Father Mowbray nails it

One of those time-shiftable bits from Brideshead Revisited:

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” (pg. 186)

Dept. of Co-incidence

I’ve enjoyed Brideshead Revisited as novel and film, multiple times. Lately the Penguin version has been reposing in the bathroom, recovering from the latest bout of reading, and recently it was joined by another Penguin edition, The Best of Betjeman, which I picked up as a give-away in a roadside restaurant. I was planning to blog a so-English verse I just happened to read last night:

And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast-high ‘mid the stands and chairs–
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs.

(from “Death in Leamington”, pg. 15)

…and I thought I should inform myself about the details of Betjeman’s life. I knew he’d been Poet Laureate, but I didn’t know that Waugh had modeled Sebastian Flyte’s bear Aloysius after Betjeman’s Archibald Ormsby-Gore, or that C.S. Lewis had been Betjeman’s (much-despised) tutor. Don’t miss the 1959 BBC interview (1:45, on life at Oxford, hearties and aesthetes, being sent down). And The Times offers a picture of Archie and Jumbo, and more delicious details.

Mrs. Fenwick goes to California and back

There’s something charming and, well, quaint I suppose in the formal communications of a vanished era. I found this bit of correspondence in a box of stuff in the barn at Horton Landing, and dimly remember that I bought it in a box of junk store miscellany. Customer service has done a lot of serious backsliding in 53 years…
Mrs. Fenwick's trip
The itinerary is full of eye-openers too:
Mrs. Fenwick's trip
Mrs. Fenwick's trip
Mrs. Fenwick's trip

Only just a bit creepy

I bought this portrait years ago, and it’s been reposing in the barn at Horton Landing (where I’ve been busily cleaning and organizing for the last few days):
the Gold Locket portrait
I know very little about its subject, but presume that she died before it was done –such memorials were common in Nova Scotia parlours in the late 19th century. Attached to the lower corner is a photograph that I can’t squeeze any more out of than this:
attached to the Gold Locket portrait
You can fill in the rest of the story…