Wednesday 28 March
The comedian Arthur Smith is sunning himself on his small patch of lawn beside the service entrance roadway into his 1930s South London apartment block which Hitler admired. We discuss the forthcoming Shakespeare Birthday celebration in Southwark Cathedral on Monday 23 April at two-thirty (as the Chinaman said to the dentist). This year's theme is Dickens and it becomes clear as we talk that the Victorian novelist rescued The Bard from perpetual down-marketing. He used to put on plays with his friends and family every year on Shakespeare's birthday like we do. The singing cellist is taking part too. Arthur shows concern for her condition. He too once spent a week with a tube up his nose he tells me. It is ten years since his own stay in intensive care which is another event to commemorate.
Saturday 24 March
The singing cellist is home from the hospital for the weekend. She has a rehearsal, so we pack her instrument into its coffin-like case and take the bus to St Alfege’s Church, Greenwich, where the Centre for Young Musicians’(CYM) is giving its annual concert. The college is on the other side of town but the CYM director gets the venue cheap, because he is also the organist. This makes him successor to Thomas Tallis, the Father of English Music, who is buried in St Algfege’s with his wife Joan. He died in 1585 aged 80 which impressed his contemporaries, one of whom wrote in a brass plaque :
The comedian Arthur Smith is sunning himself on his small patch of lawn beside the service entrance roadway into his 1930s South London apartment block which Hitler admired. We discuss the forthcoming Shakespeare Birthday celebration in Southwark Cathedral on Monday 23 April at two-thirty (as the Chinaman said to the dentist). This year's theme is Dickens and it becomes clear as we talk that the Victorian novelist rescued The Bard from perpetual down-marketing. He used to put on plays with his friends and family every year on Shakespeare's birthday like we do. The singing cellist is taking part too. Arthur shows concern for her condition. He too once spent a week with a tube up his nose he tells me. It is ten years since his own stay in intensive care which is another event to commemorate.
Saturday 24 March
The singing cellist is home from the hospital for the weekend. She has a rehearsal, so we pack her instrument into its coffin-like case and take the bus to St Alfege’s Church, Greenwich, where the Centre for Young Musicians’(CYM) is giving its annual concert. The college is on the other side of town but the CYM director gets the venue cheap, because he is also the organist. This makes him successor to Thomas Tallis, the Father of English Music, who is buried in St Algfege’s with his wife Joan. He died in 1585 aged 80 which impressed his contemporaries, one of whom wrote in a brass plaque :
'He served long tyme in Chappell
with great prayse
Fower Soveregnes Reygnes (a thing
not often sene)
I mean King Henry and Prince
Edwards Dayes
Quene Mary and Elizabeth our
Quene’
This is fixed to the wall in the south-west corner of the
church next to an ancient organ console behind a glass screen, presumed to
contain pipes which Tallis himself used. A notice draws attention to the fact
that the D key is more worn than the others, but offers no explanation beyond
hinting that D, perhaps, was as supreme with the Tudors as C with us. D to D on
the white notes is minor and modal, invariably producing a dark, melancholy
flavour. Another note also says that the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth grew up
in Greenwich and would have come to church at St Alfege’s.
The head of strings makes frantic calls to absent members of
the cello ensemble. They arrive in dribs and drabs. A cellist I remember as a
treble has grown to exceed six foot. He wafts by, a girl on each arm and the sophisticated whiff of tobacco
smoke in his wake. I wander among the dead while they rehearse. General Wolfe
was brought back here after his ‘glorious death’ at the age of 32 on the
heights above Quebec having ‘won Canada for the Empire’. General Gordon, who
was assassinated in Khartoum was baptised here in 1833. Conrad Dinwiddy ‘fell’
in France in 1917, aged 36. He had invented the Dinwiddy Rangefinder and a
slide rule for field firing, but, I thought, neither did him much good in the end.
We walk to Greenwich Park through standstill traffic,
frustrated drivers fuming through their windscreens. I have a recollection of
walking here holding my father’s enormous hand fifty years ago. Six foot four,
he stood and I have never outgrown him, though I stand a chance now that he is
shrinking down to my height with age. I in turn hold the singing cellist’s tiny
hand though hers has shrunk with anorexia. We sit on a bench while the sun goes
down and Mrs Jones makes her way to us with a picnic. The singing cellist
doesn’t eat hungrily, but neither does she resist my urging to finish her
sandwiches like she used to. She even has a sense of humour. Passing a sweet
shop in Greenwich with minutes to spare before the concert, she says, ‘Although
I’m an anorexic, I think I’ll just pop in here for a moment.’ She eats nothing
indulgent herself but she loves poring over food which other people are going
to eat.
