Tom Roper's Weblog

On Trafalgar Day

Sixty years ago my parents were married, on Trafalgar Day. I never asked them why they chose this day, if indeed they did have any choice, or if my grandparents had proposed it as being an auspicious day for an admiral's daughter's wedding However it was arrived at, it cleverly rendered the date unforgettable.
The cult of Nelson was still honoured in my family. My mother claimed some distant kinship with him, and I have somewhere parts of a dinner service supposed to have belonged to the hero of the Nile. I have doubts as to the authenticity of this claim. In early nineteenth century England, items from Nelson's dinner service would be as common as fragments of the true cross in the early church.
After last night's frost the leaves on the mulberry tree have suddenly fallen and the courgette plants have collapsed into mush.
I shall honour today's memories with a swim in the sea before dusk.

Accidents of birth

I celebrated my 55th birthday yesterday. The most compelling refutation of astrology for me is to look in the newspaper that day at the birthdays of the famous. In what sense could I be said to have anything in common with Paddy Ashdown, Ralph Nader, Julia Neuberger, Robert Scruton or Elizabeth Taylor?

It is more fun to look at the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) whose praises I have sung before. It is simplicity itself to construct a search for those in it who were born on 27 February, and amusing to imagine that I might share more than just a natal date with some of them.

And so I find myself sharing a birthday with Frances Cornford, the classicist, Henry Custance, the jockey, Lawrence Durrell, who is not read as much as he should be these days, John Fothergill, author of An Innkeeper's Diary, but who I did not know until today was one of Edward Perry Warren's circle of young men, the Lewes House Brotherhood, Richard Garnett, librarian and developer of the printed catalogue at the British Museum, described as being 'always been susceptible to intelligent young women', Kenneth Horne, of Round the Horne and Beyond our Ken, James Klugmann, historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Cyril Bertram Mills, the circus proprietor, Seán O'Faoláin, the writer and Ellen Terry the actress. These links all go to the ODNB entries, but you may need to go by way of your public library if you are not in an institution that has access. Most public libraries have subscribed.

There is another sense of accident about my birth but I will save that for a future post.

The heroic age of knitting

Among my late mother's effects were a number of knitting patterns. I have scanned some of them; to the modern eye they seem quaint and often comical, but there is a poignant evocation of the 1950s here too. I know there are many knitting bloggers, and I wish to make clear, as they are fierce people with sharp sticks, that I admire them greatly. My mother did try to teach me to knit, but failed. There is a small covetable prize to anyone who can guess correctly how many of these garments I wore as a child. I will tell you for nothing that I wore this balaclava. Please leave answers in the comments.

Interment of ashes

Last Saturday I joined my cousins Sue, Ann and Mark Roper, to put my Aunt Betty's ashes in a grave in St Leonard's churchyard in Seaford, where they joined her husband's, Uncle Lewis, who died in 1978. With the ashes they buried a sprig of rosemary and some sea-water.

Lewis was the third of four children, my Aunt Mary (1909-1991) being the oldest, my father, William George, aka Tim (1912-1997) the next, and the youngest my Uncle Tony, born in 1921.

Funeral games

As a postscript to the ash-scattering, I was fascinated to find this post of Mary Beard's from her Don's Life blog,  Do-it-yourself cremation, about both Cambridge crematorium and home-made ceremonies, such as we conducted last October.
I remember being fascinated by reading, as an eight year old boy, of the funeral games in Homer and Virgil. We had no such games for my mother, but there was last Saturday's triumphant Boat Race and this Saturday is Grand National day, two events she enjoyed.