poetry
Walking in Tangier, 1937/38, and Helen's love of literature
Elisabeth Swan
Transcript
Their house was up on the mountain and one got very fond of the scenery, I mean, it was really Mediterranean scenery with wonderful views of the sea. We went every evening for a walk round the back which was quite a rough walk and we'd go to the Mediterranean coast and Mummy was always quoting, 'Nobly, nobly Cape St Vincent to the North-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood red, reeking into Cadiz Bay'. You know, she came out with quotations at the drop of a hat. She was so familiar with English literature really and poetry. So we really loved those walks and then we often had a session of being read to from a nice book before we went to bed.
Enjoying reading in the house, surrounded by artworks, early 1980s
Edmund de Waal
Transcript
The thing about being able to sit and read in Kettle's Yard, to look and read simultaneously, seemed to me completely correct actually, that actually it was not the sanctified space of art where one valorised object sits beautifully lit and that you pay homage to it and that everything else is aligned as if there's nothing there but you and the art object. But it seemed to me utterly so wonderful to be able to sit in an armchair with a David Jones book of poetry and have a Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture in front of you or the pebbles or whatever. It seemed to me that's actually how life is. What made sense was both the domesticity of it, you know, the house-ness of it. The fact that it had all the different kinds of spaces in which you could be and you could move between them and have different moods, to sit or be in different kinds of spaces and still look at things, but then it was also the encounter between the objects and the house so that again those hierarchies seem to be broached.






