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Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page i

Fresca
A Life in the Making
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page ii

In memory of Fresca’s nieces and nephew, Sonya Allinson (–),

Enid Allinson (–), Vanessa Allinson (–),
Michael Allinson (–) and of my own father,
John Michael Henry Franks (–).
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page iii

Fresca
A Life in the Making
A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

HELEN SOUTHWORTH

sussex
A C A D E M I C
P R E S S
Brighton • Portland • Toronto
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page iv

Copyright © Helen Southworth .

The right of Helen Southworth to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act .

ISBN 978-1-78284-357-3 (PDF)

First published in  by

SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
PO Box 
Eastbourne BN BP

Distributed in North America by

SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
ISBS Publisher Services
 NE th Ave , Portland, OR , USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes
of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Southworth, Helen, author.
Title: Fresca : a life in the making : a biographer’s quest for a forgotten
Bloomsbury polymath / Helen Southworth.
Description: Chicago : Sussex Academic Press, . | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN  | ISBN  (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Allinson, Francesca, –. | Women–England–
Biography. | England–Intellectual life–th century. | Bloomsbury
group. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.
Classification: LCC CT.A S  | DDC . [B] –dc
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Typeset and designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne.

Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall.
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

List of Illustrations xii

Prologue 
Part One A Childhood 
Part Two Coming of Age 
Part Three Judy Wogan 
Part Four Writer! Composer! 
Part Five Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War 
Part Six My Own Different Personal Life 
Part Seven No Remaining, No Place to Stay 
Part Eight Love Under The Shadow of Death 
Coda 

Notes 
Index 

v
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page vi

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s

Sonnets. O friendship, how piercing are your darts—there, there, again there.
All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying
day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waves, he went over me, his devastating
presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul.
It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up.
‘You are not Byron; you are yourself.’ To be contracted by another person into
a single being—how strange.
(Passage marked by Enid Marx in her copy of Virginia Woolf ’s
The Waves, Enid Marx Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum)

And what [is she] thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there is
a reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers
the innumerable questions that we ask as we stand outside on the pavement
looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than
to pick one’s way among these vast depositaries of facts, to make up the lives of
men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the
extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn
about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets are given us, and
we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There
is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and
women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelist
could surpass.
(Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book’)

One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
(Nietzsche quoted by Tippett from Michel Tournier’s
The Wind Spirit, Those Twentieth Century Blues)

If we have the courage and the freedom to write exactly what we think; if we
escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always
in their relation to each other, but in relation to reality; and the sky too and the
trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no
human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there
is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of
reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will
come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which
she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who
were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.
(Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, my emphasis)
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page vii

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Tale of Research or Biography as Detection and Jigsaw
‘A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets’

I N the ten-line foreword to her  Hogarth Press book, entitled A Childhood,
Francesca Allinson describes her efforts to avoid ‘shut[ting]’ her protagonist,
Charlotte, ‘too closely within the exact hours and places of her own experience’.
This resistance to enclosure, to pinning down one’s subject, I found echoed in
the lines marked by Fresca’s friend and the illustrator of A Childhood, designer
Enid Marx, in her first edition of Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves () held at
the Victoria and Albert Museum archives. The last sentence of the extract, used
here as one of the book’s epigraphs, are the words of Bernard, the character most
often linked to Woolf herself. They read: ‘O friendship . . . To be contracted by
another person into a single being—how strange’.
Although I have tried to find out as much information, in as much detail as
possible, about Fresca, following Fresca’s and Marx’s lead, I have tried to maintain
an openness to her story and to let myself consider how Fresca’s life and work
intersected with that of her contemporaries. In her own prologue to A Childhood,
Fresca warns that ‘if [Charlotte] strikes you as odd, have patience with her, for
many of her contemporaries felt and acted very much as she did’. To borrow
from Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, in many respects an author and a book
seminal to this project and to Fresca’s life (Woolf ’s original lectures were presented
at Cambridge University while Fresca was in her last year at Oxford University),
rather than pin down Fresca I have tried to ‘let [the] line [of thought] dip into
the stream’: ‘Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its
line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither
among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—
you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s
line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?’
Details of Fresca’s life came to me as items, as clues, ‘a thimble, a skull, a pair
of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets’. Following Woolf ’s lead, I have ‘pick[ed] [my] way
about among these vast depositaries of facts, [made] up the lives of men and
women, [created] their complex minds and households from the extraordinary

vii
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page viii

Preface and Acknowledgements

abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about’. I have
structured Fresca’s story after the fashion of A. J. A. Symons’s  The Quest
for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, as a kind of detective story in terms of
these items (books, photographs, wills, etc.) and where possible in terms of the
order in which they presented themselves to me. In the absence of a single Fresca
archive, I have built my own.
My goal with this book has been to expose the biographical process, to show
the project ‘in the making’, and, in this regard, I follow in the footsteps of and
am indebted not only to the work of A. J. A. Symons, but A. S. Byatt, Janet
Malcolm, Daniel Mendelsohn, Richard Holmes, Lisa Cohen, Hermione
Lee, Alison Light, and Martha Hodes, among many others. This is a ‘biog-
raphy-in-action’, to use Michael Holroyd’s helpful term for Richard Holmes’s
work.
To this end, I have included leads that did not pan out, that did not produce
gold, as well as, of course, those that did, and details and anecdotes that pertain
only peripherally to Fresca’s life story. Several readers of this manuscript advo-
cated separate appendices for different characters, or several different books.
Sybil Oldfield, for example, suggested a second book under the title I have
adopted here for this preface: Biography as Detection and Jigsaw. While acknowl-
edging and addressing as best I could readers’ concerns about losing the Fresca
thread, I have opted to keep in many of the deviations, the rabbit holes, the
spider’s webs, the roads not taken, and the dead ends. As Hermione Lee argues
in the introduction to her collection of writings on biography, Virginia Woolf ’s
Nose, quoting Henry James, biography, like death ‘smooths the folds’ of the
person one loved. ‘The figure retained by the memory is compressed and inten-
sified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count;
it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than nebu-
lously, for a swarm of possibilities.’ I want to show the folds of a life, ‘the swarm
of possibilities’, and also the bumps one encounters on the quest to write the
story of that life. In her recent Common People, Alison Light describes her own
‘reflection on the process [of researching the lives of her family]’ as a means to
‘let the texture breathe a little and to capture, if I could, something of the
emotional see-saw which accompanies archive visits and historical discoveries’.
My aim, further to Light’s, is to reveal how the frequently haphazard research
process mirrors the emotional see-saw that is life, in the sense that breaks in
the historical record are often reflections of breaks in the lives of an individual.
Fresca: A Life in the Making captures the topsy-turvy quality of most of our
lives, as well as showing how biography too can get turned upside down in the
making, how a single remnant, story or image can throw everything into
different relief.

viii
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page ix

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book incorporates traditional biographical research methods, such as

on-site archival work, interviews, and standard library research. It also takes
advantage of the many newer resources available via the Internet such as
Wikipedia, Google Maps, Google Books and crowd-sourcing mechanisms.
Beyond the fact that this is simply what the research landscape now looks like,
some of these newer resources prove particularly useful for secondary or lesser
known figures such as Fresca. Library catalogues, book sellers’ online inventories,
and eBay are all wonderful sources of information, but it does mean that the
research, like some of the images, is of varying quality and reliability, and that,
as a result, there is occasionally a layered or secondhand quality to my findings.


Most compelling about Fresca’s story, and certainly the thing that drew me to
her, is the extraordinary breadth of her experiences, her tenacity, her vitality, her
engagement, and her conviction. On Fresca’s death Lady Margaret Hall prin-
cipal Lynda Grier described Fresca in a letter to Margaret Lambert as ‘so full of
life, the essence of it’. And she continued: ‘I think I always felt more alive when
[Fresca] had paid me one of her all too infrequent visits. Last time she came it
was to tell me about the wood, I suppose about . She was looking magnif-
icent, and as usual I felt revived by the sight of her.’ I hope I have captured
Fresca’s vitality in this book.
Grier was not the only person whose life Fresca transformed. While Fresca’s
story constitutes the backbone of this book, there are many, many different lives
being lived here. Fresca’s life story is the story of several intersecting circles of
intellectuals and of many diverse creative enterprises, some of whom and which
have yet to be written about in any detail. This is a book about women and men
who were ‘unconventional, multifariously creative, and on a quest for new ways
of living and loving’, as Eleanor Breuning eloquently put it. It is about indi-
viduals whose refusal of categories often hampered their bid for celebrity or kept
them in the background; these were people who worked together at a period,
framed by two world wars, when collaboration and cooperation were perhaps
even more necessary to creative production than they usually are.
Just like Fresca, I have relied on and been shaped intellectually and emotion-
ally by a vast number of people. While I take responsibility for all errors and
inconsistencies in this book, I want to acknowledge that my work is indebted
to many people’s hard work and expertise and it has been a pleasure to collabo-
rate with so many different people on this project. If I have missed anyone here,
they will find themselves in the book.
I am indebted to Fresca’s family and friends, especially the late Sonya
Allinson, but also the late Vanessa and Michael, and the next generation of

ix
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page x

Preface and Acknowledgements

Allinsons, Tim, David, and Christine. Thanks also to Kit and Jean Martin who
were the first to give me clues in my quest for Fresca and generously welcomed
me into their home. Oliver Mahony, Archivist at Lady Margaret Hall, also
provided invaluable information early in the process.
Eleanor Breuning, Jill Lewis, Alan Powers, and Matthew Eve, as well as
Verity Elston and her colleagues at Compton Verney provided help learning
about Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert. Caitlin Adams, Charles Lillis, the
Wogan-Brownes, and the late Beryl Mackay, daughter-in-law of Eleanor Elder,
helped me build my picture of Judy Wogan and the Arts League of Service.
In the field of music and Tippett studies, Alain Frogley, Thomas
Schuttenhelm, Justin Vickers, Meirion Bowen, Nicolas Bell, David I. Clarke
and the late John Amis gave invaluable advice. I’d also like to thank Danyel
Gilgan who shared anything he could find related to Wilf Franks and Fresca
and Virginia-Lee Webb and Christopher Weathersbee about Den Newton.
My wonderful colleague and friend Mark Hussey read all of this and was
immensely supportive. Beth Daugherty, Sibyl Oldfield and Elizabeth Raisanen
also read big pieces and gave me lots of excellent feedback. Jude Cook provided
invaluable advice on my proposal and Stephen Rogers has been hugely helpful
throughout the project, even accompanying me on some of my first excursions.
Oliver Soden, working on his own biography of Michael Tippett, read every-
thing and was hugely generous with ideas and suggestions.
Many other colleagues and friends helped in myriad ways: Claire Battershill,
Nicola Wilson, Alice Staveley, Elizabeth Willson-Gordon, Mike Widner,
Alina Oboza, Ida Thuv, Paul Peppis, Mark Whalan, Heidi Kaufman, Leah
Pickup, Catherine Brindley, Ellen Mulligan, Michele Taylor, Richard Taylor,
Theresa Koford, Richard York, Kristin Barker, Danielle Curran, Michele
Gladieux, Christi Binstadt, Dan Schmitt, Susan Lowdermilk, Mira Geffner,
Hilary Ross, Midna Ross, Chulita Southworth, Jackie Jones, Susie Harries,
Alexandra Harris, Helen Smith, Trevor Bond, Stephen Barkway, Stuart Clarke,
Catherine Hollis, Greg Thomas, Kelly Sultzbach, Rachel Bowlby, Christine
Froula, Diane Gillespie, Emily Kopley, Melba Cuddy Keane and colleagues
and students at the Honors College at the University of Oregon, especially
Carol Giantonio, Henry Alley, Roxann Prazniak, Susanna Lim, Vera Keller,
Joseph Fracchia, Tonya White, Rabea and Deborah Stueckeman and Monique
Balbuena. Very special thanks to my lovely friend Emma Fenton and her
family, Simon Hall, Leo and Charlie, and also to my mother, Susan Franks,
my father, John Franks, who died sadly during the writing of this book, and
my nephew Oliver Franks.
Thanks to Elise Hansen for copyediting and immense gratitude to Tony
Grahame for giving this book a chance. I am grateful to the Oregon Humanities

x
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page xi

Preface and Acknowledgements

Center and the Honors College at the University of Oregon for financial
support. And finally un grand merci à Stanislas Meyerhoff, whose joy, optimism
and extraordinarily open heart has given me the courage to finish this book.
In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur.’

xi
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page xii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Prologue
. From J. Howard Woolmer’s Checklist of the Hogarth Press. 
. Young Michael Tippett. 
. Dust jacket of A Childhood (Random House). 
. Fresca at  (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). 

Part One: A Childhood

. Clara Barkow (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). 
. Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow Coat’ (Allinson
Estate). 
. Adrian Allinson’s ‘Scene from Le Jardin des Amoureux’
(V&A). 
. Adrian Allinson’s theatre poster (V&A). 
. Adrian Allinson’s costume design for a Flame. 
. Adrian Alinson at a Slade picnic in : Mark Gertler
and Edward Wadsworth sit to Adrian’s right and Stanley
Spencer to his immediate left. 
. John S. Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame
Tisceron: left to right: Currie, Gertler, Nevinson,
Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron (). 
. Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry. 
. Jean Rhys. 
. Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Alan Odle (Harry Ransom
Center). 
. Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Dorothy Richardson and
Odle, undated (Beinecke). 
. Playbill for My Fair Lady starring Michael Allinson. 
. Adrian Allinson (Allinson Estate). 
. Adrian Allinson on the Penguin Classics Complete Saki
cover (Penguin). 

xii
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page xiii

List of Illustrations

. Anna Pulvermacher’s sketches (courtesy of Kit Martin;

Allinson Estate). 
. Adrian Allinson’s ‘Allegories of the Arts’ (V&A). 
. Oil painting by Sonya Allinson (Allinson Estate). 
. Figurine by Molly Mitchell Smith. 
. Adrian Allinson’s ‘Café Royale’ (Allinson Estate). 
. Map of Spanish Place. 
. Façade of Allinson Spanish Place house (HS). 
. Heritage plaques at Spanish Place (HS). 
. Advertisement for A Book for Married Women, The
Freewoman, . 
. Poster (Edinburgh University Special Collections). 
. From Allinson scrapbook. (courtesy of Kit Martin;
Allinson Estate). 
. Enid Marx’s tray woodcut, A Childhood (Random House;
Eleanor Breuning). 
. Winifred Stanhope (Edinburgh University Special
Collections). 
. ‘Why Be Ill?’ poster (Edinburgh University Special
Collections). 
. T.R. Allinson and Fresca (Allinson Estate). 

