Face-to-Face

The ghost of Christine Keeler is returning to public view, in the form of a TV series now on BBC, and a forthcoming exhibition in London, which I heard about through Natalie D’Arbeloff’s blog, in which she says

Christine Keeler was, in that story, simultaneously absolutely powerless and absolutely powerful. She was neither victim nor hero and could not protect herself from the manipulations of powerful men.

Reading this, I thought of chess. I first heard that a pawn may become a queen from “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, given me for my seventh birthday. I was in a quarantined hospital ward at the time with nobody to ask, so wasn’t sure if this pawn-to-queen transformation was in the rules or part of the fiction. In any case, this most powerful piece can be trapped and taken out. Christine Keeler: Red Queen (See also The Girl who Torpedoed the Government”).

She was 9 days older than me. We met by chance when we were both 18, in the summer of ’59, and chatted on a grassy spot for an hour or two till cut short by the sunshine turning to rain. Face-to-face versus relayed reportage, which tells you more about a person? I knew her, of course, only from what she presented, and out of that, what my naïveté allowed me to understand.

Half a century later I’ve learned that we as flesh and blood humans are infinite beings, whose future is not written in the stars. It’s not a scripted screenplay but an improvisation. As in a movie what happens is affected by our encounters, and who those real-life characters are. Can we truly know a person? There’s what they choose to show us, their own idea of who they are, and the impressions we receive. When I speak of infinite beings, I mean something beyond all those.

What I’ve called “reportage” may be words, images or other artworks. It’s finite, cannot tell the whole truth, cannot help being mingled with fiction. Fiction arising from ignorance, selective truth or deliberate creativity. And yet all of these may be influenced by a glimpse of infinity.

Meeting Christine Keeler* made no difference to my life except as an episode whose memory wasn’t evoked till I first read her name in the papers four years later, and recognised it. I don’t suppose she remembered me at all.

And yet her adult life was shaped by encounters, not with just anyone but those she felt would help exploit her assets, and get her where she wanted to go. Which is not where she ended up.

We both had insecure and unfortunate childhoods. My own adult life has been largely a mess until it changed—into the wonderful blessing of living happily ever after. There: in two sentences, enough autobiography.

After finishing the above, it suddenly occurs to me that Natalie and I have met face-to-face too. How far if at all has it changed our lives? Or have we been influenced more by reading one another’s blogs? Perhaps art brings out more than life?