Welcome.
We're
gathered today to celebrate the life of Joan Abse. For those I haven't
met before I am Joan and Dannie's son-in-law and have the honour of
introducing our speakers this afternoon. But first I would like to
say a few words about Joan myself. Several others will be talking
about Joan's literary and artistic achievements - her great works
- but I would like to speak instead about her greatest work of all,
her Christmas pud - quite possibly the greatest gift anyone could
bequeath to the world.
I am only half joking here for it is Joan's art of living that I most
wish to commemorate. As my wife Susanna, Joan's second daughter, reminded
me just the other day, Joan is still present in so many ways. Her
legacy is in the food we cook - Grandma's green soup and still the
family favourite - beef brisket; in the generosity of care that her
children Susannna, Keren and David have inherited and taken into their
chosen professions and relationships; in our rituals of pulling hair
on birthdays with chants of "hen and goose" and even in
my own daughter's chosen first tentative steps into a career in art
history that was majorly shaped by Joan
Joan poured out a very particular care and love and everyone that
met her fell in love with her - fell in love not in the shallow fickle
sense of Hollywood, but deeply, passionately and respectfully. When
I first took my first shaky steps into the Abse household it was an
invitation to lunch at Hodford Road. Coming from a family that discouraged
talk at table, it was like I had stumbled into the UN with everyone
oppositional and a major heated debate in full throttle. I felt like
taking my shoe off and banging it on the table like Kruschev. But
this was just a normal lunch, passionate, opinionated, committed.
The Abse family cares passionately about ideas, literature, art, people,
ethics; and the Rayburn stove at its very heart was Joan. Her own
wonderful book on Ruskin she subtitled The Passionate Moralist. It
is a fitting epitaph for the way she lived her life.
Joan
was passionate about her family and her relations and responsibilities
to the world and her greatest achievement is that the legacy of those
relationships lives on inside us. It's just a terrible shame that
she is not here today to see how much she meant to her children -
among whom I presumptuously number myself - and to the children of
her children, as well as all her friends.