Friday 30 March 2012
Wednesday 28 March 2012
Tuesday 27 March 2012
Sunday 25 March 2012
9 o'clock on sunday morning
politician with passion
With Andrew Marr this Sunday morning was David Milliband as I have never seen him before. Now he is out of office he appears to have matured. He presents his ideas and his observations with an overt enthusiasm I seldom see from his fellow politicians. Thank you Andrew Marr for letting us witness this transformation. Your ‘show’ is one of the highlights of my week.
francis cameron, oxford, 25 march 2012
Friday 16 March 2012
1942 : the church of st peter in fulham
1942
st peter’s church, fulham
I suppose my problem with telling you about St Peter’s Church in Fulham is : I don’t really know where to begin. I went there because I was directed to be there. Why that was, I never knew. I never questioned. And now those who might have enlightened me are no longer with us in this life. I did what was expected of me. A door was pushed open onto a physical representation of a parallel universe.
My fingers move over the keys. I write ‘St Peter’s was suffused with belief .. ‘ and I am aware this is my old self, the self of 2012, speaking. I see and hear by projection through the senses of my young self of 1942. My commentary comes from the far regions of old self. Almost seventy years of living cannot be denied. They make their contribution. Their gloss on a distant recall.
It is Sunday morning. I arrive in good time. As I always do. Time to go line by line through that checklist pinned up in front of me. Make sure all my pieces of music are there. Ready and in right order. It is the first time I have needed an order of service to follow in detail. As the events proceed inexorably on ground level beneath me, I must look and listen. Follow my prompt sheet. Pick up my cues. Play what and when I am required to play. Otherwise to keep silent. To look. To listen.
Such sounds as there are, are the sounds of preparation. Down below me, under the watchful eyes of the Master of Ceremonies, the servers, already robed, go about their duties. Books vessels and cruet are precisely in their appointed places. Candles are lit. Candles in profusion. fiat lux.
So it is as it has been for countless ages. Sacred space is lovingly and reverently prepared. Here was, many times, the birth of sacred drama. Theatre. Opera. Oratorio. The house swept clean. Pure and sanctified for the presence of The One.
The murmurations of assembling congregation dwindle and fade into silence. My overture of introductory mood music is over and done. Expectancy is tangible.
With a single ting of the sacristy bell we are all alert. Curtain up. The ritual surrounding the re-enactment is begun. Old Self begins introibo ad altare dei. Young Self plays the hymn for the Introit. The congregation rises. Takes up its books of words. Gives forth in full voice.
The procession of priests and attendants moves with dignity along its accustomed path. Thurible and boat boy are ready. Charcoal glows fierce red. Incense is offered up. This is both sacrifice and purification. Smoke rises to fill the building with its sweet scent. The Presence hovers. Acknowledging oblation. Present becomes glimpses of eternity.
dominus vobiscum. The Lord be with you. et cum spiritu tuo. And with thy spirit. Priest and people. Bidding and response. oremus. The Celebrant intones the collect proper for the day. Amen. So mote it be.
The Epistle is read from the Epistle Side. More incense rises heavenward. The hymn for the Gradual. The little procession to the ambo on the Gospel Side. The intonation of the written word. Sacred scripture. Treated with great reverence. As though the book by association becomes holy.
credo. ‘We all have faith in our one and only true God. And in his Son and the Spirit which together make up the Holy Trinity. Three-in-One and One-in-Three.’ I’ve never yet heard a sermon which even attempts to explain this central facet of belief. And on that one Sunday in the year when it is ordered for the Athanasian Creed to be said or sung, the symbols on the printed page are conjured into sound. quicumque vult – ‘Whosoever will be savèd, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.’ When, on the extremely rare occasions I have heard the preacher in the pulpit feel an obligation to attempt an explanation, the explanation offered was that the mystery was so far beyond human comprehension, there was no point in trying to offer one.
Pausa! Like the interval in a theatrical performance, the action goes into unheeded suspense. It is time for the sermon. Time for Young Self in the organ loft to turn off the blower and wait for signs of the sermon’s coming to its end before switching on the engine once again.
