AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS
Hidden away in a corner of Mexico City, a reclusive artist lived and
worked for more than half a century.
She was revered by the Mexican art world, but never courted publicity,
and was little-known overseas.
Surprisingly, she was English, and her name was Leonora Carrington.
Now, 100 years since her birth, the spotlight is at last upon her...
..and her work is being celebrated worldwide by museums
and high-profile admirers.
Collectors are starting to take note.
But what story lay behind this forgotten artist
who is inspiring a new generation?
Leonora had once been at the epicentre of Surrealism,
Europe's most revolutionary art scene...
and had rubbed shoulders with the greats of 20th-century art.
What led this woman, who conquered Paris in the 1930s,
to a life in exile so far from home?
As it turned out,
hers was a very strange and extraordinary story indeed.
Well, I think it's never too late to mend...
to mend the fact that I'm ignored in my own country.
AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS
My mother had imaginary and real worlds,
sort of juxtaposed.
She didn't feel that one was as alien to the other.
And my mother felt that there was always fantastic in the real
and the other way round...
..and the mysterious was always around the corner.
I was never entirely sure which side of the canvas she was on.
She seemed, in her mind, to inhabit
the places that she painted and the
creatures that she drew, they were
just like extensions of her life.
Everything came from dreams she had had,
in some way interpreted into the canvas.
We can look at those pictures of hers and walk around inside them and
meet these strange creatures that are there.
They're usually quite benign, some of them are a bit scary.
But it's the sort of creatures that I would be very glad to meet in my
own dreams.
I always had access to other worlds, like we all do.
We all sleep, we all dream.
That kind of feeling that you have in childhood,
of things being very mysterious.
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
Do you think anybody escapes their childhood?
I don't think we do.
Well, what my mother told me about growing up in England was how she
would create a whole world of her own,
because she was a pretty solitary
little girl.
She grew up as the only girl in a family with three brothers.
They played together, but they didn't include her much.
So, she had to build her own universe, let's say.
CHILD'S VOICE: Now you must know, Moskoski is not on Earth.
It is on a little planet called Starvinski.
Dragons Of Moskoski, chapter one.
CHIRPING AND CHATTERING
EERIE MINIMAL MUSIC
Horiptus is found on the north-west coast of Java.
Feeds on millet oil seed.
INSECTS BUZZ
Her father was a very, very wealthy owner of a textile mill,
called Harold Carrington,
and her mother was the daughter of an Irish doctor.
When Leonora was three, they rented this really stupendous house,
called Crookhey Hall.
CAWING
It was a kind of dark, rather exciting place.
EERIE BIRDCALLS
There was a lake. We had a myth that it was bottomless,
and we weren't allowed to go there alone.
DOG BARKS
We did think that there was a ghost in the tower.
EERIE WAILING
Her brothers went to boarding school when they were quite young.
Leonora stayed at home until she was about 11 or 12.
And, of course, she was isolated, as she didn't have any sisters.
She was all alone in the nursery with the French governess.
She was called Mademoiselle Coutable.
She never liked me.
I had temper tantrums.
CHILD'S VOICE: Seen standing in space,
soft blue and green feathers around its neck.
Peacock.
Notes: birds, etc.
Seen while asleep. Seen alive on a plate.
Like salad. Coloured green and blue.
Wet like a frog, and wriggly.
When she got to, I think, 11, she did go away to school.
She went to two Catholic boarding schools.
I was expelled from two schools.
Both convents.
I think I was mainly expelled for not collaborating.
I had a kind of allergy to collaboration.
The Mother Superior wrote a letter saying,
"This child is neither capable of study or play,
"and hence we are returning her to you."
My grandmother got us some watercolours at first,
and apparently it was a rather complex set of colours.
It wasn't just a cheap set.
My grandmother was probably the most
instrumental person in that stage,
because my grandfather was not very
enthusiastic about her activities,
and her imagery.
But my grandmother was a Celt,
so she thought this was perfectly natural.
In a way, Leonora's whole world
started to grow when she was very little.
All this magical Celtic world that her mother told her about.
And she had these little paintings of fairy tales in her room, that she
kept all her life.
With my grandfather, the relationship was not as close.
He felt that he had to represent discipline and
all those things.
I felt him to be a very powerful presence.
I remember how frightened I was of him.
My mother, I think,
had a sort of love-hate relationship with my grandfather.
He was strict, but he was fair.
I think he provided a sort of counterbalance to my grandmother,
in terms of Leonora.
