ashamed of his previous cowardice, and that it had turned him against his wife, or vice versa, was a very weak individual who would cry when things got too much for him, and after the shooting, he suddenly changed completely, and his wife who had been dominant up till then, became the weaker and was forced to see her husband turn into a brute. This makes it sound rather curious, but it was a fascinating film. And yet I was trouble rather less by it than by If... And it should have been the other way round.

Last Friday, John Kentish asked me if I could go down to Eltham (two train stops below Blackheath) and play for a rehearsal that night, and on the Monday. Well, I couldn’t do the Friday, but I did do last night, and it turned out they wanted a conductor, not a pianist! (And they pay over £4 for it!) So with some misgiving, I took them thru parts of Traviata, which fortunately I know reasonably well, and really enjoyed it. It was quite like being back with the old Carmen chorus at home, and just the same as far as the atmosphere went. [I presume I mean that I’d been chorus master for a local production of Carmen in Dunedin, but I don’t remember doing this at all.] Only this time I had principals as well: an Aussie leading lady, and an NZ bass (the place is running with them ˗ Sadlers Wells has little else!)  There were even the same types of people there: the woman who didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, and the men shy of singing, but very hard working. I came home on a cloud! And once I got started they even took my cheek the same as the Dunedin crowd, and took it well, for English [people]! (Sorry to harp on these people, but Londoners can be lacking in a sense of humour ˗ you’re never quite sure if you’re on safe ground!)

 

Tomorrow I’ve got to get up rather earlier than I have the last few days, and go and get tickets for Dance of Death ˗ with Olivier!! Fabulous. [I presume this was the stage production, but since that began in 1967, I may have been talking about the film version from 1969.] I stayed the night at Dave’s on Sat, and then spent some time getting lost in Soho looking for the Catholic Church in there that Abigail and I had gone to on Ash Wed. Soho is easy to go straight thru, but difficult to track anything down in. I found it though and won’t lose it again! I was coming from the opposite direction this time, which was why it was so difficult. Actually I had been trying to find another street when I ran across it! Lots of love, Mike.