Dovidl, soon after, followed up with a request of his own. A boy at school had been bragging how much his parents were spending on private education. Dovidl, aghast, asked my father if he could contribute to his own fees by giving a public recital. Father gave the proposal a full day’s consideration before delivering a measured refusal. ‘For three reasons, my dear David,’ he explained, in my presence and for my benefit. ‘First, we are not poor. Second, this is not a good moment to put a Jewish débutant on the London stage – I think you know what I mean. Third, I expect to be in a position to give you a more auspicious début once this wretched war is over. So, let’s hear no more of it, there’s a good chap.’

The second point was more serious than historians of the period are inclined to admit. Culture was flourishing in wartime Britain. Men and women in every shade of khaki craved the comfort of canonic masterpieces and the prospect of self-discovery in the mirror of contemporary art. New composers, writers and performers shot to prominence, despite a shortage of newsprint to report the arts and of shellac and celluloid to record them. A creative dawn was breaking: English art was being reborn.

The anticipation for Ralph Vaughan Williams’ fifth symphony in June 1943 was almost tangible, the ovations overwhelming. Michael Tippett’s oratorio, A Child of our Time, was tumultuously acclaimed despite (perhaps because of) its pacifist agenda. Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings at the Wigmore Hall quivered with potential; his opera Peter Grimes, as the war ended, was universally recognised as the first English masterpiece of lyric drama for two hundred and fifty years.

Marvellous as the revival was, the public response in a robustly John Bullish nation was no less remarkable. Long queues formed to see Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare films, the abstract paintings of Ben Nicolson, the great reclining figures of Henry Moore. Novels by J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene sold out overnight. England, in those Spartan war years, felt like ancient Athens or Venice in the age of the Doges.

The receptivity was, however, restricted to English art, true and blue. Aliens need not apply. The minds that opened to new English writing slammed shut on foreign accents. Writers whose plays had been hits in Berlin and Bucharest sat in cafés along the Finchley Road, lamenting their paradise lost. Fine artists, unable to land a teaching post, became antiques dealers; conductors scraped a living, if they were lucky, as copyists. Soloists talked of catching the first peacetime ship to America. England had given them shelter and oblivion, laced with xenophobia and abuse.