Part of "Mr. God, This is Anna" - the last bit.

Really the whole book is too precious to miss, but this is just the last bit:

I had been given a bundle of books some time previously, but I hadn't bothered to undo them.  There didn't seem to be much point.  It was one of those idle moments; I didn't know what to do with myself.  [The war years] had made my eyes tired with looking and my ears ache with listening.  Some sign, some vision, just for a moment.  I picked up the books.  They didn't seem all that interesting.  Nothing seemed very interesting.  I flipped through the pages.  It wasn't until my eyes fell upon the name Coleridge that I stopped the pages of the book slipping through my fingers.  For me Coleridge is at the top of the heap.  I began to read:


'I adopt with full faith the theory of Aristotle that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident, that its...'


I turned back a few pages and began to read again.  ...


'The process by which the poetic imagintation works is illustrated by Coleridge from the following lines of Sir John Davies:


"Thus doth she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the individual kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers name and fates
Steal access thro' our senses to our minds." '


.... A few lines further on my eyes caught one word, 'violence'.


"The young poet', says Goethe, 'must do some sort of violence to himself to get out of the mere general idea.  No doubt this is difficult, but it is the very art of living.'


It slowly began to make sense, the bits began to fall into place.  Something was happening and it made me cry; for the first time in a long, long time I cried.  I went out into the night and stayed out.  The clouds seemed to be rolling back.  It kept nagging at the back of my mind.  Anna's life hadn't been cut short; far from it, it had been full, completely fulfilled.


The next day I headed back to the cemetery.  It took me a long time to find Anna's grave.  It was tucked away at the back of the cemetery.  I knew that it had no headstone, just a simple wooden cross with the name on it, 'Anna.'  I found it after about an hour.


I had gone there with a this feeling of peace inside me, as if the book had been closed, as if the story had been one of triumph, but I hadn't expected this.  I stopped and gasped.  This was it.  The little cross leaned drunkenly, its paint peeling off, and there was the name ANNA. 


I wanted to laugh, but you don't laugh in a cemetery, do you?  Not only did I want to laugh, I had to laugh.  It wouldn't stay bottled up.  I laughted till the tears ran down my face.  I pulled up the little cross and threw it into a thicket.


'Ok, Mister God', I laughed, 'I'm convinced.  Good old Mister God.  You might be a bit slow at times, but you certainly make it all right in the end.'


Anna's grave was a brilliant red carpet of poppies.  Lupins stood gard in the background.  A couple of trees whispered to each other whilst a family of little mice scurried backwards and forwards through the uncut grass.  Anna was truly home.  She didn't need a marker.  You couldn't better this with a squillion tons of marble.  I stayed for a little while and said goodbye to her for the first time in five years.  


As I made my way back to the main gates I passed by hordes of little marble cherubs, angels and pearly gates.  I stopped in front of the twelve-foot angel, still trying to lay down its bunch of marble flowers after God knows how many years.


'Hi, chum', I said, saluting the angel, 'you'll never make it, you know.'


I swung on the iron gates as I yelled back into the cemetery.


'The answer is, "In my middle".'


A finger of thrill went down my spine and I thought I heard a voice saying, 'What's that the answer to, Fynn?'


'That's easy.  The question is "Where's Anna?" '


I had found her again - found her in my middle.


I felt sure that somewhere Anna and Mister God were laughing.  


(By Fynn, Fontana/Collins, London, England 1974)

... And a little child shall lead them...