The Voice of a Gentleman. The Soul of a Pauper.

I was born in 1898, to Archibald and Maeve, in a less than salubrious backstreet in Bermondsey, a short stroll from the Thames. My father, despite his lack of education (or indeed anti-Semitism) was a rampant Wagnerian. He insisted that I be called Tristan and my younger sister Isolde. Clearly, the incestuous implications of this escaped him. My mother, being a meek woman, tiny, pale and tired as a spent matchstick, accepted his eccentricities without fully comprehending them.

We were only intermittently shod and often went hungry on his stevedore’s wages. Yet he would occasionally swagger through the door bearing tickets to Das Rheingold or Parsifal at the Royal Opera House in his vast calloused paws. Whisked off into a realm of limelight and glamour in my Sunday best, I would marvel to gigantic men and women with even bigger voices. I was humbled by the ‘quality’ around us and they were contemptuous of the threadbare poor, yet I would dream of bestriding the stage in armour, belting out German to an enthralled public.

It’s obvious that these operatic fancies led to my life threading the warped, scuffed boards of the English stage. I wonder whether those nights in the thrall of the rich, all dazzling elegance and champagne-fuelled arrogance, also led to my adoption of an aristocratic air and a weakness for mixing in royal circles. In a sense, I often ponder my assimilation into a class of people I should heartily loathe.

I remember thinking that very thing even as I was thoroughly captivated by Princess Margaret. I have the voice of a gentleman, but the soul of a pauper. This tortured me for many years. Naturally, now I’m reduced to my present cadaverous state, I really couldn’t give a fiddler’s fuck…