Deleted Notes & Queries response: At what age do we become capable of love?

Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 12th June 2022.

The comment has since been deleted from the website.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.

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At what age do we become capable of love?

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“Our next door neighbour is the London Underground,” said Ann Cromack, as she led me, at a brisk pace, through the labyrinthine sub-basement of the British Museum.

“We share a common wall with the Central Line,” she clarified, inserting a key into the lock of Room 45, which is also known as 'The Temple of Aphrodite'. The name conjures images of Doric columns, bleached by the glare of the Mediterranean sun; a far cry from the disquieting reality of wall-to-wall cabinets, filled from top to bottom with disembodied arms - rendered mostly in marble, many missing fingers - all layered in shallow drawers with sliding glass lids, like the macabre trophy display of a prolific and well-organised serial killer.

“Dr Peter Brook started the repatriation collection at the behest of his wife, Thalia, in the 1950s,” Cromack elaborated. She fiddled with a bank of light switches on the wall, next to the door, until she had achieved what she regarded as the correct distribution of illumination. “After he retired, he palmed it off onto Eddie Lucas, my disgraced mentor. I was handed the reins following Eddie's nose-dive from grace.”

She kicked a cat bed trailing a dishevelled red blankey, out of my path.

“Toby's having his mid-morning sulk,” she said. “He'll be down later.”

That at least explained the collage of claw marks that had gouged a patch of dull varnish off the bottom of the door. One never really knows in a museum, that is rammed to the gills with classical antiquities, whether something of ancient, and perhaps also malevolent, provenance might have let itself out of its glass case and gone for a wander.

“These are all from the amnesty?” I enquired.

“All pilfered,” said Cromack. “In the early days, when the museum put regular notices in The Times, the response was overwhelming. Peter wrote hundreds of letters to museums all over the world, asking them whether they possessed any statues of Aphrodite, or her Roman upgrade, Venus, who were missing arms. They would send back photographs. He made plaster casts of any promising candidates so they could test the fit. Nowadays we use computer technology. It is still British Museum policy to go through the whole glass slipper routine with any armless statue that passes through our portals, as they do in the touring exhibits.”

“William Gowland was my favourite of the Planetary Romanticists,” I said. “I know that sounds like damnation through faint praise.”

“I always picture a floppy-haired young man in a silken blouse, reclined on a mound of satin cushions, with the back of his hand pressed against his fevered brow,” said Cromack. 

Behind her, a tabby cat padded nonchalantly into room. Taking the red blankey in its mouth it began to drag the basket back into the centre of the room.

“You are referring to Charles Staveley's painting The End of Travels,” I said. “Did you know that it was painted in a Turkish opium den? Most people think that it depicts the death of Gowland, but he didn't shuffle off his mortal coil until he was well into his 80s."

“Well, he did leave us with an awfully big mess to tidy up,” sighed Cromack. The cat pressed its arching body forcefully against the right leg of her jeans.

I had been contemplating a witticism - something along the lines of Gowland and his admirers regarding their collective act of cultural vandalism as 'armless,' but thought that I might be venturing down too well-trodden a path.

In common with many educated and wealthy young men, the aforementioned poet had embarked upon a grand tour of Europe and had invariably fetched up in Greece where, for unaccountable reasons, he had hacked an arm off a statue of Aphrodite and returned home with it. When his daughter, Agnes, was born, a few years later, he had placed the arm in her crib so she might “know love in its most pure of forms.” I am sure that his wife, Rebecca, was thrilled to hear this indirect denunciation of her worth as a mother.

“One who is armed with love,” I said, quoting Gowland's own verse, to which the centuries have not been kind.

He was the originator of an unfortunate trend that saw a wave of romantic young Englishmen descend upon the classical ruins of the continent like locusts, divesting the arms from any statue that might be the mistaken for the goddess of love. They handed down these severed stone limbs to their offspring, or gave them away as macabre christening presents. Before long there were factories in London churning out copies. There exist disturbing daguerreotypes of plump Victorian children, dressed in their font robes, with the fingers of disembodied marble arms clamped onto their wrists.

This practice continued well into the late 20th century. As a baby, I slept under a mobile that, in addition to the usual moon, stars and assorted nursery rhyme characters, jiggled a pudgy doll's arm above my head like a grasping sword of Damocles.

“Did it have any positive or negative effect?” enquired Cromack.

I shook my head.

“I remember the first time that I was conscious of love," I said. "I was probably around seven years old. I was at grandparent's house. It was July or August and I had come in out of the sun. You know what it's like to have young eyes: The sudden transition from the outdoor glare to the interior darkness of the kitchen was so jarring that it physically hurt. As my vision slowly came back into focus, I saw my grandmother standing in the gloom by the kitchen sink, running the hot tap. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time. In that moment I felt an overwhelming love for her. If I had experienced anything like that before, then I was not conscious of it. I do know, with absolute certainty, that I have not felt anything like it since."

I hope this is of help.

image generated by Craiyon