Bedouin of the London Evening Read Online Free PDF Page A

her difficulties and immediate plans. Her failing health had made it impossible for her to continue to live alone at Old Forest Lodge, which she sold in May 2013, downsizing to a serviced garden flat not far from her old house after selling, giving away or destroying most of her possessions.
    She had only been there for four months when she was again taken to hospital by ambulance, having collapsed with exhaustion, caused by ovarian cancer. After three weeks of treatment, she was taken to a nursing home: ‘Horrors!! All the residents either demented or on the way to it. Staff very nice. Was absolutely terrified & lost. Decided I must leave at once. That very day. They wanted me to stay overnight. No. Must leave at once. […] called a taxi & I came post haste back to the flat. Loved it! Slept all night!!’ 45
    She spent the last three months of 2013 back in her flat, but much of January 2014 in hospital, and then had a few more weeks at home before she had to be taken to a different nursing home. She died on 15 April 2014 and was buried two weeks later in her mother’s grave at the Church of St Thomas à Becket, Warblington, Hampshire, without a funeral or any ceremony, in line with her wishes: the body was only a vessel for the spirit. She left instructions that the inscription on her headstone should read: ‘Rosemary Desmond Boswell Lightband’.
     
    The list of treasures recorded in ‘The burning of the idols’ could have graced a Sothebys catalogue. This was a collection of works created by devout artists from other faiths assembled by a knowledgeable collector who loved the art of ancient China and other cultures, all given to Rosemary Tonks on trust. Reading through this account, line by line, felt like the antithesis of Edmund de Waal’s redeeming tale
The Hare with the Amber Eyes
, in which a family history is brought to life through the netsuke figures passed on from one generation to the next through times of war, devastation and great personal loss.
    The treasures passed on to Rosemary Tonks from her aunt are lost forever. The one great gift she has left us – her books of poetryused to survive only in the libraries of collectors. Commenting on this situation in the aftermath of her death, Oliver Kamm wrote in
The Times
:
    Her art, she had decided, was dangerous rubbish. The Bible was what mattered. She burnt the manuscript of her last novel and instructed publishers to remove her poems from anthologies.
    I find this a deeply saddening mental state and, if the decision were mine, I’d have no hesitation in giving permission for Tonks’s work to be published now. The creator of a work of art can no more decide its fate than he or she can decide its critical reputation. […] In death, Rosemary Tonks deserves the respect of rediscovery. 46
    I know I must share the delight of many thousands of readers that Rosemary Tonks’s family – not without much hesitation and careful consideration – decided in the end to agree with that sentiment. There was no ban on republication in her will, written many years after she ceased to be Rosemary Tonks, so that her books didn’t even exist for her then. The woman who destroyed that priceless collection given to her on trust seems to me a very different person from the author of those marvellously edgy and timeless poems.
    This edition should re-establish Rosemary Tonks’s critical reputation as both a unique voice in 20th century poetry and the author of some exceptionally astute and unusual critical writing.
     
    NEIL ASTLEY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & NOTES
    This book could not have been published – nor this introduction written – without the support and assistance of the Rosemary Tonks Estate, and I wish to thank her cousins Jill Brandt, Wendy Reynolds and Tim Butchard for their kindness and help over a number of years, and most of all, for being open to make a difficult decision to act in the interests of the work for which they became responsible.
    This introduction