I wondered at it then and I wonder still. Why did I decide (or rather why did I feel compelled) to splice random memories of Uncle Tom into my narrative? These episodes certainly don’t add up to a rounded memoir, a picture of a man in full, and in some respects they’re only tangentially relevant to the main thrust of the story. I’m not sure this strand of the book actually really works as a plausible exploration of motive. So… Those who feel there’s a disconnect here… I’m sure they’re right. Or sort of right.
Maybe I was just looking for an excuse, had long been looking for it, to tangle with memories important to me. But the intellectual justification, the aesthetic notion that there’s a mutually enhancing effect in play here, evocation of the film and evocation of a man whose imagination was fired by that film somehow working in harmony to generate a little heat or light or whatever… well, maybe it just doesn’t add up. And maybe if I fail sometimes to feel convinced then it’s even less likely that you, dear reader, will be stirred in the slightest.
And yet, isn’t it the duty of us all, jointly and severally, to salvage what we can? Any opportunity we get?
In loving memory?
Don’t worry. This is no trite Larkin-Arundel-Tomb moment. You know: the notion that what will survive of us is love.
Tom had a table-top cigarette-lighter, silver, miniature urn meets Aladdin’s lamp, ornate with vaguely classical tassels and braid, which gave it a fastidious delicacy, yet it was chunky as a hand grenade too.
One day, at least a year after I had first written about it, I came across it in a junk shop. I was astonished, amazed, flabbergasted. What were the odds? It was going for rather more than a song, though it was not in working order, no wick, no flint; but of course I bought it.
And then, when I got it home, I did some research. Turns out it was made by the Ronson company and they produced them in their millions starting in 1936 but for a couple of decades thereafter.
So, my Ronson Queen Anne is not Tom’s actual Ronson Queen Anne, obviously… though stranger things have happened.
I have never sought to replace its wick and flint.
Nor, for that matter, have I tried rubbing it.