The hymn for the Offertorium. Then the great solemnity. The celebrant the deacon and the sub-deacon stand in single file facing the altar in the East. (We all faced East in those days though we had long forgotten the old traditional way of celebrating the Divine Sacrifice so that the elevation of the consecrated host coincided with the first shining of the dawning sun through the great east window.) For this is the heart of the mysterium. The words of the Secret are articulated in silence by the priest. The sanctus bell rings. Signals us to raise our eyes to the revivified host. To the Real Presence. Christianity notwithstanding, the old ones are present here and in every sanctuary before whose altar the myth is re-enacted. ‘This is my body .. ‘ And the Great Mother smiles upon us as, to half-glazed eyes, she manifests. The bread of communion. ‘This is my body .. ‘ The wine in the chalice : ‘I am the true vine.’ Diónysos. The fertility of the earth and all that therein is. per omnia saecula saeculorum. And all reply : ‘World without end. Amen’
The climax is past. We sing Communio as the faithful come to communicate with their God. Somewhere – but not in Advent or Lent – gloria in excelsis has been sung.
The Last Gospel is read. Loud and clear. ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Oh shameful shameful sad and vulgar in principio erat verbum from the pen of Jerome sitting at his translator’s post in Bethlehem while Anno Domini CCCCC draws nearer every day. The second century composer of KATA IOANNEN confirmed in his koiné Greek that there, before the beginning of anything, was the LOGOS. Maybe, as I have heard, Jerome really did consider the understanding of Logos to be far beyond the capacity of the ordinary men and women who formed the Christian communities of his Latin speaking West. Some of us feel he unwittingly and at a distance triggered the Reformation with his verbum which came to be interpreted as the word written upon the codex folio. It is so easy for thoughts to be dominated by the implications of that verbum.
ite missa est. It is the final curtain. Young Self explodes into a grand postludium. The play is ended. Come down to earth. Go in peace.
Old Self is redolent with Latin. Young Self never even considers it. So why is it important?
The Church of St Peter in Fulham is part of the worldwide Anglican communion. Father Eric Bates is, in his own words, a ‘clerk in holy orders’. An ordained minister of the established Church of England. Yet he speaks as a believer in ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’. Once I heard him deny the existence of the word ‘Protestant’ in the Book of Common Prayer. (He was right. But it is there – crucially – in the Coronation Service when the monarch promises to defend – or is it ‘uphold’? - the Protestant Religion.)
Gradually, during my time as his organist, I began to hear from this parish priest about the High Church revival of the 19th century. How there had been a great desire to return to the practices of the universal Catholic church as it had existed in England before King Henry’s break away from the authority of the Pope in Rome. The various regional Uses, as contained in such preReformation service books as survived, had been examined and an English liturgy been constituted to reawaken an observance centred on the celebration of the Mass as the main instrument of devotion on each day in its due season.
The rhythm of a fixed part of the year beginning on the First Sunday of Advent in preparation for the unfettered joys of the Nativity on December 25th - and the days and weeks following - merged, though never quite seamlessly, into the rhythm of a complementary part of the liturgical year beginning on Ash Wednesday whose calendrical date varied with reference to the phases of the full moon next after the Spring Equinox. Equinox. Day and Night balanced in equal duration. The rhythm of the Sun and the Moon dancing together created, as it were, the setting for the great festival of Resurrection beginning, as in ancient custom, on the Eve of Easter Sunday. This, then, was the high point the climax the very lynchpin of Christianity.
* * * * * * *
I switch off the blower. Turn off the lights. Pick up my books of words and music. Go down the narrow stone steps to ground level. And out to the exterior world. It feels somehow different. Old Self smiles indulgently. Young Self has emerged from the womb of the sacred enclosure with its walls and ceiling enwrapping space both broad and high. Particles of incense are still held in that space. Sparkling in the beams of exterior light shining through the opened doors. (The windows have been ‘blacked-out’ to comply with wartime regulations.) The world outside is dwarfed by comparison.
A few steps along Rosaville Road. I am with my uncle Harry Hunt and his wife Lil. Lil Simpson as was. After lunch I go to their front room. Sit at the upright piano. Rehearse my part in the coming evening service. The pointed text of the psalm in one book. The musical notation in another. I learn to hold the printed score of the chant in short term memory as I sing the words. My fingers move from chord to chord as each half line dictates.
* * * * * * *
Evensong is much as I remember it from my days on the Decani or South side of the choir in St Mary’s Church at the head of Bryanston Square. Except. Except. Now there are more candles and incense. And an office hymn. Bearing its niggling sense of intrusion. The disjunction of Benediction. The monstrance with its consecrated host held aloft. Blessing the people. Let us adore .. Young Self is focussed on fitting his fingers to the rhythms of the delicate choreography played out down below in the Sanctuary. Old Self wonders if perhaps it was here – subliminally - that a sense of the Real Presence began to make itself felt to the adolescent on his isolated perch.
