After a bad start to the beginning of 1911, by the spring Delius was beginning to recover:

He and Jelka left the clinic in Dresden in January, went to Wiesbaden (where they heard Schuricht conduct Sea Drift), and were back in Grez by the first week in March. Delius was able to receive visitors again, and Beecham came twice. In March he brought with him his new friend (and lover), the American-born London society hostess, Lady Cunard, who had apparently come to like Delius’s music, and at the beginning of June Beecham drove over to Grez in his car, and took Delius back to London, with Jelka following by train. They stayed at 9 Hans Place, near Harrods, the home of the wealthy art-collector Frank Stoop and his wife, whom they had come to know quite well. Delius met Bantock on the 16 March and, with Jelka, they went to the first of Beecham’s all-Delius concerts, which included the premiere of Songs of Sunset, with Appalachia, Paris and the first Dance Rhapsody. During the interval, Delius first met Philip Heseltine, the seventeen-year-old schoolboy who was to play a large part in his life for almost the next twenty years.

Philip Arnold Heseltine was born, somewhat incongruously, in The Savoy Hotel on Piccadilly (or ‘on the Embankment’, as he later put it)3 on 30 October 1894. The men in his family had been successful stockbrokers and solicitors, and his father was also a solicitor. However, he died when the boy was only three, and two years later his mother – a very domineering woman, with whom he developed an almost Oedipal relationship4 – remarried and moved to a large, old house in the middle of Wales. Heseltine went to Eton, where he was taught music by two remarkable men, Edward Mason5 and Colin Taylor, the second of whom remained a confidant and friend for life. They introduced him to Delius’s music in 1910,6 and he quickly acquired a deep love and, indeed, an obsession for it.