KATHLEEN MAY MASCARÓ (née Ellis)

31 August 1912 – 14 February 2004

On 29 January this year, just a fortnight before she died, dear Kathleen wrote her last letter to me.  It reached me in London, addressed simply to ‘Dr William Radice, Professor of Bengali, SOAS, Universitat de Londres.’

I was rushing to prepare for a week in Houston, Texas, so I took her letter with me and answered it with a postcard from Houston that I bought at the Museum of Fine Arts opposite my hotel.  It was of a painting by Paul Klee that was like a patchwork of bright colours.  It reminded me of the rugs that Kathleen wove at Dry Drayton.  I said on my card that I hoped, if the weather was grey in Cambridgeshire, the colours would cheer her up.  I don’t think my card reached her before she died.  But I’m glad its cheerful image of light and colour was on its way to her, because her letters and cards to me often brought the same.  For example, a card of a painting of a Greek harbour, sent to me on 9 October 1988, with the message: ‘I collected this card yesterday, and, knowing your affection for the blue Mediterranean, I pass it on to you.’

Let me read you her last letter to me, as her clear voice and handwriting were just as they always were.       

Dear William,

I have been sent a most wonderful book from the university of the Balearic islands.  They are celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Universitat de les Illes Balears, and so they are publishing the book, in which ‘the living memory of each of the Honorary Doctors, their curriculum vitae and the investiture ceremonies are reflected.’  There are three or four pages on Juan with a wonderful portrait of him in colour, and a picture of a gathering of people – including a good picture of you at the end of a row.  You really should come & see this book (which will be yours when I die!).  Can you manage to come or must you wait until my decease?  

It’s ages since we have corresponded.  I hope I can find your address.  

With much love,

Kathleen

I think, with her memory suffering from age, she had forgotten that I had in fact been in touch with her just before Christmas, and that on the spur of the moment I’d seized a free morning to visit her, on 19 December.  When she wrote the letter, Juan, as always, was in her mind, and in particular the magnificent Investidura in Santa Margalida in September 1997, when I was so proud to accept his posthumous honorary doctorate on her behalf.  What could be more natural than to put the University of London on the envelope in Catalan – ‘Universitat de Londres’?

Juan was so central to her life, and his achievements as a translator and thinker were so unique and enduring, that it would be easy to devote much of this address to him.  But it is Kathleen whom we remember today, Kathleen May Ellis, as she was when she married him in 1951, Kathleen the mother of their children, Kay as she became known to Violet Hawkes and the large circle of family and friends who took her so much to their hearts when she sold the old house in Comberton and moved to Old Rectory Drive, Dry Drayton, to spend her last few years in perfect happiness and tranquillity.

There are many ways to help and influence and enrich other people.  Juan did so – and continues so to do –  all over the world through his books.  Kathleen’s influence, as a teacher, mother and friend, was unobtrusive, more localised perhaps, but no less profound than her husband’s.

Looking through all her letters to me, I was amazed at how many points in my life, during the thirty years that I knew her, her calm rationality, her warm sense of humour, her wise open-mindedness touched and strengthened and encouraged me.  I’m sure there are many other people here today for whom that was also so.

Kathleen was totally a Cambridgeshire person.  She was born in the thatched house in Comberton, named ‘The Retreat’ by her mother almost as if she knew that Juan would one day live there; and she lived there right until her move to Dry Drayton.  Her parents were themselves from Comberton, so Violet has told me; her grandfather delivered post on foot from Barton to Toft; her father worked as a manager for Chivers.  They had a son too: when I visited Kathleen before Christmas, she told me that her brother got through the whole war in the RAF, only to die in a civilian air crash afterwards.

Kathleen became a primary school teacher, in Cromer before the war, in Histon during the war, and then for many years at Dry Drayton Parochial School, where she guided the infant section.  A year or two ago I took her out for lunch at the Black Horse in Dry Drayton.  The middle-aged waitress recognised her as her old school teacher, greeted her with lively affection.  I don’t think Kathleen remembered her (it’s the fate of teachers to be remembered by far more pupils than they can ever keep in their minds), but she did recall the family: there were several siblings.  The waitress must have been one of hundreds of past pupils who learned from Kathleen, benefited from her patience and merriment; her total respect for the dignity of the child.

Kathleen went on teaching while Martin and Mary were growing up, and she remained rooted to Cambridgeshire.  But through marrying Juan Mascaró i Fornés (a lodger, at the time, in her parents’ house) she discovered many new worlds.

