[COPY] CHAPTER THREE: The Unassuming Life of Simon Barrington-Ward

How to live a joy filled life

Lesson 3 – Live each day as if it were your first…

Simon and Jean had a mutual friend who had gone back to the UK, Ken Carey, who felt Jean was a very good thing and could see that Simon would really flourish under her care and she under his. Simon’s time at Ibadan university in Africa was drawing to an end, as he had been if you like, ‘on loan’ from Cambridge, where he was going back to be a Dean at the college he had been chaplain of in the mid 1950’s, at the beginning of the ‘60’s. He began to realise that bringing Jean home with him, was something he really would enjoy and of course Jean had already seen how it could and would work, but had said nothing.

He took her up to the top of a beautiful tower, overlooking a Palm Plot, and there without even having kissed, or gone out to a dance, or anything, he asked Jean if she would be his wife. She said ‘Yes!’, without hesitation. He sent a telegram back to Ken saying ‘the palm plot thickens…”

As they descended the stairs of the tower, Simon, who was always someone who would want to consult his mother before taking a major decision in life, felt he needed a little reassurance this would be the ‘right thing’ to do, so asked Jean to hold off saying anything to anyone until he had spoken to an old friend. They were after all, from different parts of the country and lifestyles and backgrounds to a certain extent, but they had the key ingredients, of a love of Christ and the people of the world which God had called them to serve. So, as soon as he could, he rushed around to an older missionary lady he knew, who reminded him of his mother, he thought, I will just ask her advice, but as he walked in, she looked up and exclaimed, ‘Oh you’ve got engaged to Jean Taylor- how marvellous!’ He smiled and dashed back around to Jean and said ‘It’s on!’. The joy was written all over his face and she had assumed the rest!

So it was, Simon and Jean began their life together travelling back to Cambridge. I can only imagine the culture shock for Jean being flung into his academic life, which had been very much the life of a bachelor. Jim Ede, who lived opposite them at Kettle’s Yard and whom Simon consequently confirmed (though he always referred to Jim leading him in the confirmation classes rather than other way around), used to regularly come over and rearrange the furniture, telling mum, ‘No, this needs to be in a light, that’s far too fussy Jean, throw a white throw over that. You don’t want that Victorian tat’… and so on. Jean took all of this rearranging in her stride with good grace and charm which were and always remained hallmarks of her character. Jim remained a firm friend of the family, even when he moved up to Scotland, where his flat in Edinburgh became another ‘mini kettle’s yard’. In fact, we would always stay with him on our way up north. My sister, Mary, reminded me and vividly remembers early visits there as small children with Jim anxiously sucking in his breath and saying as I came incredibly close to a skeleton leaf he’d found and placed in some precise and perilous spot, or perfectly placed pebbles and saved on a white shelf, ‘touch with your eyes, touch with your eyes’.

In fact, when we were very small, we were always made to play outside, whatever the weather. It was deemed to be ‘safer’ out there, but even there, there would be glass balls and all sorts potentially breakable artefacts and treasures, so the poor man I’m sure found our visits much less stressful once we became a little older.

On visiting Kettle’s yard which I did as a teen and a student I found it remarkably similar to his home in Edinburgh… you would ring a little bell, only open in the afternoon as that when the light was ideal, between 2 and 4pm. A small group of retired old ladies who knew Jim and volunteered would let you in and you’d be free to wander from room to room, to sit down and pick up a book. A few students would be quietly studying in a corner. The place exuded peace, and space and light. I remember he loved to boast about being given an artwork for the price the frame because he understood the artist. My favourite example of this, was of Ben Nicholson’s still life of two pears and cup which is still hanging in Kettle’s yard now. Apparently, Nicholson asked him what it was about? And unhesitatingly he said, “friendship of course, the goblet is making for the pears…”. He was quite right apparently and got given the picture for his efforts for the price of the frame because he understood the deeper meaning behind the art. And that was Jim’s gift, his way of seeing, of seeing how light and art and life can and should be merged.

He placed paintings at eye level or below, so you didn’t have to strain and look up to see them, they were part of what you could easily look at. He put sculptures in spots where the light on them would give them movement, the dancer by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska a perfect example of this. She is still dancing as the light flickers on her form and moves with you around the table.

He remained and remains an inspiring influence on myself, my sister and our whole household. His was in fact the first death of a close family friend I remember reading about in a newspaper whilst on my gap year in Germany. This is in the era before internet, or mobile phones, so I was unaware for much of the time of what was happening outside my small course at the Goethe Institute learning German for my studies at Cambridge the following year in Theology. It was a blissful time away from home, growing up with a freedom that is no longer possible. But still, it had disadvantages of not being able to speak to family often, nor hear news back home. Getting given an English newspaper by a friend one day, glancing through in the paper’s obituary in 1989 they had his face staring back at me as the featured death of the day. It was quite a shock. Before the advent of mobile phones, it felt odd to see it in print his face, and no one would have thought to contact me whilst abroad. He had carried on visiting the “elderly” in a local hospital I recalled when we saw him in Edinburgh last, until he himself was almost joining them. I remember thinking how curious an old man should be visiting other elderly people, but with beautiful bright blue eyes, his beret (which I donated to Kettle’s Yard when he gave us a spare one of his) he never did grow old in some ways and inspired me to paint and draw and in fact enthused about the Christmas card I made mum and dad a black white etching which he said ‘contained a magical sense of light’. He was just one of the many influences of our family home. And I still have that original Christmas card on our mantlepiece with the poem my father wrote within it, as Simon did every year. I drew it and Simon wrote a poem for inside for hundreds on their long Christmas card list from when I was around 11 until really 25 (which would start being sent out in October!) Packing up my mother’s desk in the bottom drawer she kept every original artwork I had done for them. I left them in there. We still have the desk and the drawer in our own drawing room now. It felt like wonderful tribute to their friends and all those they had collected over the years. As one of my own dear friends once said ‘Friends are the best collectibles’.