Part Two: Coming of Age

. Margaret Lambert’s Brown Book obituary for Fresca
(courtesy of LMH). 
. Class photo  (courtesy of LMH). 
. Detail of Fresca (and possibly Barbara Frank)
(courtesy of LMH). 
. Class photo  (courtesy of LMH). 
. Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH). 
. Class photo of  (courtesy of LMH). 
. Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH). 
. Photograph of Margaret Lambert (origin unknown)
alongside LMH class photo detail. 
. Painting by Cycill Tomrley of Margaret Lambert
(courtesy of Eleanor Breuning). 
. Hugh Allen, folk dancing . 
. Dorothy L. Sayers. 

xiii
Fresca_01_Plms 11/04/2017 11:24 Page xiv

List of Illustrations

. Ernest Walker (from the frontispiece of Margaret

Deneke’s book). 
. Two photo strips of Fresca (Eleanor Breuning). 
. & . Photos of Bickerdike puppets (V&A). 
. Puppets on shelves at the V&A archives (V&A). 
. Fresca’s L’Amfiparnaso programme (courtesy of Eleanor
Breuning). 
. Harro Siegel’s puppets. 
. Wilf Franks and Michael Tippett in Spain (courtesy of
Caroline Ayerst). 

Part Three: Judy Wogan

. Eleanor Elder (Travelling Players). 
. Dust jacket for Elder’s Travelling Players designed by
E. McKnight Kauffer. 
. Paul Nash’s ‘Wood on the Downs’,  (Tate Gallery). 
. Arts League of Service transport (from Travelling Players). 
. Judy Wogan (from Travelling Players). 
. Judy Wogan in ‘St Valentine’s Day’ (Madame Yevonde)
(Caitlin Adams and V&A) 
. A young Judy Wogan (Caitlin Adams). 
. & . Martin’s Grove letter (courtesy of LMH). 
. Map of St Osyth (Crown copyright Ordnance survey). 
. The entrance to Martin’s Grove (Helen Southworth). 
. H.M. land registry map of Martin’s Grove (Ed Greig). 
. Old/Tan Cottage, St Osyth (Helen Southworth). 
.–. Arts League of Service post cards (Ivy Jacobs). 
. Grafton Theatre programme (Caitlin Adams). 
. Grafton Theatre programme (Caitlyn Adams). 
. John Amis (Helen Southworth). 
. Enid Marx’s seaside wood cut for Fresca’s A Childhood
(courtesy of Eleanor Breuning). 
. Photograph of Jaywick. 
. Phillip Wilson Steer’s ‘The Beach at Walberswick’. 
. Judy Wogan. 

Part Four: Writer! Composer!

. Fresca in the s (Eleanor Breuning, Sonya Allinson). 

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List of Illustrations

. Alice Ritchie (Mon}ks House photograph albums,

Houghton Library). 
. Marx’s London Underground textile design, s. 
. Cover of Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s Two Stories
(Random House). 
. Older Enid Marx in her studio. 
. Younger Marx (Design Council Archive, University of
Brighton Design Archives). 
. Times Literary Supplement advertisement for A Childhood. 
. Vegetarian News advertisement for A Childhood
(Emily Kopley). 
. Marx’s copy of Mrs Daloway (sic) bound in paper of her
own design (V&A). 
. Marx’s paper used for her copy of A Room of One’s Own
(V&A). 
. Marx’s paper for The Common Reader (V&A). 
. Marx’s cover design for Woolf ’s Collected Essays
(–) (Random House). 
. Marx’s woodcut for ‘Sunday’ chapter of Fresca’s
A Childhood (Random House; Eleanor Breuning). 
. Intimate Opera. 
. Fresca sitting on car bonnet, ca. s (Sonya Allinson). 

Part Five: Pacifism in the Face of the Second World War

. Dick Sheppard. 
. Bernard Archard ( Jim Belchamber). 
., ., . Moses Farm in the s (Robert Marriage). 
., . Photographs of Fresca’s East Grinstead addresses
(courtesy of M.J. Leppard). 
., . Photographs of Kingsmead. 
. Den Newton (Tate Gallery). 
. Den Newton and Mary Lee Settle (from Settle’s book). 
. Den with Settle and Chris (from Settle’s book). 

Part Six: My Own Different Personal Life

. Page from Fresca’s diary (British Library). 
. Fresca and her mother, Anna (Sonya Allinson). 
. Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. 

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List of Illustrations

Part Seven: No Remaining, No Place to Stay

. Entrance to Mill House (Helen Southworth). 
. Drawing of Mill House by Erhlich (Kit Martin). 
. Fresca skating at Virginia Water in Surrey with Cyril and
Veronica
from scrapbook at The Mill House (Kit Martin). 
. & . ‘ impressions of the  wood-engravings for
Francesca Allinson’s Nursery Rhymes’ on sale at Abbott
and Holder. 
. Cecil Sharp. 
. Ralph Vaughan Williams (). 
. Handwritten comments by Ralph Vaughan Williams
(VWML). 
. Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML). 
. Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML). 

Part Eight: Love Under the Shadow of Death

. Constable’s ‘Dedham Vale’ . 
. John Nash’s lithograph of the River Stour, Early Summer,
for Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields. 
. Fresca’s death certificate (Kit Martin, The Mill House). 
. Clare Railway Station (Helen Southworth). 
. The River Stour (Helen Southworth). 
. St Osyth. 
. Post mortem (Addenbrooke’s Hospital). 
. Fresca’s unmarked burial site, The Mill House (Helen
Southworth). 
. Marx’s fabrics, Thisbe (V&A). 
. Marx’s fabrics, Pyramus (V&A). 
. Waldo and Muriel Lanchester. 
. Lanchester puppets for L’Amfiparnaso. 
. Eleanor Elder, Judy Wogan, Elder’s sister (Caitlin Adams). 
. Sketch of Tippett by Karl Hawker, Christmas card for
Cyril and Veronica Allinson (The Mill House). 
. Sidney Keyes. 
. Alun Lewis (Gweno Lewis). 
. Keyes with Milein Cosman. 

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List of Illustrations

Coda
. Jacqueline Mesmaeker. 
. Dedication page. 
. Young Jacqueline. 
. Petals. 
. Clown. 
. Fish. 

For permission to reproduce all Allinson related material I am grateful to Tim,

David and Christine Allinson. Acknowledgement to the Will Trustees of the
Michael Tippett Estate and to the Michael Tippett Musical Foundation
for permission to quote from the letters of Michael Tippett and other Tippett
material. For permission to reproduce Douglas Newton materials, Virginia-Lee
Webb and the Tate Gallery; for Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert related
materials, Eleanor Breuning and the Victoria and Albert Museum; for Leonard
and Virginia Woolf, Random House, University of Reading, Harcourt Brace
and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of
Virginia Woolf; for W.H. Auden, Faber and Faber and Curtis Brown; for Judy
Wogan, Eleanor Elder and the Arts League of Service, Charles Lillis, John
Wogan-Browne, Jeremy Jensen and the late Beryl Mackay; for Hazel Archard,
Jim Belchamber; for Bryan Fisher, Ardan Fisher; for Wilf Franks, Danyel
Gilgan; for David Ayerst, Caroline Ayerst; for Alun Lewis, Gweno Lewis; the
Bodleian Library for Dorothy L. Sayers; Sheil Land Associates for Jean Rhys;
the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust for Ralph Vaughan Williams; St Osyth
map reproduced by kind permission of the Ordnance Survey. ‘Poetry, Fiction
and the Future’ from The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume , –,
edited by Andrew McNeillie. Text copyright c  by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copy-

right and other material, as detailed above. The publishers apologize for any
errors or omissions in the list and would be grateful to be notified of any correc-
tions that should be incorporated in the next edition or reprint of this book.
The author has made substantive attempts to identify copyright owners and to
obtain the necessary permission.

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Fresca_02_Prologue 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 1

Prologue
M Y quest for Fresca begins with a name on a list. The list is J. Howard
Woolmer’s checklist of the books and pamphlets published by Leonard
and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press between  and . I am fasci-
nated by networks, and Woolmer’s list of  titles represents an opportunity
to begin charting the routes via which unknown authors and their works have
made it into the hallowed cultural sphere of Bloomsbury. Woolmer, a rare book
dealer, has organized his checklist by year and within each year names appear
alphabetically. ‘Francesca Allinson’ stands at the top of the list for  shoulder
to shoulder with eminent Bloomsbury philosopher, atheist and pacifist Bertrand
Russell.

 From
J. Howard
Woolmer’s
Checklist of the
Hogarth Press.

Strange bedfellows aren’t an unusual sight on the Hogarth Press list. Famous
names sit side by side with names lost to obscurity. At the Hogarth Press, Freud,
whose Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in its first English translation in
, and T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land was published in its first English
edition in , consort with long forgotten poets such as Ruth Manning-
Sanders, author of Karn (), and Ena Limebeer, author of To a Proud
Phantom ().
These less recognizable names intrigue me. I want to know more about these
writers whose literary lights glimmered momentarily and then faded. What


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Prologue

stories lie behind these names on Woolmer’s list? I have had some luck tracking
down Birmingham Group writer John Hampson, author of two novels at the
Press, a very successful murder mystery set in a Derbyshire pub called Saturday
Night at the Greyhound in  and a slower-selling growing-up novel called O
Providence in . I’ve visited Hampson’s nephew, Roger Hubank, a retired
English professor and writer of books about mountains, at his Loughborough
home and he has given me access to Hampson’s correspondence and his
censored homosexual writings. I’ve also made efforts to learn about New
Zealand novelist Anna D. Whyte, like Hampson twice published by the Woolfs.
In Whyte’s case, I have contacted Bill Manhire, professor of English at Victoria
University in Wellington, NZ, via email. Whyte, he tells me, has been overlooked.
No birthdate for Whyte and dismissive reviews of her ‘ship-board romance/light
novel’ about ‘English People in Florence’ mean that I may well now be, Manhire
suggests, ‘the world expert on Anna Whyte’.
After Woolmer’s bibliography, I take down from my bookshelf J. H. Willis’s
 history of The Hogarth Press, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers.
Willis’s work is quite comprehensive, but I find no mention at all of Allinson
there. Francesca Allinson, like Anna D. Whyte, appears to be in the overlooked
category. Who is she and how did she move into the Woolfs’ orbit? I order a
copy of Allinson’s book online and turn to the Internet for clues.


The first name to come up in connection with Allinson is British composer Sir
Michael Tippett (–). Tippett’s contemporaries Benjamin Britten and
Peter Pears are familiar names to me, but I know less about Tippett although he
is considered one of the great British composers of the twentieth century, among
his best-known works A Child of Our Time (), the secular oratorio based on
a Negro spiritual and the events that triggered the Kristallnacht pogrom of .
I read theories later about how the longevity of Tippett’s career impacted his
fame and questions of celebrity and obscurity become puzzles for me across the
length of my search for Allinson. I learn that Tippett had ties with the peace
movement, that he was jailed as a conscientious objector during World War II
and that he subsequently became chair and then president of the Peace Pledge
Union. Like Britten and Pears, I discover, Tippett was an open homosexual.
I check out of the library Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues, published
in  and labeled an autobiography. Although the book is disjointed, I can
now piece together a first topsy-turvy portrait of Allinson. What becomes
immediately clear is the intensity of the professional and personal connection
that Tippett shared with the woman I now come to know as ‘Fresca’. In Tippett’s
pages I find a love story which has a beginning, a middle and a tragic end.

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Fresca_02_Prologue 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 3

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 Young
Michael Tippett.

In her first appearance in Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett refers to

Fresca as ‘one of two women most crucial to my life’. Theirs is a dramatic first
encounter. Tippett recounts how he met Fresca through his cousin Phyllis Kemp
when Phyl was living in the Allinson family house in Christchurch Avenue,
London, in approximately . Phyl was a student at University College
London and she was one of a number of students the Allinsons took in. Fresca
would have been  years old, Tippett . The connection is immediate,
according to Tippett: ‘[T]here was Fresca with that huge goitre on her neck,
from which she suffered so badly and for so long. Something happened between
us.’
Revealing some first clues about Fresca’s heritage, Tippett says he stayed in
 at a children’s home in Bavaria ‘started by a young couple, cousins of Fresca
on her Berlin Jewish mother’s side’. Tippett refers next to a trip he and Fresca
made to Germany in , at a moment when he ‘began to sense the importance
of music-making and the theatre in communicating messages and ideas of
significance, especially to the more deprived sections of the community’. The
purpose of the trip, for Tippett, is to take a course in vocal music at Georg
Goetsch’s Musikheim in Frankfurt an der Oder in preparation to run a Yorkshire
work-camp for students and local people started by Rolf Gardiner, Alan
Collingridge, Goetsch and Jim and Ruth Pennyman whose property is being
used. Fresca’s German is better than Tippett’s and she helps him through choral
recitation classes. They combine this trip to the Musikheim with walking in the
Bavarian hills, over the Reisengebirge, ‘living rough and sleeping mostly in
haybarns’, in so doing, says Tippett, ‘break[ing] free of a conventional type of
existence’. From Frankfurt they travel on to Czechoslovakia, in part so that
Fresca might pursue her love of puppets and her passion for baroque churches.
After visiting Dresden, Tippett says, Fresca stays on in Germany with friends
while he returns to England ‘and [they meet] up again in Boosbeck’. In a second
mention of Fresca’s health, Tippett describes how walking in Germany presents


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a challenge for the ‘frailer’ Fresca and he suggests that Fresca is also motivated
to accompany him because she feels it will ‘draw [them] closer together’.
Fresca comes up again in terms of the Boosbeck camp for out-of-work miners
in East Cleveland, Yorkshire, for which the trip to Germany has prepared
Tippett. Fresca plays Lucy, according to Tippett, in his production of John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera, alongside the local milkman as Macheath and a miner’s
daughter as Polly. Tippett and Fresca have by this time become fellow travellers
in their young lives and both see music as a social and political force for change.
Tippett’s subsequent activities include the Morley College based South London
Orchestra, an orchestra for unemployed cinema and theatre musicians and
recently graduated music students. This association is the result in part, he says,
of his encounter with London Labour Choral Union conductor Alan Bush,
introduced to him by Fresca in the late s. Tippett also mentions at this
point another person who has come to him via Fresca, an actress called Judy
Wogan. But his collaboration with Wogan on a piece called Miners, the text of
which she has written, didn’t, he feels, turn out well.
Tippett’s descriptions of Fresca’s sexuality complicate my understanding of
her relationship with him. Clearly Tippett and Fresca are very candid with each
other. With both Fresca and another important female friend, Evelyn Maude,
Tippett ‘talk[s] openly and frankly about [his] problems’. Suggesting a strong
heterosexual side to Fresca, Tippett has her declaring that Eric Kennington’s
portraits of airmen are ‘marvelous examples of the heroic and the bedworthy’;
and he describes Fresca’s trip to New York, following a trip to Switzerland to
have her goitre operated on, for ‘one of what she called her “rutting sessions,”
with men who had to be foreign or Jewish’. Tippett identifies himself as the
object of Fresca’s heterosexual desires: she dislikes it ‘when [Tippett] appear[s]
feminine in relation to other men’. She even wants to have or to raise a child
with Tippett, asking whether he’ll marry her and accept a child conceived with
another man. Although Tippett refuses to raise another man’s child, ‘having
children through artificial insemination by the husband’ is discussed, as is
marriage with Fresca. Nevertheless, Tippett also identifies with Fresca because
of what he characterizes in both of them as ‘turbulent homosexual sides’,
although their ‘own relationship was one of great serenity … For a while, Fresca
went to live with a lesbian actress, but in the long term found this produced
tension. Eventually she left saying that she was bringing into her life a turbu-
lence which might have disturbed her life as an accepting lesbian and as an
actress.’ Tippett then says that he ‘realised for [himself ] it was the other way
round: [he] accepted the turbulence as necessary for creative work’.
Following this is a paragraph outlining the three main streams of Fresca’s
professional career: first, ‘her interest in puppets, [which was allied to] her work


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Prologue

as a choral conductor—[including her direction] in Oxford [of ] a version of

Orazio Vecchi’s madrigal comedy, L’Amfiparnasso, with puppets’; second, her career
as a writer, ‘(hence her identification with Virginia Woolf )’ and her ‘autobiograph-
ical volume, A Childhood ’; and, third, ‘her [absorption] in folk-song and [the help
she provided Tippett in finding] the right tunes for [his] Robert of Sicily’.


