unearths some literary gems.
There ought to be a Nostalgics Club. The condition of entry would be a capacity for retrospective hankering.
***
And nostalgia doesn’t even stop there, for the person who suffers from it in its acutest forms can with the greatest ease be homesick for places he has never seen.
***
Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:
1 Row with A.
2 No letter from C.
3 Tooth.
4 Look for green overall again.
5 No ideas for magazine story.
6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).
7 People I ought to be dining.
And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.
***
Poor Marcus hated his name and said it was like the sound that would be made by a crocodile eating sugar almonds.
***
Once, in father’s office, a male appeared whom father addressed as ‘Ha, Clifford!’...Ha-Clifford was comparatively stricken in years (he must have been quite nineteen),
***
The episode comfortably closed with the caution, ‘– but don’t say it at parties’. The words one must not say at parties included, according to one nurse, Stomach and Flea.
[...]
About the forbidden words, Mell made a verse which we recited in duet, marching round the nursery, fingertips on shoulders, and dipping deeply at the end of each alternate line:
Strumpet and Stomach and Flea
Went for a walk on Salisbury Plain
Walking by three and by three
And they never were seen again:
Oh never, oh never again.
***
When we quarrelled, we would hurl phrases at each other of no known origin but of a quality quite admirably enraging. We knew! Not for us the popular epithets of abuse; to be termed a duffer, fool, ass, pig, left us unmoved. But if Mell wanted to make me cry with impotent fury she would recite abstractedly,
Drink in a Bournemouth cup
With a hat like a bon-bon block!
while Mell could be rendered purple in a moment if I retaliated in a quick-time march,
They called her Thunder Of The Lord!
