Berkeleys and the Paddington Set

It’s just fifty-six years ago since Anne and I moved into number 24 Blomfield Road and, very shortly afterwards, through our mutual friend Patrick Kinross, got to know Lennox and Freda, just around the corner at 8 Warwick Avenue. And my word, what a great day that was. Of course, Lennox’s name was well-known to me – I had loved his music for years. But I had never met him or Freda – and from our first meeting it was instant friendship. That friendship was still further cemented – though heaven knows it didn’t need cementing – when a year or two later my mother came back from France to spend the rest of her life in England, and became, quite literally, the Berkeleys’ next-door neighbour. She always said that her greatest pleasure was hearing Lennox’s piano through the partition wall – and, a few years later, trying to guess which member of the family it was who was playing.

And then there were those wonderful dinner-parties, Freda answering the door with that glorious honey-coloured voice: ‘Daaaaarling!’ – I can hear it now – and then a heavenly bear-hug. There would usually be one or two friends from what John Betjeman used to call ‘the Paddington Set’ – Patrick, or my mother, or Adrian Daintrey, or Frank and Kitty Giles – and then, quite often, someone I had always wanted to meet: my heroine C. V. Wedgwood, for example, or Cecil Day Lewis, or Paul Dehn, who had won an Oscar for writing some of the James Bond scripts and – far more important – the libretto for Lennox’s A Dinner Engagement.

Our own dinners on those evenings were imaginative and utterly delicious – Freda was a superb cook. And then we’d go upstairs again, for more talk, or quite often music. It was Paul Dehn, I remember, who had invented the magical, mystical MRS RAVOON, about whose unusual sightings he had composed six verses.¹ I will give you the first two:

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept, Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept. There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon, Rigid and smiling, lay … MRS RAVOON! I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun; And ‘twas midday at least ere my journey was done; But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon, For there, from the clapper, swung MRS RAVOON’

Lennox always said he was going to set MRS RAVOON to music. Goodness, I wish he had.

There was another memorable evening, too, with Cecil Day Lewis. He had a wonderful, gentle tenor voice – he knew all those perfectly beautiful Thomas Moore songs by heart: ‘Believe me, if all those endearing young charms’, ‘Oft in the stilly night’, ‘They may rail at this life’ and so many others, and he sang them lovingly, liltingly, like the poet he was, while I did my best to accompany him on the guitar. And over it all darling Freda would preside, radiating that very special warmth of hers, regularly – sometimes almost too regularly – replenishing our glasses, and always ready with another great bear-hug before we staggered out into the night. We loved her dearly, all of us.

Those were the days. They don’t come like that any more.