Here in this sacred space he was surrounded by priests and people observing ritual obligations. Genuflections towards the Real Presence. The little red lamp signalling the reality within the tabernacle. The obeisance towards the High Altar. The centre of the creation of dynamic spiritual energy. Always there. Though not yet, for Young Self, as tangible as the powerful magnetic currents he’d experienced among the Spiritualists.
Yes. ‘St Peter’s was suffused with belief .. ‘ That was manifest beyond doubt.
francis cameron, oxford, 16 march 2012
Thursday 15 March 2012
manifestations
multitasking
I turned my thoughts once again to my time as organist at St Peter’s Church in Fulham but once again my thoughts wanted to go off in a different direction. So I followed.
I came home to Harcourt Street in the summer of 1942 after completing the School Certificate of the Central Welsh Board with distinctions in Maths and Physics plus a number of credits but only a pass in Latin. In the earlier half of 1944 I enjoyed my first professional tour as a pianist. More of that later. In the months in between I appeared in different guises. In modern parlance I was multitasking while the default program ran quietly in the background.
On Sunday mornings and evenings I was the organist of the Church of St Peter in Fulham. In the interval between services I was a relative visiting that part of my mother’s family which lived in the street of terraced houses which once might have lined the drive leading up to the church. On Mondays through Fridays I was a member of the Lower VIth (Arts) at Mercers’ School. In the evenings there was school homework and piano practice. Saturdays saw me as a Special Talent Exhibitioner in Margaret Donnington’s Junior School at the Royal Academy of Music. And, on one evening each week, I was part of our Spiritualist séances in our large front room at home.
The manifestation in different guises was not new.
At the age of three I had displayed a liking for playing the piano. I guess this was a sign to my parents and formal lessons began soon afterwards. I do remember vividly walking onto the concert platform and performing in public for the very first time. My mother and I played a piano duet : four hands at one piano. It was called Winter Ride and we played with the printed score set out on the music rest in front of us. I had learned to ‘read’ music. I was four years old.
From then on, and through all my schooldays, I was set to practice the piano at home in the late afternoon or evening. In those earliest days my mother sat next to me and supervised my work. Outside in the street were the sounds of my classmates at play. Inside 23 Harcourt Street I was applied to yet another lesson : preparing for our weekly expedition to Seymour Place and Mr Moon’s Music Shop where Miss Beryl Knight sat in a little studio at the back, ready to lead me on the next step to proficiency.
A day in the warm and friendly atmosphere of St Mary’s (Church of England) Infants’ School followed by piano practice at home before anything else. And no going out to play with my friends in the street. These were the dual streams of my life at that early age. And there were family activities as well. A third stream of manifestation. And on Sundays, all was changed. We put on our Sunday Best and went to Paddington Chapel.
In time even my Paddington Chapel rôle diverged into two. At 11 o’clock I was part of the congregation sitting in the gallery. During the hymn before the sermon, we little ones filed quietly out and made our way to the basement room where we became the Children’s Church. And I was the player at the harmonium for the Moody & Sankey choruses.
As I grew older and moved into St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary School Mr Owen Oliver, our Head Teacher, set three of us aside to receive special attention in preparation for the scholarship examination. An incipient stream of homework added its own flavour to the day. And my Sunday Best was replaced by the cassock and surplice proper to a boy on the Decani or South side of St Mary’s church choir. And on one evening a week I transformed into a wolf cub in the Paddington Chapel pack.
One man in his time plays many parts.
I was changed. Metamorphosed. From a cockney kid at St Mary’s (Church of England) school to a boy in the second form of Mercers’ School where aspiration to turn into a well-spoken English Gentleman was the unspoken unwritten but compulsory requirement. That, plus piano practice and school homework, was Mondays through Fridays. Saturdays was a different theatre. The stage was set for the Junior School of the Royal Academy of Music. And Sunday mornings and evenings saw me as part of the team – I played the harmonium – at our little Spiritualist Church in a front room on the first floor of a building alongside the Harrow Road.
.. and that’s quite enough for now. I’m almost ready to return to the organ loft high above the chancel of the Church of St Peter in Fulham.
francis cameron, oxford
15 march 2012
Wednesday 14 March 2012
how did it happen?
how did it happen?
