Diana Lodge

I was delighted to discover a video of Diana Lodge, interviewed by Jonathan Stedall for HTV in the 1990s, on YouTube yesterday evening. The film, in two parts, is embedded at the bottom of this blog. Diana Lodge’s voice is one of the beautiful memories from my childhood, and I have long wanted to be reminded of it.

Diana was a dear friend of my mother’s. They met in the Black Mountains in the late 1960s, up at Capel y Ffin, where my parents often went to stay with the Davies clan. Helen Davies was a granddaughter of Eric Gill, who my mother got to know through Father Brocard Sewell, who was one of the first people to publish my mother and who had known Gill in the 1930s.

Diana Lodge in 1993

Diana, who had modelled for Gill when she was a young woman, used to stay in a caravan nearby, and struck up a friendship with my mother in particular. She was always interested in poets, and had indeed married one.

My parents came to stay with her in Gloucestershire in the late 60s - visiting her in Slad was ‘like walking into a Samuel Palmer painting’, according to my mother. When we moved to Gloucestershire, to a house advertised as ‘going for a song’ in the Evening Standard, it happened, by joyous chance, to be an easy walk from Diana’s house.

This film is about Diana’s deep faith, which she discussed at length with my mother (my mother was at home discussing spiritual matters with anyone - when she and my father were to marry, my Jewish grandmother went to Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, worrying that my father was ‘marrying out’. ‘Rosie,’ Rabbi Schonfeld said, ‘Frances is a better Jew than Michael will ever be…’) but, for me, it is the cadences of her voice that matter most deeply.

There is a deep kindness in Diana’s voice, which spilled out into every action of her that I remember, and a deep well of interest in people. Her voice, distilled, makes up a large part of the sound of my childhood; the sound of Easter egg hunts in her large garden; the sound of sun through the trees. It brings my mother’s voice back to me very strongly, and the vision of her walking through the woods of the Slad valley, sometimes with me in tow, but as often as not on her own, or with Diana, to whom she dedicated her poem Walking in Autumn.