EXCERPT FROM SARA'S
JOURNAL
October 3, 1998
Highgate, London
Wilfred has a violin lesson this morning, for which my presence is
requested. It is a last-minute request and I find myself hurrying down Cromwell Avenue in
pajama bottoms and flying shoelaces. Wilfy has yet to warm up to the joys of a musical
education. The class is a flashback to my early days in the music lesson circuit. The
teacher is an elderly woman with a long skirt and a staff drawn onto her living room
carpet. She gets the children to place marbles on the staff according to what notes she
sings. It’s too bad she can’t somehow incorporate castles into her lesson plan,
as they are Wilf’s current and most heart-felt passion.
Highgate Cemetery is one of the most famous Romantic cemeteries in the
U.K. In the 19th century, London's cemetaries were overflowing. As a solution, they
created many regional cemetaries with Highgate being one of them. Massive stones and
ornate markers abound. There is even an Egyptian-style circular catacomb. Eerie and
beautiful, completely overgrown with vines and trees. An ancient man in a tweed cap and
polished brogues gives us a sentimental tour of physicist Faraday's tomb ,a
smattering of pugilists and the huge, bronze head of Karl Marx . I am
particularly taken by the stone angels and the animal monuments…I have assured Rich
that I will erect a giant stone Airedale on his future monument.
It’s nine miles around Hampstead Heath. We sip tea at the
Hampstead Tea Rooms and walk back a different route through the Heaths, ending up at the Kenwood
House, a stately home and now a museum.
Angela is at the top of three flights of stairs, on the top of a step
ladder. The children are napping and she is working on some wall paintings. I gasp. She is
teetering at the top of her house. She says she is quite used to it. Angela is a
designer and does a lot of mural work. Her walls are an epic painting and she explains to
me how in older homes one "papers" a plaster wall that can never be perfect
because it is so old. Then she paints the wall with a washy treatment of several layers
and then often adds illustrations.
The Victorian house is magical, but it is also freezing because there
is a massive hole in the kitchen wall. The Wallises are in the midst of a remodeling
project which will include a glass-domed observatory between the kitchen and the dining
room. In the mean time there is no wall and the floors are like ice under my socks.
