The Tall Girl from Somerset 16

 

HENRY

I saw the film ‘The Queen’ the other day.  You know the one,  Sylvia Syms was in it  as the Queen Mother.  Just imagine!  I last saw her in ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ back in the fifties.  She’s still going strong.  We have aged together. Over the same years. She was beautiful in that film.  In ‘Ice Cold’ I mean.  How we age. Outwardly anyway.  Inside we are much the same.   

Talking of films, how sad that was about Robin Williams.  He made so many people laugh.  But the loud guffaw, the belly laugh, is an empty laugh.  Ephemeral and empty. Comedians are often sad, aren’t they?  Feste is melancholy.  ‘What’s the point?’ wrote poor Kenneth Williams, in his last diary entry, and he made people laugh loud and often.

The quiet smile from the heart is surer.

So what is the point?  Gerald Priestland, who was wise in these matters,  describes an incident when driving in London one morning.  He braked and stopped at the zebra crossing and made a sweeping bowing gesture to a girl who was waiting to cross.  She smiled and curtsied and walked across the road.  And that was it.  A gesture, a little detail in the day, between two people who had never met before and would never meet again, and it mattered.

Read the last lines of ‘In the Company of Cheerful Ladies’. Yes, the last paragraph.  I’d lend it to you if I could find it.  It’s on one of my shelves somewhere. How many of those books are there?  Six?  Or is it seven?  I really must gather them up and put them together on the same shelf.  I’ll do it sometime.  Yes, that is what I will do.  I really will. How those books show what the point is!  I wish Kenneth Williams could have read them.  Yes, look it up.  It’s worth the trouble. 

That is the point.

Back to films, then.  At Waterbury in the winter on Saturdays rugby was cancelled when the weather was really bad. And it had to be very bad because I remember playing in snow, cold it was out on the wing when the forwards had all the game to themselves and the ball hardly ever came out to the backs, and playing in the driving rain was normal.  When rugby was called off, a run was planned and if that too was cancelled then the cinema was considered.  Everything depended on whether the film was considered suitable. Then came the wait. Will we be allowed to go or not? What sort of film are they showing?  And then the word went round that we could go.  Marvellous! We walked down to the Odeon in pairs in our navy macks and we filled the balcony.  Heaven on earth!  Those moments when we were out of the institution, in normal life, on an equal footing with everyone else in the world, were paradise.  They were very few but the cinema on the rare Saturday afternoon, when rugby was cancelled, and even a cross-country run was impossible, was one of them.

I must be getting my affairs in order.  Well, you never know and I don’t want to give a lot of work to whoever has to clear up.  Who will that be?  It may well be Anne.  I don’t want to give her work, but I hope that she is the one who does it.  She won’t just throw things willy nilly into a sack for the dustman to collect.  She will take care of my old books even if she never reads them. I must get things straight ‘in case I miscarry’ as Sam Pepys said when he was doing much the same thing though much younger then than I am now, making preparations.

I’m not talking about my will.   I did that a few years ago though it took me some time to get round to it, I must admit.  It’s not the most agreeable thing to do, is it! No it’s my books and gardening tools and sweaters and old letters. I can’t throw them out because they mean something to me.  But they mean nothing to anyone else, and I don’t want to leave a lot of worry for someone else.  I have a lot of things to go through, and I must tackle it in a practical way.  I’ll start tomorrow.  I’ll get up at seven and be at it by eight.  Good.  That’s that then!