Second paragraph of third chapter (from a letter by Helen Waddell):
It’s wet, and the candle is blowing at the open window and there is a corncrake out in the dark. And I have felt human again for the first time. My mother died last Friday in her sleep. I found her, in the chair.
[actually it was her stepmother]
This was the first biography of Helen Waddell, published in 1973, eight years after her death. It doesn’t go into the same depth as Felicitas Corrigan’s excellent book, but it really scores by simply letting Helen Waddell’s voice speak for herself, with many extracts from her letters conveying her emotions (mostly, but not only, joy in the act of literature), and with a concentration on her home life – in particular Blackett singles out the demands of keeping a decaying house in London as one of the big distractions from Waddell’s creative work, but also refers often to the deep roots that Waddell felt in County Down and at her sister’s home, Kilmacrew near Banbridge. There’s a lot of name-dropping, but it is made up for by the enthusiasm.
Blackett herself appears occasionally in the narrative, but always in the third person, as recipient of several of Waddell’s letters. This is laudably modest; I am sure that she had some stories of her own to tell as well. She was the sister of Sir Basil Blackett, also a friend of Helen Waddell’s, and lived from 1888 to 1976; she married James Lamplugh Brooksbank in 1912 (divorced in 1942) and they had three children, one of whom died as recently as 2018.
One weird point of trivia. On 9 July 1943 Helen Waddell had lunch at the Savoy with General de Gaulle and a large group including also Lord Sempill; she comments in a letter written that day that Lady Sempill was the daughter of Sir John Lavery, who I personally always thought of as an Irish painter until I discovered in the Kelvingrove last month that the Scots think he was one of theirs. But actually it was Sempill’s first wife who was Lavery’s daughter, and she had died in 1935, eight years earlier; Cecilia Dunbar-Kilburn, who he married as his second wife in 1941, was a sculptor in her own right. Perhaps Helen Waddell just got confused in the family details; it can happen.
This is a mostly cheerful and pretty intense book about someone whoi think is interesting but you may not care very much about, but if you want to give it a try, you can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2018, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Church and State in Tudor Ireland, by Robert Dudley Edwards, and Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, edited by Jennifer FitzGerald.