I had started to write about my experience as organist of St Peter’s Church in Fulham when my thoughts led off in another direction. How exactly did it happen that I came to be there in the first place? I have no memory of saying I wanted to be a church organist. Yet here I was. Perched on the player’s stool in the organ loft high up on the south side of the chancel.
I’m not concerned with the mundane process of seeing an advertisement; applying; going for interview; being appointed. It’s what leads up to it. Deciding to look in that direction in the first place.
And, in the case of St Peter’s Fulham, the decision to apply was made for me. I did what was expected of me. That was what I did in 1943 when I was just 15 years old.
But then my mind went back along the same track. When did I start making choices for myself? When did I begin to create my own future? There are two occasions of note.
It’s 1959 and I’m moving along in my early 30s – though that was not in my conscious mind at the time. My daytime job was teaching music in a boys’ grammar school. I’d gone there three years before to set up a music department where none existed. I’d made quite a decent fist of it. But I wasn’t fully satisfied. I felt the urge to move on. To better myself. I remember having one of those internal wranglings with myself. There were two simple alternatives. IF you are going to stay in teaching THEN it’s time to look for a position in a good school where you are Director of Music. IF you are NOT going to stay in teaching THEN it’s time to start looking for something else.
A few days later I was not really surprised to open The Times and read of an impending vacancy for someone suitably qualified and experienced to take over from George Malcolm as Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral. I did what was necessary. A new phase of my life began.
Move on to 1968. I’m a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music. It’s a good place to be. And I’m not the only one to recognise I’m doing a very good job.
My 40th birthday hovers on the far horizon. Every magazine I pick up has an article on this event which draws a line and says “You’ve got this far. This is as far as you’re going to go.” Perhaps it was that which made me give thought to my future. I was happy. I was comfortable. I could go on doing more of the same until the end of my working life. I didn’t enjoy the prospect. It was time to look around.
Ten days later I was not at all surprised to open the Sunday papers and see the invitation for those suitably qualified and experienced to apply for the new position of Assistant Director at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney. I did what was necessary and in the November of that year we set sail from Tilbury on the old Iberia. We were on our way to the other side of the world.
Those are not the only two crucial choices I’ve made for myself. I’ve come to be aware we make choices all the time as we create momentous or trivial paths to travel. It’s what I now know to be part of Weaving the Web of Wird – as our Saxon predecessors did when they landed in those three keels.
francis cameron, oxford
14 march 2012
Tuesday 13 March 2012
Monday 12 March 2012
wandering thoughts
wandering thoughts
I had half-planned to write about my impressions of going to St Peter’s Church in Fulham as their ‘paid’ organist at the beginning of 1943 when I was just 15 years old. Then my mind turned back to the beginning of 1938 when I had left the choir of St Mary’s Church at the head of Bryanston Square and gone with my parents to the little Spiritualist church on the first floor of a building in the Harrow Road. To my 10-year-old self there was nothing unusual about my father and mother conducting the service and myself sitting at the harmonium to accompany the singing of the hymns. After all, I had been much younger than that when I played the harmonium for the Children’s Church at Paddington Chapel. And, at Cameron family parties, when individual relatives sang, they set the sheet music in front of me and I sightread the piano part. There was nothing special about this. It was just what I did. I suppose that’s all part of growing up.
It was much later on, when I had experienced various facets of my former lives, I came to recognise the how and why of my choosing to be born to these particular parents. Playing the piano and the organ when people were gathered together for a purpose became a key factor in my life. In this life I continued a process which had begun many decades earlier. And is likely to continue in lives to come.
francis cameron, oxford
12 march 2012
Thursday 8 March 2012
1938 : first day at mercers' school
first day at mercers’ school
Thanks to Captain C Lisle Watson, who stands in lieu of a godfather to me, I am no longer at St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary School. I have bypassed the 11-plus scholarship examination and moved directly into a fee-paying independent grammar school.
This is my first day at Mercers’ in the City of London. I am an addition to the normal limit of 15 boys in form IIA. Our form master is Mr R W H D Murray.
The first day of term is mainly occupied with administrative matters. I unhappily distinguish myself when replying to the standard question about midday meals by cheerfully confirming – in the demotic of Harcourt Street – “Im gunna ‘ave me dinners in school.” In the silence which follows, one can clearly hear the clashing together of the gates of the underworld. A stream of withering invective comes from Mr R W H D Murray condemning the carelessness of those whose speech distorts the normally acceptable standards of everyday cultured life. From henceforth I am blazoned with the mark of Outsider.
