fireside.
On his return to England, he sat down and wrote a book. His flight had taken place on the 23rd of March. A Ride Across the Channel and Other Adventures In The Air was published by Samson, Low thirteen days later, on the 5th of April.
On the previous day, the 4th of April 1882, Sarah Bernhardt had married Aristides Damal, a Greek diplomat turned actor, a famously vain and insolent womaniser (also spendthrift, gambler and morphine addict). Since he was Greek Orthodox, and she a Jewish Roman Catholic, the easiest place for them to be married quickly was London: at the Protestant church of St Andrew’s, Wells Street. Whether she was able to buy a copy of Fred Burnaby’s book to read on her honeymoon is not known. The marriage was a disaster.
Three years later, having illicitly joined Lord Wolseley’s expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, Burnaby was killed at the Battle of Abu Klea by a spear-thrust to the neck from one of the Mahdi’s soldiers.
Mrs Burnaby was to marry again; she also established herself as a prolific authoress. Ten years after her first husband’s death, she published a manual, now long unavailable, called Hints on Snow Photography .
THE LOSS OF DEPTH
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
After the Battle of Abu Klea there were ‘immense hordes of dead Arabs’, who were ‘by necessity, left unburied’. But not unexamined. Each had a leather band round one arm containing a prayer composed by the Mahdi, who promised his soldiers that it would turn British bullets to water. Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility. And sometimes, perhaps often, it works. We dodge between bullets as Sarah Bernhardt claimed to dodge between raindrops. But there is always the sudden spear-thrust to the neck. Because every love story is a potential grief story.
Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.
We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old – in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty – I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection. I could imagine myself taking care of her; I could even – though I didn’t – have imagined myself, like Nadar, easing the hair from her aphasiac temples, learning the part of the tender nurse (and the fact that she might have hated such dependency is irrelevant). Instead, from a summer to an autumn, there was anxiety, alarm, fear, terror. It was thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it; and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?
We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern. And as E. M. Forster put it, ‘One death may explain itself,
On his return to England, he sat down and wrote a book. His flight had taken place on the 23rd of March. A Ride Across the Channel and Other Adventures In The Air was published by Samson, Low thirteen days later, on the 5th of April.
On the previous day, the 4th of April 1882, Sarah Bernhardt had married Aristides Damal, a Greek diplomat turned actor, a famously vain and insolent womaniser (also spendthrift, gambler and morphine addict). Since he was Greek Orthodox, and she a Jewish Roman Catholic, the easiest place for them to be married quickly was London: at the Protestant church of St Andrew’s, Wells Street. Whether she was able to buy a copy of Fred Burnaby’s book to read on her honeymoon is not known. The marriage was a disaster.
Three years later, having illicitly joined Lord Wolseley’s expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, Burnaby was killed at the Battle of Abu Klea by a spear-thrust to the neck from one of the Mahdi’s soldiers.
Mrs Burnaby was to marry again; she also established herself as a prolific authoress. Ten years after her first husband’s death, she published a manual, now long unavailable, called Hints on Snow Photography .
THE LOSS OF DEPTH
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
After the Battle of Abu Klea there were ‘immense hordes of dead Arabs’, who were ‘by necessity, left unburied’. But not unexamined. Each had a leather band round one arm containing a prayer composed by the Mahdi, who promised his soldiers that it would turn British bullets to water. Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility. And sometimes, perhaps often, it works. We dodge between bullets as Sarah Bernhardt claimed to dodge between raindrops. But there is always the sudden spear-thrust to the neck. Because every love story is a potential grief story.
Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.
We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old – in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty – I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection. I could imagine myself taking care of her; I could even – though I didn’t – have imagined myself, like Nadar, easing the hair from her aphasiac temples, learning the part of the tender nurse (and the fact that she might have hated such dependency is irrelevant). Instead, from a summer to an autumn, there was anxiety, alarm, fear, terror. It was thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it; and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?
We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern. And as E. M. Forster put it, ‘One death may explain itself,
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