The war is not new to those of us who live in England, of course. Hitler has been bombing England for many months. Last fall and again in May, the blitz destroyed or damaged over a million homes in London and left more than forty thousand people dead. Stately buildings and cathedrals that I admired have collapsed to rubble. The church at my beloved St. Bart’s Hospital was damaged as well. Now Germany has declared war on America and Mr. Churchill, who just addressed the Joint Session of Congress to win support for the war, has suffered a heart attack. As a physician I am worried about Mr. Churchill. As a grandmother, I am concerned about my grandson, who is in the RAF, I fear that he may not return unscathed.
Panicked, our community has drawn together, trying to find a voice of reason in the madness. We all try to believe, as my old friend, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, counseled, that when clouds float in our lives, they will not carry rain nor usher in a storm, but add colour to the sunset sky. It is hard to believe this when the clouds of war gather like a pack of grey wolves.
If Sherlock Holmes were still here, surely he would be racing like a wild hare to Germany to ferret out the evil and wickedness that has caused such devastation, though this time there would be little he could do.
Sherlock Holmes... I don’t think I ever stopped loving him. I had never met anyone like him.
We met on the grounds of Oxford University. Seeking to protect me from the strange young man with the fencing foil who approached, my bull terrier sunk its teeth into Sherlock’s calf. Sherlock sustained a deep wound and twisted his ankle. From that day forward, I was drawn to him.
I came to respect the many talents and qualities he shared with my Uncle Ormond. Because my family home was in the Broads in Norfolk, I had resided with my uncle and aunt in London for many years while attending a private girls’ school and nursing school and, later, medical school. I adored my uncle, so perhaps I saw in Sherlock what I so admired in Uncle... his focus, his brilliant mind, his wry sense of humour, his tenacity, the uncanny ability to observe and deduce, the appreciation of logic, the fierce dedication to his work above all else. Before I met him, my life was like a deep, deliberate breath, measured, purposeful. My uncle said that from childhood I seemed to have an innate and obdurate insistence on carefully calculating each step of my life’s journey, anticipating every solution without an aquifer of emotion and barely a tincture of eros. Even as an adolescent girl blossoming into adulthood, I refused to let my dreams be blighted by societal limitations and expected no moments of ecstasy. I was content to soldier on and to numb my emotions if necessary.
My personality, up until then at least, was a million kilometers away from one of Chekhov’s romantic heroines. But like Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, when I met Sherlock I suddenly felt the same foolish yearnings. At times I seemed to suffer from some mysterious infestation, luminescent though it might be, which could have spread, which could have robbed me of my own ambitions, so entwined did I become with his. Without judgment, without blinking, and completely unaware of the spectre of loss or humiliation, I plunged into a kiln of emotional tar from which I could not break free. I was propelled toward that sparkling beauty that seemed to glide over Sherlock’s disturbing darkness, savagery and loneliness. I was thrown off balance by my response to him. It seemed so undignified and immature.
We were very different, Sherlock and I. I held to a Dickensian view of the lives of the poor. I often felt a moral urgency when presented with poverty, tragedy or cruelty; sometimes he saw these as merely didactic hypotheticals for someone else to deal with, and often the poor and homeless children who ran errands for him seemed to be mere secondhand casualties. I gave in to my emotions, more often than I like to admit. He could be warm but rarely intimate. He let few people get close.
As I fell in love with him, my feelings for him collided in a kind of slurry that lay somewhere between bewitching and bewildering. But he seemed astonished that someone could love him and alarmed by the idea that he could be capable of having his heart broken.
When it fell apart, I was crushed. His withdrawal from me was sudden and laced with logic, but that made it no less brutal. It was as unexpected as the sting of a hornet - swift and sharp - but such pain can linger the longest. It was the most terrible hurt of my life, and when we parted, I tried to shed Sherlock Holmes like a snake sheds its skin - because he had outraged and frustrated me. But he had also stimulated, inspired, even humbled and moved me. I had been lost in it all, in quests for justice, in him, and felt shaken and overwhelmed. So, for several years, while Sherlock completed his education at Oxford and I finished medical school, I managed to put distance between us. Snippets of information about what he was doing and how he was faring were ferried to me now and then by my brother Michael Stamford, a physician at St. Bart’s where Sherlock conducted many chemistry experiments. I tried not to pay attention.
But when I ran into him again at an Oxford event, I was like a bride unveiled as she
