The Magic Currant Bun (1952) is wonderful. Dolls' houses and cats with telescopes recur felines wrestle in ring beneath the sign 'definitely no scratching' while a pig 'looked in the moonlight even paler than he was: the moonlight has that effect on people, pigs, and things'. These books' enduring charm is independent of illustrations by (among others) Ardizzone and Hoffnung.

After his 1947 funeral at a Brighton crematorium, the town council was outraged to discover pagan texts were recited on its premises.Ĭrowley books apart, Symonds found his widest audience among children. the wickedest man in the world looked rather exhausted - whether from wickedness or from old age I did not then know'. Meanwhile, he had met Crowley whose 'head, in spite of tufts of hair on the sides, seemed no more than a skull. In 1945 he married again, to Renata Israel, and in 1947 published a children's book, William Waste. He edited the latter for a while during the war when, exempt from military service, he briefly married Hedwig Feuerstein. Picture Post and Lilliput provided regular work. For a short while he was close to Peggy Ramsay, the future dramatic agent. Part funded by research work for his reconciled father, Symonds enjoyed a Fitzrovian life with Orwell and Dylan Thomas. It recurs in such novels as With a View of the Palace (1966): 'before the war, the design of the reading room of the British Museum was still intact, and the harsh fluorescent lighting hadn't made its apperance its Victorian architecture was bathed in a restful Victorian atmosphere, that is to say in an equal mixture of light and shade.' The British Museum reading room made good Kent's shortfalls. An architect with a deep knowledge of furniture and clocks, he would not marry Lily, and ignored them for some while.Īt 16, Symonds chose a literary life. He had been sired by Robert Wemyss Symonds. Symonds was born in Battersea, London, and brought up in the Margate boarding-house run by his mother Lily Sapzells, a Lithuanian Jew.

The Shaven Head by John Symonds