But, by far the largest piece of Tippett’s autobiography dedicated to Fresca covers
the period just prior to and during World War II. It is included in a chapter titled
‘The Heart’s Assurance’, the name of a work that Tippett dedicated to Fresca and
which was first performed in  at The Wigmore Hall in central London. The
return to Fresca follows a long section on Tippett’s homosexuality, his relationship
with Bauhaus-trained artist Wilf Franks in the s and his dream analysis,
where Fresca’s appearances suggest that she remained a confidante to Tippett.
In the ‘The Heart’s Assurance’ section, there is more about Fresca’s influence
on Tippett’s professional life, including her introduction to Tippett of the work
of English composer Henry Purcell (–), her funding of Tippett’s first
recordings and also her provision of living space for Tippett at her Mornington
Terrace house. Here Tippett explains his pacifist stance, outlining the events
that led up to his three-month-long imprisonment. Fresca, too, I learn from
Tippett, supports the rights of conscientious objectors with the purchase of ‘a
plot of land near East Grinstead [in Sussex], large enough to run as a small-
holding’. Here ‘conchies’ can do land work instead of military service. According
to Tippett, Fresca lives in a flat in East Grinstead and makes frequent visits to
Tippett in Oxted, about  miles away. Tippett records the demise of ‘Fresca’s
commune’, caused in part, he says, in another cryptic reference to Fresca’s love
life, because Fresca is ‘having an affair with an older man—a conchie in the First
World War’. Tippett mentions Fresca’s health again: Fresca’s return to London
from East Grinstead is interrupted due to ill health ‘(probably as a result of
having left the goitre operation too late)’. She’s forced to ‘go and stay a half-
invalid with her brother Cyril Allinson and sister-in-law, near Streetly End in
Cambridgeshire’.
At this point, Tippett reproduces a series of letters from himself to Fresca.
This first batch of letters, the earliest of which date from , the latest ,
organized in two chronological sequences, deal mostly with Tippett’s composi-
tion work and, after , his preparations for his stay in prison.
The letters suggest intimacy. Tippett encourages Fresca in her work on folk-
song. He shows concern for Fresca’s health: he’s glad an ulcer has been ruled
out; he’ll be ‘thankful when [Fresca] is properly well’; and he regrets to hear she’s
‘off to Addenbrooke’s [hospital in Cambridge]’. Revealing a reciprocal rela-


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tionship, Tippett’s requests for Fresca’s support are myriad. He asks for help
with his musical composition work and with money. Could Fresca housesit for
him and run his Morley College choir should he be imprisoned? She’s the
closest to himself that he can offer the choir. In one letter, dated , Tippett
asks that Fresca accompany him to meet ‘[German conductor Walter] Goehr
in the artist’s room & his wife, & Phyllis & the orchestra etc.’ in an official
capacity, as ‘virtually wife—that’s to say something besides our joint selves, some-
thing public & professional’. In a kind of heterosexual masquerade, he asks that
she not wear trousers, as she has told [mutual friend] Den Newton she plans to,
but to come ‘in [her] proper dress [in which Fresca] always look[s] essentially
feminine and good’.
Fresca and Tippett also exchange gifts. A Raoul Dufy print and a painting
by Fresca’s brother, painter Adrian Allinson, seem to have come to Tippett from
Fresca. Interestingly in terms of a connection back to Fresca’s Hogarth Press
book, Tippett mentions Virginia Woolf several times. Woolf appears to represent
a shared language, a shared passion for Tippett and Fresca. Tippett writes to
Fresca from Oxted on a Saturday in : ‘I think I must give you [a very early
Christmas gift] “The Waves”’, ‘because it’s so much our own book in some
curious intimate way. I’ll try to get it in London [en route to Cambridge from
Oxted] on Thursday’. Later in this first series of letters, in an exchange dated
‘sat evening, ’, Tippett has just finished reading Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse:
‘such exquisite & mature art. I am not surprised the price was what it was for
her.’ Woolf also makes a cryptic appearance in a scene involving Tippett’s and
Fresca’s sexuality. After commenting that both had their ‘turbulent homosexual
sides’, but confirming that ‘[their] own relationship was one of great serenity’,
Tippett recalls an incident when they were walking arm in arm together ‘in a
London square’. Tippett writes that when he said to Fresca ‘“you know we really
belong to one another” […] she responded cryptically “You see that woman
ahead of us. It’s Virginia Woolf.”’ 
Den [Douglas] Newton, described first as a conchie and a writer by Tippett
in Those Twentieth Century Blues, is, at this point, an important link between
Tippett and Fresca. Tippett comes to see Den at Fresca’s and Den takes provi-
sions and reading material from Fresca to Tippett; Den relays information, such
as Fresca’s plan to wear trousers to the concert. Other names that come up at
this point are David Ayerst, John Layard, Jeffrey Mark, Karl Hawker and ‘Uncle
Tom Eliot’. Tippett also makes another cryptic mention of Jude [sic] Wogan—
he’s ‘glad to hear [her] voice on the ‘phone & what she said’. He ‘hope[s] it all
comes out alright & a love based on the great quiet after the storm & not with
admixture of hysteria any more’. Is Jude or Judy, I wonder, the lesbian lover to
whom Tippett refers?


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Prologue

A section titled ‘The Price of Pacifism’ follows the first batch of Fresca’s
letters, consisting of a description of Tippett’s H.M. Prison Wormwood Scrubs
experience and the reproduction of several letters exchanged with Evelyn
Maude, his correspondent while in prison.
After a few pages of comments about the post-war period, Tippett veers back
quite suddenly to Fresca with another series of letters prefaced with the state-
ment: ‘During the war period, Fresca and I shared each other’s troubles, ambi-
tions and dreams.’ The first few letters are out of order, then there is a series
from May to July/October  and a couple from January,  and , , repro-
duced in chronological order.
A  letter about a work in progress that would become Tippett’s The
Midsummer Marriage closes with ‘love to you both’. A  letter has Fresca
in Cambridgeshire with Cyril and Veronica. A  letter that suggests both
Fresca and Tippett are reading Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow,
borrowed from the Times lending library, closes with ‘Please get well soon.’
On April , , Tippett is sorry ‘to see [Fresca] poorly again’, but on May 
‘relieved to hear [she’s] getting better again?’ Tippett mentions friends,
including Newton, and looks forward to the time ‘when we can re-make our
circle more permanently after the war; and that always seems to turn out in my
mind as after your weakness passes’. Tippett asks Fresca for help with his
Peace Pledge Union pamphlet (reproduced in Moving into Aquarius) and Fresca
and he exchange reading materials, Plotinus for Turgenev. Again, in a letter
dated June , Tippett mentions Virginia Woolf: he’s been reading her work
and ‘as usual becoming so overcome by atmosphere as to lose sense of the here
& now. It’s extraordinarily powerful stuff & feminine to a degree—in the best
sense that is. Sometimes the artistry is uncanny.’ At this point Tippett repro-
duces a first letter from Fresca, dated ‘Invasion Day []’. It is an account of
Fresca’s ‘waking dream’ followed by Tippett’s Jungian interpretation of the
dream.
In June , Tippett talks about Germany, fearing on the one hand, and
wanting on the other, that ‘Germany [will] collapse’, that it ‘will be the scape-
goat & will be dismembered & reduced to a colony of big business, with labour
gangs snatched from Russia’. Suggesting an allegiance with Germany and
things German, several letters are signed at this point in German, with
herzlichkeit or warmly. At this time, Tippett briefly mentions Fresca’s poor
health and discusses Fresca’s folk-song book: Tippett thinks ‘the new plan for
chapter III excellent’ and he promises to pass on a recently purchased book,
‘Survey of Anglo-Saxon Art by [Thomas] Kendrick’ [Anglo-Saxon Art to
A.D.  ()] which will provide inspiration. Tippett’s cottage is bombed
in August . He moves in temporarily with friends in Sussex, then, once


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back in his cottage, appeals to Fresca for provisions. Tippett refers to Fresca’s
‘Alexander technique training’, designed to improve posture and muscle
strength.
After the letter dated January , , the closing four pages of this chapter
move quite suddenly to Fresca’s death. ‘The last years of the war were also
Fresca’s last years,’ writes Tippett. Tippett and Fresca try to live together
but the experiment fails because Tippett’s music gets in the way. Unable to
cope with her ill health and with the war, Fresca escapes from under the
watchful eye of her family and takes her own life by drowning in the River
Stour. She is wearing a cross, originally a gift from Evelyn Maude to Tippett
that he had ‘insensitively’ passed on to Fresca. Fresca leaves notes for Tippett
and for Judy Wogan. With Tippett’s letter she includes a ‘photograph, taken
during [their]  [likely actually ] tour of Germany and
Czechoslovakia, of [Tippett] with a little child; and a copy of Shakespeare’s
sonnets open at No. LVII’. Tippett reproduces the Shakespeare sonnet and the
suicide note in full.
Tippett closes this chapter with a description of the piece he will dedicate
to Fresca five years after her death. The Heart’s Assurance is a song cycle for
high voice and piano, with music set to verse by two young poets, both of
whom had died in World War II, Sidney Keyes at  and Alun Lewis at .
Tippett says that ‘he widened [the work] to commemorate all those who lost
their lives and loves in the brutality of battle’, as he feels that Fresca had in
her way.
I search Tippett’s autobiography unsuccessfully for a photograph of Fresca. I
turn to Thomas Schuttenhelm’s edition of The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett
which contains only letters written by Tippett. I do not find a picture of her there
either. Suggesting that he too recognized Fresca’s importance, Schuttenhelm has
placed Fresca fourth on the list of approximately twenty correspondents, preceded
only by Adrian Boult, the BBC and Schott music publishers.
Schuttenhelm’s selection of the letters to Fresca, larger than Tippett’s in Those
Twentieth Century Blues, tells much the same story, although in greater detail.
However, what the Selected Letters enables me to do that Those Twentieth Century
Blues does not is to measure Tippett’s tone with Fresca against that used with
other correspondents. The letters about Fresca to Den Newton are of particular
interest. Was Fresca in love with Den and/or Den with Fresca?
Details from Tippett’s letters to Den about what Fresca leaves catch my
attention. Tippett tells Den that among Fresca’s papers is her unpublished folk-
song monograph that she hopes the two of them will complete. Tippett has
‘written to Veronica [Allinson, Francesca’s sister-in-law] about the MS and will
go there to get it if necessary’.


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Prologue

Most of the pile of F’s private papers are my own letter[s?] and one of
yours. Between her bit of diary (with dreams) and my dreams and letter
and bits of other things there’s a curious chunk of ‘shadow’ biography,
which I shall keep for a while at any rate before destroying—or leave
somewhere safe for you to read or destroy one later day when I am also
in the cold ground. Her inner life is just the chaotic febrile world of
imagination which a poet has to inhabit at times for his sins. But a
woman has greater difficulty to express it artistically as a personal satis-
faction.

What is a ‘shadow biography’? I find it defined as a kind of negative image, an

unauthorized version of a life that contains the information censored from the
official version.
My map, actual and metaphorical, is considerably more detailed at this point.
I’ve found Fresca at several London addresses. While the Mornington Terrace
house has been destroyed — a fact confirmed by an interactive website called
bombsight.org, which lists it as a ‘hit’ — I find two Christchurch Avenues in
London: one in Brondesbury, the right one, and another not far off in Brent.
Uncannily, I realize that my usual London base, the home of my college friend
Emma Fenton, is just several streets away from the Brondesbury address. I have
also found Fresca in East Grinstead and in Cambridgeshire. The Selected Letters
of Michael Tippett provides a full address for the Mill House in Cambridgeshire,
so I dispatch a letter enquiring about the missing manuscript of the folk-song
monograph with the thought that English houses, especially nice ones, often
remain in the family.


