I enjoyed playing it so much at Aldeburgh with Richard that I have been trying to get it in vain chiz

I enjoyed playing it so much at Aldeburgh with Richard, that I have been trying to get it (in vain chiz.,), therefore you can imagine my joy at receiving your parcel. Lots of love to you! Yours always, David xxxxxx.”He did indeed go to stay, and Britten sent him a present afterwards, which prompted a further letter: “Dear Ben Thank you, thank you for the lovely game Dover Patrol. In November 1954, David found time to go back to school, though not for long. He took the opportunity to show off a leather belt that Britten had given him, and, in his thank-you letter, said: “I would like to spend a few days at Aldeburgh with you, the first weekend after Christmas, or whenever it is convenient with you… The boy David was in seventh heaven: no wonder the stage hooked him that night.In October, the opera opened in London at Sadler’s Wells, then it travelled to Holland and Sweden, and in January it was recorded by Decca – the first time a complete Britten opera had been committed to disc.

The very process of reliving the opera’s momentous conclusion, and almost acting it out as he spoke, brought a lump to his throat almost 50 years later. Once the curtain calls were over, the whole cast attended a reception given by the mayor, who gave Hemmings a M?lin train set. The evening was still young, and the cast set off to carouse in the alleys of Venice It ended in an alfresco rendering of folksongs by Mandikian. Hundreds of people stopped and stared at this impromptu display. Hemmings, as the star turn, enjoyed a feast of publicity photographs, all of them revealing a feisty young boy with a wicked twinkle in his eye. Hemmings was to find that the climax of his first professional stage appearance would be indelibly imprinted on his memory.

He saw the wickedness in me, he saw that evil sense of countenance about me. He thought I was naughty, and that’s why Peter Pears was afraid of me, because he thought I was naughty too!”In early September the whole cast set off for Venice to perform in the Biennale. “I wasn’t exactly what you might call a ‘prior-boy’ myself – choirboy yes, prior-boy no Did I know Miles? Yes I did He was me And I think Ben saw that in me. The decidedly unmonastic Hemmings made the connection himself. A further fascination for him was the unspoken question of whether the innocent himself had become complicit in the corruption, and therefore the “innocence” of the treble voice had curdled.

This was where there was an awkward crossover between the fictional part of Miles and the real boy they were working with,Britten was intrigued by the corruption or disintegration of innocence, and none of his works addresses this so directly as The Turn of the Screw. “Malo”, Miles’s song in the schoolroom, sets the context for the discomfiting relationship between the schoolboy and Quint which pervades the rest of the drama.As the first rehearsals of the opera progressed, Colin Graham, the stage manager in 1954, came to realise that, although the character of Miles still had “an underlying innocence, because of who he is and the age he is”, he had been “got at”. Before leaving home for Suffolk the first time, he had been warned about Britten by his father, “strangely enough in Leicester Square men’s lavatory. He told me – his exact words – ‘You know he’s a homo, don’t you?’”Although the only overt sexual reference in the story is to the previous love affair between Quint and Jessel, The Turn of the Screw has a latent sexuality that adds to the tension and the spookiness. As a choirboy travelling from Tolworth to Hampton Court, he had been molested several times by a man on the bus, “so I knew what the goings were”. But he loved me like a father, not like a lover.”If some 12-year-old boys might have been too innocent to appreciate sexual danger signs, David Hemmings was not one of them.

If you are in love with a young man, certainly you can consider him your son. He certainly wanted to bring me up, he certainly wanted to send me to an appropriate school where I could learn music and learn to play the piano, and, yes, he loved me, he did, he did. Hemmings’s response was elliptical: “I think both are entwined. The answer to that question, as I have often said, is no, he did not.