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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Great inspirations

Charles Spencer on some unforgettable characters

He was undoubtedly an inspirational English teacher, who introduced me to Shakespeare, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Larkin and many more with superb freshness and insight. Unlike Hector, and indeed several other beaks at Charterhouse in my time, there was never any wandering-hand trouble with Philip, who, despite a manner and a voice that I now realise were more than a little camp, was enthusiastically heterosexual.

No, Philip’s vice was booze, and it was one he would indulge with favourite pupils. When you were invited round to his house of an evening, ostensibly to discuss poetry or A-level options, you knew that you would roll back to your house later that night gloriously pissed.

Philip talked brilliantly when the booze was flowing. About everything and anything, from great railway journeys to Beethoven’s late quartets. Indeed when I first began to listen seriously to classical music, Beethoven’s late quartets were where I improbably began, purely because I could remember Philip talking about them with such passion. And what he said remains with me almost 40 years on.

But as with all alcoholics, there was a darker side to Philip’s nature. For the most part genial, funny and humane, he could suddenly turn vicious. Rows with his wife could make schoolboy visitors feel they had inadvertently walked into a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and sometimes Philip also turned on the boys who were his guests. I remember him reducing me to tears one night when he tore into what he saw as the fatuity of pop music and my own inanity for liking it. And he carried out his vicious demolition job with the skill and pleasure of a practised sadist.

I learnt a lot from Philip and, among much that was good, I also learnt how to be cruel. I hate to admit it but that, too, proved a useful lesson to someone who was to become a critic.

But the other great man I’ve been remembering was never cruel, though he too was a critic. Peter Hepple was editor of the Stage newspaper for 20 years, and a contributor to its pages for more than half a century, and the Critics’ Circle commemorated him last month at our theatre awards, where the prize for best musical is named in his memory. (It was won, I’m delighted to report, by the excellent Hairspray, whose score offers a pitch-perfect pastiche of American pop music in the early Sixties.)

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