DIANA RAYMOND died on the night of 15/16 February. She had been for so many years a much loved member of the congregation and many people wanted to offer tributes to her. Here we print Piers Plowright’s and Father Stephen’s addresses at her funeral on Thursday 26th February, and memories from Derek Spottiswoode, Edward Langtry and Sylvia Fry.
Piers Plowright:
There are some people who lift the heart and Diana was one of them. I knew her from my Church Row childhood. My father lived at No 21 and was the local doctor and Diana and Ernest were his patients. I think my first memory of them both is standing together in the garden of 21 about 1952 on a summer evening at one of my parents’ parties. I knew Ernest was a famous writer; I knew less about Diana though I could see how beautiful she was, how glamorous.
But Diana’s glamour wasn’t just how she looked; it was how she spoke and listened and talked. Something deep, and, with hindsight, spiritual. That kind of beauty never left her. The last time I saw her, about three weeks ago, in her flat at 22 the Pryors, she was as radiant as ever, as engaged, as curious; about books, about writers, about plays, about people, about theology, art, history. In the hall was the usual pile of biographies and novels which she’d read at three times the speed I could manage, waiting to go back to the travelling library that delivered them every fortnight. Diana might sometimes look tired, sometimes you could see she was in pain and she hated being increasingly deaf, but two things she never showed: resentment or boredom.
Zoom back to the 50s. When I first saw her, she’d have been 36 or so, because she’d been born in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, in which her father died. She’d been educated at Cheltenham Ladies College, fees paid by the Officers’ Families Fund, learnt the typing that Peter was talking about, written her first novel in the evenings (rejected, but the next one wasn’t ), met and married Ernest, already a celebrated writer. By the time I met her, Diana was herself becoming an established novelist – maybe a little overshadowed by her more famous husband, though I don’t think she ever felt that. Whatever she felt, she carried those qualities of warmth and curiosity into her work: the 24 novels, the poetry and her one play, so that the people and ideas in them touched one, the narratives and thought compelled.
And the sense of exploration. Diana was always exploring, and nowhere more, as many in this church will know, than in the areas of Faith and Belief. Her books, her poems, all her writing, are full of that particular search. When Poh Sim and I got married here in 1964, Diana and Ernest, who were there, gave us some of their novels, signed and dated, and it was from then I really began to read Diana and to appreciate her gift for character, plot, and wit – that was something she had in abundance, in her life and in her work. Never malicious – at least I never heard her be malicious – but I think she would have described life, with Dante – though meaning something rather different, as a Divine Comedy’. Here’s an example of all her qualities – including wit – not from one of her novels, but from her account of living in Flat 9, Gardnor Mansions – up the road – through the London Blitz of 1940 and 1941. Ernest and she hadn’t long been married:
That winter the doctor [my father] said, “You may expect your baby at the end of May.” (The doctor lived – and happily still does – on the other side of Church Row.) In the light of all else one could expect before then, it seemed a statement of some optimism. Nightly those wide windows in Church Row, if one turned out the light and shifted the black-out curtains, showed the slow abstract ballet of the searchlights ( the greatest of which was bedded in Ken Wood), the bursting shells from the tremendous gun barrage which now met the Nazi planes, the liquid stain of fire. The sight was so awe-inspiring that my husband one night summoned a school friend of mine (who was in fact leaving the next day) with the unfortunate remark, “Come and see this! It may be your last chance.” The upper flat swayed to the bombs like a hammock, and the brass trays, of which there were many, since the owners had lived in India, all came rattling down, adding, as it were, insult to injury. My husband, often on night duty with the Home Guard, suggested that I might like to go down to the shelter, but having seen the shelter, I decided I’d rather come down with Gardnor Mansions than have them come down on me.
The high windows in Church Row showed the pale, acid skies of early Spring. It took me now ten minutes to climb the stairs. On the evening of April 16th [1941] the warning sounded at 9 o’clock. We heard it without great foreboding; things, we said, were quieter. But there followed the heaviest raid of the war. The All Clear did not sound till eight hours later, and in London that night 1,720 people were killed. A parachute mine in Fellows Road destroyed six houses, and all Hampstead’s available A.R.P. Services were called to this one, one of the worst incidents’ in Hampstead’s raids.
There was comparative calm again until, nearly a month later, on the night of May 10th, the warning sounded an hour before midnight, to herald the last big raid on London. So noisy was it, so did Hampstead shake and the flames light up the sky, that next morning Mrs Warren [who did’ for us] came excitedly from Camden Town and exclaimed, “I said to Mr Warrren last night, Mrs Raymond will have had that baby.”
Mrs Warren was wrong. The baby arrived on the 1st June the same morning that clothes rationing was announced a different kind of bomb. But the knowledge that four coupons would be needed for an athletic vest and nine for an unlined mackintosh did not interest me just then. The warning sounded on the night of my son’s birth, but I did not hear the guns.
