Edward VIII Abdication, 1936-2007 by Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier)
From MemoryArchive
Who: Louise Porter-Cleaves (Lisa Forestier) What: Edawrd VIII Abdication When: 1936-2007 Where: Science Hill School, Kentucky-Washington, DC
ORIGINAL MEMORY: Abdication of Edward VIII as the news came over the radio at Science Hill School, Kentucky, according to Mom's oral family history.
One of my favorite parts of family oral history is the story of the abdication of Edward VIII of the House of Winsor in 1936, giving up his throne for the woman he loved, Wallace Simpson. Because I was not yet born, the story came through to me second-hand and it was Mom's that was the most riveting.
Mom, so her story goes, was at Science Hill School in Kentucky then. Her parents -- Albert Porter and Alice McGee Porter -- had been part of many generation of family migration from Scotland to the Southeast coast of America, out to Oklahoma and Texas and then back to the East. Educators, they had taken up residence in Danville, Kentucky and sun the Classics Department at the small local liberal arts college, Centre College. After rigorous home and local Danville schooling, Mom (Mildred Louise Porter -- later Cleaves) finished high school at Science Hill where the Headmistress's main goal was to get Kentucky girls into Wellesley College, Wellesley, Masssachusetts.
[Mom was, in fact, one of their stellar success stories. She went on to get into Wellesley on a full scholarship, major in English and minor in French and graduated Summa Cum Laude.]
Mom's family, Kentucky and Science Hill were exceptionally House of Windsor conscious. So when the news began to trickle through that troubles in the House about Edward were more than a tempest in a teapot, there was rapt attention, especially around the radio. As the drama built to a climax, there were, Mom's recounted, the various, the various schoolof thought. The "isn't it romantic that He would abdicate for the women he loves!" type; the 'should have done his duty to his people' type; the "that American femme fatale led the nice weak British lad down the garden path" type; the "it's all his own silly fault and he better not blame her" type. It was a big moment. The biggest thing in the South since the Scoepes Monkey Trial.
The climax and denouement were a real tear-jerker, a 10 lace hanky boo-hoo-hoo, The staff of the school and students had apparently believed that come kind of compromise bwteen love and duty could be brokered -- in the literary world something akin to PRINCE FRIEDRICH OF HOMBERG by Heinrich Von Kleist.
As time went on from that moment -- Mom got married and my sister and I were born -- the House of Windsor had become emotionally distant to us. I don't mean in an absolute way, because there was all that press and footage. But as if something in the way of trust had peaked in 1936 and unless that kind of trust could be restored, we were better off without.
PENTIMENTO:
Recently, in the fall of 2007, lining up a travel itinerary from the Martin Luther King Library (the flagship of the District of Columbia Public Library Syatem) to the Buddha Bar off the Champs Elysee in Paris, France, I noted again that the overall Entertainment Group is called George V Entertainment. (George V was the father of Edward VII who was the brother of George VI who was the father of Elizabeth II). The experience brought back these old memories. the houses in Maryland, in Garrett Park and Rockville and lower Frederick County and upper Frederick County where Mom told me this story a little at a time. The travel research was to create a proposal to bounce off my Uncle Francis' old colleagues and successors connected with the East Asian Department at Harvard University for a meeting at the Buddha Bar:a reunion for some, a first time for others. At roughly the same time I saw the film 1925 THE MERRY WIDOW by Erich Von Stroheim, a rich popular fiction rendering of the entre-deux-geurres European royalty's love v. duty dilemma. In the process of mulling it all over again, Mom's story of 1936, the "remains of the day" (to use Kazuo Ishiguro phrase)and the new beginnings, I again wondered how much of Mom's "speak memory" (to use the Nabokov expression) was owing to her taking the name Science Hill deeply, how perhaps she too, like me, resonated to the "No Single Thing Abides" passage from THE NATURE OF THINGS by the Latin writer Lucretius:
No single thing abides; but all things flow,
Fragment to fragment clings -- the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
You too, of earth -- your empire; lands and seas --
Least with your stars, of all the galaxies
Globed from the drift like these, like these you too
Shalt go. You are going, hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides, the seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are, shall other seas in turn
Mow with their sythes of whiteness other bays.
The seeds that once were take flight and fly;
Winnowed to earth or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. Life goes on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.
They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all-indissoluable All: --
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.
Flakes of the water on the water cease,
Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these,
Atoms to atoms, weariness to rest --
Ashes to ashes -- hopes and fears to peace!
O Science, life aloud your voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills --
Thrills through the conscience the news of peace --
How beautiful your feet are on the hills!
