Elizabeth used to say a poem. I don’t remember all of it, but it began “Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun ….

This is from a poem by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), one of the great Renaissance men of Victorian England.

From the Hymn of Empedocles

IS it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;

That we must feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?

Not much, I know, you prize
What pleasures may be had,
Who look on life with eyes
Estranged, like mine, and sad:
And yet the village churl feels the truth more than you;

Who ‘s loth to leave this life
Which to him little yields:
His hard-task’d sunburnt wife,
His often-labour’d fields;
The boors with whom he talk’d, the country spots he knew.

But thou, because thou hear’st
Men scoff at Heaven and Fate;
Because the gods thou fear’st
Fail to make blest thy state,
Tremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there are.

I say, Fear not! life still
Leaves human effort scope.
But, since life teems with ill,
Nurse no extravagant hope.
Because thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair.

He’s an expert on Wilkie Collins, of all things. Did you know that Wilkie Collins maintained two separate households with two separate mistresses and two separate sets of children? The scheduling difficulties must have been shocking. No wonder he took laudanum.

Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889 — Another real-life reference, this time to a somewhat obscure 19th century English novelist and forerunner of today’s mystery writers. His two best-known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, share a very similar structure to our Guernsey novel — namely, a series of letters by different protagonists to tell the tale. Interesting to speculate whether our authors came across Collins when they were looking for other examples of epistolary novels.

Laudanum – an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium, used extensively 100 years ago as an analgesic, soporific and cough suppressant, and as a treatment for almost any condition you can think of. Both Mary Todd Lincoln and the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were addicts.

“A Day in the Life of a Soldier / NH National Guard Vehicle Display.” Come to the library and see what a day in the life of a soldier is like. Write a letter to a soldier, sample a MRE (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), try on a uniform and backpack, or take a look inside a National Guard military vehicle.

This is a great program –

“A Day in the Life of a Soldier / NH National Guard Vehicle Display.” Come to the library and see what a day in the life of a soldier is like. Write a letter to a soldier, sample a MRE (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), try on a uniform and backpack, or take a look inside a National Guard military vehicle.

The Event Calendar will be updated once we have a new date for the program.

It surprised me so much. It shouldn’t have — I knew the Channel Islands had been occupied, but I never, not once, thought what that might have entailed. Willful ignorance is all I can call it. So, I am off to the London Library to educate myself. The library suffered terrible bomb damage, but the floors are safe to walk on again …. I shall study up on the Occupation.

So much to love about this quote. Lovely to see someone — even someone fictional! — heading to a library to further their knowledge of an event, place and time. I hope all our readers have frequent occasion to do likewise.

Nowadays, of course, we also have the convenience of visiting libraries in their online incarnations. The largest online “card catalog” in the world is one called WorldCat, which contains the combined holdings of over 72,000 libraries worldwide — with over 200 million items!

This is a wonderful place to go if you’re researching an obscure topic or just want to be really thorough in your research. If, like Juliet, you’d like to learn more about the German occupation of the Channel Islands, you could of course just try Amazon or try your luck at your local public library.

But look what the following searches retrieve from WorldCat — fiction, movies, and sound recordings, as well as historical works:

World War, 1939-1945 — Channel Islands.

Channel Islands — History — German occupation, 1940-1945.

Many of these works will be available from your local library via its interlibrary loan service. As always, if you’re not sure what your results mean or would like some research guidance, ask a librarian!

London Library Bomb Damage

The event will feature:

• military aircraft from the era, including an airborne reenactment of a battle;
• re-enactors in German and American camps;
• antique vehicles (1900′s through 1940′s); and,
• veterans roundtable discussion.

Much more information available from the Collings Foundation website, http://www.collingsfoundation.org/cf_battle2010.htm.

In the meantime, if you have a passion for WW II aircraft, pilot training films and documentaries for a large number of “warbirds” have been made available online: http://www.zenoswarbirdvideos.com/main.html

Here’s a short 3-minute talk by Annie to give you preview of what we have to look forward to:

One of London’s most upscale hotels, Claridge’s during the war years was a favorite of the many European royal families who had been forced to flee their home countries. Guests included the Kings of Greece, Norway and Yugoslavia, and the Queen of the Netherlands.

In 1947 a diplomat telephoned Claridge’s and asked to speak to the King. “Certainly, sir,” came the polite response, “but which one?”

Your friends are a suspicious lot, especially that fellow Stark, who said it wasn’t his job to reverse the direction of the Lend-Lease and refused to bring you to the cocktail party I threw at the View office.

Lend-Lease – An American law passed in 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which authorized the transfer of over $700 billion worth of war supplies in today’s dollars to the Allied nations, principally Great Britain and the Soviet Union. There is no dispute that history would have followed a very different course in the absence of Lend-Lease.

Lend-Lease made it clear to Hitler that the U.S. was not a neutral bystander in the conflict, and attacks on United States ships by the Germans began only a couple of months after the passage of the law.

Any materials not returned to the U.S. after the war were purchased at 10% of nominal value. Britain did not make its final payment until December 2006.

I hope you don’t sack him; he seems a nice boy, and he really had no alternative – I menaced him with Remembrance of Things Past.

Remembrance of Things Past – À la recherche du temps perdu, the most famous work by the French author Marcel Proust, published in the early part of the 20th century. One of the longest novels ever written at almost 1.5 million words, each of its seven volumes would pack a hefty wallop.

Monty Python would later satirize Proust’s verbosity with its great “All-England Summarize Proust Competition” sketch: