From all my digging on Weil in Ashford I’ve managed to discover only sparse details. I know that she died in the Grosvenor Sanatorium, after being transferred there from the Middlesex Hospital in mid-August 1943. She’d been in London for just eight months, a mainly unhappy experience for her. Frail and passionate, she had repeatedly badgered the commanders at the Free French headquarters to allow her to parachute behind enemy lines to join the Resistance. Or to be part of a squadron of ‘suicide nurses’ who would tend to the injured and dying in the occupied territories, and prove to the Nazis that ‘the French too could laugh in the face of death’. Hardly surprisingly, her entreaties were not taken very seriously. She did write, with an irony that would not have escaped her, The Need for Roots in London; she also developed a real affection for British culture, especially Shakespeare and pubs.
But her determination to continue a kind of starvation diet that she had started long before, in solidarity with all of those suffering under occupation – combined with her heavy smoking – led to her collapsing in April 1943. Her doctors at the Middlesex Hospital identified TB but also told her that rest and a proper diet would save her. They didn’t understand who they were dealing with, though, as these two concepts were anathema to Weil. Later, they called her ‘the worst patient we have ever encountered’. By the time she was transferred to the Grosvenor Sanatorium the TB had radically worsened and there was nothing more that could be done. On seeing her new accommodation in the sanatorium she simply said: ‘What a beautiful room in which to die.’
I had only a single photograph of Grosvenor Hall for us to go on – the house which had housed the former tuberculosis sanatorium between 1913 and 1955. And the fact that the hall was located in Kennington, a district on the northern fringe of Ashford.
We drive up a gentle hill, through this suburb, hoping for some clue, some sign of this building. But soon we’re emerging from the town, out into fields again. I turn the car round. By now Alice’s children are tiring and the quest to stumble upon the old sanatorium seems a bridge too far. Resigned to this, we stop at a pub by a roundabout on the edge of Ashford, a large Victorian pile, have coffee and cake to boost our energy levels. Suddenly I look up at the inn, its high gables and its extension at the back. Could it possibly be the place? Stefan and I compare the little photograph with the building in front of us. There is a striking structural similiarity, though the chimneys seem slightly different. I go inside again and ask the landlord. No, he doesn’t know anything about a sanatorium – as far as he knows this place has always been a hotel or an inn. But he gives me directions to Bybrook cemetery, where I know Weil is buried. In the gents, Stefan and I are chatting about our search when a guy emerges from a cubicle and says, ‘I reckon the place you’re after used to be the police training college – I think it was called Grosvenor Hall. It’s just down the hill, near the cemetery.’ We’re wryly amused at the breakthroughs that can occur in unlikely places, and head back to the car, keen to tell Alice of our discovery. With our potential lead we drive back down the hill in much better spirits.
At the bottom of the hill we turn off, following Bybrook Road, and almost immediately there’s another turn and a sign, ‘Grosvenor Hall Outdoor Adventure Centre’. Yes, it must be here, surely! We drive up a long track, winding through pines and avenues of poplars. There are high fences, with barbed wire at the top, curious for such a place. Maybe left over from the police college days? Not a single other car or person around. We come round a bend, and finally, there it is in front of us at last – Grosvenor Hall, with its distinctive pointed gables and intricate chimneys, the place where Simone Weil died.
Some of the trees on the left of the photograph are still there. We try to imagine the landscape through her eyes, the countryside she saw from her window. The last of this place. The earth she inhabited so uneasily. The poplars would have grown since her time, but the oak and the beech she would have seen from her window, albeit as younger trees. Mid-August 1943. The war raging on, but the tide turning now. Hamburg still smouldering from the single night of bombing which had ended 42,000 lives. The Battle of Kursk on the Eastern Front and now the Soviet army about to liberate Kharkov. American troops landing in Sicily. But Speer, in his office in Berlin, more preoccupied with the American raid on Schweinfurt on 17 August and the disruption to armaments production …
And here in Kent the wheat almost ready for harvest, the orchards growing heavy with their fruit. The recovering TB patients walking around the grounds, planning concert parties in the evenings – Joan, Rusty, Irene, Betty, Joyce, Olive, Doris, Bobby, Trudy, Daphne, Agnes, Sheila, Winnie, Mary. All preparing their songs. And the thirty-four-year-old Simone in her room, thinking back on her life, watching the clouds move eastwards, back towards the country of her birth … The clouds with no limits. Able to fly over lands occupied, cities bombed. Beyond the railways and the extermination camps. Weil had not been surprised to learn about the mass murder of the Jews, having spent her life trying to understand the extreme barbarities of the world; in fact, she used the word ‘holocaust’ long before others, asking a friend, ‘How do we condemn a holocaust if we have not condemned all past holocausts?’4
We turn back down the track. Just the hum of the car’s engine. Sun coming through, the early-evening light dappling the leaves above. The last of summer. The cemetery is much easier to find; we park by the gates, and walk through the neat paths, formed in rectangles under cherry trees. We pass a strange collection of graves – little, vibrantly coloured windmills whirling, dolls, teddy bears, and realise with a shudder that these must be children’s graves. We arrive at the western edge of the cemetery, and it’s almost as if I’ve been here before, I have such a strong sense of where the grave will be. We walk to the base of half a dozen tall pine trees and there, exactly as I’d imagined, is Simone Weil’s grave. Edged by orange and pink flowers, a simple grey tablet, with the stark inscription:
SIMONE WEIL
3 fevrier 1909
24 aout 1943
Some wisps of dead flowers laid at one corner. But we’re pleased to see that people still come here. There’s another flecked grey tablet of stone that’s been placed at the foot of her grave, with words carved in black letters, but it’s very faded, only some of them are still legible, so it’s a struggle to read:
MEMBER [?] OF PROVISIONAL FRENCH
GOVERNMENT IN LONDON
BUT DEVELOPED [?] TUBERCULOSIS
GROSVENOR
SANATORIUM ASHFORD
WRITINGS
FOREMOST
MODERN PHILOSOPHERS
We’re intrigued at the grave next to hers, extremely close. Stephen Maynard, died in 1948, and Ethel Mary Maynard. The proximity suggests some connection with Weil. Stefan then reads the inscription which says: ‘Don’t look for flaws as you go through life; and even if you find them, it is wise and kind to be somewhat blind, and look for the virtues behind them.’ Now that nobody’s speaking I become aware of the constant, low rumble of the motorway a couple of hundred yards beyond the trees, down in the valley. Before we leave, knowing our friend Johann’s strong connection with Weil’s work, I read aloud his short meditation ‘A Girl Like Antigone’ – visiting her room in Paris, the table at which she wrote, the window overlooking the Jardin de Luxembourg and the city beyond: