lesleyjonesberry

At the start of the Zeffirelli film of La Traviata, the overture plays lushly on the soundtrack, while Violetta drifts through deserted rooms like Miss Havisham. At least she does in my head – I haven’t watched the film for over thirty years. She is waiting for her lover, and she is waiting for her death: this being full blown Romantic opera, both come, the second hard on the heels of the first, just allowing for some impassioned heart-rending, full-lung-capacity singing to stretch – nay blow apart any pretence at – verisimilitude.

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Presently, my days are filled with tears.  As children, we cry easily.  Perhaps, as Shakespeare says, ‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’.  Babies cry from frustration, from pain, from fear, and this is largely a vocal activity – it is crying more than weeping.  Somewhere in Gareth Malone’s book Music for the People I think he says that a baby’s cry is, as it were, designed to be intolerable.  It’s pitched in a way to pierce through all other noises, it demands attention.  It summons succour.

Good Morrow, friends. St Valentine’s is past

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV Scene i

What is love?  This huge essential word.  It motivates us so strongly, and at the same time it is ubiquitous and clichéd.  Patently, it ranges from something quintessential within our psychological core, to the softest, most whimsical, peripheral frond and feather of feeling.

At the top of our road is a thoroughfare named Portway. It heads roughly east to west, with houses and side roads along its southern edge and West Ham Park bordering to the north. This park was originally part of the Upton Park/Ham House estate, where, in the 18th century, Dr John Fothergill created a botanical garden ‘second only to Kew’. Alongside the wide green open spaces, the football pitches and sports areas and playgrounds, all essential parts of a living, vital community resource and sanctuary – in other words, of an urban park – there is an ornamental garden, where remain traces of the design and layout of Dr Fothergill’s garden, with trees planted by him. The ornamental garden is, to me, the heart of this haven in east London.

The gate we use to go into the park – the one nearest to our house, also closest to the ornamental gardens – is designated Portway Gate.