That baby, of course, was Peter, sitting here today with Margaret and Diana’s two beloved grand- daughters, Catherine and Helen. I think you can hear her voice’ there very clearly, wry, affectionate, undaunted.
Diana, as you probably know, had been writing fiction since she was 16. She published that second novel when she was 19 and from the 1950s onwards she had a great deal of success, through the swinging sixties, sullen seventies, and edgy eighties. Even in the nineties, I remember the impact of what was her penultimate published novel, Roundabout’, in which a small and unhappy girl disappears at the Fair on Hampstead Heath. It was nail-biting stuff, harrowing and touching at the same time, and, as in several of her novels, showed Diana’s empathy with small and lonely children. As she’d lost her own father before she could know him and was an only child, she must have experienced loneliness herself maybe that drove her writing to begin with. But whatever darkness there may have been in her childhood or growing, it didn’t show in the grown up Diana. She always, as I’ve suggested, gave out light. You couldn’t walk into that flat and the room over the rattling East Heath Road with its red chairs, stacks of books and enticing pictures, without feeling it. The Pryors became Diana and Ernest’s home shortly after their time in Church Row: it was a precious place for both of them and after Ernest’s death in 1974, it must have an extraordinary consolation to her. Hampstead, altogether, she loved, the place and the people. Neighbours liked Peggy Jay, whom she used to meet at least once a week, for coffee or more I remember a particularly lively lunch party in Peggy’s Gayton Crescent flat Peggy in her mid-eighties, Diana over eighty when my step-mother, Pat, then nearly 90 (and still going, by the way, at 99) fell off her chair with laughter or drink or both; Hampstead Heath, the village, this Church which she came to every Sunday she could and which went to her when times were bad and Hampstead’s lovely streets. She loved them all. Here’s a Hampstead’ extract from a 1958 novel, Strangers’ Gallery’ Salutation Hill is a kind of compression of Downshire Hill and Christ Church Hill:
At noon in summer Salutation Hill ran with a scented expectant silence, like a road that leads down to the sea. The light walls of the Regency houses, the paved front gardens, and the trees in tubs and the jewelled window-boxes, the occasional licked-lollipop scarlet of a front door below a fanlight delicate as the skeleton of a bird, all wore a clear sea-fresh light, while in the pad of sandals on dry pavements was the sound of children running to the shore. Amongst the tricycles and woollen rabbits abandoned in the paved yards lay sometimes a bucket and spade, though the only sand to be gathered here was the thin soil between the paving-stones, or the summer dust in the road.
Residents turning to their guests at the chosen spot where the end of the road was filled with a sight of the old Salutation Inn (where Doctor Johnson had come and where Keats had heard, if not the nightingale, a nightingale), the blond dried grasses of the Heath and a surprising depth of sky, would say, “You’d never believe you were only four miles from the centre of London, would you?”
You still wouldn’t, really.
For the last five years, one of my great treats has been a monthly literary coffee morning at the Pryors; just me, Diana’s wonderful step-son Patrick who did so much for her [and an author himself] and the endlessly stimulating Diana. We’d talk about the latest novels: she’d recently particularly enjoyed David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence’ which had made her cry with laughter and I was able to put her in touch with David and a correspondence ensued; biographies old and new I’d just read Frances Spalding [another parishioner]’s splendid biography of Stevie Smith and she wolfed that down in three days. [I think she was particularly fascinated by Stevie’s struggles with Christian Belief, which, though Diana chose the opposite path, really spoke to her]; drama she loved going to see and reviewing the plays put on in this church and was here for Murder in the Cathedral’ in December, sitting in the front, hanging onto every word and writing with great perception about it for the church magazine; poetry we shared a passion for Auden, Heaney and R.S Thomas; short-stories John McGahern, Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Mansfield; we talked about her grand-daughters whom she was immensely proud of, Catherine a very motivated teacher, and Helen a librarian and beginning to be a fiction writer. She loved their visits, by the way, and only last month put one of them up + two friends. She looked a little pale afterwards, but you could tell she’d loved it. What gave her particular pleasure, these last six months, were the texts of Richard Harries’ Gresham Lectures, Literature in a Time of Unbelief’. Ernest and Diana had got to know Richard and his wife Jo when Richard was a curate here at St John’s in the late sixties, and it was Richard, along with the formidable Joseph McCullough who’d helped bring Ernest back to some kind of religious faith. Anyway, Diana had been very much hoping to go to the lectures, but was a bit too frail, so I would bring her the texts back to her and she was planning to write a piece about how Ernest might have reacted to them. Well it wasn’t to be and Richard still hasn’t given his last lecture, on very appropriately – R.S.Thomas he’s doing that next week. So I thought I’d end with a particularly tender late R.S.T. poem. It’s called A Marriage’ and it seems to me peculiarly apposite to Diana. I think you’ll hear why:
A Marriage’ by R.S. Thomas
We met
Under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
Come’ said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.
