I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales...
A Degrees of Separation story and maunderings on the past.
Finished the Goldhill book on the Bensons yestereen, and he concludes with an anecdote from his time at Kings College Cambridge when the very elderly Dadie Rylands was still in residence, Rylands having been AC Benson's last crush (though Goldhill did not know at the time that he was going to develop a Benson obsession) -
- and also the unnamed young man at Kings with whom V Woolf had lunch as recounted in A Room of One's Own. He was, apart from Frances Partridge, who I think survived him, the Last Bloomsberry Standing.
It so happens, my dearios, that very shortly after I had graduated, after the job as genealogical researcher had collapsed due to global economic circumstance, I took a job (as I may have mentioned) as an Accounts Trainee at an Academic Publisher of Antient Lineage, which at that time had a London HQ on the northern boundary of Bloomsbury -
In those halcyon days, graduating without the burden of a student loan, and Things Being Very Different, one could live (admittedly in a rather grotty bedsit with a deeply weird landlady) in central London within one's means and even save a little, at least if one was of a frugal disposition, and positions such as mine even paid for one to do the relevant professional qualification with time off to pursue it.
There were also at the Academic Press, Editorial Trainees, who, I now in retrospect suspect to have been previously undergraduates at the Antient Institution of Highah Learninz with which the Press was associated and to have got these posts through connections, rather than applying as I had done by way of the Handbook of Graduate Opportunities. I fancy they were of the sort of cohort that these days would be interns in similar positions (except the Academic Press no longer has a London HQ), simply because, when we got chatting during our tea-breaks - for in those days, o best-beloved, we had tea-breaks, which we took in a canteen, in which we were served tea by tea-ladies, and as I recall there might also have been buns and cakes and so forth - they were leading a somewhat more glam life than I was, on overdrafts. (A concept that horripilated my upwardly mobile young woman from the provinces soul.)
Anyhow, one of them was a young man who - no, I am not sure whether I would entirely designate him as camp or whether he was just a typical product of that particular environment whose mannerisms had no particular bearing on sexual orientation or gender identity - happened to mention that one weekend he had been at some do where he had been introduced to Dadie Rylands, o the thrill.
So I can now add Virginia Woolf (and AC Benson, I suppose), not to mention, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington, etc, to the significant cultural figures I am very few degrees of separation from. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3038221.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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