I have grown up believing that I once met Edith Sitwell.
It was at a nursing home, in a big old house, and I was a little boy. I wandered into a room and found an old lady in a wheelchair gazing out of the Victorian window. She looked sad and frail, wrinkles lined a painfully thin face, and a pointed nose protruded from it. She smelt of soap and disinfectant. She was very frightening.
She looked at me, held out a hand, and beckoned me to her. I nervously approached and held a skeleton hand and she obliged with a dog-tired smile. And we both looked out of the window in silence. And then a nun, wearing a terrifying cornette, came in and told me to leave. I let go of her hand and left, but not before looking back, and seeing that the strictest face offered kindness. And so, I smiled back at her.
I have grown up believing that I once met Edith Sitwell.
That old nursing home was a large house on Sandygate Road that became Claremont Hospital, set up by the Sisters of the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy. According to The Inventory of the Edith Sitwell Collection, she spent three weeks here in August 1960.
I have grown up believing that I once met Edith Sitwell.
Except it was an impossibility. Because I was not around in 1960, and she died four years later, and I was only eight-months-old. But my mother said she took me with her to visit a sick old friend at Claremont when I was a little boy, and that I wandered off and was found in an empty room by one of the nuns.
And there, I believe, I once met Edith Sitwell.
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