There was the world of language.  She learnt Juan’s native languages, Castilian and Catalan, and though she was self-deprecating about her proficiency in them – and she didn’t get much opportunity to speak them – she knew them precisely and well.  When after Juan died I was working on The Creation of Faith and needed help sometimes with Spanish or Catalan, I knew I could always rely on Kathleen for a quick and accurate translation.  And she loved those languages; our mutual friend Louise Coigley was telling me earlier this week how Kathleen so valued the concept and the word ‘Imaginación’ – so much more beautiful, she would say, than English ‘Imagination’. 

Then there were the countries and places she came to love through Juan’s connections with them: above all Mallorca, and his home town of Santa Margalida, but also France – ‘a country I love’, she wrote in a letter to me, underlining love – explored on their journeys by car to Spain and Mallorca.  And all the countries or places where she and Juan had friends came to mean so much to her: Botton in North Yorkshire where Mary found a home with the Camphill Trust; the Black Isle in Scotland where she stayed with John and Sylvia Shaw; even India, because of Juan’s involvement with its spiritual heritage, though she never physically went there.

Juan’s spiritual world was another much-loved place – a universe, rather – that she inhabited, especially after his death.  Let me quote from a letter she wrote me six months after he had gone. 

I do not feel as though I am ‘without Juan’: I did at first, but not now.  I read somewhere that a place where holy learning & teaching (Hindu, I suppose) have taken place is a kind of sanctuary, where no harm can come, and Juan’s study, where I am sleeping, has this lovely feeling.  Juan used to grumble sometimes & tell me that I never read the Gita or the Upanishads and he simply could not understand my argument, which was the truth, that I needed neither when he was there to answer my questions, and that if I were left alone I would read them constantly: which I am doing.  The Upanishads are so beautiful & if I think of the book, it has such an aura of sunshine, that it seems to glow with its own light.

How evocative that description of Juan’s study is to all of us who remember the house, the timeless way in which Juan’s aura and Kathleen’s household arts blended so perfectly: where a paella cooked by her or a Rioja opened by him seemed like the soma of the gods, and the fires she kept burning in every room were like the sacred homāgni!

But the largest world of all that her marriage to him opened up was the world of their children, Martin and Mary.  This wasn’t an easy world, all of us know that; Mary herself, who is here today, knows that.  Precisely because it was not easy, it gave her infinite and compassionate insight into every kind of difficulty that individuals, societies and the world as a whole can face.  She never regarded Martin and Mary as any different from the rest of us; she knew that the courage they have needed to get through life is needed by us all.

In her years of widowhood, she never ceased to go on expanding her horizons, exploring new worlds.  She was by nature creative; Mary in her poems has inherited that creativity.  Kathleen could have been a painter: Rowena Ryle, when I spoke to her this week, mentioned the lovely painting of onions that hung over Kathleen’s Comberton kitchen table.  She could have been a scientist or mathematician.  Maybe it was Juan’s friendship with Sir Martin Ryle that awoke in her an interest that she pursued keenly in her reading right to the end: Stephen Hawking, the New Scientist, a book called The Magic of Number that she told me in a letter in 1992 intrigued her so much that ‘I am really going to think about each page until I have conquered it.’ She was, however – no ‘could have been’ about this – a weaver: an early recruit to the weaving group that Violet established at Dry Drayton.  Elizabeth and I have a rug made by her; our daughters have bags made by her; Violet tells me that Kathleen was winding material for weaving the night before she died, finishing the bag before she went to bed.

She died on St Valentine’s Day.  Violet noticed that her curtains were still closed, thought at first she was sleeping late, then went in as she and others would do every morning for coffee and found her in the world that she had told many of us she was now more than ready for.  With what words shall I end?  So many of Juan’s would do, his own or the texts he translated.  But we’re having some readings from those.  Amongst my collection of letters and papers from Kathleen, I found, however, two pieces of writing that I didn’t know before.  One is an essay by Juan and Kathleen’s friend Raimundo Panikkar on ‘The Message of Yesterday’s India to Today’s World’.  This paragraph from near the end seems so true of Kathleen’s last years:

The Indian sense of death is this: I am in as much as I begin at death and gather more life unto myself.  I do not move toward death, I move away from it, and the further away death recedes, the more authentic life becomes.  The more present and immediate life becomes, the further it moves from death, which is a phenomenon of the past.  I live not toward my end, but successively away from it.

Finally, a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), written down by Juan in his inimitable handwriting in one of his notebooks.  There is a translation by Kathleen attached, with the note: ‘As near as I can get to a literal translation.  Isn’t it beautiful in Spanish?  An Argentinian girl told me it was made into a pop song a few years ago & everyone was singing it.’ If Gregori will forgive my pronunciation, I’ll read it in Spanish, then in Kathleen’s English.