Trivial Fond Records, Concluded

[Leslie Howard and his son, Ronald, at
their home, Stowe Maries, c. 1938]

Over the last two days I have been sharing Ronald Howard's "Hamlet" letters to his father. Those letters were written when Ronald had come to believe that his father had been murdered by the Germans. Howard had also finally accepted the fact that he would never know who ordered the shoot down of his father's civilian plane. Ronald had tried so
hard to learn the truth, but for many reasons the truth would not be given to him. Before that time, however, in the days shortly after learning his father had been killed, Ronald was in a different frame of mind. Howard stated in Trivial Fond Records that even though he was shocked and horrified to hear that his father had been killed, he accepted that his father's death was just one of those things that happens in war.

Howard remembered his father at that time, and the way he used to disappear from gatherings with friends, from parties, from movie sets. He remembered the way that his father would be there one moment, but when Ronald looked around his father would be gone, only to be found off alone somewhere, sleeping in the backseat of a car, in another room reading a book or working on a script, up in the rafters of a movie set away from the hubbub. It was at this time, when Ronald Howard was just 25 years old, that he wrote the following poem(1):

It was so like him. I always thought his exits
Had a ghost-elusive touch; he left the stage
Before one was aware that he had gone . . .
The sort of touch that turned plays into hits;
He knew the quality, seemed to gauge
Its value, as if he thought: 'This I have known,
I rather fancied it would go like this.'
And where the eyes were his defiance shone,
That always seemed much more than artifice.

Beauty he taught me, yet his presence
Near me was a teaching, an unspoken thing
That sprang between us, voice within my blood,
Consanguine music both our hearts could sing.
He gave me eyes to see as his eyes saw
The sunlight in the darkness of a wood,
Beyond the brief horizons of the war.
He gave me hope to know that he was there
Beside me, making sorrow easier to bear.

He did not fail, his life-fire was not spent;
Nor did he weary of the years that steal
Away the spirit. He simply went
Between the barriers of time as through a door
Unbolted on a new experiment,
Inquisitive to seek a life more real
Than he had known, to find his answer there
Beyond the furthest pinnacles of air.

• Howard, Leslie, ed. with Ronald Howard. Trivial Fond Records. London: William Kimber & Co Ltd, 1982. ISBN 978-0-7183-0418-8.
• Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard. London: St. Martin's Press, 1984. ISBN 0-312-41161-8.

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