On the Eve of Lockdown

 On the Eve of the Second Lockdown

 

Lord Byron wrote a long, quasi-autobiographical poem in the early C19 – Child Harold. It made him famous, and gave us that staple of the Romantic imagination – the Byronic Hero, a melancholy, rootless, but noble and passionate figure.

 

Child Harold was written in four Cantos, or books, with a break in between the first and later two. In that gap occurred the final spasm of the Napoleonic Wars: the battle of Waterloo in June 1815.

 

In the third Canto of Child Harold, Byron writes about the battle. He was an admirer of Napoleon, or at least a detester of the European kings and princes arraigned against Napoleon. He was also, like the WW1 poets a century later, much overwhelmed by the horrors of war. Waterloo was a particularly bloody battle, with many thousands of wounded left unrescued and untreated on the battlefield as the French retreated and the Allies pursued.

 

The reason I’m writing about Byron and Waterloo is a little far-fetched and even perhaps ridiculous. Byron’s poem recalls the famous ball that was held in Brussels on the eve of what proved to be the three day Waterloo campaign.

 

It was a grand, aristocratic, British affair. Most of the senior army officers, including the Duke of Wellington himself, were present.

 

There was a sound of revelry by night, Byron writes..

The lamps shone over fair women and brave men

 

But deep into the evening another sound intrudes:

 

But hush! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

Did ye not hear it?- No,’twas but the wind..

On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined..

But hark! That heavy sound breaks in once more..

Arm! Arm! It is- it is- the cannon’s opening roar!

 

Napoleon had started his attack.

 

In the small hours, Wellington ordered the officers to their battle posts. And they rode away to war, and to death or wounds for many.

 

Descending into bathos: I couldn’t get Byron’s poem out of my head when, on the “eve” of Lockdown 2.0, we went to a small concert in a private residence in Marylebone, near Portland Place.

 

The house is large, designed in the C18 (in time for Waterloo) by John Adams. One can imagine a ball taking place there (although the nearest battle would be Extinction Rebellion in Oxford Street). However, there was the feeblest of similarities with 1815 – an evening in a grand house with music, followed by the gloom and anxiety of the next phase of a “battle”, against disease.

 

In “normal” times, the owners of the house host many concerts. Through a trust, they support young professional musicians. The concerts are opportunities for those musicians to showcase or rehearse their talents. In normal times, the audience, perhaps up to [80] in number, buy tickets – but are otherwise treated as guests of the hosts. They are served drinks and canapes on arrival, and a supper in the ground floor dining room after. Inbetween these agreeable social events, people go up a grand staircase to a large high-ceilinged drawing room with a wonderful acoustic, to listen to the prodigies and protégés.

 

On the Eve of Lockdown, we listened to a pianist and flautist play, beautifully, an eclectic programme ranging from Bach, through Bartok, to a final calypso, on the way enchanting us with an arrangement of the Swahili song Malaika. 

 

Even though it was the Eve of Lockdown, and not the wretched state itself, there were of course legal restrictions. The main one was a limit of 30 guests. The second was no “social mixing” of people from different households. Therefore, although we were generously allowed drinks and canapes, we had to sit in household bubbles, either on our own or at extremely wide tables, with (in theory) no socialising with the opposite guests.

 

The seating in the concert/drawing room was sparsely arranged. Masks were worn. This by no means affected the enthusiasm of the audience.

 

But there was a different effect. The enforced lack of human numbers made one more aware than usual of another wonderful attribute of the house – its large, magnificent, and varied collection of modern art, figurative and landscape, hanging everywhere but especially in the concert room.

 

I was seated next to an intriguing painting of a young woman seemingly enmeshed in, or perhaps exploring, a vine. Studying it in between musical pieces, I found it more and more compelling, because it gave off a sense of unease, falling short of anything dramatic.

 

I couldn’t decide whether the unease was intended to be captured in the subject – the woman’s gaze averted, her gesturing hands her most prominent feature – or whether the artist was unsure of the subject and hadn’t quite “got it right”.

 

I looked up the artist later. He was John Ward, who died in 2008. Surprisingly, given the subject of this picture, he was known as a society portraitist of Royalty and the fashionable.

 

This added to the mystery. Who was this somewhat hippyish young woman? Had Ward’s socially secure artistic touch abandoned him, just a little, in painting her?

 

Such were my thoughts on the Eve of Lockdown.

 

Nov 2020