While I await a response to the Mill House letter, I receive Fresca’s A Childhood.
The book represents my first material evidence, my first real piece of Fresca. On
a first look, I am struck by the book’s resemblance to a child’s notebook. It looks
like an exercise book creatively, but somewhat crudely, wrapped by a child in
brown paper and made to look like a real book. In the cover’s whimsical repeat
pattern of a child’s game of naughts and crosses, a blue crayon strikes through
the winning line of crosses top left to lower right. The book’s title, author’s name
and the name of the press are in a neat cursive, a child’s hand, black crayon shad-
owed with blue. The price,  s.  d. or seven shillings and sixpence, is set in a
spiky circle on the spine.
Confirming what I’ve learned from Woolmer’s Checklist of The Hogarth Press,
A Childhood is a midsize hardback volume, with blue cloth boards; it comprises
 pages. It is larger than some Hogarth Press books such as the Living Poets


Fresca_02_Prologue 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 10

Prologue

 Dust jacket of A Childhood (Random House).

or the various pamphlet series, but is nonetheless compact. I find no traces of

ownership in my copy.
The front fold of the dust jacket, down the side of which Enid Marx’s design
repeats itself, holds the Press’s marketing blurb. The description of the book
immediately complicates a reading of it, a caveat at odds with the more inviting
cover. A Childhood, the blurb declares, is ‘[a] book by a new writer which it is
not altogether easy to classify. It is either biographical fiction or fictional biog-
raphy.’ The blurb then cites Fresca’s preface in full, a second warning against
trying to find the author herself among its pages, while at the same time
tempting one to do so:

In the following pages, the seasons of one year pass and at the same
time Charlotte grows from about nine to fourteen. I have left out all
mention of her precise age; partly because it does not matter and partly
because I have not wished to shut her in too closely within the exact
hours and places of her own experience. Unavoidably, Charlotte is more
like myself than anyone else: yet if she strikes you as odd, have patience
with her, for many of her contemporaries felt and acted very much as
she did.


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Complicating further the status of the work as standard autobiography,

Fresca’s preface asserts that five years are condensed into a single year, a means,
she suggests, to avoid ‘shut[ting the protagonist] in’ in terms of time and place.
The resistance to identification suggests unease. The key seems to reside in the
last sentence, which sets the book up as at once personal and universal and its
protagonist as at once eccentric and a common type.
The front fold identifies the designer of the dust jacket and of the wood engrav-
ings that preface each chapter as ‘Miss Enid Marx’. The cover page sports The
Hogarth Press logo, Vanessa Bell’s Omega Workshop-like version rather than E.
McKnight Kauffer’s more modernist wolf ’s head/printing press device inaugu-
rated in . It also includes the familiar details of publication that put Fresca in
the orbit of the two better-known names that have led me to her: PUBLISHED
BY LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE HOGARTH PRESS,  TAVIS-
TOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.I, . The book has been printed in
Letchworth, Hertfordshire, at the Garden City Press Ltd. All printing operations
moved to the Garden City Press Ltd after  Mecklenburgh Square was bombed
in . The Press operations had been transferred to Mecklenburgh Square from
Tavistock Square in August  due to redevelopment plans.
A table of contents follows the title page, listing seven simply titled chapters,
‘Illness’, ‘Sunday’, ‘The Forest’, ‘Seaside’, ‘More Seaside’, ‘Pity’ and ‘Preparations’.
Last of all, taking me back to a name in Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues,
I find a dedication: TO JUDITH WOGAN.


A few weeks later, I receive a response to my letter to The Mill House. The
sender of the folded airmail envelope is Kit Martin. Kit tells me that Cyril and
Veronica Allinson are deceased and identifies himself as their heir. He mentions
Fresca’s Hogarth Press book, her suicide and subsequent burial at The Mill
House. He also informs me that Fresca was a student at Lady Margaret Hall in
Oxford and suggests I follow up with them.
Among the items Kit gives me is a transcription of Fresca’s will, providing a
treasure trove of information, an outline of Fresca’s life. Her legacies include an
Essex wood, shares in a Sussex farm, a caravan, silver spoons, a typewriter, a
Parker pen, a china crucifix, books and a recorder. As recent biographical work
on Jane Austen by Paula Byrne and on now obscure writer and collector
Mercedes de Acosta by Lisa Cohen suggests, objects owned by individuals, ‘[the]
texture of things, [and the] life of objects’, tell us a great deal about our subjects.
Fresca’s will is dated October , , six months prior to her suicide. Also
included are handwritten or holograph instructions (unsigned) clearly recorded
just before Fresca took her own life.


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 Fresca at 16
(courtesy of Kit
Martin; Allinson
Estate).

Along with the will, Kit provides my first photograph of Fresca. This photo
of Fresca aged  makes a stark contrast to the will, taking me back to the begin-
ning of Fresca’s life, whereas the will marks its end. ‘What story lay in
between?’


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 13

PART ONE

A Childhood
A LONG with Fresca’s will and photograph, Kit Martin provides a brief biog-
raphical sketch. I learn that Fresca was born Enid Ellen Pulvermacher
Allinson on August , , at  Spanish Place in Central London. She is the
youngest of five children alphabetically named: Alfred, Bertrand, Cyril, Dulcie,
who dies as an infant, and Enid, Francesca’s birth name. Twelve years separate
the oldest, Alfred, born , who will change his name to Adrian, from the
youngest, Fresca, born . Kit also gives details about Fresca’s education.
Educated by German and French governesses, at  Fresca goes first to
University College London. After an interruption due to ill health, she returns
to college in , aged , but this time to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Kit
gives me the name of Fresca’s father—early whole foods, vegetarian and natural
prescriptions guru Dr Thomas Richard Allinson, known as T. R. (–).
Kit also includes a copy of Connoisseur
magazine, which contains an article and a
picture of brother Adrian skiing and a photo-
graph of an unidentified woman on an
Edwardian bicycle. The photo is in Cabinet
Format, so named because the larger format
portrait in its stout cardboard frame is
designed to sit on a cabinet. I identify the
bicycle as a  Model No.  Lady’s Special
Premier with Leatherette Chaincase. At first I
assume the woman with the bicycle is Fresca’s
mother, but I later realize she is the Allinson
family’s longtime German nanny and
companion Clara Barkow, known as Tickie.
Kit also provides a letter, dated , from
 Clara Barkow (courtesy of
Fresca’s niece Sonya Allinson who writes from
Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). Eavesham Road in Cheltenham, answering an


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Part One

earlier enquiry about Fresca and discussing a plan to mark Fresca’s grave. Sonya’s
existence suggests the possibility of living relatives—perhaps she had known
Fresca—and one of the next letters I write is to her.


Sonya’s first letters move me forward. Her memories of Fresca and those of her
older sisters, Enid and Vanessa, are those of children, although the older girls
would have been approaching twenty (Sonya only sixteen) when Fresca died.
People have told me that they did not take photographs during the war and I
wonder how the devastating events of wartime impacted other acts of memory.
What Sonya does tell me about Fresca suggests an energetic and creative life,
but also one haunted by tragedy. Enid and Vanessa remember Fresca ‘making
notes and collecting songs, material for her book’. They have memories of
Fresca’s puppets, ‘a small puppet theatre in her room at the top of grandmother’s
house at  Christchurch Ave’; the puppets are ‘hung on hooks in the basement’.
Fresca was a favorite aunt to ‘E and V’, according to Sonya; they ‘recall bathing
in the nude and setting fire to the grass in the sand dunes’ when holidaying with
Fresca at Cley-next-the-Sea in Norfolk and Toozie (St Osyth) in Essex. Fresca
is also Sonya’s ‘favorite relative, the others being so eccentric and alarming’.
Sonya describes Fresca as ‘kind [and] considerate, [she] made one feel impor-
tant—delightful company, gay (in the old sense of the word) and always
concealing her sadness’. Among the tragedies in Fresca’s life, according to Sonya,
‘was that she had very little love for her mother, indeed some revulsion, always
blaming her ill health on the fact that Granny was too old when she was born
and had never been a strong, healthy woman’. She suggests a connection between
Fresca’s A Childhood and her real life in this regard: ‘This comes into the book.’


Sonya’s first letter to Kit has emphasized the celebrity of Fresca’s oldest brother
and her senior by twelve years, the artist Adrian Allinson, his dates –.
I turn to Adrian as a possible means to get closer to Fresca. Kit provides Adrian’s
 unsigned Times obituary, titled ‘MR ADRIAN ALLINSON: PAINTER
DETACHED FROM FASHIONS’. The obituary celebrates Adrian as painter, paci-
fist and mountaineer. It sounds a note of eccentricity and non-conformism that
will repeat itself time and time again in terms of all of the Allinsons:

Mr Adrian Allinson, the artist, died yesterday at his studio in London. He

was . His complete detachment from fashions in art may be indicated
by saying that he exhibited impartially at the Royal Academy, the Royal
Society of British Artists and the London Group. In sympathy he was


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A Childhood

with the ‘advanced’ people, but he kept his head, so that his work passed
muster with the champions of orthodoxy. The principle that Allinson
stood for was formal organization of the picture, leaving the question of
degree of realism in representation to follow. By natural bent he painted
close to the appearance of things, but his conscious effort was to compose
them in an orderly and rhythmical design. He shirked nothing in carrying
out his aim and the combination of realism with decorative disposition
gave to his work a peculiarly arresting quality. This was intensified by his
preference for landscapes in the South of Europe, Majorca and North
Africa, where things are seen clearly in a strong light. His characteristic
defect was to seem too rational and calculating. As is not uncommon with
highly intellectual painters, he seemed to have more freedom and impulse
in watercolour than in oil.
Adrian Paul Allinson was born in  and he was at first intended for
medicine, so that his early training was scientific and his scientific habit
of mind was evident in his work, in the unflinching acceptance of botanical
character in decorative flower paintings, for example. Deciding to give up
medicine for art Allinson studied at The Slade School, where he won a
scholarship in his second year, and afterwards in Paris and Munich. His
first professional occupation was as a designer for the stage. Between 
and  he was scenic designer for the Beecham Opera Company, and
the value of this experience in clarifying his ideas, as well as of his taste
for music, could be seen in his later work.
Without prejudice to his loyalty Allinson held pacifist opinions, and
since he was as uncompromising and outspoken in conversation as he was
in his art this led to an unhappy difference with the late William
Marchant, director of the Goupil Gallery, who refused to exhibit his
pictures. It speaks for the general recognition of Allinson’s integrity that
the hostility to him soon died down. For a time he taught at the
Westminster School of Art. Besides painting he practised various branches
of applied art, including sculpture in glazed pottery, and he was latterly
poster designer to British Railways (Southern Region).
Allinson’s first appearance at the Royal Academy was with two Swiss
landscapes and a portrait, and thereafter he was a regular exhibitor, as well
as at the New English Art Club and the other societies already mentioned
and in several European cities. He was, however, most closely associated
with the London Group and took an active part in its policies and in
organizing its exhibitions.
In his youth Allinson, who was an athletic, bearded man, earnest in
conversation, was an active mountaineer; and he was a member of the


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 16

Part One

Alpine, British Universities and Kandahar Ski Clubs. He was married and
had one son.

I make quick progress digging up further information on Adrian, despite the

fact that there is as yet no monograph focused on his work. To the facts provided
by the Times obituary I add the following details: Adrian studied medicine at
Middlesex Hospital and he organized a sculpture exhibition on the roof of
Selfridges’ department store in .
Looking online, I discover that the body of Adrian’s work is vast and varied.
I find the biggest single collection at ‘Art UK’, a BBC site ‘which aims to show
the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paint-
ings, and where to see them for real’. Adrian’s work includes landscapes, mostly
alpine and Mediterranean, portraits, wood cuts, poster art, cover art, ceramics,
cartoons and illustrations of ballets for ballet historian Cyril Beaumont’s books,
including many of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe ballet company. (Pictured
[left to right]: Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow Coat’, ‘Scene from Le
Jardin des Amoureux’, a theatre poster [Victoria & Albert] and costume design
for a Flame [Victoria & Albert]). A second string to his bow, Adrian also works
as a translator, from both French and German. He has translated several works
by Anatole France and a biographical study and two essays by Belgian symbolist
writer Maurice Maeterlinck (), among other things.
I also find Adrian on the peripheries of the lives of several famous Slade Art
School graduates, including Bloomsbury figures Mark Gertler and Dora
Carrington, as well as Edward Wadsworth, Christopher [C.R.W.] Nevinson,
and Stanley Spencer. Adrian appears in David Boyd Haycock’s recent book

 ‘Jardin des Amoureux,’ by Adrian Paul

Allinson, UK, 1911 (V&A).

 Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow

Coat’ (Allinson Estate).


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 17

A Childhood

 Poster advertising George Bernard Shaw’s  Adrian Allinson’s costume design for a
The Great Catherine at the Vaudeville Theatre, Flame in an unproduced ballet (V&A).
by Adrian Paul Allinson, UK, 1913 (V&A).

about The Slade School of Fine Art, A Crisis of Brilliance, and I find pictures of
him there. In all of these, Adrian’s idiosyncratic personality stands out: first, at
a Slade picnic in  where Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth sit to
Adrian’s right and Stanley Spencer to his immediate left; and second, in John S.
Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron. (Left to right: Currie,
Gertler, Nevinson, Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron []).

 John S. Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame

Tisceron: left to right: Currie, Gertler, Nevinson,
Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron (1910).

 Adrian Allinson at a Slade picnic in

1912: Mark Gertler and Edward
Wadsworth sit to Adrian’s right and
Stanley Spencer to his immediate left.


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Part One

Outside The Slade Adrian’s friends are equally eminent. They include
composer Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) and writer Jean Rhys, both of whom
he met at painter Augustus John’s Crabtree nightclub in the early part of the
First World War. Rhys later describes her relationship with Adrian as a ‘semi-
demi love affair’. I find Adrian in one of Rhys’s short stories, entitled ‘Till
September Petronella’. Rhys casts him as the awkward and unloved Marston,
with ‘his long, white face and his pale-blue eyes’, opposite Heseltine’s more
seductive Julian. Adrian responds, according to Lilian Pizzichini, by describing
Rhys as beautiful, but also over-delicate and a wet blanket. Carole Angier
explains that Adrian renamed Rhys Ella in his autobiography, which I have at
this point yet to see.

 Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry.  Jean Rhys.

 Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Dorothy  ‘Mr Watkins,’ portrait of Alan Odle, by

Richardson and Odle, undated (Beinecke). Adrian Paul Allinson, UK, 1914 (HRC).


