ABSTRACT

The life of an alien in that war could be embarrassing: the life of an enemy alien intolerable. It was so for Alfredo Campoli during the Second World War. The Aranyis were staying with the Asquiths when the police came to investigate them; and it was the Prime Minister himself who motored them to the police station at Didcot. Not much, for enemy aliens were unlikely to find engagements. But when the war was over, they became good friends, often playing together in chamber concerts, and making a recording of this very work with Myra Hess, whose first recording it was. As authors have seen, nobody had better soil than the Aranyis for cultivating national dislike of the two big teutonic nations, without need of the press to sow, grow, manure and arrange it in daily vases. Adila, unlike Jelly who has a fine precision in a wide English vocabulary, made laughable mistakes in English to end of her life.