Monday, 1st September, 2014
Victoria and her Albert.
~ Just a bit of a warning, this one gets philosophical! ~
It’s not stretching the truth too much to say that I’m still shattered from the wedding. The good thing about the library is that there are always a million different things to do. On a day like today, when I’m still emotionally and mentally exhausted, it’s nice to be able to switch off my brain and do some manual labour.
When I say manual labour, I mean moving books. I don’t mean the standard sized books, though. Today I was rearranging the oversize collection.
I’ve told you about oversize before. Some of the books are massive. Some were so big I couldn’t even lift them. Add that to the heavy bookplates that are attached either side and it’s quite a work out. Moving the books from the bottom shelf to the top shelf made my arms shake, and some of the books are so old that I have to make sure I manoeuvre them gently into their places – absolutely no dropping, scuffing or sliding.
As is usual when I’m amongst the stacks and the many books, I was distracted for much of the day. I found a beautifully decorated book which I’m pretty certain should be in the WEG collection (we’re still finding them amongst the normal books 100 years on).
I’m not distracted for hours; I just read a chapter here and there. Despite all of the archaic looking, beautifully decorated books surrounding it, this book was the one that caught my eye.
I suppose I’ve always thought of Queen Victoria in the childish ‘one is not amused’ kind of way. I’ve never been very interested in the personal lives of the famous in history (apart from the Romantics – and Vikings – of course). I’ve always tended to go towards the stories of the ‘normal’ people, the peasants, the maids. In Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs, it’s always the lives of Downstairs that are infinitely more interesting.
Perhaps it was because I’ve watched Tooth and Claw (the Doctor who episode) recently, when the David Tennant Doctor and Rose encounter Queen Victoria. Although the standard amusement of Russell T. Davies emerges with Rose and the Doctor making a bet on who can make her say ‘not amused’, her character has another dimension which I always knew about but never really though about – her deep love and mourning for her late husband.
The chapter in this book, then, that most stood out to me was this one.
It seems to me that in society you are allowed a certain amount of time for public mourning, usually up to the date of the funeral. It is then that the mourning becomes closer knit, limited to close family and friends. Eventually it turns inward, and becomes a very intimate kind of mourning that nobody talks about. I’m sure everyone has those times, just like I do, when something triggers a memory of someone who has died, and for at least the rest of the day they stay with you in your mind.
Queen Victoria, however, was a woman who had the power to maintain this mourning publicly. She is an example of someone who has been forced to confront the ultimate fear (at least mine); losing someone that you utterly and devotedly love. She had the power to sustain this loss and mourning without anyone telling her that she had to draw it inwards. It’s fascinating, psychologically; although it feels harsh at the time, quietening the wails of loss helps you to clear your mind and accept that your loved one has gone. Queen Victoria is an example of someone who could not be told to be quiet and move on; she was not (as) constrained by society. The only man whom she would allow to advise her was the one who had died.
She was allowed, and allowed herself, to wallow in the despair of his loss. She ordered that life should go on as if he were still alive. With no one to counteract her, the servants duly laid out his clothes every morning and brought up a bowl of hot water for him to bathe. Wherever she went, she brought a picture of him with her and would sleep on the same side of the bed she always had, with a photo of him hanging over his side.
Her life became driven by ideas that he had spoken of; he had decided on a match for their son, and she was determined that the match would go ahead. ‘It is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, that his wishes – his plans – about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.’
During the wedding ceremony was one of the only times when she was forced to accept that he was not alive; seeing her children walk alone down the aisle, without their father where he should have been, she wrote that ‘it was indescribable. At one moment, when I first heard the flourish of trumpets, which brought back to my mind my whole life of twenty years at his dear side, safe, proud, secure, and happy, I felt as if I should faint. Only by a violent effort could I succeed in mastering my emotions!’
You can see in the plate that she refused to be a part of the wedding party; she watched from above (in the top left hand corner). She wrote that the day he died was ‘the day my life came to an end.’
As an atheist, I often wish that I could believe in an afterlife. Each time I lose someone, to me they have simple disappeared. The synapses have stopped firing and everything that that person was has disappeared, like a candle being blown out. There is no chance of meeting them again someday in a wonderful place. This chapter really showed me that you cannot dwell on the people you lose. Abiding by the unspoken rule that at some point not too soon after someone dies you have to start moving on leads to a much healthier understanding of life. They become a part of you; I still hear the voices of people who have died when I’m doing things that they would have liked or something that we did together before. For example, there was a wonderful lady who I was close to when I visited her in Canada. It was slightly different because she knew that she was dying of cancer. I can still hear her words of wisdom even now; her telling me that it’s healthier to eat six small meals a day than three big ones; telling me that the power of positive thinking will help to find you a car parking space on a busy day; that we will go out in the wind and rain because we are British, and are made of sterner stuff. When I am at (Indian) family functions, I can still vividly remember my Naniji grasping my hand and leaning her weight on me the last time we went on a hospital visit, saying in her broken English, ‘You are my grand-daughter.’
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