It’s a bright and brassy day and – ‘We could walk by the city farm and see the goat’, the Librarian says, ‘and then maybe go on as far as the harbour.’
‘The goat may not be out in this weather’, I say (pawn to c4), ‘and the harbour area will be swarming with infected people (Bf4).’
‘We’ll be in the open air’, she says, ‘you can wear a mask and’—(Qd4)—‘it’s my birthday.’
Birthdays – they come but once a year, unless you’re a reigning monarch. The pleasure, the anticipation, the dread, the guilt. ‘I did not forget your birthday’, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her friend Loren MacIver, ‘but could not find the Western Union and had no telephone. Forgive me. I am just not used to work, you know, and find it takes a lot of time, effort, and character, etc.—things I don’t have any of.’[1]
Occasionally, there are instances of peerless symmetry: D. H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda, both born and dying on 11 August, or Charles Waterton, the traveller and conservationist, buried on his 83rd birthday. Some people celebrate by doing something life-changing. On his thirty-first birthday, Saturday 22 February 1913, the sculptor Eric Gill went to Brighton to be received into the Church by Canon Connelly, accompanied by his wife Ethel – who afterwards changed her name to Mary. Then they went home, in time for Leonard and Virginia Woolf to arrive for the weekend.[2] Others involve themselves in other people’s birthday celebrations – sometimes unwisely. So Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, Boer War veteran, military theorist and former disciple of Aleister Crowley, served as Oswald Mosley’s minister of defence-in-waiting—so some pretty bad choices already—then, in April 1939, accepted an invitation to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday parade. In that same year, he denied allegations about German concentration camps.[3]
Still, presents! Occasionally, beauty trumps utility. Of W. B. Yeats receiving on his fortieth birthday ‘a book so ornate you couldn’t read it’— a copy of Chaucer from William Morris’s Kelmscott Press—Hugh Kenner comments: ‘Fortunately, Morris tended to print books you’d already read.’[4]
The Librarian made do with a few books, a necklace, champagne, chocolates, fish pie (which, admittedly, she made herself), phone calls and text messages: a proper lockdown birthday. There was no goat; nor did we go on to the harbour that morning. But the next day, Arnos Vale Victorian garden cemetery being open, we wandered around some of its 45 acres, sticking to the wide paths. Damp weather but a good, unbirthday walk.
Notes
[1] Postcard dated 10 February 1966: Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), 443.
[2] Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 115.
[3] David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here (London: Granta, 2002), 77.
[4] Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 216.
Reconstructionary Tales 