Biscuits from Q's Tobacco Jar

The To the Lighthouse bubble burst and so I returned to a place I kept circling to but still wasn't sure of; that place was Q.
Question, question, question. I give you no answers.
But not this time, for this Q had a name. A Q that didn't belong to me or anybody, (not even Mr Ramsay), but only to himself. And oh, maybe to his wife, his son and daughter, and his pupils, and readers, [Hmm, my starting point is flawed already.], including one very important reader (later writer, then recognised author) Helene Hanff. [Hint: 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Futura published both in one volume.] She, I think, was my introduction to Q...or was it made through Daphne du Maurier? [She completed his last unfinished novel Castle Dor, the recreation of the legend of Tristan and Iseult.]
Well, however it was done, Mr Ramsay's philosophic alphabetical musings reminded me of him, and so, like any book-lover does I turned to my books, a very modest collection, to see what I could find (if anything!) of him. And Q gave me H. A set of Helene Hanff paperbacks published by Futura, and amongst them was Q's Legacy, which is essentially a thank you letter to him, this mysterious and literary Q, a Q she never met though she did get to take tea in his Common Room and sit in his armchair.
Q? Who is this Q?
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. A Cornish man (born there in 1863), a Cornish writer (of popular novels), a professor of English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was known to his pupils (not students) as simply 'Q'.
Helene Hanff [would it be disrespectful, do you think, if from here on in I called her Helene? Perhaps Miss Hanff would be more appropriate.] restarted her education with a volume of Q's lectures: On the Art of Writing, and from Miss Hanff's perusal of that I learned I too prefer Jargon to good English prose i.e. long fancy words, and lots of them, [You may have noticed.] when the sentence could be made plainer. Miss Hanff was shocked. I was shocked. Q was disappointed.
Yet Q had reeled Miss Hanff in; with him she was going to improve her mind. She set about it studiously [Q would have been proud.], saving for books and borrowing books from libraries [a lady after my own heart.] and made slow but rewarding progress. Q arrived at the right time, and stayed, supported her from her orange-crate bookshelves while she journeyed on. [I in reading this have developed (lock-down) bookcase envy, not of orange-crates but of shelves and shelves of books, of rooms lined with books.]
But how did Miss Hanff end up in Q's [the man who it is said Kenneth Grahame attributed Ratty to] Common Room, years after Q had died? By invitation, that's how. From his biographer's widow. An invitation Miss Hanff accepted on her third [or second? It's unclear] tour of England in 1975, persuaded by that and other fan mail to take in literary sights. That she did, and I for a second time went with her.
What followed on this whistle-stop two-week tour, amongst meeting familiar and not so familiar faces, was literary sightseeing (Q, it appears, the last stop) and history lessons. I learnt a lot I hadn't known and then had forgotten, and so had to relearn it all over again. Like what? Like...Thomas and Jane Carlyle's living arrangements (Thomas' overwhelming need for quiet and Jane's determination [some might say forbearance] to achieve this. Like...Oliver Cromwell (the Lord Protector) does not reside peacefully in this grave; his decomposing corpse was publicly disembowelled on the orders of Charles II, whose father Cromwell had beheaded. Like... the private royal executions on Tower Green. Like... the relationship between George VI and Mrs Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and his passion for architecture. Like..the difference between a don and a fellow [Othello, get it?]
But the one q. I wanted answered Miss Hanff did not answer: she sat in Q's seat in front of a grey stone fireplace, she held Q's dark brown bowler hat (on her lap), but did she take a biscuit from (actually put her hand inside) Q's tobacco jar?

Picture credit: Photo of Arthur Quiller Couch (source: Wikipedia).

See Q's Legacy by Helene Hanff.

Written June 2020.

To the House - Part Three

Lily, a forty-year-old Lily, was still at the house, still inside the house, with Mr and Mrs Ramsay.
The breakfast table was being cleared, Lily, older than five, younger than ten was helping. Mr Ramsay still in his towelled dressing gown was vacuum cleaning the carpet, the dining room. (around and under the table), the living room (the central part of it), and and the passage from it leading past the dining room to the kitchen, where Mrs Ramsay was filling the sink with hot water and bubbles. A young Lily having finished putting used plates, cups, forks, spoons and knives on the side was standing slightly behind Mrs Ramsay (at the sink, her pink shirted and tartan skirted figure with its back to her) with a checked tea towel in her hands. She was going to dry and put away. Mrs Ramsay left nothing to drain. All that had been used was washed; all that had been prepared on was wiped over.
Forty-year-old Lily observed a younger Lily through forty-year-old eyes. Step forwards, pick up, dry; step backwards, set down. Until all had been dried and moved to a unit on the opposite side of the kitchen; only then was it put away, in roughly the place it was supposed to be: everyday cutlery in the kitchen drawer, large plates in the cupboard underneath, side plates and cups in the unit above with sliding doors. Mrs Ramsay and young Lily were performing a dance, only Lily the younger was leading, flashing here and there; Mrs Ramsay, at the sink, was restricted to hand and arm gestures. There were sparks between these two; of humour teased out.
Was this what life was all about, the older Lily wondered.
Mr Ramsay meanwhile had put the vacuum away and could be heard, one foot after another, going up the stairs to shave and dress. The downstairs stereo had been turned off, the radio upstairs (in their bedroom) would be turned on, tuned as it always was to classical music. Music sometimes too rousing for that time in the morning. Mr Ramsay would exult with it; Mrs Ramsay would not; she would protest.
Mrs Ramsay, Lily observed (the young and the old) was feeding the birds; 'slinging out a tray' (she used to say) of bread and odds and ends (usually at this time bacon rind). [The birds (or the dog, Sam dog) were given anything that hadn't been eaten and couldn't be saved. She would do all manner of things with cold potatoes for instance.]
Next, Mrs Ramsay too would disappear upstairs to put her face on; then she (with Mr Ramsay) would be ready to confront the world. Young Lily of this morning didn't want to watch her, and neither did the old; forty-year-old Lily wanted to watch Lily, for she knew Mr and Mrs Ramsay's movements so well but was less sure of her own.
What would this young Lily do? Would she read – a Famous Five or My Friend Flicka; would she play that addictive game on the calculator with its high-pitched rolling rrr (which her tongue could never imitate); would she play marble solitaire; would she sit like Mrs Ramsay [the To the Lighthouse Mrs Ramsay] and take up the knitting needles? She sat on the sofa, that to her resembled animal fur; she knitted; continued to knit a ball of coloured wool into nothing, and waited for the next part of the day to begin: shopping, perhaps, at the small local stores, where old friends would be hailed and new introduced; washing put on, washing pegged out; lawn mowing; kind Mr Carmichael might drop in (he had bad skin) unannounced for a coffee; a salty ham sandwich on white crusty bread (which butter?); a walk to the beach (sometimes instead of that a nap; Lily would read); the (compulsory) afternoon cup of tea.
All this old Lily could see clearly in her mind's eye, as could the young. The day, and days to come, were spread out before them both.
But where were Cam, William, James, Andrew, Prue? Where were they now? Cam and William [her parents] were in Surrey; James [her uncle] had moved to London, remarried and relocated [with her aunt Minta] to Yorkshire; and Andrew and Prue [her cousins] had turned out a little wild. Mrs and Mrs Ramsay [presumably Mr Carmichael too] were dead; perished, each alone. Only forty-year-old Lily comes and goes, as a ghost, free as smoke, to the house.

