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to strike her. Trust Claudia, he thinks, to come up with something new.
Lisa spent most of her childhood with one grandmother or the other. A London flat is no place for a child and I was frequently travelling. Lady Branscombe and my mother had much in common, not least the tribulations of offspring beyond their comprehension. They faced up to the illegitimacy bravely, sighed to one another over the telephone and tried to do what they could for Lisa, arranging for Scandinavian au pair girls and boarding schools.
Jasper never dominated my life. He was significant, but that is another matter. He was central to the structure, but that is all. Most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I’m ready. At the moment I’m dealing with strata.
One of my favourite Victorians is William Smith, the civil engineer whose labours as a canal constructor enabled him to examine the rocks through which his cuttings were driven and their fossil contents, and draw seminal conclusions. William Smith shall have honoured treatment in my history of theworld. And John Aubrey too. It is not generally realised that Aubrey, the supreme gossip, the chatterer about Hobbes and Milton and Shakespeare, was also the first competent field archaeologist and that, moreover, his simple but astute perception in the matter of church windows that one style precedes another and thus can we form a chronology of buildings makes him a seventeenth-century William Smith. And Perp. and Dec. the ammonites of architecture. I can see Aubrey swishing through the grass of a Dorset churchyard, notes in hand, anticipating Schliemann, Gordon Childe and the Cambridge Tripos with the same eye that I see William Smith in a stove-pipe hat squatting absorbed over the debris of a slice of Warwickshire.
I have a print – you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum – of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer’s shop and a blacksmith’s and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith – or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse – passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer’s shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph – sixty minutes – was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.
I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away. Suppose though that William Smith – or whoever did walk down that street that morning – had in his progress moved the cart from point A to point B. What would we see then? A smudge? Two carts? Or suppose he had cut down the tree? Tampering with the physical world is what we do supremely well – in the end, perhaps, we shall achieve it definitively. Finis . And history will indeed come to an end.
William Smith was inspired by stratification. My strata are less easily perceived than those of Warwickshire rock, and in the head they are not even sequential but a whirl of words and images. Dragons and Moon Tigers and Crusaders and Honeys.
The Chinese dragon dish is still in the Ashmolean. I saw it last month.
I was thirty-eight when Lisa was born, and doing nicely. Two books under my belt, some controversial journalism, a reputation for contentious provocative attention-seizing writing. I had something of a name. If feminism had been around then I’d have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me. As it was, I never felt its absence; being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset. My gender was never an
Lisa spent most of her childhood with one grandmother or the other. A London flat is no place for a child and I was frequently travelling. Lady Branscombe and my mother had much in common, not least the tribulations of offspring beyond their comprehension. They faced up to the illegitimacy bravely, sighed to one another over the telephone and tried to do what they could for Lisa, arranging for Scandinavian au pair girls and boarding schools.
Jasper never dominated my life. He was significant, but that is another matter. He was central to the structure, but that is all. Most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I’m ready. At the moment I’m dealing with strata.
One of my favourite Victorians is William Smith, the civil engineer whose labours as a canal constructor enabled him to examine the rocks through which his cuttings were driven and their fossil contents, and draw seminal conclusions. William Smith shall have honoured treatment in my history of theworld. And John Aubrey too. It is not generally realised that Aubrey, the supreme gossip, the chatterer about Hobbes and Milton and Shakespeare, was also the first competent field archaeologist and that, moreover, his simple but astute perception in the matter of church windows that one style precedes another and thus can we form a chronology of buildings makes him a seventeenth-century William Smith. And Perp. and Dec. the ammonites of architecture. I can see Aubrey swishing through the grass of a Dorset churchyard, notes in hand, anticipating Schliemann, Gordon Childe and the Cambridge Tripos with the same eye that I see William Smith in a stove-pipe hat squatting absorbed over the debris of a slice of Warwickshire.
I have a print – you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum – of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer’s shop and a blacksmith’s and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith – or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse – passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer’s shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph – sixty minutes – was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.
I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away. Suppose though that William Smith – or whoever did walk down that street that morning – had in his progress moved the cart from point A to point B. What would we see then? A smudge? Two carts? Or suppose he had cut down the tree? Tampering with the physical world is what we do supremely well – in the end, perhaps, we shall achieve it definitively. Finis . And history will indeed come to an end.
William Smith was inspired by stratification. My strata are less easily perceived than those of Warwickshire rock, and in the head they are not even sequential but a whirl of words and images. Dragons and Moon Tigers and Crusaders and Honeys.
The Chinese dragon dish is still in the Ashmolean. I saw it last month.
I was thirty-eight when Lisa was born, and doing nicely. Two books under my belt, some controversial journalism, a reputation for contentious provocative attention-seizing writing. I had something of a name. If feminism had been around then I’d have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me. As it was, I never felt its absence; being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset. My gender was never an
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