The First Nowell
Despite writing about Simona and her love of Vaughan Williams for nearly two years now, I still had not heard any live performances of his music, so it was an easy decision when I was offered tickets to hear a concert including The First Nowell. It seemed particularly appropriate that the first live performance I go to should be of a work on which he collaborated with my grandmother, and to make it even more perfect, the concert was being staged by the Charlton Kings Choral Society, in which my father sings.
I had heard The First Nowell several times as I have the Vaughan Williams Christmas Music CD, but that recording does not include Simona's libretto, based on medieval mystery plays. That makes it all sound far grander than the nativity play that it is; the script covers the Christmas story we all know so well: the angel's annunciation, the journey to Bethlehem, the shepherds and kings. Similarly, Vaughan Williams's music is predominantly variations on well known carols, with some additional choral interludes. This all makes for a very familiar and comforting start to the festive season.
Simona wrote about the work in her account of VW's funeral, how she was working with the vicar of St Martin in the Fields on a Christmas work to raise funds for the church's charitable work, specifically for the Ockenden Venture that housed refugees. She had visited Hanover Terrace to discuss some of the final aspects of the orchestration with VW in August 1958, just a few days before he died. The final work on the score was completed by Roy Douglas.
The original performance was squeezed into a run of My Fair Lady at Drury Lane, which caused VW much consternation as he had to restrict his orchestration to far fewer musicians than usual. The performance I saw had only strings and a piano, so I dread to think how he would have reacted! Simona not only wrote the libretto, but staged the first performance including designing the set and the costumes. Among her papers I found the original drawings she made of the costumes, some of which illustrate this piece, and showed me again how little I knew about the extent of her skills when she was alive.
Simona always loved Christmas, but in a serious rather than a frivolous way. Fripperies and frivolities were not her style (despite what the Christmas section of Pigtails and Pernod would suggest), but her responsibilities for maintaining the local church nativity scene were never shirked; she often returned home from our house on Boxing Day because she needed to go to the church to add the Wise Men to the tableau. I have inherited some of her favourite traditions though, and I don't feel Christmas has really started until Carols from King's is broadcast. The First Nowell epitomises her approach to Christmas: tasteful, intellectual, traditional and sacred.
As I travelled down to Cheltenham for the concert I was reading Tom Cox's 21st Century Yokel, and coincidentally reached the chapter about his grandmother, The Best Waves. Tom's grandmother was a nan; 'a grandma, while technically the same relation to you, was a much sterner and less relatable character than a nan'. This applies to Simona, definitely not a nan, and not even happy to be grandma. A later quote, however, made me reflect on my relationship with Simona:
“...you can spend your life very close to a relative but, due to the cruelty of time, in some areas of mutual interest still manage to miss them slightly, like two people who’ve entered the same forest on footpaths that come agonisingly close but never quite converge.”
As a child Simona was an occasional and brief visitor, who always seemed a little distant and uninterested in us as children. As a teenager, and following my grandfather's death, I spent more time with her but had little interest in the Shakespeare and classical music she loved, and I think she still thought me somewhat trivial. In young adulthood, when I began to share some of her interests, I was too absorbed in my own world of work and friends. In later years Simona's functional capacity started to decline and, too late, you recognise so many areas of common ground. All the jobs I dreamt of as a child - actor, tour guide, writer - were the jobs she had held and I could have spent hours speaking to her about. Reading Pigtails and Pernod showed the fun side to Simona that she rarely showed us, but I hadn't read it and didn't appreciate that side of her until it was too late. I don't think the paths Simona and I were on quite converged - nearly, but not quite - but I think I understand her better now than I ever did.