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 19

A Childhood

Through his friendship with painter Alan Odle, fellow St John’s Wood
School of Art student and Café Royal drinker, Adrian also meets writer Dorothy
Richardson, Odle’s wife, in about . Richardson describes Adrian as ‘always
in difficulties with an endless succession of girlfriends’ and Odle’s biographer
Martin Steenson suggests that it was the ‘lascivious Allinson’, not Odle, who
seduced sculptor Nina Hamnett. Adrian and Richardson become lasting
friends, Richardson editing his unpublished autobiography during a stay at her
house in . (Pictured clockwise: Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry; Jean Rhys;
Alan Odle [by APA]; Adrian’s portrait of Richardson and Odle, undated
[Beinecke])


At this point I have run across several references to Michael Allinson, Adrian’s
son and Sonya, Enid and Vanessa’s cousin. Searching online, I discover that
Michael has become a Broadway actor, and I track him down via the New York
social club the Players Club, of which he is the past president. Michael has been
Rex Harrison’s understudy and has played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady for
many years on Broadway. He’s also had major roles in The Beaux’ Stratagem, Henry
IV Part I, and The Importance of Being Earnest, in Shadowlands with Nigel
Hawthorne, Oliver and An Ideal Husband. More recently, I note, Michael has had
a small part, Sir David, in George Clooney’s film Syriana. Bruce of the Players
Club calls Michael in Orange
County, California, on my behalf and
then calls me back with Michael’s
number. Speak loudly, Bruce tells me.
Michael (pictured here as Henry
Higgins in ) has not lost his
beautiful theatrical British accent.
He is in his late eighties and he can’t
remember very much about Fresca.
Like Sonya, Michael affirms that
Fresca was his favorite aunt. Sonya
Allinson has told me that Michael
‘had his own room in Mornington
Crescent (as did C & V [Cyril and
Veronica] and, Tippett and perhaps
others)’.

 Playbill for My Fair Lady starring

Michael Allinson.


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Part One

Michael is planning a version of My Fair Lady for a local venue. He has found
an Eliza and she is ‘tall and tolerably good-looking’. He has tried out a perform-
ance at the retirement home and, he tells me, ‘the old crones were up out of their
wheel chairs clapping’. He coughs and then apologizes, he broke a rib the week
before. Michael clearly wants to talk and I see why the charming Michael was
so easily able to become the philanderer I later learn he was.
Michael mentions that he has two sons. I find son Tim Allinson, an engineer
living in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, on the Internet. Tim gives
me a copy of Adrian’s autobiography, held with Dorothy Richardson’s papers at
the University of Tulsa (which I had seen mentioned by Jean Rhys’s biogra-
phers). He also provides another photograph of Adrian, uncanny in its resem-
blance to the -year-old Fresca. This image has somehow found its way onto
the cover of the Penguin Classics Complete Saki resulting, Tim tells me, in some
confusion.

 Adrian Allinson (Allinson Estate).  Adrian Allinson on the Penguin Classics

Complete Saki cover (Penguin).


Adrian’s autobiography, entitled A Painter’s Pilgrimage, proves invaluable in terms
of understanding the Allinson upbringing. It represents a polished and detailed
record, the result of Adrian’s efforts to ‘dress the body of [his own] book in the
best suit of literary clothes it [was] in [his] power to cut’. He has ‘remodeled


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 21

A Childhood

the style three times’ and, in a reference to Richardson’s editing, has sought ‘the
advice of more expert tailors than [him]self at each fitting’. Like Fresca, Adrian
has ties to the literary world, socially, but also in his capacity as a translator and
an illustrator of covers of little magazines such as Coterie, and he likely writes
with an eye to publication.
In his introduction, Adrian explains that he had planned to write his memoirs
once an old man, however a ‘sequence of sleepless nights brought about by the
London Blitz’ has precipitated him into the project a lot sooner than he’d antic-
ipated. Forced to move into the Gloucestershire countryside, deprived of his
brushes and inspiration, Adrian has turned to writing. He writes from memory,
he says, not having accumulated the diaries and letters necessary for a more
anchored account; and this he sees as giving him greater freedom. Adrian gives
the actual date of composition of the autobiography as April , ‘when the
very existence of Britain seems to hang in the balance’.
The central theme of the first pages of Adrian’s autobiography, in a
section titled ‘PARENTAGE’, is the thoroughly non-conformist nature of the
Allinson family. Adrian characterizes father T. R. Allinson and mother Anna
Pulvermacher as ‘rather outside the general ruck of the class and time to which
they belonged’. He acknowledges that he too was ‘cast from the same freakish
mould’. He is considered ‘by popular standards [to be] a queer fish, a freak, one
of those “artist fellows”, whom much may be forgiven, but who at the same time
cannot be taken quite seriously’.
Adrian provides a detailed description of his father’s upbringing. Adrian’s T.
R. is the hero of an adventure story who strikes out on his own. Raised in
Lancashire by ‘a wealthy and ardent Catholic’ stepfather, although ‘of yeoman
stock’ himself, Tom dodges a career in the priesthood, opting instead for medi-
cine and ‘the extremes of Atheism [sic]’. Rejected by his stepfather, Tom works
first as a chemist’s assistant before going to the University of Edinburgh to study
medicine (qualifying in ). Tom’s next stop is London, where he opens a
practice in Islington and sets about challenging ‘the orthodox medical methods
of the day’ with an investigation of ‘problems of Hygiene and Diet from a
common sense angle’. T. R. experiments first on himself, developing what Adrian
calls ‘Spartan habits, in which the exclusion of all flesh foods, stimulants and
narcotics was the predominating feature’. Despite ‘an equable temperament,
which made social intercourse with him easy and frictionless’, T. R.’s ‘fanaticism,
combined with an utter disregard of public opinion, his open condemnation of
the medicine bottle and the surgeon’s knife’ lead to accusations of ‘quackery’.
An ‘unconventional’ dress code means he was considered a ‘crank as well’.
Adrian describes the marriage of his parents as one of convenience: T. R. real-
izes that ‘a married doctor inspires more confidence than a bachelor’.


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 22

Part One

According to Adrian, his father is motivated neither by love of a particular

woman nor desire for family in selecting a wife. Finding that women who share
his views on free thought and vegetarianism are few among the English middle
classes, T. R. looks for a foreign wife. He chooses Anna Pulvermacher, identified
by Adrian as the German friend of one of his patients and ‘born in Berlin of
“liberal” Jewish parents’.
Adrian’s first descriptions of his mother show her to have been a suitable
choice for his father. Set on the profession of artist at the age of four, the head-
strong Anna struggles through her father’s financial gains and losses on the stock
market to achieve success as ‘a competent portrait painter’, her later work hung
by the Royal Academy. Adrian describes his mother as a ‘a sound draughtsman
[with an] unobtrusive technique and a sympathy for her sitters’. Her formal
training, however, extends only to two years under the tutelage of ‘a fashionable
portrait painter’.
Confirming Anna’s gifts as a draughtsman, among items held by Kit Martin
at the Mill House I find a sketchbook, dating from the s. Included is this
sketch of Clara Barkow, the woman on the bicycle, whom I’d misidentified
earlier on as Anna, and two figures at work, one sewing (or perhaps lace-
making), the other reading, likely Anna’s parents.

 Anna Pulvermacher’s sketches (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate).

Anna’s dedication to art influences Adrian’s decision to become an artist, in

particular his selection of The Slade, although it seems neither mother nor son
knew much about the school before he went there. Anna had taken a few classes
there herself, without however realizing the prestige of the school. Anna’s love
of music also represents a ‘pleasurable memory’ for Adrian.


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 23

A Childhood

However, despite these shared interests, mother and son do not see eye to
eye. Adrian portrays Anna, rather cruelly, as rigid and sexless, characteristics that
inevitably produce tension between Anna and her children: ‘There had been no
flirtations or love affairs in her life and in any case she lacked the type of femi-
nine looks and charm [allure] that attract easy attention from men. [. . . ] She
was conscientious to a fault and dominated by a sense of duty, but showed a lack
of humour and of attractive feminine foibles. In later years an aggressive dogma-
tism introduced an element of friction between her and her family.’ And in
another short description, Adrian takes his critique a step further:

Had mother been endowed with specifically feminine charms, those early
days might have contained for me elements of ecstasy which fall to the lot
of most children, illuminating childhood with unforgettable moments of
glory. My memory records no such experiences; an ordered and controlled
animal well-being devoid both of highlights or deep shadows fill the
canvas.

Consistent with both parents’ penchant for austerity, T. R.’s northern English
thrift and Anna’s German immigrant background, and despite his mother’s
artistic talents, the Pulvermacher Allinson home life, according to Adrian, is
plain and restrained. The ‘shoddily furnished’ house accommodates ‘bamboo
monstrosities, ill designed chiffoniers and overmantles’ not uncommon at this
period for families of their rank, Adrian admits. The walls are ‘closely hung’ with
Anna’s portraits ‘mainly versions of ourselves at all ages’, says Adrian, ‘which we
did not find stimulating to our young imaginations’. Adrian speculates that his
own preference for landscapes over portraits and his interest in ‘design and
colour’, absent from his mother’s work, may have resulted from ‘this early surfeit
of faces’.
The children are occasionally treated to a theatre visit, albeit with cheap seats
in the pit. The mantra at home is ‘Moderation in all things’ and the family motto
‘Live and let live.’ T. R. discourages ‘luxurious habits through an over generous
distribution of pocket money’. Adrian admits that, in retrospect, he appreciates
the lessons he has learned about respecting all animals (‘I am happy’, he says, ‘in
the thought that no fish, bird or beast has died for my entertainment’), but he
wishes that the ‘moderation’ principle had itself been applied with more moder-
ation. ‘We grew up in an atmosphere of rationalism and philosophic nihilism.
George Bernard Shaw was the family patron saint,’ writes Adrian. ‘His satire
and devastating criticism of current cant and humbug were our mental food, so
that all the tender fantasies and charming nonsense dear to children never came
our way.’


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 24

Part One

Adrian’s account also brings perspective on the broader Allinson family.

‘Neither T. R. nor Anna had strong attachments, father having left Manchester
as a young man and mother having emigrated from Germany.’ Adrian describes
the ‘entire absence of close relatives’ on both sides, with the exception of ‘some
cousins by marriage of his mothers’, in strong terms, as resulting in ‘emotional
[. . .] starv[ation]’. Anna’s death certificate, which I find along with the sketch
book at the Mill House, names niece Sofie Ehrlich of a York Street, Berlin
(New Hampshire, US, or Germany), and cousins Mrs Rosy Myers and Mrs
Nash; the census lists Esther Gershon as a ‘cousin’. Adrian mentions a visit to
an aunt in Berlin when he was ; he also calls Broadway actress Lena Maitland
‘cousin’.
Adrian explains that his father is so preoccupied with work that ‘there was
little entertaining in our house’. T. R. finds the company he needs among his
patients who ‘run to the tens of thousand [and are] drawn from every rank of
life’. The few guests that do make it to the Allinson table are oddballs, according
to Adrian. Among them is Louis de Rougemont, famous for his tall tales of
experiences amid cannibals appearing in the Wide World Magazine, and cham-
pion woman cyclist and vegetarian Miss Simons. Perhaps explaining his pres-
ence at the Allinson table, de Rougemont had invented an unsuccessful meat
substitute during World War I.
Despite the negative portraits of Anna in particular, Adrian closes the first
section of his autobiography with retrospective optimism about his upbringing.
Adrian’s description confirms the source of the Allinson children’s unconven-
tionality: ‘The general tenor of home life was one of advanced liberalism from
which the usual Victorian taboos and smugness were entirely lacking. Father
was a rebel whose refusal to kowtow to the conventions laid down by the British
Medical Association had caused him to be crossed off the medical register. Far
from handicapping him, this allowed him to pursue his chosen course.’ And he
closes with: ‘Freedom in fact was the keynote of our upbringing and if I had been
given a conscious choice of parents, I doubt I could have bettered the one made for me’
(my emphasis).


Adrian writes in his autobiography that it isn’t until his secondary school that
he realizes his ‘race’ puts him at a disadvantage—and he appears to mean by
‘race’ his Germanness rather than his Jewishness. In one of only a handful of
mentions of Jewishness in the autobiography, Adrian describes fellow Slade
student painter Mark Gertler’s Jewishness as something foreign to himself and
makes no reference to his own heritage. Adrian writes: ‘Born in Whitechapel,
[Gertler] was sensitive of his origin and background but our friendship was inti-


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:39 Page 25

A Childhood

mate enough for me to be invited to his home. The East End was “terra incog-
nita”; visits there seemed quite an adventure. The jostling crowds of Russian,
Polish and Central European Jews had so transformed this corner of London
that I felt I was going abroad but minus the expense and discomfort entailed.’
Jewishness has come up in Fresca’s A Childhood. In her second chapter, enti-
tled ‘Sunday’, Fresca’s protagonist Charlotte’s friend Thea is Jewish. Again, here
Jewishness is held at a remove. Perhaps heralded by Charlotte’s imaginary other,
Lizzie Simpkins of chapter one, I wonder if red-headed, green-eyed impulsive
Thea might be a second alter ego for Fresca/Charlotte. The lesson in this
second chapter is justice and maybe Fresca feels that it is from the German-
Jewish side of the family that she has acquired a sense of fairness. At the end of
‘Sunday’, the impulsive Thea ‘unable to endure an insufficiently final religion as
well as her own violent temperament, is shortly to meet someone who would
convert her to the Roman Catholic religion’. Supporting the idea that Thea is
Fresca, Sonya tells me that Fresca converts to Catholicism as a teenager. In a
letter (that comes to me later in the research process) to Miss Fletcher, tutor at
Lady Margaret Hall, Fresca’s friend Margaret Lambert explains Fresca’s name
change. She says that T. R. Allinson ‘being a strict rationalist of the Victorian
stamp gave his children names alphabetically and had them registered, not
baptized. When [Fresca] became a convert to Catholicism in her teens she took
the baptismal name of Francesca and by that name all her friends knew her.’
Adrian’s Germanness appears to have represented a more significant issue
than did his Jewishness. After election to the artists’ exhibiting society, the
London Group in , Adrian’s affiliations with Germany, both his blood and
his sympathies, result in his exclusion from an exhibition at the Goupil Galleries:
‘In the autumn of ’ when war fever seemed at its most virulent Marchant, the
owner of the Goupil Galleries where our annual shows were held, sent an ulti-
matum to the Group.’ Marchant (–), London art dealer, son of a
Bristol iron-founder, insists that ‘no enemy aliens, conscientious objectors or
sympathizers with the enemy were permitted to exhibit in his galleries, and
should the Group contain any of these, his walls would be closed down’. Adrian
knows that ‘this shot was aimed mainly at [his] own head as [he] was reputed
to embrace all three elements in one person’. Although ‘it was unanimously
agreed [at a special meeting] that politics should be kept out of the domain of
Art and the Group rejected Marchant’s terms’, no other gallery is available.
Adrian withdraws his work ‘on condition that [the group] sever [their] connec-
tion with [Marchant] after its termination’.
When World War I breaks out, Adrian is in Dieppe with artist Walter
Sickert. Adrian explains his lack of concern for England and an objection to
war, which would flower into conscientious objection, again with an oblique


Fresca_03_Pt1 10/04/2017 16:39 Page 26

Part One

reference to the German blood running in his veins: ‘In England too, the war-
fever raged, but somehow I seemed immune; was there not enough British blood
in my veins for me to catch it, or were there other reasons?’ He has been brought
up, he says, ‘to consider the taking of life—whether animal or human—as a
crime’. And, further, in terms of Germany, family ties complicate his support of
the war: ‘The stay in Munich [with an aunt, as a boy] had tended to make me
look upon Germans as a people much like ourselves, little variations of tempera-
ment and habits of life seemed all that differentiated the two peoples. Possibly
the shallow judgment of youth, but it was mine and I clung to it. Today I still
cling to it.’ I later discover that similar experiences motivated Fresca’s consci-
entious objection.


