Helen Tookey on Lucy Tunstall's 'Aunt Jane and the Scholar'

Aunt Jane and the Scholar by Lucy Tunstall

In 1956, or thereabouts,
Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful
scholar from the subcontinent.

Her house is tall and thin like a doll’s house.
Pictures are filling in the walls,
but where the paint shows through in a chink
it is the authentic dull pink of oxblood and lime.

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still
like a still ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers (she must remember) a long trip
to the only part of Canada where it never snows,
weeks and weeks of sky and sea and sickness like snow-sickness.

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

We can easily imagine ‘Aunt Jane’ as the protagonist of a novel, say by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf (conveniently ignoring the mention of ‘1956’, which puts her a bit too late for either of them); yet I think that this poem of sixteen lines tells us as much and as little about her as we would ever discover from that putative novel. The poem is wonderfully compressed, economical; yet we feel that it has given us the essence of a life, and of the oblique yet strangely close relationship between an elderly spinster and (perhaps) a child or young girl, neither of whom really fits in the proper adult world of relationships and talk and work. ‘In 1956, or thereabouts’, the poem begins, ‘Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful / scholar from the subcontinent’. We hear no more about this scholar – the poem immediately switches into a kind of timeless vivid present, the point of view of the speaker visiting the elderly, spinster aunt – yet the opening lines inform everything that follows; we can imagine the implied narrative, the impossible, impermissible love, the forbidden realms of scholarship, the single journey to Canada, and then the withdrawing into the ‘cloistered’ life in her house in London, which is ‘tall and thin like a doll’s house’ – a kind of pretend version of ‘real’ adult life.

The poem draws us (with its speaker) in close, through its language, which in the third stanza becomes a mimetic echo-chamber:

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still like a still
ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers...

We are caught, disturbingly so, inside chiasmus and echoing sound-patterns (‘well’, ‘walls’, ‘water’, ‘lawn’, ‘still’, ‘still’, ‘well’). The language holds us, with the speaker, with Aunt Jane, in a kind of stasis, immured and motionless, with only memory as a kind of half-life.

The final couplet, spare and compressed, completes the mimesis:

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

With their echo of Owen’s ‘drawing down of blinds’, the lines convey loss (the ‘beautiful scholar’, the journeying, the possibilities that then seemed open) and the slow ongoing aftermath of that loss; Aunt Jane’s horizons are reduced to the ‘square / of London sky’, while companionship comes only from the cypress, which leans over her perhaps with solicitude but also with age – like the ‘tall’, ‘thin’ house and the ‘deep’, ‘underwater’ garden, another mirroring of Aunt Jane herself. The last two lines seem to tell us so little of Aunt Jane’s life after its early promise, and yet (‘Ever after a drawing-in’) they tell us everything.

Helen Tookey