HAYLEY WESTENRA AT CADOGAN HALL
A Personal and very subjective Odyssey!
Introduction—getting thereFor those who know London well, just jump to ‘Arrival and Denouement’..
With a surfeit of Moderators present, not to say three of them sitting next to me, I felt sufficiently surplus to requirements as to consider not writing at all. Then I thought, why not? There’s always room for the idiot’s view (or do I mean the idiosyncratic one?), if only to encourage debate! So, here I am.
The thrust of this missive is at our overseas friends, for whom the names of the places mentioned will doubtless have meaning in memories of visits made, or hopes for visits to be made… or simply dreamed about. For those readers, these distant but still famous names may awaken a little excitement and bring an added dimension, by placing them in relation to one another in casual mention of ‘everyday’ passing.
I have wondered about this less than conventional approach. My excuse is that lovely
Evening Standard interview Hayley gave in which she said how much she loved wandering around London, as I do and as I and my American friend love doing together when he is over here.
Summer arrived in England, this week, or at least in London Town and the immediate countryside. My heart was already welcoming the day from at least yesterday, when I realised I would switch out entirely for Hayley. I left my ancient home town, where William the Conqueror was finally offered the crown of England, after several weeks of zigzagged rampaging of the countryside between Hastings and around and to the north of London.
Departing home with a holiday nonchalance that mattered not which train I caught, it was a slow, forty-five minute journey to Euston, where I promptly forgot to check the times of the last trains back home! A slightly longer stroll to St Pancras, the Harry Potter London station, rather than the nearer Euston Square station, took me past the new building and plaza of the British Library. At King’s Cross station I caught the Circle line train for Bakers’ Street, travelling along that stretch of line that was the first underground railway in the world. Hence the airiness of Baker Street station, to allow the smoke to dissipate! In those days one had a choice of 1st 2nd or 3rd class travel!
Alighting at Baker Street I emerged opposite Madame Tussauds and the London Planetarium and turned towards Baker Street, just a little way down from 221B, the home of the most famous detective in the world, where his lodgings are a museum decorated in the manner Conan Doyle describes the place in his Sherlock Holmes stories.
Business transacted, I strolled down Baker Street (quite a long street) to Oxford Street, with the emporia of Marks and Spencer on one side and Selfridges on the other. Meandering through each I returned to Oxford Street for a No. 6 to the Aldwych.
Driving down Oxford Street, the bus turned right at Oxford Circus and trundled down Regent Street. Hopping off at Piccadilly Circus I wandered towards Leicester Square, stopping off at Fridays’ for lunch.
After a quick bite, I walked through Leicester Square to the back of the National Portrait gallery. Past St Martin’s in the Fields, across Trafalgar Square to a No. 11 stop, opposite the Whitehall theatre, for so long the home of Brian Rix farces. I do not think I have been invited by anyone to fall off my seat in hysterical laughter since that era—at least not in a theatre!
The No. 11 took me past Horse Guards Parade, where two mounted officers were astride their ebony chargers resplendent in their silver and gold breastplates. They always remind me of that couplet from Matthew Arnold’s poem Sohrab and Rustum:
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
His cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold.
More mundanely, these cohorts were surrounded by the usual tourist crowd.
We passed the Cenotaph and the entrance to Downing Street and then drove round Parliament Square where, for the next few weeks, tourists will be missing the ‘ding dong’ of the Westminster Chimes. One of the bells in St Stephen’s tower (it is the big bell, neither the clock nor the tower that is ‘Big Ben’) requires new bushes on the axis on which its hammer swings.
At 3 tons it is one of the smaller bells (Big Ben itself weighs 13 tons!) but nonetheless, disengaging it from the rest of the clock mechanism and lowering it to the ground for transport to the Whitechapel foundry, remains a tricky operation.
Between the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey stands the parish church of the House of Commons, St Margaret’s. Down Victoria Street, passing the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster to Victoria station itself where, on the opposite corner a street away is the kitchen entrance to Buckingham Palace.
Alongside Victoria station, with its long platforms for the Continental boat trains (not Eurostar, that leaves from Waterloo) and into Lower Sloane Street and finally Sloane Square. A journey of twenty minutes from Trafalgar Square.
A loaf around Peter Jones and then on to look at Cadogan Hall. I saw Richard, smartly dressed in a blue suit on sentry duty outside. Clearly, like me he realised we were in Sloane Ranger country and wished to be lost in the undergrowth amongst the natives!
He advised me that Hayley had already arrived but would not be signing tonight. However, as a crowd of us would be turning up she’d ‘poke her head’ out of the stage door at the end. Oh, Hayley. You are so absolutely superb. Who else would be so considerate and so caring?
A meander off for a quick bite I met the Hayters dining at a side walk table with Roger, just about to leave to see if Richard had arrived, which I assured him he had. Squatting at a side table reserved for someone yet to arrive I ordered kedgeree and a tonic water and whiled away a pleasant few minutes chatting before they decided to clear the table to enable me to indulge myself.
Arrival and denouementThis UK series with Hayley is definitely turning into some real fun times of HWI members meeting up with one another face-to-face. As has already been posted, there were some of us convinced there was going to be a photo call while others of us decided that running so late the show must surely start any moment and we went in ahead.
The photographers have proved the point it was worth waiting longer and finally they joined me ensconced in my row, having only a few minutes previously disrupted half a row to reach my midway point. The others, fortunately, came in from the other end to meet up with me literally, Richard to my right, then Roger, then Dave.
In my view, remembering how I opened this report, enough has been said except that for the first time Hayley worried me. I kept wondering just when was she going to come on? I felt we would run out of time and all we would have would be a couple of songs.
Then another worry crept in. Hayley, this is one fab night. This is one hell of a do. I’m used to you Hayley standing out head and shoulders. Okay, when you are battling things out with Fiona the two of you are on a par but it is still the Hayley show and different instruments. Here you actually had another female singer ’competing’ with you, even allowing for the fact a mezzo is a completely different instrument. Where in this show is Hayley? Would she stand out? Would, by contrast of all these excellent performances, only come across as ‘on par’. Was there a danger of an anti-climax? I was seriously worried for you.
Then on you came. Just walking on stage it was your show. Despite the brilliance of what had gone before you stood out, in command without appearing commanding. It was not a question of being head and shoulders above the rest. You stood out in harmony with them. An incredible feat. And here I go, jumping in with all six feet flailing in my usual manner, spontaneously as I write. There will come a time when you will have your own television show. You can do it. You can hold and manage the greats in your own way. You’ve got what it takes. Not yet. Not quite yet. But the maturity and self-confidence that such a demanding job requires is there, growing steadily, quietly hidden for now but building.
On Tuesday night at Cadogan Hall, you gave me the same emotion I felt when first I saw you perform at The Palladium. The emotion that determined I had to do what I had never done for anyone in my life before, stand at a stage door waiting for a star.
On Tuesday night you re-awoke that same emotion expressed simply as this: ‘You’re damned good lady, you’re damned good indeed!’ Tuesday night made me realise how extraordinarily privileged we are to meet with you at all, let alone the number of times so many of us have been privileged to do so.
So, the end of that show and what happened? You’d promised you would meet us at the stage door. And you did! There, at that stage door, an international star stepped out onto the side walk to talk to some of the fans she knew well enough to be so casual with. So casually, her manager slipped his jacket over your shoulders to keep out the chill of a summer’s late night air, just off London’s Sloane Square.
Thank you, Hayley Westenra, for being such a very wonderful person indeed,
Peter