During World War I there is much anti-German sentiment in England.
Prohibition includes a wartime ban on the sale of German-made products in
shops and on German classical music. Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, in their
The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain –, report that
‘[t]he popular Press continued to refer to the Germans as Huns even so late as
; nor was any faith given to the complaint of Germans during the Armistice
period that they were starving—as many of them were’.
The Allinson family’s Spanish Place home is just around the corner from the
concert hall now called the Wigmore Hall. Given the family’s interest in music,
it is likely they attended, or at least knew about, some of the early performances
which featured ‘Artur Schnabel, at the age of , play[ing] a recital so successful
that a second was hastily arranged []; composers Percy Grainger and Saint-
Saëns [. . .]; Melba and Caruso [singing]; [and] -year-old Thomas Beecham
[giving] his first concert []’. Built by and originally named for German
piano makers Bechstein, the building, which opened in May of  as a piano
showroom with a -seat concert hall, just a year before Fresca’s birth, is seized
as enemy property in  and sold to Debenhams at a drastically reduced price
before reopening as Wigmore Hall in . The Pulvermacher Allinsons likely
witness this seizure and sale with some trepidation.
I find online parliamentary records in the form of an order for and an appeal
against governess Clara Barkow’s deportation in  that provide evidence the
family is indeed touched by Germanophobia, and possibly also anti-Semitism.

GERMAN GOVERNESS. (REPATRIATION).

HC Deb  April  vol  cc-W W
Colonel Josiah WEDGWOOD
asked the Home Secretary whether it is intended to deport to Germany,


Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
largo tiempo, y raya a veces en familiar y cómico. Como ninguno de
los dos primeros tiene pretensiones de orador, no defienden causas en
la escena, ni se ven obligados a dividir sus oraciones en diversas
partes, ni a emplear exordios ni pruebas ordenadas como Eurípides
que no pierde ocasión de hacerlo. El teatro es para ellos un templo
venerable en donde el pueblo cree y aprende, no cátedra de filosofía n
escuela de relajación. En una palabra, y usando una frase repetida
muchas veces, pero que pinta el genio de estos tres poetas: Esquilo
representa el nacimiento de la tragedia, pero el nacimiento de un
gigante; Sófocles su más acabada perfección, y Eurípides su
decadencia.
Sin embargo, discurriendo sin pasión, debemos decir que Eurípides
poseía grandes cualidades, como ingenio e inventiva inagotables y
fácil y amena poesía, y que sus tragedias se distinguen, ya por lo
patético, ya por sus felicísimos rasgos, ya, en fin, porque su autor es e
que más se acerca a nosotros y más se ajusta a nuestras ideas. Su
diálogo es animado y vivo; bellísimas sus descripciones; sentencioso y
profundo a veces; gran poeta en sus coros; variado y nuevo en sus
fábulas, y hábil en la elección de las situaciones dramáticas de sus
personajes. Era griego al fin, y contemporáneo de muchos de los
hombres más eminentes de su patria en la política, en la filosofía, en
las letras y en las artes. Ninguno como él ha representado pasiones
vehementes, de esas que rayan en la locura; ninguno conmueve a sus
lectores con tanta fuerza; ninguno, en fin, ha sondeado como él e
corazón humano, ofreciéndolo sin disfraz a la expectación de las
gentes. Hasta en sus defectos es admirable, y así se explica la
estimación que le dispensaron sus contemporáneos y la fama que
logró en toda la Grecia, lo cual ni allí ni en parte alguna suele
adquirirse sin dotes eminentes.
 HÉCUBA

ARGUMENTO
Cuando los griegos pusieron sitio a Troya y Príamo se vio
acometido de tantos y tan fuertes enemigos, no solo acudió a la
defensa de su reino poniendo al frente de sus tropas a sus numerosos
hijos, que podían manejar las armas, sino que, presintiendo el fata
desenlace que esta guerra podría tener para su familia, confió su hijo
impúbero Polidoro a la custodia de Poliméstor, rey del Quersoneso de
Tracia, y depositó en sus manos al mismo tiempo un cuantioso tesoro
Poliméstor, mientras resistieron los troyanos, fue fiel a los deberes que
le imponían sus antiguas relaciones con Príamo, en cuya mesa había
apurado tantas veces la copa de la hospitalidad; pero cuando pereció
el anciano rey de Ilión y los griegos la tomaron e incendiaron
repartiéndose su rico botín y las cautivas que habían hecho, según las
leyes de la guerra entonces vigentes, codicioso del oro que guardaba
o por congraciarse con los vencedores, o sin temor ya a los parientes
de su tierno pupilo, lo asesinó con alevosía, apoderándose de sus
riquezas. A los tres días de muerto, y deseosa la sombra de Polidoro
de que se diese sepultura a su cadáver, se apareció a su madre
Hécuba, que, en compañía de las esclavas troyanas, esperaba en e
Quersoneso vientos favorables a la navegación de los griegos
Hallábanse estos detenidos allí, aterrados con el fantasma de Aquiles
que, derecho sobre su túmulo, situado enfrente, había rogado que se
le sacrificase Políxena, hija también de Príamo y de Hécuba, y
hermana de Polidoro; y con tal premura que, a no hacerlo, no podrían
navegar hacia su patria. Esta tragedia de Eurípides se propone
representar dramáticamente los dolores de Hécuba, herida en su
corazón por la muerte de sus dos hijos Políxena y Polidoro, y la
venganza que toma de Poliméstor, cegado por ella y por sus esclavas
que matan también a sus hijos.
He aquí su argumento. Es fácil de observar que abraza dos
acciones distintas, la venganza de Poliméstor por Hécuba, y la muerte
de Políxena, si bien su centro de unidad es la mísera exreina de Troya
dolorosamente afectada por la muerte de sus hijos, corona de sus
terribles infortunios. Es eminentemente trágico, quizá demasiado, y su
desarrollo, aparte del defecto de la duplicidad de la acción, trazado con
la maestría que caracteriza a Eurípides. Pertenece al ciclo troyano, y
expone dramáticamente un episodio posterior a la guerra de Troya
Ofrece, por tanto, algunos puntos de contacto con Las Troyanas, s
bien la fábula de esta última tragedia es anterior a la de Hécuba. E
coro se compone en ambas de cautivas troyanas, y así en la una como
en la otra describen los horrores del asalto y los males que la
esclavitud les promete lejos de su patria. En Las Troyanas se reparten
los griegos las esclavas, y en la Hécuba sirven ya a sus distintos
dueños, como dice el verso 95, τὰς δεσποσύνους σκηνὰς προλιποῦσα
En ambas es también Hécuba la protagonista, perdiendo en una a su
mísera hija Políxena y a Polidoro, y en la otra a su nieto Astianacte
hijo de Andrómaca y de Héctor.
En las demás peripecias de ambas tragedias hay ya notables
divergencias, que podrán conocer los estudiosos, si quieren
compararlas. Los caracteres, tales como se representan en el teatro
griego, están bien sostenidos, y tanto Agamenón como Odiseo y
Poliméstor conservan sus diferencias y cualidades tradicionales. El de
Políxena, su heroica resolución y su muerte, es de gran mérito
artístico, y ofrece esa belleza plástica de primer orden en que fueron
inimitables los griegos. No podemos decir lo mismo de Hécuba
vengativa, furiosa y cruel, hasta el punto de apelar para e
cumplimiento de su venganza (en el verso 789) a la deshonra de su
hija Casandra, para conciliarse el favor de Agamenón, diciendo:
ποῦ τὰς φίλας δῆτ᾽ εὐφρόνας δείξεις, ἄναξ,
ἢ τῶν ἐν εὐνῇ φιλτάτων ἀσπασμάτων
χάριν τίν᾽ ἕξει παῖς ἐμή, κείνης δ᾽ ἐγώ;
ni aprobar sus sangrientos sarcasmos contra Poliméstor, ya ciego, y la
ira insensata que la domina, la cual, si bien disculpable en cierto modo
por su especial y desgarradora situación, no por eso nos parece hoy
de buen gusto, ni creemos que tampoco lo fuese entre los griegos. La
mitad o algo más de esta tragedia es de lo mejor que ha escrito
Eurípides por su patético; lo restante vale mucho menos. Entre sus
escenas dramáticas más curiosas debemos citar la de la llegada de
Odiseo para llevar a Políxena al sacrificio; y entre sus más bellos
trozos, por el aroma helénico que respira, la descripción de la muerte
de Políxena hecha por el heraldo Taltibio. Los dos poetas latinos Ennio
y L. Accio y el erudito Erasmo de Rotterdam la han traducido en versos
latinos; Lodovico Dolce en italiano, y nuestro Fernán Pérez de Oliva ha
escrito una traducción de ella; Racine ha copiado algunos versos en su
Iphigénie, y Voltaire en su Mérope.
En cuanto a la época en que se representó, parece lo más probable
que fuera en la olimpiada 88, 4. Así lo hace presumir la parodia de los
versos 162 y 173 de esta tragedia, hecha por Aristófanes en los 708
709 y 1148 de su comedia titulada Las Nubes; y como esta se
representó en la olimpiada 89, 1, parece lo más verosímil fijar la de la
Hécuba en el año anterior, porque esas alusiones del cómico griego no
podían referirse sino a tragedias representadas poco tiempo antes
cuya memoria conservaba todavía el público. Esto debe entenderse
dando por supuesto que Aristófanes no retocase su comedia, como
todo lo hace sospechar, en cuyo caso viene a tierra todo el edificio
levantado con tanto trabajo por los eruditos, puesto que la parodia
indicada pudo ser muy bien una adición posterior. Teobaldo Fix, en su
Chronologia fabularum Euripides, pág. 9, añade que debió ser en la
época que hemos fijado, y da como razón que en el verso 558 y
siguientes se alude a la fiesta instituida por los atenienses después de
la toma de Delos, de que habla Tucídides (III, 104) y Plut. (Nic., c. 3)
pero es poco convincente, porque la alusión, si existe, es tan vaga, que
nada prueba. Aun sin haberse instituido esas fiestas, pudo Eurípides
decir muy bien lo que aparece en los versos citados. Lo mismo sucede
con lo que ha creído ver M. Artaud (Tragédies d’Euripide, tomo I, pág
15) en los versos 649 y 650, alusivos, en su concepto, a la derrota de
los espartanos en Pilos. Aun suponiendo que los espartanos no
hubiesen sido derrotados, era natural que Helena llorase a las orillas
del Eurotas, acordándose de Paris y de sus goces en Troya. Algo más
vale lo que añade después, fundándose en la versificación de esta
tragedia, indicio de ser de las más antiguas de Eurípides.

PERSONAJES
La sombra de Polidoro, hijo de Hécuba.
Hécuba, reina cautiva de Troya.
Coro de cautivas.
Políxena, hija de Hécuba.
Odiseo.
Taltibio, heraldo griego.
Una esclava de Hécuba.
Agamenón, general de los griegos.
Poliméstor, rey de Tracia.

El lugar de la acción es la costa meridional del Quersoneso de Tracia, frente a la Frigia.

La escena representa el campamento de los griegos, y se ven en ella dos tiendas, a la
izquierda la de Hécuba y las cautivas troyanas, y a la derecha la de Agamenón y Casandra
Empieza a romper el día.

