It is December 1913 and in the bleak midwinter (‘In the BMW!’ choristers will quip), I set off on a solitary walk through Essex to clear my head after a tough term of teaching. The students at James Allen’s Girls’ School (JAGS) enjoy the carol I wrote to Christina Rossetti’s words for my friend Vaughan Williams’s New English Hymnal a decade ago, and it is one of the most popular in the book – although Harold Darke’s version, which is based on mine, pips it. Success at JAGS brought me a second post at the newly opened St Paul’s, a young ladies’ equivalent of the centuries-old cathedral school. I composed my St Paul’s Suite for the girls’ orchestra and felt like Vivaldi writing for the orphanage. The governors were so impressed they built me a soundproofed room.
I take the train to Roman Colchester and set off in a north-westerly direction. I have some reading matter in William Lilly’s , my hobby, and an orchestral suite comes to me based on the moods governed by the heavenly bodies. Lilly was a 17th-century seer who predicted the Fire of London. The planet Mars, the Bringer of War, invokes aggression, confrontation and energy and inspires in me a threateningly urgent five-four march with ominous bow-tapping at the start. Next year war happens. I predicted it. Millions ‘fell’. Colchester will erect an elaborate memorial with a St George in ornate chivalric armour impaling a dragon on his mighty double-handed sword. There are raindrops on my spectacles.
