Theme: Music

The parents were always reading and there was lots of music and lovely music parties because there was a double room on the first floor with four Georgian windows and this was perfect. We called it the big sitting room but we didn’t sit in it very much and it was used for music parties and they had various friends who were really very good musicians. They realised we got out of bed and sat on the stairs and listened to this music and I think the parents rather ignored our presence and didn’t send us back to bed. Jim knew that they were important musicians. He was quite happy to talk about music but I think Mummy will have given the more expert understanding really. Solomon was quite a famous, a very famous pianist who used to come and the Lena Quartet and then David and Norman who were from the English Singers I think. As soon as you’re really deep into one of the arts, you seem to get the others as well because we definitely had people who were writers… writers, musicians, poets and artists and they seemed to know each other and a lot of people used to come.

And then of course the opening of the extension was a great occasion when Jim managed to get all these people to come. So what with the Prince of Wales and Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim and it was a marvellous party. I certainly enjoyed it very much and wore my diamond earrings, about the only time ever and met a lot of people. When they were leaving, we always remember, we looked out of a window and Daniel Barenboim and Jacqui were doing a sort of dance on that green in front of the cottages [Harold Swan: Daniel surely was swinging her around] Yes, yes, that’s right. They were on their way home but of course it was very memorable because it wasn’t awfully long after that that she was known to have multiple sclerosis. The thought of her dancing, I’m afraid, wasn’t possible after that.

She loved the music, the concerts, she really got going on that. Marvellous occasion with Prince Charles, because, you know, they came for the opening of the extension and Jacqueline [du Pre] and Danny Barenboim were playing, and after the concert she was very busy getting drinks ready for the musicians and the little lobby where you come in by the door was absolutely full of Prince Charles, aged about 18 or something, completely surrounded by young admirers, all touching his sleeve and asking about cello – she said he thought cello was a rather squeaky instrument, that she didn’t think he was going to go on playing it – and anyway, in comes my mother from the kitchen door, laden with a tray, elbowing everyone out of the way. Well she was very anxious always to behave properly in the right circumstances and had no idea that it was Prince Charles she was elbowing out of the way so we managed to pull her leg about that one a great deal.

You could identify Jim’s taste. It was pretty conventional and… Ravel and perhaps Benjamin Britten’s earlier works, easier works, were about as far as he would go in terms of departing from the canon that starts with Bach. But there was a hideous part of this which, after about 18 months I managed to discontinue, which was that Jim made the University buy two, for their time, quite good cassette recorders and I was supposed to record each evening’s music and post the tape to Edinburgh which was of course an idea of him being able to be in touch. It had a slightly creepy element to it, of Jim being there in spirit if not in flesh but far, far more of a problem for me was that various of the musicians had copyright ab-dabs when hearing about it and although the understanding was that when booking them, Jim would clear this, perhaps he didn’t always remember to or perhaps they didn’t notice what they were saying yes to.

Yes, the music programme was very established. It was funded slightly differently, I can’t remember now, I think its funding came through… it was dedicated funding. It had a very loyal and strong cohort of subscribers, you know, people who came to the concerts. Some of them were very, very old, I do remember this. One or two, I used to think they wouldn’t get in and out of the door, you know, people in their late nineties who’d have to have special chairs with lots of cushions and you know… It was run by a lady called Diana who used to come down from London. Diana used to stay overnight in the bedroom and burn her toast in the morning and set the alarms off. You know, the music audience and the art audience seemed to be very different. It certainly wasn’t what you’d call open access or encouraging people to come who wouldn’t see it as their first and immediate priority. There was no sense of trying to broaden the audience.