Sunday: A house of memories: Faure & Betjeman

Dear friends,

This morning I was thinking of all the beautiful music Jim loved and how he would listen to opera and concerts. Elgar’s Enigma Variations came to mind but I could not find a good YouTube without commercials attached! So here is one I like — it goes on in the YouTube for a bit too long, but it’s accompanied by pleasing impressionist paintings and it is the background theme for the 1979 Pride and Prejudice (to mark the passing of time):

Last night I succumbed to NPR’s continual pleading for money: it was the Romance album that got me, and David Ginder’s voice so I contributed for this year too and will get an album of music like this you are hearing if you clicked on the YouTube. I listen to NPR night and day, except when I put CDs into my Macbook Pro, where I’m beginning to listen to good novels once again.

He used to love the water in Southampton, took me for walks along the River Itchen one year:

River Itchen, Ovington

Here is Bejteman’s Summoned by Bells (the chapter on his childhood in Cornwall): Jim liked to walk along beaches for miles at stretch:

I ran alone, monarch of miles of sand,
Its shining stretches satin-smooth and vein’d. ~
I felt beneath bare feet the lugworm casts
And walked where only gulls and oyster-catchers
Had stepped before me to the water’s edge.
The morning tide flowed in to welcome me,
The fan-shaped scallop shells, the backs of crabs,
The bits of driftwood worn to reptile shapes,
The heaps of bladder-wrack the tide had left
(Which, lifted up, sent sandhoppers to leap
In hundreds round me) answered “Welcome back!”
Along the links and under cold Bray Hill
Fresh water pattered from an iris marsh
And drowned the golf-balls on its stealthy way

Over the slates in which the elvers hid,
And spread across the beach. I used to stand,
A speculative water engineer-
Here I would plan a dam and there a sluice
And thus divert the stream, creating lakes,
A chain of locks descending to the sea.
Inland I saw, above the tamarisks,
From various villas morning breakfast smoke
Which warned me then of mine; so up the lane
I wandered home contented, full of plans,
Pulling a length of pink convolvulus
Whose blossoms, almost as I picked them, died.
Bright as the morning sea those early days!

He also biked a lot as a boy; it was a way of getting away; he permanently injured his arm (he had steel plates in one of his elbows and by his late 50s arthritis so bad he couldn’t swim any more): from Summoned by Bells again, “Private School” where Betjeman bicylces through North Oxford:

The bindweed hung in leafy hoops
O’er half a hundred hawthorn caves,
For Godstow bound, the white road wound
In swirls of dust and narrow shaves,
And we were biking, Red Sea troops,
Between the high cow-parsley waves.

Port Meadow’s level green grew near
With Wytham Woods and Cumnor Hurst:
I clicked my Sturmey-Archer gear
And pedalled till I nearly burst-
And, king of speed, attained the lead
And got to gushing Godstow first.

The skiffs were moored above the lock,
They bumped each other side to side:
I boarded one and made her rock-
“Shut up, you fool,” a master cried.
By reed and rush and alder-bush
See soon our long procession glide.

There is a world of water weed
Seen only from a shallow boat:
Deep forests of the bladed reed
Whose wolves are rats of slimy coat,
Whose yellow lily-blossoms need
Broad leaves to keep themselves afloat.

A heaving world, half-land, half-flood;
It rose and sank as ripples rolled,
The hideous larva from the mud
Clung to a reed with patient bold,
Waiting to break its sheath and make
An aeroplane of green and gold.

The picnic and the orchid hunt,
On Oxey mead the rounders played,
The belly-floppers from the punt,
The echoes that our shouting made:
The rowing back, relaxed and slack,
The shipping oars in Godstow shade …

Once more we biked beside the hedge-
And darker seemed the hawthorn caves
And lonelier looked the water’s edge,
And we were sad returning slaves
To bell and rule and smell of school,
Beyond the high cow-parsley waves

A book he bought in a shop in Chicester in the 1990s. It conjures up the English physical world Jane Austen knew too and apparently loved … I shall scatter his ashes somewhere there (Torquay the dream).

I wrote this about memories and Summoned by Bells last February when I had an intimation he was ill.

A new local friend visited me here yesterday: I surmize she was startled by my house, a place of books, photos of Jim scattered around, his favorite painting: it may have seemed a shrine. At any rate she got out as soon as she could. I’ve seen this reaction before — when Jim was alive and well. So It’s not a shrine: its outward form and things are our inner lives together over nearly half a century. What have I but these memories? to live by. I shall never leave it if I can help myself. As long as I am here among our things I have not lost him altogether.

Time has stood still for me despite all the changes made in the house — by Caroline and then me forced to by the crashing of my computer. Yesterday as I looked about through the eyes of my visitor I saw it as a house of the past — my and his past but also my present and future too. I realized my friendship with this woman will be limited — she doesn’t understand. I did have another visitor when my good friend Kathy from the Net visited me — Kathy found nothing strange in the house; she was comfortable. The ex-chair of the English department lost her husband to lung cancer at age 59 (he never smoked a day in his life) and she sold everything — gave away all his papers to a library (at least she didn’t chuck them). I can’t imagine ripping all this away: I would die; I have Yvette here and Caroline not far but they are not my contemporary adult life in and for myself where I exist as an individual. Without this house and him, all that’s left of him that we built together, there’d be nothing left for me to live on or with or have any meaning from.

I can lose myself while I write and read – that is a help. I’m wanting to return to my movie project (a book) really on the basis that it would absorb me and cheer me to keep it up. It won’t mean what it would have — for I know how little books mean having published one except if you know of those who read and appreciated it — I might not have what it takes to get it published without him. But the writing of it would be good — I was disappointed over the JASNA rejection because I would have immersed myself in that telling myself it was towards the book.

This afternoon I shall betake myself to a film adaptation — you see my excuse — it adds to my knowledge — Invisible Woman, the film adaptation about Ellen Ternan from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ternan’s life with Dickens (featuring Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Kristen Scott Thomas, Tom Hollander — favorite actors all). I do love these kinds of films, rich.

Sylvia