The other good friend who was with us for the Ring picnic parties was Richard Weatherill. He had gone down the previous year and was now teaching at Winchester, but he joined us whenever he could. This was helpful, for he had a car, and would pick us up in Oxford sometimes to get to Covent Garden, and then bring us back before driving off to Winchester late in the night.
He was a great companion, immensely knowledgeable about music, though what I recall best of his comment on the cycle was that Josephine Veasey, who sang Fricka, scolded Wotan rather as Pat sometimes scolded the rest of us. She was I fear going through a difficult period at the time, for her boyfriend Desmond was in the process of parting from her. She was quite convinced that both David Burgess and Richard were also in love with Desmond, and had a great time comparing what was going on to the plot of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, with the others, nobly like the Marschallin there, giving up Octavian to the youthful Sophie.
Pat was somewhat thrown then when in February 1976 David got married to Kate Costeloe whom he had been close to for years. But she then did well in her civil service exams and felt much better, going on to share a house in Greenwich the following year with Richard who had also entered the Civil Service and a couple of other friends. Richard later shared a flat also with Desmond’s next girlfriend, which all struck me as very Iris Murdoch if not quite Richard Strauss.
I stayed twice I think at Winchester with Richard and also saw him at Abingdon School to which he moved for the summer term. And we did get to the opera quite often together, though I cannot be sure that he was the Richard I have recorded for a performance at Covent Garden in February 1976 of ‘La Clemenza di Tito’. But it seems likely, for he exulted over Janet Baker who sang Vitellia in that production. Equally exciting as Sesto, written for a castrati voice, was Yvonne Minton whom I was by now familiar with. And after the performance we drove down to Winchester, as a letter home records, ‘getting there at five, due to the car collapsing on the way. It was very dotty being stranded in Guildford at a petrol station called the Demon which had no spanners, but dirty magazines and Noddy books. We very ostentatiously looked at the latter, at which itinerant taxi drivers were heard to mutter ‘infantile’ – though this may have had to do with our complete helplessness as regarded the car.’
My other companion for opera during this year was Charles Wood, who had lived opposite me when he came up as a freshman in 1973. He was now in his final year, but quite game to get down to London for the opera, and indeed once as when I was with Roger we missed the last train back and had to spend much of the night in the waiting room in Reading. And once I remember we were dueling with umbrellas on the platform to get back to Oxford when Mark Studer who knew us from the chalet saw us and said he just knew it had to be us.
I went with Charles and his great friend Paul Scholl, with whom I shared a cottage in the country the following summer, to ‘Rigoletto’ at Covent Garden in November 1975. Peter Glossop was great in the title role, though I have no recollection of Gilda or the Duke.
The pictures are of Richard and Paul and Charles and Desmond at reading parties, Lamledra and Ahakista and the Chalet and Lamledra again; and then we have Josephine Veasey juxtaposed with the redoubtable Pat.