A book of verse and thou. For Valentine's

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Just for once, I thought I’d do a post for Valentine’s day. Normally I’d avoid it, since I think that Valentine’s Day, like Easter, Christmas or, indeed, the Eve of All Hallows (OK, OK, Halloween if you prefer), have all become little more than excuses for commercial exploitation.

But the words above, from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, happen to pop into my mind today, and they struck me as somehow appropriate for St Valentine’s. The words are really Edward Fitzgerald’s, since his ‘translation’ is in reality his own composition, a fine poem of the English language, inspired by the Persian Khayyam.

A loaf of bread beneath the bough
As seen by Edmund Dulac

That quatrain seems particularly apt when accompanied by the Edmund Dulac's illustration, reprinted in the edition my grandmother owned and, according to the inscription, gave me in September 1980.

There’s plenty wrong with the illustration. The man holds the book, and he’s lying down with bread and wine next to him. The woman is standing, ready apparently to serve, and offering nothing but herself and her looks.

On the other hand, there is a haunting quality to the picture that touches me all the same, a peace, a stillness, as well as the elegance and stylisation – just look at the overdone crescent moon in the background, its horns stretching far further than is natural. It creates an effect that is otherworldly, while it makes one think, and above all admire.

It all seems to fit with the poetry. A little sustenance to feed the body; a little wine to lubricate the soul; a little verse to charm the mind; and the company of two people with all the qualities to enjoy them. Yes, even on their own, on the edge of the wilderness, as the previous quatrain proclaims:

With me along the strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown

There we can create our own little morsel of Paradise against all the annoyance of everyday life. That strikes me as a better way to celebrate Valentine’s day than any card, or even a bunch of flowers.

Danielle and I will probably watch a little TV rather than read any poetry. But we’ll raise a glass to each other anyway. And then I might raise another to my grandmother. It’s in the copy of the Rubáiyát she gave me that I keep a drawing of her when she was thirty.

My grandmother, Yeta Bannister
At 30 years of age, in 1930

To be honest, I enjoy it as much as the picture. Or the verse.

Have a great Valentine’s.

Turning down an empty glass for Breda

It’s such a cliché, someone discovering that you live in London, or Belfast, or New York, and asking ‘I have a friend who lives there. Do you know him?’

So, back in 1983, I reacted with derisive scepticism to an Australian friend who told Danielle, my wife, ‘I met a great couple of Irish doctors in Grenada. They’re moving to England. You must meet them.’

‘Yeah, right,’ I thought. England’s smaller than Australia but that doesn’t mean we all get our bread from the same bakery.

Still, my incredulity was a bit dented when I heard soon after that they were moving to Witney, a market town in West Oxfordshire. We were moving there too. We moved and discovered they were living three minutes walk away from us.

I’d been right that England was larger than our friend thought. But the world’s a lot smaller.

That was the start of a friendship with Ronnie and Breda that’s lasted thirty years.

Breda with her hallmark smile
After mushroom picking with Danielle

It started with watching each others’ children grow up. Danielle even took the notion of babysitting to unusual heights: because their pregnancies were almost synchronised, she was able to breastfeed Breda’s elder son while she was looking after him; Breda had to admit she found that slightly shocking, though with her head she realised it made perfect sense if the child was crying. 

Breda sets the pace
for one of our sons and a daughter-out-law

For me too the shared kids experience wasn’t always easy. 

Breda was one of the world’s warmest and most generous people, her hallmark smile always available and full of affection, in good times as much as in moments of adversity, of which she had more than her share. However, she was also gifted with exceptional intelligence that could make her gentle wit as mordant as it was insightful: at a time when I was travelling a great deal for work and leaving the children with Danielle more than I should have, she remarked to me ‘you’re a bit of a bachelor father, aren't you?’ 

The best reproaches are those delivered with humour, and that one is forever engraved on my mind.

Even after both they and we left Witney, we continued to visit each other, and also, as often as we could, visit other places together.

On one occasion we had a magnificent camping holiday, with all the children, at Royan in Western France. It’s unforgettable for the number of times Ronnie and I went chasing their teenage adopted daughters through the night-time dunes – chasing the girls back to camp, the circling boys away.

But Royan was also the site of a memorable hunt by Danielle and Breda for the best local Pineau des Charentes. For anyone who doesn’t know this excellent drink, it’s made of one-third cognac, two-thirds grape juice, giving it a deliciously healthy and innocuous fruit flavour, that covers one heck of a kick.

There are two schools of thought on how to approach tastings. There are those who spit out. Danielle and Breda belonged to the other school. The striking image of the Royan holiday was therefore their return to camp, rolling back unsteadily on their bikes, heavily laden with bottles, and fully loaded with Pineau.

There would be many more trips down the years. We went round Copenhagen by boat. We shivered at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. We gazed in slightly dizzy wonder at the whirling dervishes in Istanbul. We listened to Smetana on the Charles bridge in Prague.

Breda (left) and Danielle share a moment of culture
Over cocktails in an Istanbul bar

In Prague, it was Danielle who organised the accommodation and, in a spirit of economy, booked us into a backpackers’ hostel. It reminded Breda, she told us with distaste, of dormitories in the convent where she’d been educated. 
But all her reservations dissolved when she met the barman, a cheerful Czech who could make any tropical drink you might like, and many other cocktails besides.

