Kingsley Amis

I've just finished Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis.  It is no way a cheerful book, but it is an absorbing read.   I had read Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Slipstream" - she was Kingsley's second wife.   And I think I may have mentioned his poem Camberwell Beauty before in my blog.

It is about his first wife, who he left for Elizabeth Jane Howard.    Though that is rather a simplified way of putting it.   And looking this up reminds me that he called the poem "Instead of an Epilogue", not "Camberwell Beauty".  But of course, it is not about the butterfly, it is about his first wife Hilly, which is why it is dedicated "To H."


          Instead of an Epilogue

To H.

I.

In 1932 when I was ten
In my grandmother's garden in Camberwell
I saw a Camberwell Beauty butterfly
Sitting on a clump of Michaelmas daisies.
I recognised it because I'd seen a picture
Showing its brownish wings with creamy edges
In a boy's paper or on a cigarette-card
Earlier that week.  And I remember thinking,
What else would you expect?  Everyone knows
Camberwell Beauties come from Camberwell;
That's why they're called that.  Yes, I was ten.

II.

In 1940 when I was eighteen
In Marlborough, going out one winter's morning
To walk to school, I saw that every twig,
Every leaf in the vicar's privet hedge
And every stalk and stem was covered in
A thin layer of ice as clear as glass
Because the rain had frozen as it landed.
The sun shone and the trees and shrubs shone back
Like pale flames with orange and green sparkles.
Freak weather conditions, people said,
And one was always hearing about them.

III.

In '46 when I was twenty-four
I met someone harmless, someone defenceless,
But till then whole, unadapted within;
Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed,
Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused;
If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault,
Whose eye I could have met for ever then,
Oh yes, and who was also beautiful.
Well, that was much as women were meant to be,
I thought, and set about looking further.
How can we tell, with nothing to compare?

Kingsley Amis


Its seems clear he loved both his wives.   But...   we, the damaged children of Adam, are so lost when we do not anchor ourselves to our Creator's moral standards.  We bob about, driven by the currents of the world and our own imperfection, doing terrible damage to ourselves and to each other.

We, the Captain and I, were listening to the D-Day experiences on the radio this morning. Terrible damage, Very very sad.  But I am glad they are recording the experiences of those who were part of it, as soon there will be no-one left who was alive during those war years. I am past my three score years and ten and am a child of the post-war baby boom era.   Soon there will be no-one left even to remember the immediate post-war, the bomb sites and the food rationing.

Memories fade and become distorted. And they become spun to political agendas.  But Jehovah's memory does not fade, it remains clear, true and undistorted. So there is the hope for the dead, that they are remembered by their Creator, and that he will wake them from the dreamless sleep of death when the time comes.