The fathers' sons

Proust did the time lapse thing so well in the final pages of Time Regained that I feel kind of intimidated in even beginning to describe this day. 

We flew back to England with Bobby in a matchbox and so many people came to say goodbye to him. 

I realised I am now the age my mother was when I first left Cookham for Paris, then London, then definitively to France.  I realised that I found my cousins and my oldest friends in their children and loved the people my aging cousins and friends have become.

Bobby, Bryan Harvey and Adrian Saul stood by a groyne on North Wittering Beach in 1962.  60 years later the sons of Bobby, Bryan and Adrian stood by a fence in the vicarage garden and paid this homage to their fathers.

We drank quite a bit of wine before crossing the paddock and down to river where we emptied our matchbox daddies from a jetty into the Thames, down which they'll continue to travel together.