Moving on to book two
So I've finished Simona's book about Vaughan Williams and his music. I enjoyed reading it and discovered aspects of my grandmother that weren't apparent during her later years, as well as a lot about the music of Vaughan Williams. I didn't know Simona was a dancer, or that Vaughan Williams wrote music for film. I hadn't appreciated the challenges just to discover new music back in the 40s and 50s; with few recordings and without the sound quality we take for granted in the 21st century, Simona spent her time scouring the press and concert listings for live performances. Undoubtedly these would have been more satisfying than listening on the gramophone, but it meant that at the time of writing she still had not heard all of Vaughan Williams's compositions.
I could probably achieve this today with relative ease, and perhaps I eventually will, but even if I try to get to all the pieces Simona has written about I'll never move on. The book is engaging and clearly well researched, and Simona isn't afraid to say just what she thinks of the pieces - positive or negative. But going into this project with limited knowledge of Vaughan Williams's works I have to admit that I've found it quite hard going; reading an analysis of a piece of music you don't know is surprisingly frustrating! The structure of the book lends itself to being revisited - to dip into as I continue to explore the music over the coming year. The desire she expressed in the opening chapter, that her writing will persuade others to share in her delight, has certainly been realised in my case.
“...all I want to do is to shout aloud, to anybody who will listen, my delight that I was fortunate enough to be born into this century and not any other. For who, having discovered and fallen in love with his music, would not willingly endure the drabness of present-day life and the menace of the hydrogen bomb and all the other benefits the twentieth century has to offer, for a lifetime, and, I devoutly hope, an eternity to follow, of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams?”
I will enjoy my continued musical education and will return to the book and Simona's subsequent friendship with Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams on this blog later in the year. But for now I'm moving on to Pigtails and Pernod, the account of Simona's teenage school holidays in Dieppe.
The characters, the locations and some of the stories have been known to me since childhood. As a child we went on holiday to Dieppe and remember walking for what seemed like hours around residential streets as my father tried to locate the Chalet Caude Cote, where Ginny and Ginga lived and Simona spent those holidays. After one false identification we did eventually find the house and its current residents, who invited us in, and so began a friendship between my parents and the Barbe family that continues to this day.
I think this is a book I'll attack with more gusto and it will definitely provide me with a better insight into my family heritage. I may even recreate that childhood trip to Dieppe (although not via the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry) and the search for the house that played such a part in my family history. My father better prepare himself for lots of questions over the coming weeks!
“Whatever the weather - stormy or smooth - Simona Pakenham crossed the English channel six times a year between Dieppe, the home of her grandparents, and Newhaven, which was conveniently situated for school.
She tells the story of three typical holidays spent in the Chalet Caude Cote - Christmas, when she was twelve, skirts were above the knee and ‘Hallelujah’ was the tune on everybody’s brain; Easter when, when her school-resistant cousin Johnny, she shared a mild attack of post-confirmation religious mania and learnt to play the Yo-yo; the summer, when, at almost nineteen, she danced till dawn in the Casino and was introduced to Pernod outside the forbidden Cafe des Tribunaux, though her more serious contemporaries, the Romilly boys, had run off to the war in Spain and taxes were beginning to drive the English out of France.”