Underneath The Water

 Underneath the water
Six feet deep
There lies Hitler
Fast asleep.

Child's skipping rhyme as recorded by Charles Causeley.

I dreamed I was in the Chancellery at the end of World War II. The papers the Nazis had left behind would need to be sorted through. Then Hitler emerged from wherever it was he'd been hiding and sat down with us.

So many of the great men and women of the past never died in the way history records but faked their deaths and were seen afterwards by "reliable" witnesses. Jim Morrison is alive and working as an electrician in L.A.  Tsar Alexander II went off and became a Holy Man. Joan of Arc married a nobleman. As for Jesus-  well, need I go on?  In the case of Hitler there are still Argentinian country people who remember the elderly German chap who lived with his younger wife on a farm in the hills and used to receive visits from seemingly important folk in big sleek automobiles. There are photos. The moustache has gone. His health wasn't good and he died in the 1960s.

Perhaps the truthiest truth is that there are multiple timelines, billions of them- and there's a certain amount of leakage between them (viz the Mandela effect).  In one timeline Hitler committed suicide, In another he was arrested by the Russians, in a third he has rescued. Perhaps there's even one in which he suffered the fate imagined for him in Tarentino's Inglorious Basterds. Why live out only one version of one's life? Let's rather extract every last drop of juice from the human experience.

The latest "great man" to be both alive and dead is Jeffery Epstein. He wasn't suicided, he was spirited away and is currently living out his life in a luxury villa in Tel Aviv. A great number of people believe this to be the case. Winesses have emerged.....

Benjamin West

 The Lewes Meeting House has a copy of this print. It'll be worth a few bob. They have it leaning against a wall, out of sight, out of mind. I love old prints and if I weren't a fine upstanding citizen I'd have waited until no-one was looking and added it to my collection.



It's called Mr West and his family. The original was painted by Mr West and commemorates a visit of his elderly male relatives to see his new-born second son. The two old gents are Quakers wearing Quaker gear- which is presumably why the Lewes Meeting House aquired it.

Mr West is Benjamin West, the American painter. Born in Pennsylvania, he studied in Italy, as one did, then moved to England where he prospered, becoming court painter to George III and the second president of the Royal Academy, in succession to Joshua Reynolds. He seems to have been an agreeable man. When the American colonies rebelled against the mother country he kept  a discreet silence and wouldn't be drawn.

He is best known for big, splashy paintings of historical events. He did Bible stories, Roman history, medieval history and modern times. and was prolific in producing them. Sadly they are not very much to modern taste, being theatrical, melodramatic and often wildly inaccurate. If you set aside your prejudices it is possible to admire them for their energy and imagination. The best known of them, and one of the most carefully considered is his Death of Wolfe. Wolfe was the general who captured Quebec from the French-  thus securing Canada for the British Empire.  I do rather like it. As West's histories go it is really quite restrained. Wolfe was famous and singular among officers for carrying a rifle- just like a common soldier- and there it is discarded at his feet. West has done his research.



Scrolling through the reproductions of West's work on wikipedia I found a number of rather charming little paintings of everyday subjects which look as if they were done quickly, freely and possibly even for fun. In the first we have some gentlemen in a punt out fishing with what looks rather like a sea battle going on in the far distance. In the second we see some sturdy British peasants reaping corn and canoodling in the vicinity of Windsor Castle while some glittery gentlefolk look on.