‘Excellent choice of place to stay,’ she assured Danielle, smiling over the brim of a brimming glass.

Ronnie and Breda in Christiania, Copenhagen
With your humble narrator becomingly in the background

It was only in January that we had our last trip together, to Lanzarote in the Canaries. The setting was glorious and Breda’s irresistible joy in conversation on any topic, was a boon to us all. And yet she didn’t contribute as much as she wanted to, or as she had on other trips: she was suffering from a terribly debilitating digestive condition that left her in terrible pain. 

Even so, the visit to Lanzarote was a great success, though that was in part because it wasn’t until her return that we realised that she wasn’t suffering from any banal digestive problem. What she had was cancer at an advanced stage. With her oncologists’ encouragement, she put up a brave fight, but a few weeks ago it became clear it was a losing one. She was admitted to hospital and hope faded that she would ever go home.

On Thursday evening, 14 November, the thought came to me that I was quietly relaxing in front of an enjoyable TV programme while my friend was lying in hospital, drugged and facing death. But only a few minutes later, a phone call from Ronnie revealed that I was wrong and the truth far worse: at the time I’d thought of Breda’s declining life, it was already over.

Yesterday, Saturday 22 November, we said our farewells to her. My eulogy, saying much the same as I’ve written her, was just one of three. It was followed by a local doctor who had worked with her and told us about a woman who consulted him because she was having trouble conceiving. When he saw her again a few months later, she was already pregnant. 

Apparently, in the meantime Breda had seen her and told her ‘relax. Make love, not babies.’ It worked a dream.

Breda was a great doctor, above all because she was so fundamentally human. That’s why her place is still set among us, though it remains empty, her glass untasted, and I can think of no more fitting tribute for an excellent friend than the last quatrain of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

    And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
    Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
    And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
    Where I made one – turn down an empty Glass!

I’ll be turning down many an empty glass for Breda. But first I’ll raise it, full, to her memory.

Pretty memories

August 15th: good day for a couple of pretty pictures. And I don’t mean to do with the feast of the Assumption, which will be celebrated more than enough around the world, especially in most countries with Catholic roots, where it's usually a day off.

We moved house last Friday and I spent some time putting books out on shelves. One was a favourite of mine: a coffee-table sized edition of the Rubayiat of Omar Khayyam with illustrations by Edmund Dulac. If you like Art Nouveau painting at all, then Dulac will knock your socks off. 

So here’s pretty picture number 1, his illustration for one of the most famous quatrains of the poem:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
 Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
 And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

But the volume contains another picture, a pencil portrait of a woman.

Pretty picture number 2:

My grandmother.
Half the age I am now

It was from her, my grandmother, that I inherited the book and, of course, the portrait. It’s dated 1930. She was born in 1900.

When I was a child, it seemed to me that my grandmother was incredibly old, like most grandparents to their grandchildren. Why, when I first knew her she was in her fifties. It was almost shocking that anyone could be that old, a chastening thought now that I’m seven years older than she was when I was born. Besides, I’m a grandparent myself these days.

And there’s that picture of her when she was a mere sprig of a thing at thirty...

I enjoy looking at it and remembering her, especially on 15 August, her birthday.

So, Grandma, happy birthday and thanks for the book and the great images. 

Or perhaps I should just say:

Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; 
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

Musical Memories

It’s hardly an original statement, but it’s extraordinary just how evocative a piece of music can be.

My father had an immensely irritating habit which I have completely inherited, of half whistling, half under his breath, some tune he couldn’t get out of his head. As a child I didn’t find this irritating: it struck me as just one of the things that adults – sorry, grown-ups – habitually did. And I still don’t find it irritating when I do it myself. But others! Why, it’s as tedious as those people in crowded carriages who insist on explaining by mobile how you change a car tyre or make a soufflé.

One of the tunes which seemed to haunt my father most was the main theme from the third movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. This is an extraordinary melody, swinging high and low, at just the right speed, neither hurried nor leisurely, like a wave heading for a shore.

It was my father who introduced me to Beethoven and for many years I regarded him as simply the very best composer there had ever been. Well, after all, what better authority is there than a father’s? But later of course the reaction set in. Why, there was Bach, there was Mozart. There was Schubert! Dashing off pieces so fast he often couldn’t always finish them. And finding his way straight to the heart.

But then today I put on the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

It really is an extraordinary piece. Dark. Then wistful. Gay. Sad. Lilting. Majestic. Whoever else I may have dallied with at times, Ludwig is special. And of course he brings back memories.

One of my father's possessions that I've inherited is the miniature copy of the Rubayiat of Omar Khayyam which he would carry in his flying tunic, on missions with the RAF during World War II. The final quatrain is the poet’s goodbye to the world:

And when thyself with shining foot shall pass
Among the guests star-scatter'd on the grass,
And in thy joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one — turn down an empty Glass.

I’ll have to fill and empty a glass tonight. And turn it down. While, of course, half whistling the theme from the third movement of the Violin Concerto.

Still listening to your music.
And half whistling it, just like you