Old Age or Early Death?

My father lived to be 93. In past centuries it was extremely rare for anyone to reach such an age. George II, who died in 1760, was the first British monarch ever to pass the age of 70 (and only three have managed it since), which suggests that most ordinary people led even shorter lives.

Many famous people are seen so much as products of their time that it is difficult to imagine them living into a later era. For instance, if Mozart had lived as long as my father, he could have read the Communist Manifesto, and so could William Pitt the younger. And can we imagine William Shakespeare coming out of retirement at the age of 85 to comment on the execution of Charles I?

In some cases, it is an early death which paradoxically serves to immortalise someone's reputation. Nelson's legend climaxes with his death in the moment of victory at Trafalgar: his reputation would surely be different if he had survived the battle and lived as long as the Duke of Wellington. Max Beerbohm imagined Lord Byron living till the 1850s, and writing long letters to the "Times" about the repeal of the Corn Laws; Byron's image, like those of Keats and Shelley, is linked with early death, without which they might have ended up like Wordsworth or Coleridge. We could hardly envisage Oscar Wilde, aged 85, being evacuated back to England from Paris in 1940 ahead of the German invasion; and I fear Marcel Proust, aged 68, would have refused to leave, and would have perished in Teresinstadt concentration camp around 1943. The thought of Aubrey Beardsley (1873-98) as a war artist in either World War makes one shudder: equally, the mental stability of Van Gogh (1853-90) would not have been helped by witnessing the First World War, and Raphael (1483-1520) was spared the sack of Rome by the Imperial armies in 1527. One wonders what D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) would have made of Nazism, and Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) would surely have considered Mrs Thatcher and her supporters appallingly vulgar.

It is best for a romantic hero to die young, because:-

"Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man"
(A. E. Housman: "To an athlete dying young")

At the opposite extreme are those who achieved their finest successes late in life, or kept working well into old age: Gladstone and Churchill, Milton and Goethe and Tolkien, Titian and Michelangelo. The greatest of such people appear not as anachronisms left over from an earlier age, but as products less of a single period, but of all time.

The Strange Guests; part one

Betty knocked tentatively on the door of room number 212. Voices from within told her that the occupants were still there, but it was now late in the morning and unless she was able to make their bed very soon she wouldn’t have time to get ready for her lunchtime duties. She hadn’t yet met the couple in 212, but Elsie, who normally did this room, said they were foreigners and “a bit funny”.

       The door opened a fraction, and a pair of eyes peered out through the crack. When they recognized Betty’s chambermaid uniform and cleaning gear, the door was opened more fully and a youngish woman, plainly dressed and with her hair tied severely back, poked her head out and quickly glanced each way down the corridor to ascertain there was no-one else there, and then pulled Betty quickly inside and locked the door behind her.

       The air inside was thick with smoke. A great mass of papers littered the table by the window, with more on the floor. Seated at the table was a man in shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, with a pen in his hand. The woman spoke to him in a foreign language, and he then turned to face Betty.

   “If you please, sir; I’ve come to make the bed and tidy the room”, said Betty.

   “And what is your name, child?” His accent was so strong that Betty had difficulty understanding him.

   “Betty Worthing, if you please, sir”. She dropped him a little curtsey, because she sensed that, despite the fact that his clothes were rather shabby and that he and his wife were occupying one of the cheapest rooms in the hotel, he was nevertheless a gentleman.

   “Ah, Betty Worthing, yes”. (He pronounced it as “Vording”) “You may clean the room, child. But you must never touch my papers. Never, you understand?”

    “Yes, sir”. Betty proceeded with her work, conscious that the couple were closely watching her every movement. She was careful not to touch a single paper, however much she longed to stack them in a neat pile and dust all the cigarette ash from the table. She allowed herself no more than a single fleeting glance at one paper, which was not only in a foreign language, but written in strange letters which she could not read. At last she finished her work, curtsied to the couple and let herself out. They were indeed “a bit funny”!

Betty was assigned to room 212 for the next few weeks. She never found the room empty, at any time of the day. The strange couple always had their breakfast in the room, and never went down to the dining room together for other meals. Sometimes the man went out for a walk on his own, or the woman went shopping, and to post letters. They wrote a lot of letters, often to foreign countries. Sometimes they had visitors, mostly other foreigners, and then animated conversations continued throughout the night.

     As the man became more accustomed to Betty’s presence, he began to ask her questions; about how much she was paid and the hours she had to work; about her family and life in the town. Often he made notes about her answers. In time she found it easier to understand him, though he never learnt to pronounce her name properly. In an odd way, she liked him. His wife said little. Betty worked out from their conversations (which were never in English) that she was called “Nadezhda” and that she called her husband “Illyich”. That’s a very strange name, Betty thought.

Then one day the clerk at the hotel reception desk called Betty over. “There’s a man wants to speak to you”, he told her, indicating a respectably-dressed stranger seated near the entrance. “He says it’s important”.

    Betty didn’t usually like to be seen walking out with strange men, but she allowed him to take her to a café (where fortunately there wasn’t anyone who would recognize her) and they sat in a quiet corner. She remained on her guard, and hoped he wouldn’t suggest anything improper.

   “You are Betty Worthing, chambermaid at the hotel?” He asked, and she nodded. “And you clean room number 212, where live a man and a woman, yes? Tell me now, how does he look?”

   Betty considered. This man was clearly another foreigner; perhaps from the same country as the couple in 212, since he pronounced her name in the same way. What was going on, she wondered. But she saw no harm in answering his question.

   “He’s not very tall, and his forehead’s bald. He’s got a little beard. He’s got high cheekbones and his eyes are a bit slanted. I think his wife calls him Illych”.

   “Ah yes! It is him!” the man hissed, “And his woman, Nadezhda, she is very plain, yes? She is not his wife, you know. Immoral behaviour! Yes, a very bad couple! Most wicked!”

   Betty stiffened. Her brother was living with a girl who wasn’t his wife, and although she didn’t approve of such behaviour, she didn’t see why strangers had any right to make remarks about it.

    “Are they criminals?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

   “Ach, your police; they are so stupid! Just because this man commits no crime under your law, they ignore him! But this man, he is more dangerous than any robber; far more dangerous! But you can help us. He has many papers in his room, yes? Then perhaps you can bring some to us: you will be rewarded. Or does he let you post letters for him? No? Then you can persuade him to, and bring them to us. And also the letters he receives, yes?”

   Betty found herself disliking the man more and more. She might only be a chambermaid, but she still had some professional pride; and the suggestion that she, an honest girl working in a respectable hotel, might steal a guest’s papers and letters ….. the very idea! And why should a foreigner say the British police were stupid: what an insult! On the other hand, she was tempted. It wasn’t so much the promise of a reward, though heaven knows she could do with more money. But she’d always had the dream that she might one day be the heroine of a great adventure mystery, and now it looked as if the dream might be coming true.

     “I’ll see what I can do, sir”, she said, cautiously.

(Continued in a later entry)  

Kingfisher

Suddenly my wife said, "Look!"
and I turned just in time to see
a flash of brilliant emerald
fly under the bridge
but not out the other side.

Many times we returned to that bridge.
We longed to see him again
maybe perched motionless on a twig
scanning the river below for his prey,
unsuspecting minnows and sticklebacks,
or diving, an iridescent meteor,
into the brown waters

But he never came back.
This king of fishers,
lethal killer in miniature regal pomp,
wasn't there for our benefit,
he existed only for himself:
was interested in us only insofar as
we interfered with his hunting.