Mercers’ was dedicated to the proposition that there is only one correct standard of speech conduct dress devotion and manners for the sons of fathers intending their offspring for careers in the offices of the City of London. School uniform was obligatory – as was the purchase of that uniform from the one store authorised to stock it. Best behaviour was also demanded in journeying to and from school. At all times we could expect to be under the watchful eye of authority. Misdemeanours would not be overlooked. Or forgiven. That would be letting the side down.
I shall write more about Mercers’ later on. In January 1938 I had denoted myself as not cut out from the standard pattern. If I intended to remain I must recast myself so as to be indistinguishable from the dark blazers and grey shorts which surrounded me.
francis cameron, oxford, 8 march 2012
Sunday 4 March 2012
sunday 4 march 2012
sunday 4th march 2012
I wake up at 5:30 and feel the psyche back in command of the ship with the physical system beginning to rebuild after its recent collapse.
Kate and Darren came to see me early on Tuesday’s evening. They made their farewells at 9:20. Ten minutes later I was in bed in deep sleep. A full twelve hours.
Wednesday was a semiconscious state. Too weary to think. Too lacking in direction to go downstairs and eat. Almost a default state of lying in bed, coming to the surface now and again, and then relapsing into a state resembling sleep . Though not of the refresh and restore kind.
Thursday was of a like kind. In bed. Not the real me. Coming to the surface now and again to make a cup of tea or use the bathroom. At eight in the evening what remained of conscious mind prompted the thought that I had taken no food for two days. I was glad Monday’s shopping had included a tin of Big Soup. That was a short expedition to the kitchen. Two minutes in the microwave. Stir and return for one more minute. Consume. Leave the dirty dish on the draining board. Thinking about washing up is too much of an effort. I don’t recall going back upstairs to bed but it must have happened.
Friday. And the physical is drained. I am like a vehicle running on empty. The psyche prompts me. Makes me get out of bed and phone the medical practice. The reserve tank (Do cars still have a reserve tank?) and the self-preservation of the psyche get me there for my midday appointment with Dr Chang-A-Sue, a young Chinese woman with exactly the right approach. As I explain my symptoms and my minimal self-analysis she becomes aware she has been called to visit Barbara early this very afternoon. She will do so knowing the state I am in.
I make my way to the Union for lunch. I can manage soup and bread. I have no appetite for more. Mark comes in. Makes sure I have his phone number. If I need to get away from home, he will come and collect me. If it comes to it I have an escape route. In Boswells, Emilia fills my prescription. Makes sure I understand how and when to use the components. I make my way at a fairly steady two miles an hour to St Aldates and the bus stop.
16:30 - plus or minus. The house is full of people. The ambulance arrives. Barbara is taken back to hospital. She has a virus. Nikki, the occupational therapist, fills me in with the past the present and the future. Then they are all gone. I am alone in the house. Yet I am not alone. I am surrounded by animated shadows. I leave everything as it is. Climb the stairs to sleep. When I wake up it is well past seven. I must eat. The Duke of Monmouth is warm, newly refurbished and friendly.
Saturday. That was yesterday. I really remember very little about it. I was in bed. Too far gone for most of the time. Come the evening I return to the Duke of Monmouth. Cheese pie, jacket, salad, a glass of marsala, and change from £7. Incredibile. I sit in my own little island of silence surrounded by the bustle of those for whom the evening is just beginning.
Sunday. This is where we came in, as they used to say in the days when ‘the pictures’ had continuous showings. 11AMTO11PM as the News Theatre at Baker Street station had it. I must post this and then go back to bed. Psyche has rubbed away some of the mist from the window. Physical still has some way to go.
I go back to the top and read through before signing off and posting. The word GOTHIC in large wavy letters floats across the internal screen. Another part of memory reminds me of reading Edgar Allen Poe in the years before the doors clanged shut on that Sunday morning in 1939.
francis cameron, oxford
Saturday 3 March 2012
saturday 3 march 2012
I decide to have an easy day. I’m all too aware I could start to get to grips with all that needs to be done round the house. But that’s not the wisest course of action. My energy levels are low and I’d be better advised to let those levels build up before I start to put things in order once again. Sleep and eat. That seems to be the order of the day.
francis cameron, oxford