Muddling through

It so happened that in 1961 I was part of a little group — three of us — which welcomed ‘Mr Jazzman’ to London. That was the code name for Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer, who had that day jetéed over the barrier in Paris and defected to London. He had very little English but he was already amused, and giggling, at what he regarded as the quaintness of Englishness. ‘All the same, all the same’, he kept saying, meaning the rows of terraced houses he had glimpsed as he was swept from London airport to the Brompton Road.

A year before this I had crossed on the ferry to the Isle of Wight with my mother-in-law, née Lehmann. She looked about her. ‘What an extraordinarily ugly race we are,’ she remarked. We were certainly a varied lot (Saxon? Celtic? Many different skull-shapes). To me, newly returned from Java, it was a relief that not everyone had black hair.