Carpenter Birthday Quotes

I think he had a very, very good smile, for somebody whose teeth were somewhere between so-so and bad. What seems not a whit onerous to write about is the mechanics of it. His smile often went backward or forward when all the other facial traffic in the room was either not moving at all or moving in the opposite direction. His distribution wasn't standard, even in the family. He could look grave, not to say funereal, when candles on small children's birthday cakes were being blown out. On the other hand, he could look positively delighted when one of the kids showed him where he or she had scraped a shoulder swimming under the float. Technically, I think, he had no social smile whatever, and yet it seems true (maybe just a trifle extravagant) to say that nothing essentially right was ever missing in his face.

In Downhill All the Way, Leonard remembers them returning from an evening spent with Vanessa in her studio in Fitzroy Street. (This was in 1930.)A drunk woman was being abused by two passers-by and was then accosted by a policeman who seemed to Leonard to be ‘deliberately trying to goad her into doing something which would justify an arrest’. He lost his temper, challenged the policeman in front of a small crowd, and made him let the woman go. What Leonard omitted to mention in his reminiscence was that he and Virginia had been to a fancy-dress party for Angelica’s eleventh birthday. Virginia was dressed as a (‘mad’) March Hare, with a pair of hare’s ears and paws. Roger Fry, at the party, had been a wonderfully characterful White Knight. And Leonard was ‘wearing a green baize apron and a pair of chisels as the Carpenter’. But as he tackled the policeman (‘Why dont you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame’), ‘holding his apron and chisel in one hand’,114 he forgot all about his comical fancy-dress in his anger and his determination to see justice done.

It is so poignant,’ Nancy wrote to old Swinbrook-sewer Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘She feels so ill . . . two days ago she said, “Who knows – perhaps Tom and Bobo?” . . . She laughs as she always has . . . We long for her to go in her sleep, quietly.’38 A week later Sydney had a minor stroke and slipped into unconsciousness. ‘Before that it was dreadful,’ Nancy wrote. Sydney had been unable to swallow anything but sips of liquid because of throat constriction and was starving to death. Nancy had often claimed that she had never loved her mother but now she found that her feelings for her were stronger than she had suspected. ‘Now she is slipping away and feels nothing . . . the sadness comes and goes in waves. I have a feeling nothing really nice will ever happen again in my life. Things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age and death.’39 Sydney died on 25 May, just after her eighty-third birthday. A carpenter travelled over to the island and made her coffin, and a neighbour said prayers over her body.