The Passions of Vaughan Williams

The last blog was a bit maudlin in places, so I thought I'd post something a bit shorter and lighter and give those of you who never met Simona a chance to see and hear her in her later years. She was interviewed in the late 2000s for two programmes about Vaughan Williams: O Thou Transcendent and The Passions of Vaughan Williams. I still have a recording of the latter BBC4 programme and watch it from time to time, always amused at how it is populated by posh old women, including Simona. 

Showing footage from the programme to friends has made my constant claims that I'm not posh, merely a southerner living in a northern city, far harder to justify! But it is lovely, and a rare privilege, to be able to hear Simona's voice more than five years after she died. The Simona in this film is the one I knew best, recorded in the home I most associate with her, Cobbler's Cottage, a beautiful Cotswold cottage that belonged to her second husband Kenneth and which she (and we) often visited throughout my life. 

I was also lucky to have met two of Simona's closest friends who also feature in the programme: Ursula Vaughan Williams (of course) and Jill Balcon. In my late teens while visiting Simona in London she and Ursula took my sister and me for dinner at a local restaurant where they were frequent visitors. We were shown to 'Mrs Vaughan Williams's regular table' and I spent the evening slightly mortified at the volume of their conversation!  I met Jill Balcon when I worked at a prep school and she had visited to judge a poetry reading competition (her late husband Cecil Day-Lewis had taught at the school in his youth), where she greeted me with an initial distance that turned into an enormous hug as soon as Simona's name was mentioned. I didn't have the nerve to confess my adoration for her son, which continues to this day...

So, if you are a fan of Vaughan Williams, or are just interested to find out a bit more about Simona and her obsession with his music, I hope you enjoy watching.