Closed books

I took the opportunity to have another peek inside the derelict mansion I blipped before when I told the tragic story of the gentleman's residence that ended up in the possession of a local farming family. Their clever son seemed destined for academic success but suffered a catastrophic mental collapse in his teens and never fulfilled his promise. Instead of passing his exams, going to university and perhaps becoming a teacher or a cleric, he languished at home, cared for by his parents and eventually by his aged father alone, inhabiting the servants' quarters of the empty house. I only saw him once when I knocked at the back door they used, a shadowy figure lurking nervously behind the old man. Both son and father died a few years ago and there are plans now to restore the house. I wanted to get some more pictures of the way it was.

It was a gusty day and the wind was blowing through the now-glassfree windows, setting the shutters banging and wafting the tattered curtains to and fro. The reclusive father and son had lived in some squalor with only a TV for company. Their sitting room was decorated with bottles on the mantelshelf and the kitchen had primitive  cooking arrangements.. The elegant reception rooms were abandoned, the decorative  moulding mouldering away. Upstairs, water leaking through the roof has brought down the ceiling but in one of the almost-empty bedrooms a cupboard full of damp books bears witness to the failed hopes of the young scholar. A jumble of volumes includes school textbooks in a variety of subjects but mainly the classics - Virgil, Caesar, Tacitus, Juvenal, as well as dictionaries, prayer books and Teach Yourself Geology and German. (I can't help wondering if well-meaning family and friends didn't overload the young man with expectations that he could not live up to: one was signed from the vicar.) An exercise book contains detailed notes on television  news programmes, the handwriting deteriorating from neat legibility to an uneven scrawl as it went on - was he trying desperately to organize his muddled  thoughts?

This pile of classics books neatly tied with string (perhaps by his mother, in the fond hope her son would one day return to his studies) seemed especially poignant to me, topped as it is by an outdated royal picture book. In a weird irony, on the floor below lay a broken ornament - a plaster owl severed from its branch.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates