<<  -- 7 --  Adrian Williams    JOHN RUSSELL FRCM (1916-1990)

So for three weeks in the early summer of 1977 I lived at Ben's Folly in the Berkshire countryside, practising for hours in the daytime gradually committing my programme to memory, sometimes going down the hill for drinks with John at the Hatch Gate pub in the village and talking to Frank behind the bar, sometimes trundling down the same hill on 'yellow peril' the dilapidated old bike, sometimes driving their car in monotonous circles on their driveway just for fun (I didn't have a driving licence in those days).

I recall a walk down through villages and past remains of churches to Aldermaston one luxuriously warm day, catching a train there and being picked up at Theale by John. A summer gathering of family and friends, eating Margaret's kedgeree (brown rice of course) in the sunset glow with lounge sliding doors open to the fields, and afterwards making a chorus of little whistles out of cow parsley stalks, John blowing with mirth in the midst. John loved visitors, old friends, family. He often used to say 'All I did was meet a girl called Margaret, and suddenly the house was full of people'.

A visit for a few days by the violist Bernard Shore and his wife Olive, then already quite elderly, John and Bernard performing for us Bernard's own arrangement for viola of Elgar's Violin Sonata [listen], Bernard, Olive, John and Margaret with me in a line for a treasured photo. And then Major Dent down in Hillfields, aged ninety, puffing to the piano by the windows overlooking great lawns, and singing (shakily but not bad for ninety) Quilter's O mistress mine [listen] to John's or my accompaniment.

Suddenly a jolly chuckle and dozens of little explosions of 'what?' 'what?' when he couldn't hear something, finally grunting off into the dark labyrinths of his mansion. [listen to Major Dent and John Russell talking about Arthur Marshall and Betjeman.]

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