Part Four - Performers

Summary

The war years in Amersham brought our family into quite close contact with a number of German and Austrian refugees such as a large, very sombre German communist named Bertha Heimberg. For a while she was our housekeeper, whose unavailability to attend the school play on the grounds that it was the anniversary of ‘our leader's death’ I only fully understood half a century later, when I found the name Ernst Thälmann attached to every main street in towns that had formed part of the lately-defunct German Democratic Republic. I've often wondered how Miss Heimberg fared once her party had its way after the war and the Soviet occupation.

The conductor Walter Goehr lived less than half a mile away from us, just the other side of the Metropolitan railway line. He'd studied in Schoenberg's composition master-class in Berlin, fled like his teacher in 1933 and settled in Amersham. He noted my precocious musicality; later, Hans Keller was to maintain, with how much accuracy I cannot judge, that for a long time Walter had undervalued the at-least-equal-but-different talent of his own son Peter Alexander, a fortnight younger than me and universally known as Sandy. The Goehrs we ‘for the duration’ knew well. Walter was nut-brown and wrinkled and altogether fascinating. Of course I knew nothing of either his studies with Schoenberg or his legendary predatoriness with women, but his instinctive musicality made a strong impression. Mrs. (Laelia) was just as striking, a blonde lady most vividly remembered for her appearances on the scene with several very lively poodles whose leads would gradually weave around her what one had to call a dog's-cradle. An early Intimation of Immorality came as I overheard her playing a boogie-woogie piece by Monia Liter; but it was Schoenberg's Op. 19 piano piecelets that I eventually copied out at the Goehrs’.

Significantly, of our two left-wing fathers, Walter went by the golden rule that he who fails to survive fails altogether and so sent Sandy to the nearest minor public school, Berkhamsted; whereas my Fabian Socialist father stuck to egalitarian principles, which dictated state education – the best, obviously, since I was in the top decile, and the Left's literal egalitarianism and antielitism of the 1960s and after was still twenty years away.