Picture credit: P R Francis.

See To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

Written in lock-down, May 2020.

To the House - Part Two

Lily was at the house again, standing on the front lawn, again with a pen and notepad in her hand; this time she decided she was going inside. The first mark on the blank page had been made but it wasn't right; it wasn't wrong either, but it wasn't whole. The problem would only be solved if she went in. She had done so before, why was she pausing? No, she must not let herself be put off. What waves could possibly hurt her? None that hadn't been felt, on and off, on and off, for years, not too many years to count, but years still.
A shrub, possibly the same shrub, as it had done in the past hid the dark brown front door with its one step. Nobody went in that way (very few left by it); its doorbell was only rung by the milkman, the postman and the newspaper boy, or as a game. Run away, run away. Friends and family went in by the high white side gate, walking up the drive and passing the kitchen window, to open its top grey latch [tricky for those small in height and for those with little fingers, though its bottom board could be stood on; if a bigger person was around, it could be opened and swung inwards with the smaller still hanging on.], and be met, two steps from it, by the painted blue kitchen door, mostly open, sometimes shut.
This, Lily, the skimpy old maid of forty, did now. She was in the inner sanctum! There was the garage, where not only was the white Mazda kept but the tins of the dog food which the Labrador fetched himself, carried in his smiling mouth; the red gummy mouth that also liked to play towel-tug. There was the garden, its long green strip and its wider bottom, with its silver-barked trees and bonfire pile. And there, of course, was the door, the wide open kitchen door.
There was movement inside. Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay! Lily cried. Expecting her to turn round. But Mrs Ramsay was preoccupied slicing bread and frying bacon and brewing tea. Fried or scrambled? she called through the serving hatch; fried, a deeper voice replied. She cracked an egg on the side of the frying pan that contained the bacon; it spat and sizzled. The bread, white and brown, was being grilled at the top of the cooker, at just the right eye-level height.
From the other side of the hatch came the sounds of spoon against bowl. Lily placed her face before it and looked though. There! There was Mr Ramsay! Same as ever, a hearty man (his wife a whippet compared to him; some might say a terrier, a small Jack Russell), with his thick white hair like a stiff brush eating cornflakes with condensed milk. His wife had had her branflakes, which she would in a moment follow with toast. Brown toast and marmalade. And tea, there was always tea, with sugar.
Mr Ramsay was reading The Telegraph; a folded Telegraph, next to the place-mat on which his bowl sat. Not at the table Pop! Mrs Ramsay reproved as she took his empty bowl and set down his breakfast plate (Mr Ramsay grumbled but said nothing). Lily had trailed in after her and squeezed in the seat against the wall, next to the sideboard. Mrs Ramsay reappeared bearing the toast, white and brown, and cut into triangles, in its holder, and took her seat opposite Mr Ramsay.
So there they were, he at the head of the table and she at the other. And Lily, as so many times had been the case, in-between. Mrs Ramsay buttering (with her butter) brown toast and then adding a blob of marmalade on the corner and biting into it, while Mr Ramsay tucked into his fuller plate, then went on to white toast with his butter. All swallowed down with tea.
Other mornings, breakfast might be Mr Ramsay's kedgeree, but mostly it was cereal, then eggs (any way), with bacon or without, and toast, and tea. Different tastes in this house, near the sea, on the mainland, were catered for.
Was nobody else joining them? There were no sounds from upstairs, and no signs of the dog. Sam dog. No signs of Lily herself. No, wait, there was classical music playing. How had she missed that? There it was in the background, the radio on. If anyone else had been there, Lily remembered, Mrs Ramsay would have ordered rather than asked, though phrased it as a question, Pop, can't we have that off? Instead, breakfast over, she had taken a section of the paper and was now leaning over it doing the crossword puzzle. 

Picture credit: P R Francis.

See To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

Written in lock-down, May 2020.