If ‘Adventure’ was essential to Calderon, as Kittie said, what part did this play in his so desperately wanting to get to the Front? Probably quite a lot, as my last quotation in ‘Thirty Quotes from George Calderon’ on this blog suggests.
It is well known that upper- and middle-class Edwardian women were attracted to being V.A.D. nurses also by the ‘adventure’ it promised — a form of emancipation from their conventional social identities. But although their experiences were every bit as visceral and traumatic as the men’s (see Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth or Enid Bagnold’s A Diary without Dates), they were in less danger of being killed outright or physically maimed. For the men to say that they were going to Flanders ‘for the adventure’, strikes us as chillingly trivial or romantic. Did they actually believe with Peter Pan that ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’?
This could only be entertained by someone who did not know, could not yet imagine, what dying on a World War I battlefield was like. And it is one of the most difficult things, I find, to get one’s head round today about the attitudes of public school men like George Calderon to signing up in the first year of the war.
Next entry: A correction?
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Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon, 1912
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
The Peter Pan Factor
If ‘Adventure’ was essential to Calderon, as Kittie said, what part did this play in his so desperately wanting to get to the Front? Probably quite a lot, as my last quotation in ‘Thirty Quotes from George Calderon’ on this blog suggests.
It is well known that upper- and middle-class Edwardian women were attracted to being V.A.D. nurses also by the ‘adventure’ it promised — a form of emancipation from their conventional social identities. But although their experiences were every bit as visceral and traumatic as the men’s (see Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth or Enid Bagnold’s A Diary without Dates), they were in less danger of being killed outright or physically maimed. For the men to say that they were going to Flanders ‘for the adventure’, strikes us as chillingly trivial or romantic. Did they actually believe with Peter Pan that ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’?
This could only be entertained by someone who did not know, could not yet imagine, what dying on a World War I battlefield was like. And it is one of the most difficult things, I find, to get one’s head round today about the attitudes of public school men like George Calderon to signing up in the first year of the war.
Next entry: A correction?
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