When I paid my five farthings

Keeping in touch with old friends is one of life’s great joys. That’s made less easy by Covid, of course, but fortunately we do have email and all sorts of social media tools to help us along. In particular, it’s always a great pleasure to receive an email from one of our dearest friends, Gerda.

Gerda’s Swiss, but you’d hardly know it, given the number of decades (far more than any of us want to remember) she’s lived in England. The Swissness comes out most (or used to, before his career started to wind down) whenever Roger Federer was playing competitive tennis somewhere.

I wanted to write that watching Federer win, was her greatest joy, but that isn’t true. It was certainly an experience she savoured, but she does have other joys that are even stronger. Watching her granddaughter grow, for instance, and it was fun to see a couple of pictures of her attached to Gerda’s latest email, along with a video of the two-year old feeding the family dog. It was a systematic process, one piece of food at a time, laid carefully on the ground for the dog to pick up, or occasionally fed straight into his mouth. Almost as touching as seeing the little girl so busy was to see the dog so patient, quietly waiting for the next piece of food and, if he was taking it from her hand, doing it with exquisite gentleness.

However, it wasn’t the gorgeous girl, enchanting as she was, who provided the incentive for writing the email. 

St Martin’s: one of London's most charming churches
Immortalised in song, and the site of much singing

Gerda had received, and decided to forward, a message from St Martin’s in the Fields about their forthcoming concert programme. Do you know the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons?

Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clements

The second verse is

You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St Martin’s

That St Martin’s. Probably the finest eighteenth-century church in London. In keeping with Protestant tradition, it’s quiet and understated as well as beautifully elegant.

Its concert programmes usually feature choral pieces accompanied by small instrumental ensembles. Well, obviously small, since a full 60-piece symphony orchestra would have trouble fitting into the interior of the finest, but understated and restrained, eighteenth-century church in London.

Gerda was reminded of the time when we went to one of those concerts together. “I think one of your sons joined us too,” she reminisced. She’s right. And that was another story.

I’m a fan of Mozart’s Requiem. Nothing original about that, lots of people are. It’s a key element in Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus. The film presents it as written under the urging of Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s envy-ridden and mediocre rival, as part of a plan to drive the greater composer into his grave. I can’t imagine that Peter Shaffer, who wrote both the screenplay and the play it’s based on, didn’t know that story was almost certainly false. I imagine he decided to go with it anyway because the dramatic potential of a man writing one of the world’s great pieces of music, as the requiem for his own funeral, was just too good to pass up.

Tom Hulce as Mozart dictating his Requiem to
F. Murray Abraham as Salieri in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus

While we were living in Strasbourg, in the early years of the century, a friend of ours mentioned a forthcoming performance of the piece. My elder son, Michael, accepted my invitation to join us, so I set it all up.

On the day of the concert, however, Michael was late home. I waited until what I judged to be the latest possible moment I could but eventually, despairing of his arrival, headed for the concert without him. I enjoyed the performance but was upset, on my return, when both Michael and my wife Danielle pointed out to me that he’d got home just a minute or two after I left. Had I waited a few moments longer, I could have taken him with me and we could have enjoyed the music together. 

Strangely, the memory of that missed opportunity rather tormented me over the next decade or so. 

Well, I don’t want to overstate things. I didn’t lie awake night after night torturing myself with guilt and self-reproach. It wasn’t the Ancient Mariner with the albatross around his neck or anything like that.

Sorry to disappoint.

No. It was more a recurring niggling anxiety. “I promised to take Michael to hear Mozart’s Requiem, and I failed.” That kind of thing.

So it was great that one day, when we were back in England, he happened to be visiting us just when St Martin’s was putting on the Requiem. I ordered tickets. Everyone was ready on time when we travelled to central London, and we took our seats at our leisure well before the concert was due to start. 

As a bonus, Gerda also joined us. 

In the immortal words of Robert Service in his remarkable comic poem The Cremation of Sam McGee, “a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code”. 

Well, that’s how I’d felt all those years. Now at last I could settle my debt, and lay down that burden. It was as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

The performance was fine. Perhaps a little light, with so few instruments. But the voices were good. And the setting was, as ever, magnificent.

As, of course, was the company. 

Thanks, Gerda, for having contributed to it. And for reminding me of it now.