LA SOMBRA DE POLIDORO
Vengo de la mansión de los muertos y de las puertas de las
tinieblas, en donde Hades habita, separado de los demás dioses; soy
Polidoro, hijo de Hécuba, cuyo padre fue Ciseo,[21]y del rey Príamo
Este, viendo el peligro que corría la ciudad de los troyanos de caer a
empuje de las lanzas griegas, me llevó ocultamente de Ilión al palacio
de Poliméstor, huésped suyo tracio que siembra las muy fértiles
llanuras del Quersoneso,[22] rigiendo con su cetro a un pueblo
cabalgador. Mucho oro envió también conmigo mi padre, para no deja
sumidos en la miseria a los hijos que le sobreviviesen, si alguna vez se
hundían las murallas de Ilión; y como yo era el más joven de los
Priámidas, secretamente me alejó de mi patria, cuando ni podía
soportar el peso de las armas,[23] ni sostener la lanza con mi infanti
brazo. Mientras no variaron las lindes troyanas y sus torres no se
derrumbaron, y mientras mi hermano Héctor venció con su lanza
como a tierno renuevo me alimentó el varón tracio, huésped de m
padre. Pero cuando Troya sucumbió y exhaló el alma Héctor, y fue
derribado mi hogar paterno, pereciendo Príamo junto al ara
consagrada a manos del sanguinario hijo de Aquiles, el huésped de m
padre me mató sin compasión, codicioso del oro, y me arrojó a las
ondas del mar, para guardar en su palacio mis riquezas. Yazgo, pues
en la ribera, a merced de las tempestades, agitado por las movibles
olas, no llorado, insepulto.[24] Ahora recurro a Hécuba, mi amada
madre, habiendo abandonado mi cuerpo, y después de vagar durante
tres días por el aire, ya que esa desgraciada ha venido desde Troya a
esta región del Quersoneso. Todos los aqueos, que tienen naves
hállanse en esta costa tracia, porque Aquiles, el hijo de Peleo
apareciéndose sobre su túmulo, detiene a la armada griega, que
movía hacia su patria los marinos remos, pidiendo que se le sacrifique
sobre el túmulo mi querida hermana Políxena. Y lo conseguirá, y le
harán esa ofrenda sus amigos, porque el destino ha fijado para este
día la muerte de mi hermana. Mi madre verá dos cadáveres de dos
hijos: el mío y el de esa infeliz doncella. Me apareceré, pues, para que
me sepulten, a los pies de una esclava, en brazos de las olas. He
rogado a los que imperan en el infierno que me concedan la sepultura
y que me vea mi madre; se cumplirá mi mayor deseo; pero me
apartaré un poco, que sale ahora la anciana Hécuba hacia la tienda de
Agamenón,[25] asustada de mi sombra. (Sale Hécuba de la tienda).
¡Ay, madre mía, que de reina te has convertido en esclava, y de
feliz en infortunada! Algún dios te castiga hoy por tu ventura anterior
(Sale Hécuba apoyada en sus esclavas, y se dirige con tardo paso a la
tienda de Agamenón).
HÉCUBA
Llevad delante de la tienda a esta anciana, ¡oh vírgenes troyanas!
sostened a vuestra consierva, antes vuestra reina; coged mi arrugada
mano; guiadme, llevadme, ayudadme, que yo, apoyado en el corvo
báculo, aceleraré cuanto pueda mi tardo paso. ¡Oh relámpagos de
Zeus! ¡Oh tenebrosa noche! ¿A qué me despertáis con terrores y
apariciones? ¡Oh tierra veneranda, madre de los sueños de negras
alas!;[26] libradme de esta visión nocturna, de la sombra de mi hijo, que
vive en Tracia, y de la terrible aparición de mi hija Políxena, que he
visto con mis ojos durante mi insomnio. ¡Dioses indígenas, proteged a
mi hijo, áncora de mi linaje y el único que de él queda en la fría Tracia
bajo la tutela del huésped de su padre!
Algo nuevo va a ocurrir; con lúgubres lamentos se mezclarán
nuestros llantos. Nunca mi alma ha sentido tanto miedo ni tanto horror
¿En dónde encontraré al divino Heleno o a Casandra, ¡oh troyanas!
para que me interpreten estos sueños? He visto una manchada cierva
que despedazaba un lobo con sus garras llenas de sangre
arrancándola violentamente de mis rodillas, que movía a compasión
También me aterró el espectro de Aquiles sobre lo alto del túmulo, que
pedía se le sacrificase algunas de las desdichadas troyanas. ¡Que no
sea mi hija, oh dioses, que no sea mi hija! ¡Yo os lo suplico!
EL CORO (apareciendo sobre la timele).[27]
De prisa, ¡oh Hécuba!, he dejado la tienda de mi dueño para
buscarte, ya que la suerte me ha hecho esclava suya, arrebatándome
de Ilión, cautiva por la lanza de los aqueos, no para aliviar tus males
sino para anunciarte, mensajera de dolores, triste nueva. Dícese que
en solemne asamblea han decretado los aqueos sacrificar a tu hija a
los manes de Aquiles: tú sabes que se apareció sobre su túmulo con
sus doradas armas, y detuvo las naves que surcaban las ondas con
sus hinchadas velas, sujetas por cuerdas, exclamando así: «¿Adónde
habéis de ir, ¡oh dánaos!, sin tributar antes a mi túmulo los honores
debidos?».[28] Gran tempestad se promovió entre ellos, dando origen a
dos opiniones opuestas en el belicoso ejército de los griegos, y
creyendo unos que debía ofrecérsele una víctima, y otros lo contrario
Agamenón no se olvidaba de ti, porque la profetisa Casandra tiene la
honra de frecuentar su lecho; pero los Teseidas,[29] nobles atenienses
pronunciaron dos arengas, conviniendo ambos en la necesidad de
regar el túmulo de Aquiles con sangre caliente, y negando que el lecho
de Casandra debiera ser nunca preferido a la lanza de Aquiles. Igua
era el número de los que defendían estas dos opiniones antes que e
hábil, ingenioso, elocuente y popular hijo de Laertes persuadiese a
ejército, que no debía desairar al más fuerte de los griegos po
víctimas serviles, no fuese que alguno de los que habitan en la
mansión de Perséfone dijera que los dánaos, ingratos con sus
hermanos, muertos por la Grecia, abandonaban los campos de Troya
Pronto, pues, vendrá Odiseo a arrancar de tu pecho y de tus
arrugadas manos a la doncella. Acude a los templos, acude a los
altares, prostérnate ante las rodillas de Agamenón y suplícale; invoca
a los dioses que están en el cielo y debajo de la tierra. O tus ruegos
impedirán que te arrebaten tu mísera hija, o la verás sucumbir sobre e
túmulo,[30] virgen manchada con su sangre, que, como río, correrá de
su aurífero[31] cuello.
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí, mísera! ¿A qué he de gritar? ¿De qué servirán mis voces
y mis lágrimas? ¡Vejez infortunada! ¡Intolerable servidumbre, que no
podré sobrellevar! ¡Ay de mí! ¡Ay de mí! ¿Quién me defenderá? ¿Qué
gente? ¿Qué ciudad? Murió el anciano Príamo, y morirán también sus
hijos. ¿Iré por aquí o iré por allí? ¿Adónde me encaminaré? ¿Do habrá
algún dios, o algún genio, que me socorra? Ya no me será grato ver la
luz. ¡Oh, troyanas, mensajeras de malas nuevas, mensajeras de
calamidades; me habéis dado muerte, habéis acabado conmigo! ¡Oh
pies míseros! Llevadme, conducid a esta anciana a la tienda
inmediata. (Volviendo hacia su tienda). ¡Fruto de mis entrañas, hija de
misérrima madre! Sal, sal de tu habitación; oye la voz de tu madre, ¡oh
hija!, para que conozcas la amenaza contra tu vida que ha traído la
fama.
POLÍXENA
Madre, ¿por qué te quejas? ¿Qué novedad anuncias, haciéndome
salir de mi tienda, aterrada como un pajarillo?
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí! ¡Oh hija!
POLÍXENA
¿Por qué sollozas?
HÉCUBA
¡Ay, ay de tu vida!
POLÍXENA
¿Por qué dices esto?
HÉCUBA
¡Hija, hija de desdichada madre!
POLÍXENA
¿A qué llamas con esa voz de mal agüero? Nada bueno me indica
Habla, no me lo ocultes más tiempo. ¡Tengo miedo, madre, tengo
miedo!
HÉCUBA
Refiero, ¡oh hija!, un rumor fatal: dicen que los argivos han
decretado arrancarme tu vida.
POLÍXENA
¡Ay de mí, madre! ¿Cómo me anuncias tan horrendos males?
Explícate, madre, explícate.
HÉCUBA
 Los argivos, de común acuerdo, tratan, ¡oh hija!, de sacrificarte
sobre el túmulo del hijo de Peleo.
POLÍXENA[32]
¡Oh, madre, que tales penas sufres! ¡Oh tú, la más infeliz de las
madres! ¡Oh mujer desdichada! ¿Qué numen ha suscitado contra ti de
nuevo tantas infaustas e inauditas calamidades? Ya no seré tu
compañera de esclavitud; ya no podré, siendo tu hija, consolarte en tu
deplorable vejez. Como a leoncilla criada en las selvas, como a
ternerilla nueva, me verás separada de ti, me verás degollar, y bajaré a
las subterráneas tinieblas de Hades, en donde yaceré con los muertos
Por ti lloro, ¡oh madre desdichada!, por ti me lamento amargamente
No por mi vida, llena de males y de oprobio, porque es mejor mi suerte
muriendo.
EL CORO
He aquí a Odiseo, que viene con pies ligeros, ¡oh Hécuba!, a
participarte sin duda alguna nueva.
ODISEO
Paréceme, ¡oh mujer!, que conoces la decisión del ejército y e
resultado de sus sufragios; pero te lo diré, sin embargo. Los griegos
han decretado que tu hija Políxena muera sobre el alto túmulo de
sepulcro de Aquiles. Quieren que yo sea quien acompañe y conduzca
a la virgen, y que el hijo de Aquiles presida y ejecute el sacrificio
¿Sabes, pues, lo que has de hacer? No me obligues a emplear la
violencia ni intentes luchar conmigo; resígnate ante una fuerza mayo
y, de lo contrario, teme mayores males. Sabido es que hasta las
desdichas se han de sentir con moderación.
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí! Gran lucha, según presumo, se prepara, y abundantes
gemidos y no pocas lágrimas. ¡Y no morí cuando debía haber muerto
y Zeus no me mató; antes me conserva para que cada día sufra
mayores males! Pero si es lícito a esclavas preguntar a los que son
libres, sin amargura ni encono, dígnate contestarme, y que nosotras
que preguntamos, escuchemos.
ODISEO
 Te es lícito; interroga; te concedo sin obstáculo este plazo.
HÉCUBA
¿Recuerdas que fuiste de espía a Ilión, disfrazado con viles
harapos, y manchada tu barba con las gotas de sangre que caían de
tus ojos?[33]
ODISEO
Me acuerdo; grande fue mi apuro.
HÉCUBA
Pero te conoció Helena, y a mí sola lo dijo.
ODISEO
No se me olvida que estuve en gran peligro.
HÉCUBA
Y abrazaste humildemente mis rodillas.
ODISEO
Y mi mano, fría como la de un difunto, se agarró a tus vestidos.
HÉCUBA
¿Qué decías entonces cuando eras mi esclavo?
ODISEO
Atormenté mi ingenio y mi lengua para no morir.
HÉCUBA
Te salvé, y te dejé salir de Troya en libertad.
ODISEO
Por esto veo la luz ahora.
HÉCUBA
¿Y no podré echarte en cara tu ingratitud, habiendo confesado lo
que acabo de oír, y no haciéndome bien, sino todo el mal que puedes?
Ingratos sois los que anheláis alcanzar fama en las asambleas; que yo
no os mire, que para nada os acordáis de vuestros amigos que sufren
ganosos de decir algo que os concilie la gracia del pueblo. ¿Pero a
qué astuta invención habéis recurrido para decretar la muerte de esta
niña? ¿Manda acaso el destino sacrificar hombres sobre el túmulo, en
donde debieran sacrificarse toros?[34] ¿O Aquiles reclama esa sangre
con justicia para matar a su vez a los que le mataron?[35]
Pero esta no le hizo mal alguno. Mejor fuera que pidiese a Helena
víctima más grata a su sepulcro, causa de todas sus desdichas y de
su venida a Troya. Si conviene que muera alguna cautiva ilustre, de
notable hermosura, esto no nos atañe, que Helena es bellísima, y ha
hecho no menor daño que nosotras. Oblígame la equidad a defende
así mi causa; oye lo que debes exigir en cambio, siendo yo quien te lo
pide. Tocaste mi mano, como tú mismo dices, y estas débiles rodillas
cayendo a mis pies; yo ahora toco las tuyas, y te suplico que me
pagues mi anterior beneficio, y te ruego que no arrebates de mis
manos a mi hija, y que no la sacrifiquéis. Bastantes han muerto ya
esta es mi alegría; esta sola el olvido de mis males;[36] esta me
consuela por muchos, y es a un tiempo mi ciudad,[37] mi nodriza, m
báculo, la estrella de mi vida. Los que vencen no han de manda
injusticias, ni porque son felices creer que lo han de ser siempre. Yo
también lo era y ya no lo soy, y un solo día me arrebató para siempre
mi dicha; respétame, pues; ten compasión de mí, vuelve al ejército de
los argivos, y adviértele que es odioso matar mujeres cuya vida
perdonasteis al arrancarlas de los altares, apiadándoos de ellas
Prohibición de derramar sangre hay por la ley entre vosotros, tan
favorable a los libres como a los siervos. Basta tu autoridad para
persuadir a los demás, aunque defendieras peor causa, porque las
palabras de villanos y nobles, siendo las mismas, no valen lo mismo.
EL CORO
No hay hombre, por feroz que sea, que al oír tus gemidos y
continuos sollozos no llore también.
ODISEO[38]
Escúchame atenta, ¡oh Hécuba!, y que la ira no te ciegue hasta e
punto de interpretar mal mis benévolas frases. Pronto estoy a
protegerte, porque tú me salvaste, y así lo he dicho siempre, que no
negaré lo que todos han oído. Tomada Troya, es preciso que tu hija
sea sacrificada al más valeroso de nuestro ejército, que la pide, si es
cierto que los males de muchas ciudades provienen de que se
recompensa lo mismo a los fuertes y buenos que a los cobardes
Aquiles merece entre nosotros ese honor, ¡oh mujer!, habiendo muerto
como un valiente por los griegos. ¿No es vergonzoso que al que en
vida tuvimos por amigo no lo sea después de muerto? ¿Qué, pues, se
dirá si es preciso juntar otro ejército y venir de nuevo a las manos con
el enemigo? ¿Pelearemos, o cuidaremos solo de nuestra vida, viendo
que ningún homenaje honroso se tributa a los difuntos? Bástame
cualquier cosa mientras yo exista, aunque tenga poco; mi mayo
deseo es que sea honrado mi sepulcro, porque esta gracia dura
mucho tiempo. Si dices que sufres males dignos de lástima, oye de m
en cambio que hay entre nosotros ancianos y ancianas como tú, y
muchas esposas que perdieron esforzadísimos esposos, a quienes
