poet with no better grounds of comfort than a common person? At first it is. But how should the case be otherwise? The poet has only the same materials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better; but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him. The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes and thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum. A Poet’s doubts and anxieties are more comforting than a scientist’s certainties and equanimities.
William Allingham
1944 [Algiers]
We went to Hospital No.95. Incredible place, ex-boys’ school, miles and miles of it, vaulted, monastic, cool in summer and cold right now. 2500 there. Far grimmer than 94. How lucky the boys were at Taplow – air, light, space, newness and even gaiety. In the first ward (we did all orthopaedics yesterday) there were two of the illest men I have ever seen, I think. Just skulls but with living wide, very clear eyes. It was a huge ward and difficult to know where to put the piano. We put it in the centre in the end which meant that I had to keep spinning round as I sang. I tried a monologue, but it was no good in there – too big, too decentralised. While I was walking around talking before we began I said to the illest of the two very ill ones that I hoped he’d excuse my back when I had to turn it on him and he said he would if I’d excuse him for not being shaved. Oh, gosh. [He died two days later.]
Joyce Grenfell
1952 [Egypt]
We were at the El Mansur race course by 7a.m. to watch the trials from Colonel ‘Dickie’ Bird’s flat inside the grandstand. . . . ‘The person we must find is Madame Paris,’ Desmond said later as he shepherded us toward the betting hall: ‘All the jockeys slept last night at her brothel and she knows which horses are being pulled or doped!’ . . . We soon spotted Madame Paris, a short, fat woman with hennaed hair and puffy white cheeks, her red mouth a gash. She was shovelling money through the hatch with scarlet claws covered in rings. Desmond waylaid her and she whispered something in his ear. He came back beaming. ‘Don’t bet the favourite on the first race!’ he announced. ‘Madame P. says Mustapha is going to pull the horse!’ Mustapha is one of the older jockeys, a great frequenter of Madame P.’s brothel and a drug addict. He is riding a horse belonging to Tariq, a senior government official’s son, who doesn’t want it to win – he is betting heavily on the second favourite.
There was a wild cry of ‘Zerroff!’ and the little horses disappeared in a cloud of dust, the jockeys hanging on to the britches of the one in front – except of course for the ones who had been paid to lose, and they were pulling on the reins like mad. Inexplicably Mustapha seemed to be winning. . . . ‘Oh dear,’ said Desmond, ‘poor Mustapha will be in trouble! He wasn’t pulling near hard enough, and Tariq will have lost a packet.’
Sure enough, just as we were about to go, there was a wild outcry from the bar, where Tariq was drowning his sorrows with drink. He had struck Mustapha and Mustapha had struck him back. As two soldiers dragged the jockey from the grandstand and manhandled him through the crowds, he shouted obscenities against the government, reserving his choicest language for Tariq, a well-known queer. ‘OH FATHER OF PRICKS,’ he yells, ‘so many times has thine arse been breeched that . . .’The rest is so awful I really can’t write it! . . . ‘Not much like old Epsom, is it, dear?’ Desmond said as we drove back in his car. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but much more fun!’
Joan Wyndham
1971
Yesterday evening . . . Eardley and I spend some time goggling at the television – partly at yet another American moon shot, partly at a film about Anne of Cleves. The moon shots disgust me in some curious way; there seem such wide disparities involved – between the boredom of listening to a flat American voice reciting figures and distances, mixed with ‘OKs’ and ‘ERs’, and the horrifying human tensions and anxieties lying behind them – and between the courage and danger of the astronauts and the cowardly Eardley’s enjoyment of that courage and danger. Perhaps I malign him or exaggerate the nature of his emotion, but I take his feelings as typical of many people’s. So what is left but dismay and semi-disbelief as I loll back gazing with a sort of distaste at the infinitely brilliant mastery of space by men’s minds.
Frances Partridge
2 February
1751
Having received a full answer from Mr P— [Vincent Perronet], I was clearly convinced that I ought to marry. For many years I remained single, because I believed I could be more useful in a single, than in a married state. And I praise God, who enabled me so to do. I now as fully believe, that in my present circumstances, I might be more useful in a married state; into which, upon this clear conviction, and by the advice of my friends, I entered a few days after.
John Wesley
1821
I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits – I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects – even of that which pleased me over night. In about an hour or two, this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water, in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty – calculating, however, some lost from the bursting out and effervescence and overflowing of the soda-water, in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience. At present, I have not the thirst; but the depression of spirits is no less violent.
Lord Byron
3 February
1826
This is the first morning since my troubles that I felt at awaking
I had drunken deep
Of all the blessedness of sleep.*
I made not the slightest pause nor dreamd a single dream nor even changed my side. This is a blessing to be grateful for. There is to be a meeting of the Creditors to-day but I care not for the issue. If they drag me into the Court obtorto collo [‘by the throat’] instead of going into this scheme of arrangement they will do themselves a great injury and perhaps eventually do me good though it would give me much pain.
Sir Walter Scott
1973
Still reading Walter Scott’s journal. He, the least valetudinarian of men, recorded the incipient signs of his old age: ‘Terrible how they increase the last year.’ He clearly had little strokes, yet was not sure whether they were strokes or not. Found he could not marshal his words, and thought it was fear or nerves which caused this; that he must pull himself together and snap out of it. Reminders of mortality are indeed painful.
James Lees-Milne
1977 [Brussels]
Dinner at a very good fish restaurant enlivened, if that is the word, on the way out by sensing a slight feeling of embarrassment amongst the staff, which was indeed well founded, as we saw on the ground floor – we had been eating on the first floor – the upturned soles of a Japanese who seemed at least unconscious and possibly dead. When we got outside an ambulance drew up and a stretcher was rushed in. We asked Ron Argen, our inimitable
