John Bayley > Quotes

“So much of childhood seems to have been spent in secret, and most of its pleasures came from this. Most of the memories I have of it, too. I already considered life to be far from wonderful—something, indeed, to be avoided as much as one could, like school or games or children’s parties. Life, real life, was like a picture that frightened me seriously.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“My mother took me in her arms, cradled and shushed me. I stopped crying at once, appalled at this disquieting kindness, and embarrassed by it, too. I found she was saying, “You must see the new moon, darling, but not through glass. I’ll put the window wide. And then you must kiss your hand to it seven times and wish.” With her arm round me, I stood at the window, still snuffling back tears, and obediently went through this unfamiliar ritual, as outlandish as the Danish habit of going to bed in the daytime. She had never mentioned the moon before, just as I could not remember her ever calling me “Darling” before. It occurred to me that there must be modes of behavior even in England which were still unknown to me. Rather like those unusual things that were done among the Danes.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“But all this means nothing. Gerda is not there. Only in my mind. The mind that is helped and solaced by the same demons, the same friends, who have destroyed the mind of an Iris who is close to me now, closer to me than ever, and yet far away. Walking in a dream, with Iris beside me.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“One evening, after I had been pottering around her room like a small rodent, Gerda suddenly said in her flat, thick voice, “I want to feel what man be in bed. Come in bed here.” She said this with the same apathy and lack of interest with which she let me flour the pastry dough (my father was partial to pastry) or asked me by gestures to turn the handle while she fed the mincing machine. I received her suggestion in the same spirit. She held back the sheet, gestured me to get in, and followed. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling; she didn’t look at me or show awareness of my presence. We were a close fit and I was crammed against the wall as if in a game of sardines. I might have been lying beside a big dead fish or reptile, a whale or crocodile.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“I came on my mother shedding a few tears in the drawing room. My mother had hastily blown her nose and spoken to me in an irritated way—a rare thing for her. I knew she knew she should not have been doing it—such demonstrations either of grief or happiness were not the thing at all—and so I was not upset by her crossness, feeling that we had been caught out, as it were, together, and that we must both do better in future.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“I was not aware of the weaver fish, with its highly poisonous spines, whose venom can cause acute agony, even death when untreated. The wife of Field Marshal Montgomery is thought to have died in this way, after paddling with her children off the east coast. The victor of Alamein was then an unknown major. He is reported never to have mentioned her name again, and he never looked at another woman.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“This feast of memory seems never to have existed for me before these days when Iris has lost her own memory. Or so it seems to me today, when I lie in bed and luxuriate in thoughts about Gerda and Littlestone and times past, memories which have been brought to me, as if with the flourish of a maître d’hôtel, by one of Dr. A.’s closest friends and allies. The friend who ministers to her, as she lies beside me, is not recollection, but unconsciousness, the tranquil, shallow doze in which she will lie, I hope, for two hours yet, murmuring and crooning a little at intervals.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

“The man was looking at me quizzically. But at the same time, he seemed to have lost interest. I’m sure that he did have a heron’s skull, and that he would have shown it to me. What else might have happened, I, of course, had no idea of at the time. In those days, children—children at least of our class and background—were not warned against the possible consequences of speaking to strangers. “Perhaps we may meet again,” he said, but not at all hopefully, as if such a further encounter were now extremely unlikely to take place.”
― John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire