A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
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was living with her mother off Primrose Hill at the time, in a flat with one sitting room, one bedroom, and a tiny room under the eaves with a stove and a sink. She once told me that when she was a child practising on the upright piano perched on the landing, if she fell into a daydream, the door above her head would open and Granny would lean out and whack her head with a saucepan to get her going again. At this point however her childhood was over. She was a scholarship student with a promising career, and she’d been invited to practise on the grand piano of Ian and Lys Lubbock, who lived near Coram Square.
Every morning she walked down past the Zoo and along Prince Albert Road to the Lubbocks. Signs of war were everywhere. On Primrose Hill, an ancient wood had been cut down to make room for anti-aircraft guns. The animals of the London Zoo were being evacuated to Whipsnade in Bedfordshire, protesting, in large canvas-covered trucks. The bombing was expected to start at any moment.
The first thing she noticed as she walked into the Horizon office – my father’s flat – was a long table against the wall, piled high with books and manuscripts. The larger room overlooking the square contained a wing chair covered with pink silk, a big horn gramophone with a stack of records running along the floor and a long trestle table set for lunch. Awed by these surroundings, Natasha knelt and flipped through Stephen’s records: Schnabel’s ‘Beethoven Society’ recordings of the sonatas, the Busch recordings of the Haydn quartets and Fritz Busch conducting Mozart operas at Glyndebourne. Her taste precisely. And casually propped against the wall near the records, a little Picasso watercolour.
She was briefly introduced to Stephen, but before she could ask him about his taste in music, they sat down to lunch. A crowd of about ten people in the small flat. Cyril Connolly, Horizon’s main editor, sat at the head of the table. Natasha was down near the novelist Rose Macaulay, whom she remembered as having kept her crumpled velvet hat on at table, complete with veil.
Looking at Stephen surreptitiously from a distance, Natasha realized this wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. Three years earlier, in October 1937, she’d joined a group of music students at the Kingsway Hall in London during a rally on behalf of the Spanish Republic. By that time the Spanish cause was as good as lost, but this did not make Stephen Spender less of a glamorous figure. He described the young English poets who had fought and died for Spain: John Cornford, for example, and Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. (‘Spender praised the representatives of culture who had lost their lives whilst fighting with the Spanish Government Forces,’ wrote a listener from MI5.) Natasha admired Stephen’s speech because, unlike the others on the platform, what he said was free from the usual bombast.
After lunch the guests mysteriously disappeared, leaving Stephen with the washing up. Natasha helped – and that was that. As a child I often imagined this scene: the guests leaving with their fingers to their lips like actors miming silence in a film. He’d been depressed all winter and his friends were longing for him to start a new life.
Years later, she described how she looked when Stephen first saw her. ‘He probably thought me rather demure, even old fashioned, with my hair parted in the middle and the two long plaits wound over the head in Victorian style.’ This is typical of the way my mother saw herself: shy, retiring, perhaps at some level even anti-social.
After they’d tidied up, they walked around Mecklenburg Square, and then out to supper together, staying on until the restaurant closed, darkness fell and Natasha had to go home in a taxi. During their walk Stephen mentioned the death of a friend, and he stopped and shut his eyes in an unconscious expression of pain. This was what attracted her: his willingness to reveal emotions. Not many Englishmen she knew did that.
They were both tall, so there was no problem about keeping up with each other when they walked in Regent’s Park next day. And the next. And the next. Less than a week later, in another taxi with the Lubbocks going from a cocktail party to their house to have dinner, a tipsy Ian leaned forward and told Stephen that he should ‘take on’ his wife Lys, not Natasha. Which suggested to Natasha that in the eyes of the world, she and Stephen had already ‘taken on’ each other.
My mother writes this regarding her first impressions: ‘The sudden luminosity of spirit which possessed me from that first day, I remember as a kind of mutual renaissance shared with Stephen, in whom one could sense this tentative turning towards the light, whilst I also was moving away from a restless year I had spent in Hampshire as paying guest of Susan Lushington, where music had been the only solace from the troubled impermanence I had known since 1939 in both outer and inner life.’ It’s a long sentence. When it came to revealing her emotions, my mother wanted to cram everything in and move on.
With several other Royal College students she’d been evacuated to Ockham Hall, where Susan Lushington, a keen amateur musician, had offered them hospitality. ‘Despite successful achievements at the College and beyond, in recovering from an illness I had been troubled about the value and direction of my daily devotion to music.’ She was certainly something of a success. In March 1940, she’d performed Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto with the Royal College Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent. Not the easiest piece in the world. But illness? I know nothing about this, but my mother once told me that she’d had a stomach ulcer at the age of twelve, which suggests stress.
Her fellow students were marrying or going off to the war, or both in quick succession. What was to become of her? She didn’t want to live with a musician and she hardly knew anyone else. A musician ‘would be confining, compounding of stress, and prone to shop-talk. Too narrowing.’ She was not interested in politics. ‘Public life, its battles, crowds and compromises were not for me.’ She could see herself doing good in a quiet way, at an individual level. ‘I was a kind of agnostic Christian, totally unconcerned with dogma, but fond of and admiring those selfless lives, whether historical or personally known to me, which combined a sense of the sacred with understanding, love and tolerance.’
In the few diaries my mother left she insists that an introspective life would have suited her best. The life she chose with Stephen was the opposite of that, but she wasn’t incapable of presenting a brave face to the world. Quite the contrary. She was also a musician, so she knew how to perform.
My mother was the illegitimate daughter of Rachel Litvin, an actor of Jewish ancestry born in Estonia, who’d come to England with her family as a child. Her father was Edwin Evans, a well-known music critic and champion of contemporary French composers. Unfortunately, my grandfather was married when Ray became pregnant, and although he offered to obtain a divorce, my grandmother refused.
In these dire circumstances, Ray was helped via her friendship with Betty Potter, a fellow actor, whose powerful sisters took over my mother’s birth and foster care. Bardie, one of Betty’s sisters, even offered to adopt her, but Ray refused. Margaret Booth, married to the son of the shipping magnate Charles Booth, became Natasha’s ‘Aunt Margie’. In fact all the sisters became Natasha’s elective ‘aunts’.
When Natasha was a few months old, the ‘aunts’ found a foster-mother for her. Unencumbered, my grandmother did her best to continue her career. ‘I walked with Miss Litvinne, mother of an illegitimate child, down Longacre, & found her like an articulate terrier – eyes wide apart; greased to life; nimble; sure footed, without a depth anywhere in her brain. They go to the Cabaret; all night dances; John Goss sings. She was communicative, even admiring I think. Anyhow, I like Bohemians.’ Thus my grandmother depicted by Virginia Woolf, of the sharp eye and sharper tongue, in the year 1924, when my mother was three. The following year she saw Ray acting the part of an orphan in a play. She was not impressed. ‘Poor Ray Litvin’s miserable big mouth & little body.’
Throughout my mother’s childhood, the Booth family at their grand house on Campden Hill, or at their even larger property at Funtington in Sussex, took care of my mother and encouraged her musical gifts. Funtington was full of the Booth children, although they were slightly older than Natasha. There are photographs. She is with them. They