One of the many symptoms of acute stress disorder is ‘hyperarousal’, e.g. irritability and outbursts of anger.
About now, whilst Kittie was with him, Calderon learned that Colonel Wilson had been killed on 6 November:
George was in hospital when the news came that he was killed. He was still very weak and when he heard it he downright cried — he saw I was upset by his crying, it was so unlike him, and he said quite angrily, ‘Why on earth shouldn’t I cry?’
I noticed that his heart went out to others in a way it had not done before the War — I think he really loved those men he was most with for that short time in Flanders. Captain Fitzgerald, Lord Anglesey, Mr MacIntosh are the names that specially stood out.
Even Kittie, with all her experience of nursing soldiers and of stress in others, was taken aback by her husband crying ‘downright’, i.e. ‘actually’, ‘unashamedly’, ‘unrestrainedly’. It was ‘so unlike him’… It was presumably unlike Edwardian males generally. But she put her finger on the reason. As Santanu Das has written in his powerful Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (CUP, 2008, p. 136):
The myth of heroic masculinity fostered through the works of Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and encouraged through the public school sporting system exploded in the mud and blood of the Western Front. A very different order of male experience, one that accommodated fear, vulnerability, support and physical tenderness, sprang up in its place.
Kittie had much more to say about this phenomenon later, and was very perceptive about it. We shall return to the subject next year.
Next entry: Kittie’s therapy
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Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon c.1901
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
‘He downright cried’
One of the many symptoms of acute stress disorder is ‘hyperarousal’, e.g. irritability and outbursts of anger.
About now, whilst Kittie was with him, Calderon learned that Colonel Wilson had been killed on 6 November:
Even Kittie, with all her experience of nursing soldiers and of stress in others, was taken aback by her husband crying ‘downright’, i.e. ‘actually’, ‘unashamedly’, ‘unrestrainedly’. It was ‘so unlike him’… It was presumably unlike Edwardian males generally. But she put her finger on the reason. As Santanu Das has written in his powerful Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (CUP, 2008, p. 136):
Kittie had much more to say about this phenomenon later, and was very perceptive about it. We shall return to the subject next year.
Next entry: Kittie’s therapy
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