Father Stephen:
Over the last few days I have been looking at Diana’s privately printed reflection on old age, faith and death called Are we nearly there?’ There I found this comment:
I have known people say that the only reason why people go to church is because they want to know what happens when they die. This is absolutely not true: what I need to know is what happens while I live.’
And in the last chapter there is the evidence I think that Diana did discover what she needed to know.
Old people love, not with the passion of youth but with a force compounded with all they have known, suffered, regretted – they love with power and sometimes with pain, because they havelearnt that what truly matters is that love should go out, and never mind what comes in.’
Now that she is no longer nearly there but really there, what we shall all miss most I think is Diana’s appearance of not minding all that she had to endure – all that came in – and the gentle power of her loving presence – of love going out from her. And that loving presence came I think from the fact that she really knew the truth of these words that she quotes from a sermon by John Donne, words that came into her mind when she first went back to her beloved Borrowdale twelve years after Ernest died:
He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter though thou have no Spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, orconscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the Spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as thesheaves in harvest to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.’ (Christmas Sermon at St Paul’s 1624)
* * * * * * *
The Revd Derek Spottiswoode:
Many of us are living in a time of very real mourning over the seemingly rather sudden death of Diana Raymond. Speaking with her over the telephone as I did, it was beyond imagination to believe that within twelve hour or so she would be dead. In her nineties though she was and although increasingly physically frail, she maintained a truly remarkable openness of mind, heart and spirit to the very end. For my part, if I were ever to be credited just a little with such openness I would consider my life to have been a success indeed!
That openness flowed into a great clarity of mind; if any should doubt such clarity even near the end, I invite them to get hold of HPC’s magazine of December 2008* and read Diana’s review of the Hampstead Players’ performance the previous month. That review, like previous ones, displays her theatrical and literary knowledge, her wonderful perceptiveness and her great gift with words.
I say without hesitation that she was one of the most remarkable women whom it has been my privilege to meet and to claim as a friend.
It was in the autumn of 1986, shortly after my arrival as an already elderly but newly ordained curate that Graham Dowell, our then Vicar, introduced me to what became lovingly known as the Wendy Group [it being hosted by Wendy Trewin]. The group had begun some three years earlier as an ecumenical Lent Group, but rather than closing at the end of Lent continued meeting every three weeks [every four weeks after Wendy’s death]. Diana was a member of that group from its inception and her loyalty to that group, and more importantly to her deep faith, was shown by the fact that so far as I am aware she never missed a meeting until her health and her hearing and my own folly of crashing my car nearly two years ago brought a halt! At all meetings she listened carefully and intently to what the rest of the group said and her verbal contributions were always straightforward and uncomplicated, very much to the point and wise. In her quiet way she was, at least during the 23 years or so that I have known her, a great servant of her Lord and of his Church.
I have mentioned her gift for words it was coincidentally fitting therefore that the February magazine should contain one of her poems! (the December issue)
As we send our condolences to her son Peter and his family and to her stepson Patrick and his sister Lela, we give thanks indeed for her life, for her friendship and her great contribution over many years to the life of this parish and give thanks that at the end she did not have to endure an expected operation, and died peacefully at home.
* * * * * * *
For Diana
You were like a glowing window in the church.
Sunlight shone through the glass;
the picture showed an angel, welcoming
whoever came to her for help or consolation.
You were in pain, and yet you lifted
pain from us – we only saw your smile
of welcome when we turned to you
for understanding or for recognition.
So now the window in the church is taken down.
We mourn your loss, but we rejoice to know
the greeting that will be yours in a brighter land,
the songs of joy there that will welcome you.
� Sylvia Read
* * * * * *
Edward Langtry:
I was fortunate to have known her and shall always remember how welcoming she was; I never once heard her say anything negative about anybody or anything, she will live on in our hearts for a long period of time. I first met her in 2005, and immediately she made me welcome. Eventually Diana told me I had to call her Diana, instead of Mrs. Raymond; I thought I could never take such a liberty out of respect for her age, but she insisted friends should call each other by their names . I was so touched she regarded me that highly.
She was special – there wasn’t any doubt about that. To me Diana was someone who made me feel wanted and useful; it gave me enormous pleasure to be the one who took her hymn books after the service and carried them for her, and then the duty of collecting her walker; it may sound trifling, but she made me feel useful, and I am really going to miss her.
Death is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t sink in immediately, and feels so final at first; but when the shock of it has sunk in, I will see Diana live on in the church, and in many other ways; she was the one who gave me a home in a certain part of that church. To me pew number 3, the outer edge, will always be her seat, while I thank God for the pleasure of knowing this wonderful lady.
In memoriam – Diana Raymond