Doctors he would not tolerate; he had always believed in treating himself, and now he had not even the energy to do this.
I am sorry, Ellen; but I have always been plain-spoken, as you know. Living quietly as you do, you should manage very well on your allowance. But when it comes to supporting your husband as well, that is another matter. However, do not let us talk of it again. It is embarrassing to both of us. If you are ever in want, my dear, write privately to me.
It seemed strange that things could still be done to me after I was dead, that my body would perhaps be found and handled by people I should never know, that really a little life would go on about me which I should never feel.
We don’t need vows, you and I’, he said, ’nor gold nor metal. What we are to each other lasts to the grave and beyond.
In the afternoon I begin writing a book, it is called The Alternative. It is fun writing it.’ The Alternative, like John, in the Wood of the World, leaves a total blank in memory. Possibly, like many a work of genius, it never got beyond the first page!
Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
I’m convinced that a chap’s best chance of doing his finest work is by sticking very much to himself, and of course working very hard, and, most important of all, by talking very little about it.
I had not realised until then that grown-up people could be unhappy, that they could cry. I did not want to think about it.
She is like a child playing at houses,” whispered my mother. “What I ask myself is this – where will it all end?
He laughed and shook his head. “I think you’re incorrigible.” “Good God, I hope so. Otherwise why live?
The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.
Impossible that they should live while I was no more a part of existence.
Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind? You have that fatal quality of silence – of a tight repression that suggests a hidden fire – yes, a burning fire unquenchable.
In 1994, Flavia published a biography of her mother, picking up the story where Myself When Young leaves off – the marriage to Tommy Browning and subsequent family life. The biography concludes with a celebration of the scattering of her mother’s ashes over the Cornish cliffs, and a belief that she has joined her dead husband in a boat sailing them into infinity.
It seemed strange that life must go on without our need for it.
I was young, and I’d never been hurt before.
How many minute, invisible, intangible threads go to the making of a single human being, and what a strange jumble of hereditary impulses must have been this young Kicky and young Gyggy.
Living alone in Paris was very different from living in his own home with his family. In the old days there had been the familiar routine of day by day – meals at regular hours, the companionship of his schoolfellows, all the normal bustle of a happy, monotonous existence. Now he was a friendless young man, with no money and no profession, and he realised, with a little stab of disappointment, that he did not know what to do with himself.
His best friends were Tom Armstrong, who was two years older than himself and had been painting now for several years, and a Scotsman, Lamont, with a dry sense of humour and a twinkling eye. There was Rowley, too, a giant of wonderful physique and the tender heart of a child, moved to tremendous rage if anyone insulted his friends; Poynter, and Aleco Ionides, and the sinister, slightly crazy Jimmy Whistler, who wore his dark curls long and was a great poseur, even in those days.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we lived within those walls. That was yesterday.