Trim, pronouncing the word ‘Aga’ as ‘aahGaah’ when we called it ‘the Agga’. Penny and I are friends to this day and I am also godfather to one of her sons.
Endnotes
1.(1927–2016). Lecturer (at this time) and later professor of the History of Art in Trinity and previously keeper of Art at the Ulster Museum. Author (with the Knight of Glin) of The Painters of Ireland 1660–1920 and many other publications. Obituary by Robert O’Byrne, Apollo, October 2016.
2.Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties (2009). See also Anne Leonard, Portrait of an Era: Trinity College, Dublin in the 1960s; and Jeremy Lewis, Playing for Time (1987).
CHAPTER 4
FRIENDSHIPS AND FOREIGN PARTS
General studies had an advantage over honours degrees in that the end-of-year exams took place in June, and one was then free for four months until the start of the Michaelmas term in late October. I would go to London immediately term ended in June, and find myself a job (or jobs) and a place to live. I would work, and save money, for about two months and then take off for another two months hitchhiking in France, Italy, Spain and, one year, Morocco. (I had read Brideshead Revisited.) My mother had her concerns about this and wrote to me, ‘Poste Restante, Tangier’ (12 September 1968), to tell me that my Aunt Polly had come to lunch: ‘She was quite worried about you getting lifts to Morocco, said there are queer people in the world. I hope you are all right staying there – be careful, as we read so much about Dope dens etc. I know you have sense.’
It was news to me that my mother was given to reading about dope dens, but her anxieties in respect of my welfare were ill-founded. On my arrival in Morocco, I am sorry to say that the ‘Dope dens’ of Tangier eluded me. But, during these summers away from Trinity, and from Ireland, I did have a host of other experiences that enriched my life greatly. They, and the people I encountered, meld in my memory now and the chronology is hazy. One year, I got a job doing accounts (yes, accounts) in the Daily Mirror offices in Holborn; but the accounts I did were not for the Daily Mirror but for one of their weekly publications, a tabloid called Reveille. It was one of the first mainstream publications to feature photographs of glamour models – it may have been banned in Ireland on that account – but it also covered, in a saucy way, the worlds of pop and royalty. This was an office job, nine to five, but at six o’clock I would make my way to a pub nearby, where I worked as a barman until closing time at eleven o’clock. Another year, I went into Claridge’s Hotel and asked for a job, and was taken on to work in the Still Room. The hours were seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. I made Melba toast from seven till ten, crafted butter pats from ten till twelve, and brewed coffee from noon till three. I had the afternoon off and then returned at six for a second job (until eleven at night) on one of the floors. There, I was on duty in the pantry where room-service meals were put together: they came up in a lift from the kitchens and I would set up the trolleys for the waiters to take to the rooms. I never did any waiting myself and never met any of the guests. A manager took a shine to me – I think he felt that, from his point of view, I might have more to offer than Melba toast – and over the weeks that I was there he made suggestions that I should think of a career in hotel management: he could help me get a traineeship in Claridge’s if I was so inclined. I wrote and told my mother about this and she replied (on 15 August 1966): ‘You were very lucky to get a job in that good Hotel. The idea of doing “Hotel Management”? A degree in Law would be less worry and more secure.’ Another of my jobs was in some sort of small family-run printing firm. I can’t recall what I did there but when I was leaving, the owner tried to persuade me to stay on. ‘You could have a career here,’ he said, pointing out that he and his wife had no children to take on the business. But I was not tempted.
One year I rented a room in Barkston Gardens, off the Earl’s Court Road, with a sinister landlord who lived with his wife on the ground floor and always emerged into the hall to see who was entering or leaving. If I was five minutes late in paying the rent, they would send their bruiser of a son up to bang on my door and threaten me with eviction if I did not produce the cash there and then. Much superior was the accommodation I found (through friends) another year. This was in a council flat in Streatham with a ‘Mrs Hutt’ (as I shall call her). She was posh but, having fallen on hard times (hence the council flat), took various cooking jobs here and there. She had mislaid her husband and, much to her own embarrassment (and the embarrassment of everyone else), had taken an Irish navvy as a live-in lover. Her eldest son, who was in the RAF and modelled himself on the actor Leslie Phillips, did not live with her but appeared from time to time. But her second son, who was mildly mentally handicapped, did, and so did her daughter, a happy blonde twenty-something who came and went as she pleased, always with a friend or more in tow. I was happy squeezed into this ‘ménage’ although, as I was working from early morning till late at night, I was only really there on Sundays, when Mrs Hutt would cook a fabulous Sunday lunch, which we ate on our knees at five o’clock in the afternoon (having spent lunchtime in the pub down the road).
A young Australian artist whom I met, Michael Garady, lived with his friend in Rutland Mews off Exhibition Road. Once, when I was stuck for accommodation, he invited me there for a couple of weeks (his friend being away). Michael, who was handsome in a masculine way, with tousled blond curly hair and, in manner, tentative and fey, was having some success in London with his painting and was working towards an exhibition: ‘I have to finish many paintings to let the Grosvenor Gallery choose in September for the November exhibition. Unfortunately they take a long time to dry and I will need to have them finished,’ he wrote to me (on 9 August 1966). His sister, Saxon, who had never been to Europe before, was about to arrive from Australia: she would be accompanied by a girlfriend, who I think was called Diana. They arrived, Saxon a rollicking, large, good-looking blonde and Diana, petite and more mysterious. They immediately bought a Jaguar car and drove around London in whichever gear they managed to find: accustomed only to automatic transmission, they did not know, until I showed them, that you had to change gear. Without meaning to be, they were both in their own way completely and bombastically outrageous, and they had not been very long in London before they found themselves – on account of a mishap in an antique shop – in Marylebone Magistrates Court. Michael was offered the loan of a flat in Paris (84 Boulevard Rochechouart – my mother wrote to me there) and a plan was made for Saxon and Diana to drive over to stay with him, bringing me with them. And that is what happened.
On the trip over, when I mentioned that I hoped to go to Morocco, they thought that a wonderful idea and immediately offered to drive me there. They had no notion where any place was but, in the event, they returned to London in their Jaguar and I set off for Morocco on my own. A year later, Michael being away, his friend Peter Feuchtwanger invited me to stay in Rutland Mews until I found some place of my own. Peter was German, and a classical pianist and composer. He was obsessively devoted to the memory of the great Romanian pianist Clara Haskill (d.1960), and had composed a work for violin and sitar for Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. At the time I was staying with him he was composing the music for a ballet to be staged at Covent Garden and, by way of preparation, had been allocated complimentary seats for every ballet performance. This meant ballet two or three nights a week; and on several nights, he took me with him: a car collected us and we sat in the stalls. I saw Monica Mason, Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley in new ballets by Kenneth MacMillan but alas, I did not see Fonteyn and Nureyev. But the real treat came after the performances. Peter, taking me with him, went backstage to chat with the dancers in their dressing rooms, as they removed all those bandages from their exhausted feet. At Trinity, I hardly dared enter the doors of the Players Theatre, much less talk to any of the student-actors; but backstage at Covent Garden with Peter I managed to take it in my stride. A year or so after I wrote this memory, I came upon Peter’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph (28 June 2016). He had recently died aged 85. He was described as ‘the go-to teacher for many of the world’s leading concert pianists, among them Shura Cherkassky, Martha Argerich, and David Helfgott; but he himself had given up performing when he was only 20’. With sadness, and regret that I had not revived my friendship with him in my adult life, I read with some surprise ‘he is survived by his partner, the artist, Michael Garady’.
After about two months of working long hours,