Orlando

The first time I ever became aware of Virginia Woolf was in the 1960’s. On the front cover the distinguished but now extinguished magazine ‘Life’ was a black and white picture of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. They were both in full tempestuous thespian flow portraying the breakdown of a marriage fuelled by alcohol. Across the cover were the words ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’.

I asked my Mum who Virginia Woolf was. In a way that I soon worked out was her defense mechanism for dealing with anything that was beyond her comfort zone she said “It’s not really the sort of thing you should be getting involved with at the moment”.

I later discovered that the play was nothing to do with the real Virginia Woolf.

For some forty years the subject of Virginia Woolf lay dormant in my mind. Then, on a transatlantic flight she was resurrected. One of the movies was ‘The Hours’. The story line linked three women over seventy years, including Virginia Woolf. Her book ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is one of the connections between them. The other connection is depression and suicide affecting them in different ways.

Near where we were staying on holiday was a secondhand bookshop. The owner offered to help me find what I was looking for but his help would have taken away most of the pleasure of looking for myself along the yards of overcrowded shelves. I hit the jackpot and found two books by Woolf. One was a collection of essays with some running to twenty or thirty pages about writing, literary criticism, art and life. It is not a book to be read, for me at least, from cover to cover like an adventure story. What I enjoy about this book is delving into a page at random when I have a few spare minutes just to savour her words and command of the English language. Her words are free flowing and her discussions with herself and the reader are not constrained by word counts or space. What a mind to take the reader through her thoughts.

The other book I bought was a novel that was meant to be read from start to finish. It was about a young boy in the Elizabethan era that went to her royal court. Then he became a diplomat during the reign of Charles II representing the crown in Turkey. It was there during an uprising that he was knocked out and woke up several years later having gone through a gender change. The story ends in the 18th and 19th century with the main character trying to recover her estates through the courts of justice.

I did not have time to read this book while we were away on holiday but I would take it with me to the stables where we kept our horses.

My quality time at the stables came after the horses had been turned out for the day and their stables were all ready for them to come into in the evening. Quality time included a cup of coffee, a couple of biscuits, a book and if I was really lucky some warm summer sunshine.

During one of these quality moments I became conscious of eyes looking at me. I looked towards the gate and the fence line but could not see anyone. I then looked down towards my feet and saw a brown pigeon looking up at me. It did not seem scared of being so close to me. Slowly, so as not to scare it, I broke some crumbs off of my biscuit and dropped them down near to where it was standing. When it had finished eating it flew away. The next ‘quality time’ it appeared from nowhere. I was bit slow with the biscuit crumbs and it started to tap its beak against my shoes. The biscuit crumbs were dropped, eaten and the pigeon flew away. This became a routine and on wet days when I sat in the small office the pigeon would wander in and either stand on the small desk or stool waiting for its daily ration of crumbs.

On one of these wet days it came into the office and started to peck at my shoes for its crumbs. I served them and while it was eating I quietly whispered ‘Orlando’. It stopped eating and looked up at me. Not quizzically with its head to one side but straight at me. It seemed we had gone through a successful naming ceremony.

When Orlando came to see me on the following days, instead of eating and flying away it would eat and then go to sleep either on the desk or on the warm concrete outside while I read my book.

‘Orlando’ was the name of the book I was reading and that seemed a good enough name for the pigeon. Like the people whose lives Woolf’s Orlando had touched; my Orlando seemed to come from nowhere and I could not determine if my Orlando was male or female. Orlando seemed a suitably androgenous name.

Towards the end of the summer as I reached the last pages of the book I felt that my Orlando was looking at me. I waited to feel its beak tapping my shoes asking for food. When I did not feel anything I looked down where Orlando would normally be but the pigeon was not there. This sensation happened for a couple of more days and then it stopped. Orlando was not around anymore.

Like Woolf’s Orlando, I had been touched by another Orlando who seemingly came from nowhere but must have come from somewhere but where? And now, Orlando has disappeared from my life to somewhere but I still have the book.