It was the first death of a close relative, of someone who had been an essential part of my life, and it affected me much more deeply than I had expected.
As a child, it seemed to me that the house was full of music. There were two Bechsteins, an upright and a grand, and sometimes both were being played simultaneously, to say nothing of David’s flute and Marcus’s clarinet. At such times the house was a veritable aquarium of sound, and I would become aware of one instrument and then another as I walked about (the different instruments did not seem to clash, curiously; my ear, my attention, would always select one or another).
My mother was not as musical as the rest of us, but very fond, nonetheless, of Brahms and Schubert lieder; she would sing these, sometimes, with my father accompanying her at the piano. She was especially fond of Schubert’s ‘Nachtgesang’, his Song of the Night, which she would sing in a soft, slightly off-key voice. This is one of my earliest memories (I never knew what the words meant, but the song affected me strangely). I cannot hear this now without recalling with almost unbearable vividness our drawing room as it was before the war, and my mother’s figure and voice as she leaned over the piano and sang.
My father was very musical, and would come back from concerts and play much of the program by ear, transposing fragments into different keys, playing with them in different ways. He had an omnivorous love of music, and enjoyed music halls as much as chamber concerts, Gilbert and Sullivan as much as Monteverdi. He was particularly fond of songs from the Great War, and would sing these in a resounding bass. He had a large library of miniature scores, and always seemed to have one or two of these in his pockets (and indeed he usually went to bed with one of them, or the dictionary of musical themes that I gave him later for one of his birthdays).
Though he had studied with a noted pianist, and was always darting to the keyboard of one or the other of the pianos, my father’s fingers were so broad and stubby that they could never fit quite comfortably on the keys, so he usually contented himself with impressionistic fragments. But he was eager for the rest of us to be at home on the piano, and engaged a brilliant piano teacher, Francesco Ticciati, for us all. Ticciati drilled Marcus and David in Bach and Scarlatti with passionate, demanding intensity (Michael and I, younger, would play Diabelli duets), and at times I would hear him bang the piano with frustration, shouting, ‘No! No! No!’ when they failed to get things right. Then he would sit down sometimes and play himself, and suddenly I knew what mastery meant. He instilled in us an intense feeling for Bach especially, and all the hidden structure of a fugue. When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, ‘smoked salmon and Bach.’ (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)
I found the house somewhat stark, musicless, when I returned to London in 1943. Marcus and David, pre-med students now, were themselves evacuated – Marcus to Leeds, David to Lancaster; my father was busy, when not seeing patients, with his duties as an air-raid warden; my mother equally so, doing emergency surgery late into the night at a hospital in St. Albans. I would wait up, sometimes, to hear the sound of her bicycle bell, as she cycled back, close to midnight, from the Cricklewood station.
A great treat at this time was to hear Myra Hess, the famous pianist who almost single-handed, it seemed, reminded Londoners in the midst of war of the timeless, transcendent beauties of music. We would often gather around the wireless in the lounge to hear the broadcasts of her lunchtime recitals.
When Marcus and David came back, after the war, to continue as medical students in London, the flute and the clarinet had long been abandoned, but David, it was evident, had exceptional musical gifts, was the one who really took after our father. David discovered blues and jazz, fell in love with Gershwin, and brought a new sort of music to our previously ‘classical’ house. David was already a very good improviser and pianist, with a special flair for playing Liszt, but now suddenly the house was full of new names, names unlike any I had ever heard before: ‘Duke’ Ellington, ‘Count’ Basie, ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, ‘Fats’ Waller – and from the horn of the new wind-up Decca gramophone he kept in his room I first heard the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Sometimes when David sat down at the piano, I was not sure whether he was playing one of the jazz pianists or improvising something of his own – I think he wondered, half seriously, whether he might become a composer himself.
Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up. For David this was music, while Marcus’s passion, from an early age, had been for languages. He had an extraordinary aptitude for learning them, and was fascinated by their structure; at sixteen he was already fluent not only in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but in Arabic, which he had taught himself. He might have gone on, like his cousin Aubrey, to do oriental languages at university, but then the war came. Both he and David would have reached call-up age in 1941-42, and both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London.
Mr. Ticciati, our piano teacher, died in the war, and when I came back to London in 1943 my parents found another teacher for me, Mrs. Silver, a red-haired woman with a ten-year-old son, Kenneth, who was born deaf. After I had studied with her for a couple of years, she became pregnant once again. I had seen my mother’s pregnant patients almost daily, as they came to her consulting room in the house, but this was the first time I saw someone so close to me go through an entire pregnancy. There were some problems toward the end – I heard talk of ‘toxemia’ and I believe my mother had to do a ‘version’ of the baby, so that it would come out head first. Finally Mrs. Silver went into labor and was admitted to hospital (my mother usually delivered babies at home, but here it seemed there might be complications and a caesarian section might be necessary). It did not occur to me that anything serious might happen, but when I got home from school that day, Michael told me that Mrs. Silver had died in childbirth, ‘on the table.’
I was shocked, and outraged. How could a healthy woman die like this? How could my mother have let such a catastrophe occur? I never learned any details of what had happened, but the very fact that my mother had been present throughout evoked the fantasy that she had killed Mrs. Silver – even though everything I knew convinced me of my mother’s expertise and concern, and that she must have encountered something beyond her power, beyond human power, to control.
I feared for Kenneth, Mrs. Silver’s deaf son, whose main communication had been in a homemade sign language he shared only with his mother. And I lost the impulse to play the piano – I did not touch one at all for a year – and never allowed another piano teacher thereafter.
I never thought I really knew or understood my brother Michael, even though he was the closest to me in age, and the one who came to Braefield with me. There is, of course, a great difference between six and eleven (our respective ages when we went to Braefield), but there seemed, in addition, something special about him which I (and perhaps others) were conscious of, though we would have found it difficult to characterize, much less to understand. He was dreamy, abstracted, deeply introspective; he seemed (more than any of us) to live in a world of his own, though he read deeply and constantly, and had the most amazing memory for his reading. He developed, when we were at Braefield, a particular preference for Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield, and knew the entire, immense books by heart, though he never explicitly compared Braefield to Dotheboys, or Mr. B. to the monstrous Dr. Creakle. But the comparisons were surely there, implicit, perhaps even unconscious, in his mind.