Sunday, January 21, 2018

His name was Owen

From Novel and Unwelcome Coincidences by Susan Hill.
When I was a child, I frequently visited my maternal grandmother who lived with her sister, my great aunt. They were the last survivors of a family of seven sisters and one brother. His photograph, in army uniform, stood on the piano. He, the pride and joy, the youngest and best beloved, had been killed at the Battle of the Somme on his 19th birthday. His name was Owen. To them his memory was green, and they spoke of him constantly, and of that war the war, though they had lately lived through a second (this was the late 1940s).
The actual point of Hill's essay is the role of coincidences in life, and a description of three occasions where work she was producing was eerily paralleled by other authors. Not literary espionage, just coincidence. It is an interesting read.

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