hoy cubre la tierra idea.[39] Ten, pues, paciencia; si hicimos ma
decretando honrar al fuerte, habremos pecado sin saberlo; vosotros
bárbaros, ni tratáis a los amigos como a amigos, ni honráis a los
muertos, y por eso es la Grecia afortunada y vosotros sufrís las
consecuencias de vuestro yerro.
EL CORO
¡Ay! ¡Qué dura es la esclavitud, y vivir en ella, y sufrir lo que no
debemos, y ser víctimas de la violencia!
HÉCUBA
¡Oh, hija! El aire se ha llevado mis palabras, proferidas en vano
para librarte de la muerte; si tú puedes más que tu madre, no pierdas
tiempo; habla en diversos tonos, como el ruiseñor, para que no te
arranquen la vida. Abraza las rodillas de Odiseo, que acaso excites su
compasión y lo persuadas; sobrado justa es tu causa, y acaso lo
muevas a lástima, porque tiene también hijos.
POLÍXENA
Te veo, ¡oh Odiseo!, ocultando tu diestra bajo el vestido e
inclinándote hacia atrás para que no toque tu barba.[40] Alégrate, que
has esquivado mis súplicas, que ensalza Zeus; yo te seguiré, obligada
por la necesidad y sin rehuir la muerte, que si otra cosa hiciera
parecería mujer cobarde y demasiado amante de la vida. ¿Para qué
he de vivir habiendo sido mi padre rey de toda la Frigia?[41] Plácida
comenzó mi existencia, haciéndome esperar que después me casaría
también con reyes, y que haría envidiable la suerte del que me tomase
por esposa y me hiciese compañera de su casa y de su hogar. Yo
ahora infeliz, reina era de las mujeres del Ida, virgen notable e igual a
los dioses, y solo me diferenciaba de ellos en que estaba expuesta a
la muerte. ¡Y soy esclava! Este solo nombre me hacía desearla en un
principio, no pudiendo acostumbrarme a oírlo. Acaso tocaría después
a dueños crueles que me comprarían por dinero, siendo hermana de
Héctor y de tantos héroes, y me obligarían a amasar el pan, a barre
su casa y a tejer con la lanzadera, pasando triste vida; y mi lecho
antes digno de un rey, sería profanado por cualquier esclavo. No será
así; al Orco entregaré mi cuerpo, y mis ojos, siempre libres,[42] no
verán ya la luz. Llévame, pues, y mátame de paso, ¡oh Odiseo! No
debemos esperar nada ni confiar en nadie, que el destino me fuerza a
sufrir esta desventura. No te opongas, ¡oh madre!, a mi propósito n
con palabras ni con obras; déjame morir antes que apelar a ruegos
vergonzosos, indignos de mí. Quien no está acostumbrado a los
males, los sufre en verdad, pero le duele sujetar a ellos su cerviz; e
muerto es, bajo este aspecto, más feliz que el vivo; que una vida sin
honra es la mayor de las desdichas.
EL CORO
Favor insigne y señalado entre los hombres es nacer de nobles
padres, y más nobles aún son aquellos que a la nobleza de su linaje
añaden la de sus acciones.[43]
HÉCUBA
Con dignidad has hablado, ¡oh hija mía!, pero con dignidad no
exenta de amargura. Mas si conviene honrar al hijo de Peleo y podéis
evitar el oprobio que os amenaza, no quitéis a esta la vida, ¡oh
Odiseo!, sino conducidnos a ambas a la hoguera que arderá junto a
sepulcro de Aquiles, y sacrificadnos sin compasión. Yo di a luz a Paris
que mató al hijo de Tetis, hiriéndole con sus flechas.
ODISEO
La sombra de Aquiles, ¡oh anciana!, no pidió a los griegos que
fueses tú la víctima, sino solo esta.
HÉCUBA
Matadme al menos con mi hija, y beberá la tierra y el que la pide
doble raudal de sangre.
 ODISEO
Basta la muerte de tu hija; no añadiremos otra, y ojalá que ni aun la
suya fuese necesaria.
HÉCUBA
Morir con mi hija es mi más ardiente deseo.
ODISEO
¿Cómo así? Yo no sabía que también tuviese dueños.
HÉCUBA (abrazando a Políxena).
Como la hiedra a la encina me adheriré a ella.
ODISEO
No lo harás si obedeces a quienes son más prudentes que tú.
HÉCUBA
Jamás consentiré que se la lleven.
ODISEO
Y yo no me iré sin ella.
POLÍXENA
Escuchadme: tú, hijo de Laertes, muéstrate más generoso con
madres justamente irritadas; y tú, madre, no luches con los
vencedores. ¿Quieres caer en tierra, y que se lastime tu débil cuerpo
vencida por la fuerza, profanándote un brazo vigoroso que te separará
de mí? Así sucederá sin duda. Nada hagas que no debas hacerlo
Dame tu dulcísima mano, ¡oh madre amada!, y que tus mejillas toquen
las mías, que nunca después (esta es la vez postrera) veré el disco y
los rayos del sol. Y no volverás a oírme hablar, ¡oh madre!, ¡oh tú que
me diste a luz!, que ya voy a los infiernos. (Abrazadas las dos entablan
el siguiente diálogo):
HÉCUBA
Nosotras, ¡oh hija!, seremos esclavas en la tierra.
POLÍXENA
Sin haber conocido esposo, ni casarme como a mi linaje convenía.
HÉCUBA
 Digna eres de lástima; yo también soy desgraciada.
POLÍXENA
Allá en el Orco yaceré separada de ti.
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí! ¿Qué hacer? ¿En dónde acabaré mi vida?
POLÍXENA
Moriré esclava, habiendo sido mi padre libre.
HÉCUBA
Y yo he perdido cincuenta hijos.
POLÍXENA
¿Qué he de decir a Héctor o a tu anciano esposo?
HÉCUBA
Diles que soy la mujer más digna de lástima.
POLÍXENA
¡Oh seno maternal! ¡Oh pechos que tan suavemente me
alimentasteis!
HÉCUBA
¡Deplorable e inesperada desdicha!
POLÍXENA
Vivo feliz, madre mía; adiós, Casandra...
HÉCUBA
Otros podrán vivir, no una madre.
POLÍXENA
Y tú, hermano Polidoro, ahora entre los caballeros tracios...
HÉCUBA
Si vive, que lo dudo, siendo tanta mi desgracia.
POLÍXENA
Vive, y cerrará tus ojos al morir.
 HÉCUBA
Matáronme mis males antes de haber llegado mi última hora.
POLÍXENA (arrancándose de los brazos de su madre).
Llévame, Odiseo; cubre con el peplo[44] mi cabeza, porque, antes de
sacrificarme, desgarran mi corazón los gritos de mi madre, y yo e
suyo con los míos. ¡Oh luz! ¡Siquiera puedo invocar tu nombre! Nada
tuyo me pertenece, sino el espacio que media entre este lugar, y la
cuchilla y el túmulo de Aquiles. (Se retira).
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí! Ya no puedo sostenerme, y desmaya mi fuerza. ¡Oh hija
¡Abraza a tu madre, extiende tu mano, dámela! (Acuden sus esclavas
y la sientan en el suelo). ¡No me dejes sin hijos! Yo muero, ¡oh amigas
(Con la vista fija en Políxena). ¡Oh, si yo viera a la lacedemonia
Helena, hermana de los Dioscuros, la de los bellos ojos, que arruinó a
Troya ignominiosamente!
EL CORO
Estrofa 1.ª — ¡Oh aura, aura marina, que impeles a las ligeras
naves, surcando las olas! ¿Adónde llevarás a esta mísera? ¿Qué
dueño me comprará para arrastrarme a su hogar? ¿Iré a las riberas de
la Dóride,[45] o a las de la Ftía,[46] en donde dicen que el Apídano,[47] río
de cristalinas ondas, fertiliza los campos?
Antístrofa 1.ª — ¿O a alguna de las islas, al son del marino remo
para vivir triste vida, a do crece la primera palma que vieron los
hombres,[48] y el laurel sagrado en honor de Leto y de sus hijos
delicias de Zeus? ¿Cantaré himnos con las vírgenes delias a la diosa
Artemisa, y celebraré sus blondos cabellos y su arco?
Estrofa 2.ª — ¿O en la ciudad de Palas y en el peplo amarillo de
Atenea labraré con la aguja la cuadriga y sus caballos, sembrándolo
de tejidas y artificiosas flores, o al linaje de los titanes, a quienes Zeus
el hijo de Cronos, condenó con sus rayos a perpetuo sueño?[49]
Antístrofa 2.ª — ¡Ay de mis padres, ay de mis hijos, ay de mi patria
que cayó envuelta en humo, vencida en la guerra por los griegos! Yo
dejo el Asia sierva de la Europa, trocando el tálamo por el Orco,[50] y
me llamarán esclava en tierra extraña.
TALTIBIO
 ¿En dónde, ¡oh doncellas troyanas!, podré encontrar a Hécuba, la
que hace poco era reina de Ilión?
EL CORO
Es la que miras, ¡oh Taltibio!, junto a ti, tendida en tierra y envuelta
en su vestido.
TALTIBIO
¿Qué diré, oh Zeus? ¿Te interesas por los hombres, o ellos lo creen
falsamente, pensando que hay dioses, y que la fortuna domina a
mismo tiempo a los mortales? ¿No fue Hécuba reina de los frigios
ricos en oro? ¿No fue esposa de Príamo, gloriosamente afortunado?
La lanza ha derribado su ciudad, y ella, esclava y anciana, huérfana de
sus hijos, yace en tierra, manchando con el polvo su cabeza
desventurada. ¡Ah!, ¡ah! Viejo soy, pero más quiero morir que sufri
vergonzosos males. (Acercándose a Hécuba). Levántate, ¡oh muje
infeliz! Que tu cuerpo y tu blanca cabeza abandonen la tierra.
HÉCUBA (levantándose).
¡Ah! ¿Quién turba mi reposo? Quienquiera que seas, ¿por qué no
respetas mi aflicción?
TALTIBIO
Yo soy Taltibio, heraldo de los hijos de Dánao, qué vengó a llamarte
de orden de Agamenón.
HÉCUBA
¿Has venido acaso, y entonces llenarás mis deseos, para
sacrificarme ante el túmulo por mandato de los griegos? ¡Oh, cuán
grato me sería! Vayamos cuanto antes, apresurémonos; guíame, ¡oh
anciano!
TALTIBIO
Vengo a llamarte, ¡oh mujer!, para que sepultes a tu hija, ya muerta
Encárganmelo los dos Atridas y el pueblo aqueo.
HÉCUBA
¡Ay de mí! ¿Qué dices? ¿No has venido a buscarme, cuando estoy
a punto de morir, sino para anunciarme males? Pereciste, ¡oh hija!
arrancada de los brazos de tu madre: yo quedo sin hijos, sin ti a
menos; ¡oh, cuán desgraciada soy! ¿Cómo la sacrificasteis? ¿Con
respeto, os ensañasteis en ella, ¡oh anciano!, como si fuese un
enemigo? Habla, aunque tus frases me aflijan.
TALTIBIO[51]
Me harás llorar dos veces, ¡oh mujer!, compadecido de tu hija
ahora humedeceré mis ojos recordándolo, y al morir lloré también
junto al sepulcro. La muchedumbre infinita del ejército aqueo acudió
alrededor del túmulo para presenciar el sacrificio de Políxena: el hijo
de Aquiles la llevó de la mano hasta colocarla en lo alto del túmulo
teniéndome a su lado; seguíanle los principales jóvenes aqueos para
sujetar a la víctima en las convulsiones de la agonía. El hijo de
Aquiles, con el vaso dorado de las libaciones, las hizo a los manes de
su padre, ordenándome después que impusiese silencio a todo e
ejército. Yo entonces, en medio de ellos, dije: «Callad, ¡oh griegos!
haya silencio en el pueblo; que ninguno hable, que todos guarden
compostura», y la muchedumbre calló en efecto. Él, a su vez, se
expresó así: «Recibe, ¡oh padre mío!, hijo de Peleo, estas libaciones
que evocan a los muertos, y muéstrate propicio: ven a beber la negra y
no libada sangre de esta virgen, que el ejército y yo te ofrecemos
favorécenos, desata nuestras popas, suelta nuestras naves, y
concédenos a todos que tornemos con felicidad desde Troya a nuestra
patria». Así dijo, y todo el ejército le acompañó en su oración. Cogió
luego la empuñadura de oro de su espada, y, desenvainándola, hizo
seña a los jóvenes griegos para que sujetaran a la víctima. Ella, a
conocerlo, habló de esta manera: «De buen grado muero, ¡oh argivos
que arruinasteis mi patria!; nadie toque mi cuerpo, que ofreceré a
hierro mi cerviz con ánimo esforzado; pero por los dioses os ruego que
no me sujetéis, para que muera como debe morir una mujer libre, que
me avergonzará ante los manes el nombre de esclava, siendo reina»
Murmullos de aprobación se oyeron en la muchedumbre, y el rey
Agamenón ordenó que los jóvenes soltasen a la virgen. Ella, a
escucharlo, desgarró su peplo desde los hombros hasta la cintura,[52] y
enseñó su pecho, tan hermoso como el de una estatua, e hincó en
tierra sus rodillas, y pronunció esta frase muy animosa: «He aquí m
pecho; hiérelo, ¡oh joven!, si lo deseas; si ha de ser en la garganta
prepara la cuchilla». Él vacilaba, movido a compasión; pero al fin la dio
muerte, y su sangre corrió a raudales. Al morir no se olvidó de su
decoro, y ocultó a nuestras miradas lo que no deben ver los hombres
Después que exhaló el alma, ocupáronse los griegos en distintos
menesteres, ya cubriéndola de hojas, ya llenando la pira con ramas de
pino. Los que nada hacían, oyéronles expresarse así: «¿Te estarás
quieto, ¡oh perezoso!, y no ofrecerás a esta doncella ni fúnebres galas
ni tu peplo? ¿Nada darás a esta víctima tan valerosa como noble?»
Esto es lo que puedo decirte acerca de la muerte de Políxena
considerándote, si miro a tus numerosos hijos, la más feliz de las
mujeres, y si a tu suerte, como a la más infortunada.
EL CORO
Horribles desgracias han sobrevenido a los hijos de Príamo y a m
patria por decreto inexorable de los dioses.
HÉCUBA
¡Oh, hija! En medio de tantos males, no sé a cuál atender: si uno
me alcanza, el otro no me deja: sucédense sin cesar y acumúlanse sin
descanso. Y ahora no puedo olvidar tu triste suerte y dejar de gemir
pero no lo haré con exceso, sabiendo con cuánta grandeza has
muerto.[53] No es, pues, de admirar si una tierra estéril, favorecida po
el cielo, produce rica cosecha, y que la fértil, privada de este bien, dé
amargo fruto: solo entre los hombres el malo es siempre malo, e
bueno siempre bueno, y no le dañan las calamidades, y siempre es
virtuoso. ¿Proviene esto del linaje, o acaso de la educación? No puede
negarse que algo contribuye la educación, enseñando la virtud, que
quien bien la aprende distingue lo bueno de lo malo. Pero todo esto es
inútil: tú, Taltibio, vete y di a los argivos que nadie toque a mi hija, y
que la preserven de la multitud, que no faltarán atrevidos en tan
numeroso ejército, y cuando la licencia entre marinos es más violenta
que el fuego, teniéndose por malo al que no lo es. (Vase Taltibio).
Tú, anciana servidora, toma esta urna, y sumergiéndola en la mar
tráeme agua para lavar por última vez a mi hija, esposa y no esposa
virgen y no virgen,[54] para exponerla al público como merece; pero
¿cómo lo haré sin recursos? ¿De qué medio me valdré? Reuniré las
joyas de estas cautivas que me acompañan en la tienda, si han podido
ocultar algo suyo de la vista de sus nuevos dueños. (Vase la esclava).