This is a great day for the people of Indo-China.
Meaning that the terror the French, as colonial masters, had inflicted on Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) for generations surely was now going to end. And indeed, Weil’s comment was absolutely prescient. The forces of liberation in Indo-China became unstoppable, and the supposedly ‘invulnerable’ French forces, weakened irreparably by their humiliation in the Second World War, were eventually defeated in Indo-China. This short sentence – that for Weil’s detractors has been used (or rather abused) as an indication of her ‘self-hatred’, as a Jew, as a Frenchwoman – actually reveals itself to be one of the most powerful statements in the history of anti-colonialism. There is always a wider context, if we should choose to see it. And, on top of the geopolitical thrust of this statement, Weil is also challenging us to stop thinking that our own suffering and problems are all that matters, encouraging us to look beyond the narrow worlds that most of us inhabit. Colonial liberation starts with liberating ourselves from self-absorption. Being able to hear and see others for the first time.
I pick Stefan up at Dartford station, and we drive south and rendezvous with the others at Tonbridge. None of us know Kent well, and we’re surprised at how shabby and run-down the town looks – boarded-up shops, broken bus shelters, a long way from our mental image of the affluent ‘Garden of England’. We drive a couple of miles east to the village of Tudeley, and pull up outside All Saints’ Church. It looks like a simple medieval church from the outside – rather squat, with a square tower and short spire – yet contained within is a breathtaking artwork, unique in the world. But before we enter, we walk to a tiny graveyard only a few hundred yards from the church, but hidden down a lane. The gate is locked, so we have to make our way over a fence at the back. A single oak dominates the little cemetery, perhaps a dozen graves spread out beneath its branches – the resting place of the d’Avigdor-Goldsmid family. Although Jewish cemeteries are common in our cities, it’s less usual to find such places in the middle of the English countryside.
The gravestones are beautifully designed with fine lettering and decoration. The one I’m looking for has a line from a Shakespeare sonnet carved across the top – ‘Summer’s lease hath all too short a date’ – and the name of the young woman commemorated – Sarah d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, and her dates, 1942–63 – with the simple inscription ‘Lost at sea’. Her brief life is the reason why the artwork exists in the church. We are struck by another inscription, for an older relative, Osmond Elim d’Avigdor Goldsmidt, 1877–1940, who was president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews: ‘A Life Remarkable for Sincerity, Force of Character, Devotion to the Welfare of Others and Kindness to All’. On our way out we are fascinated to find another, smaller headstone, in a little enclosure all on its own, behind yew hedges. Clearly not somebody from the family, but obviously loved by them. But this grave seems quite mysterious, the life only hinted at by the four words given (two different names), and no dates at all: ‘Mahmoud Bouchtet (Jon Carteret)’.
We have a picnic nearby, under willow trees, and I go through the little I know about Sarah’s short life and death. She’d grown up nearby, at Somerhill House, a Jacobean stately home near Tonbridge – her father was Jewish, Sir Henry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, and her mother, Lady Rosemary, was Anglican. Sarah was brought up Anglican too, both she and her mother worshipping at All Saints’ in Tudeley. Sarah and Rosemary were very interested in modern art, and in 1961, at an exhibition in Paris, both had been electrified by seeing Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows, created for a synagogue in Jerusalem – Sarah called them ‘jewels of translucent fire’. On 19 September 1963, tragedy struck the family. Sarah had been out for a day’s sailing off the coast near Rye, with her boyfriend, David Winn, and Patrick Pakenham, the son of Lord Longford. In the evening, after a fine late summer’s day, a sudden storm materialised, capsizing their boat, and throwing the three of them into the sea. They were a couple of miles from shore, and night was falling. They tried desperately to right the boat, but all their efforts failed, and first David and then Sarah slipped into the sea. Patrick, a stronger swimmer, managed to make it back to the shore, but by the time he had alerted help, his companions had drowned.
Over the following year or so, Sarah’s mother, through her connections with the art world, invited Chagall to create a window in Sarah’s memory at the church in Tudeley. The artist by this stage was an old man, very reluctant to take on new commissions, especially in a country he hardly knew, but Rosemary was persuasive, and Chagall appreciated the fact the family were Jewish and Christian (connecting to his own universalist beliefs), and so eventually he accepted the commission to design the east window at All Saints’. Four years after Sarah’s death, in December 1967, Chagall came to Tudeley for the dedication of the extraordinary memorial window. When the eighty-year-old artist saw how brilliantly his design worked in the little church he was extremely moved, and declared, ‘C’est magnifique! Je les ferai tous!’ – and, over the next eighteen years, true to his word, Chagall designed eleven further windows, the last being installed in 1985 – the year he died at the age of ninety-seven. Tudeley is the only church in the world to have all its windows designed by Chagall.
We walk up to the church, and just before we get there, as if by fate, the sun re-emerges from clouds, and so the moment we walk in, the late-afternoon light dapples and dances a flood of myriad blues and greens and yellows from the windows. It’s an overwhelming sensory experience. We gaze at the east window, and the image of Sarah in a sea of indigo, and then a ladder leading up to an illuminated Christ with arms outstretched from the Cross … There are other windows with angels, horses and trees, birds, flowers and butterflies, exquisite paintings in light. The stone floor shimmers as we move across the nave, and the blues give way to honeyed golds and ochres. But the afternoon is fading now into early evening and Simone Weil is calling us to continue our journey eastwards.
We drive for an hour or so, down dipping Kentish lanes, tree tunnels. Squalls of August rains after the heat of the day. The talk now moves on to Germany, Alice is describing a conference there, high up in the mountains. A meeting of counsellors of refugee children that she’d been asked to speak at because of her writing. She was deeply troubled by how disturbed these counsellors seemed to be themselves, and so unaware of their inability to look at their own histories. A sense of burial of trauma, of denial. And yet they couldn’t see how this must affect their work with the children. We’re now on a B-road to Ashford, following a lorry, but I feel no impatience driving today. The rain intensifies. We talk about how the older generations of Germans – those who were young adults in the war years – dealt with the catastrophe that Nazism represented. Or in some cases didn’t. I tell the story of Christian, the little boy growing up in the ruins just after the war, hiding behind the door, watching his parents singing Nazi songs with their friends. Just the sound of the windscreen wipers now. And a question in our minds of how many other children felt betrayed by their parents in these years. Stefan remembers how haunted he was, a long time ago, seeing Rossellini’s devastating Germany, Year Zero, ending with the young boy’s suicide among the ruins of post-war Berlin. Past Sissinghurst, edge of Ashford approaching. We’re sweeping round on the ring road, DIY warehouses, ugly travel lodges. When we reach the end, we’re amused to see the local authority has named this grim stretch of dual carriageway ‘Simone Weil Avenue’.