I just watched a film starring Helena Bonham-Carter called "The Heart of Me" about a star-crossed love affair, betrayal, family interference and tragedies of war, things which I know very well from personal experiences.
The male lead in the film was killed during the German bombing of London during World War 2. He was outside mid-day in the middle of a street strewn with debris from bombed buildings and there were policemen in tin hats doing their job of shepherding humans under cover.
It was the tin hats which set me off tonight, thinking about the small collection of military paraphenalia which I brought you over the course of years and visits to you in London, Bahrain and Fort Leavenworth. One of those things was a tin hat from a former British officer's collection of WWII items he'd acquired. The man who gave it to me, now deceased, was a neighbor who lived in a flat in Dalmeny Court on Duke Street, St. James's, where I'd rented a flat while studying at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies just a 20-minute walk away.
From the U.S., I'd brought you a soldier's helmet from the Vietnam war which was from my father's collections.
More importantly, I brought you a 3-stemmed pink glass lamp made from a giant brass shell casing from WWII which had been turned into an exquisite piece of art with a crescent moon and a woman who looked as if the artist was imprinting a Greek-goddess with a flowing gown. The casing was reported to have come from an important naval ship based in Hawaii during the war.
I'd spent the wages of a whole summer's work to buy it for you just before I left Seattle and brought it to London when I moved there in the late 1970s for graduate studies at SOAS. I had it packed and crated again in London, in Mayfair actually, by a helpful business acquaintance of your family, Mr. Moore, in late September 1980 days before I embarked on my final trip to Bahrain just a few days after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran.
Major Johnson, who designated himself as your private secretary, collected it from me and said he would see that you received it. It needed cleaning and he said he'd designate "an Indian chap" for that task.
I suggested that it may need rewiring due to electrical current differences between the U.S. and Bahrain. My suggestion was interpreted by the good major as a hint that some "delicate wiring" may have taken place in transit at some point. I told him that I'd imagined it in a war room such as I'd seen in films with a green-felted pool or snooker table covered with maps and toy-sized military hardware and men gathered around it re-fighting WWII as you and other chaps did at Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth.
You never had the kindness to acknowledge my gift to you, but you should know now, if you ever did, that every gift I gave to you was from the heart of me, starting from the biggest gift a woman has to give the man she loves.
