Syncronicity

Isn't syncronicity a funny thing? I was puttering around the living room, kind of trying to tidy up...i have noticed a funny smell there the last couple of days and trying to figure out what it is, probably some old papers or books that i moved from the office. I remembered picking up some hand-me-down books left downstairs in the Lobby, so thinking that might be on the source i went looking for them. Picked this one up and smelt it...hmmmm, yes, this might be one causing the mild offending odor...so i take it outside to put on the little table on the balcony to air it out, and as i place it down on the table i glance at the title: A King's Story: The Memoirs of The Duke of Windsor. First published in 1947 and dedicated to Wallis

The funny thing about this is that last night i watched a two-hour (made for t.v.?) movie called: Her Royal Affair, the story about Wallace Simpson.

It was month's ago that i picked up this book thinking i might like to read it someday, and it got buried in amongst my clutter of papers and crafts, but today it resurfaced.

Then i noticed some yellowed newsprint sticking out, and opening up the book i found an article from The Vancouver Sun dated May 8th 1975, the headlines blaring "Good Riddance. What luck that Edward VIII quit!" The article by A.L. Rowse goes on to state:

"The first thing to be said about Frances Donaldson's King Edward VIII: A Biography of the Duke of Windsor, is that it is quite the best book on the subject, reliable,very well informed, written by a gentle-woman who knows both the world and how to write. The tone is excellent, cool and courteous, remarkably without bias.

The second thing is that the reader can rely on this account of it all, when he simply cannot on the Windsors' stories. Both their books are self-justificatory, and without any objective understanding of their determining conditions of their position, of what happened to them, and why.

The Duke of Windsor was really a psychological case. He constructed for himself a caraspace, within which he lived, took up the position that he had been badly treated and had been in the right all along.

The fundamental fact is that he was unsuitable for this job as king and would never have stayed the course. From this point of view Britain owes a debt to the then Mrs. Simpson, now Duchess of Windsor, for getting him off the throne.

This was appreciated at the time at my Oxford College, All Souls, where Geoffrey Dawson was a key figure: as editor of the London Times, a friend of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Archbishop C.G. Lang, he was one of the inner circle who knew everything. When the affair was being discussed, someone said that Edward was quite unsuitable for king and a monument should be erected to Mrs. Simpson for ridding us of him.

There is a most important consideration which provides the perspective in which to view the historic episode. The affair was managed in such gentlemanly fashion in England, with so much of the usual English humbug, all the cracks papered over so far as possible, that even today people are not aware of the true facts of the situation. The financial facts, for one.

Lady Donaldson says that everything has now been said and all is known about the abdication. This is not so: we have not been told about the financial aspects, and naturally she was not given any information by the royal family. She mentions the Duke's meanness about money, that it became an absorbing interest to him and that he made a vast fortune." - to be continued at a later time (my writst are getting sore from too much keyboarding)

By-the-by: the newspaper clipping is an editorial-page book review from the Wall Street Journal, and Dr. Rowse is a well-known British scholar whose special field of study is Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age.

Once the book (the one written by the Duke, strangely titled "A King's Story") is "aired-out" and fit to be indoors, i thought that it would be my Summer Reading, but having read only 8 or 9 pages i doubt that i will be able to plow through it, even in a few summers or more.

The reading is hard going, with labourious sentences like this one describing a scene from his childhood, when he was misbehaving had had to be disciplined by his 'man-nanny' [my interpretation]:

"Finch marched me off to the bedroom, laid my face down on the bed, and while I kicked and yelled, applied a large hand to that part of the anotomy which nature has conveniently provided for the chastisement of small boys." - oh brother!