The first few months after EMI saw me busier than ever. In preparing my chapter on Chopin's songs I consulted Doris Kaye, my cousin Rue's wife, who was Polish by birth. Having come to England as a student in the 1930s, she was the only survivor of a family whose other members had remained in Warsaw and were all murdered in the early days of the Holocaust. Doris was of indispensable assistance in translating the song texts from a language of which I knew nothing. We simply sat down together, she told me what every single word in each poem meant, and I then transformed the result into reasonably graceful but still literal English.

One does not enter the profession of music critic in order to make a fortune. By way of illustration, my first batch of records for review in London included seven or eight releases, and I was paid ten shillings (fifty pence in modern British currency, if not in present-day value) for each of the reviews—but one of the recordings was of Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie, and the score of that work, which I felt obliged to buy in order to write a properly responsible and well-informed review, cost twenty pounds, or five times what that entire month's work for Records and Recording earned me. Busy though I was, besides working on the Chopin songs, with my various reviewing assignments for the Guardian and two of the Seven Arts magazines, it was getting so hard to pay my bills that I was beginning to think I needed to crawl back into some kind of paid job. What rescued me, just a day before I planned to take that step, was the kindness of my friend Joan de Smith, my flatmate John's cousin, who was a frequent visitor to our fl at. She handed me one hundred pounds: “Maybe that will tide you over,” she said, and it did.

The flat was within about fifteen minutes’ drive from the Royal Festival Hall, where many of my evenings were spent, though the summer shifted the focus of reviewing to the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC's Henry Wood Promenade Concerts.