Poet's Grave - Rosemary Tonks

 Seek, and ye shall find. And if at first you don't succeed, try and try again. With a little help from a friend, I eventually found Rosemary Tonks. She wasn't really hidden in death any more than she had completely disappeared in life, she just wasn't easy to find. 

The grave is first of all not really at the Church of St. Thomas a Beckett, Warblington, as given by Neil Astley in the introduction to Bedouin of the London Evening. It is in the much more extensive adjoining municipal cemetery. We know her inscription has her as Rosemary Lightband, the married name she lived under after she stopped being the writer, Rosemary Tonks, but if I missed her on previous visits it might be because I came from the wrong direction. She's on the reverse side of her mother's headstone, but I had been looking for her mother, Gwendoline, too.

In the end, suddenly, there she was and that was the accomplishment of this project and some kind of ambition achieved. I'm very glad I got there in the end. You go south from the main gate to section 2 before you reach the end and she's about 10 rows in from the path and maybe a dozen from the hedgerow, in between the great, weeping tree swaying in the summer breeze and a more prosaic one. I'm not saying they are a willow and an apple tree. 

To be fair to her, she hadn't completely disappeared in life either. Some family knew where she was but they kept her whereabouts quiet so that she could evade the literary world that was wondering where she'd gone.

In the Jewish tradition, I left a stone on the grave in memory. They last longer than flowers. There will be more to say, perhaps, elsewhere in due course.

 

On the way back I tried what might have been a short cut back to Havant. Warblington is a bus ride and a walk from my house. It probably wasn't a short cut but it was a pleasant scenic route on a Sunday afternoon, joining the shoreline and the old Billy line where trains used to go from Havant to Hayling Island and I was able to add this photo to my very intermittent series of pictures that remind me of lines of poetry. I don't think we've had 'there is a willow grows aslant a brook' in which Gertrude reports the death of Ophelia in Hamlet and I know that this certainly isn't a willow but it could be a brook.