But she later came into conflict with him.
FOOTSTEPS
He wanted for her to be a certain way,
a certain upbringing,
a certain social behaviour and so on.
REMOTE LAUGHTER AND VOICES
Certainly, after maybe 16 or 17,
she was reluctant to be a model of what he wanted.
Leonora's father was in the process of becoming very wealthy, very fast.
They were nouveau riche, and they knew it.
They wanted all the trappings of wealth.
In a family like that,
everything rests on who the daughter of the family marries.
In this family, there was only one daughter,
so who she married could have carried that family up into the
higher social echelons, as it were.
Well, they wanted me to conform to the life of horses and hunt balls
and being well considered by the local gentry, I suppose.
That sort of thing.
So, Leonora went to live in London, to be launched into society,
to come out as a debutante.
This was one of my grandfather's plans, to present her to the King.
So they gussied her up and dressed
her in these silk garments and so on.
I wrote.
There are lots of stories there.
The Debutante was a book that I wrote afterwards
about my experiences.
"When I was a debutante, I often went to the zoo.
"The animal I got to know best was a young hyena.
" 'What a bloody nuisance,' I said to her.
" 'I've got to go to my ball tonight.'
" 'You're lucky,' she said, 'I'd love to go.'
" 'Ring for your maid, and when she comes in,
" 'we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face.
" 'I'll wear her face tonight, instead of mine.'
" 'It's not practical,' I said. 'She'll probably die.'
" 'Somebody will certainly find the corpse, and we'll be put in prison.'
" 'I'm hungry enough to eat her,' the hyena replied.
" 'And the bones?' 'As well,' she said.
"My mother entered, pale with rage.
" 'We'd just sat down at table,' she said, 'when that thing,
'sitting in your place, got up and shouted,
" 'So, I smell a bit strong, what? Well, I don't eat cakes.'
" 'Whereupon it tore off its face and ate it,
" 'and, with one great bound, disappeared through the window.' "
She said it was torture.
That was maybe the last time Leonora ever did as she was told.
CRUNCHING AND CHATTER OF DINERS
Her family have been seen as this upper-class family,
but they were not an upper-class family.
They were a family who didn't fit in.
I think that's key to understanding Leonora.
Leonora, from her earliest times, didn't fit in.
The thing about Harold Carrington was that he came from a family
where women would have known their place.
Men were the workers, they went out,
women stayed at home and did as they were told.
He wasn't used to anybody answering him back,
and the one person who did answer him back was the person he least
would have expected - his only daughter.
And I think that was a big shock for Harold.
And I think that led to the very big clash between them.
She used to say that her father was very stern and very severe,
but I think she cared very much about her father.
She said that her father was very narrow-minded and very difficult,
but she spoke more about her father than about her mother.
There were no marriage proposals, unsurprisingly.
And I think her parents were probably at a bit of a loose end as
to what to do with her next,
and I think that she came up with this idea of going to art school.
I was planning of going to London to study painting.
I already knew that.
For Leonora, this was the beginning of freedom for her.
She was at art school,
and she was mixing with a different sort of person.
She found that she was an artist.
She found that she wanted to study art.
And she found Surrealism,
and Surrealism was something that surprised her,
because it was so familiar.
My mother gave me Herbert Read's book on Surrealism,
and I had an affinity with it.
She opened that book,
and she connected with Surrealism, and in particular
she connected with the pictures she saw in there
by an artist called Max Ernst.
Deux Enfants Sont Menacs Par Un Rossignol.
Two Children Being Frightened Of...
Rossignol is for the nightingale, isn't it?
I felt, "Ah, yes, this is familiar.
"I know what this is about."
A kind of world which would move between worlds.
The world of our dreaming and imagination.
It was a seismic moment in the art world.
The public of Britain was just struggling to
cope with the Post-Impressionists,
and suddenly here were all these people who were regarded as madmen.
Critics recommended they should be locked up, to protect the public.
My mother saw these paintings, and
she was really fascinated with them,
and she confessed to me, "I want to be there...
"I want to be recognised in this group."
One evening,
she's invited for dinner to the home of a friend of hers from art school,
and they had invited an artist who was in London because he had a show
on at the time, and that was Max Ernst.
They both met, and something really must have clicked very significantly
for her.
I knew his work and admired it.
I thought he was a very extraordinary person.
He was very intelligent.
He was also very attractive.
She said it didn't take very long before they were lovers.
Her father, having heard about this relationship,
and obviously incandescent at the turn of events,
decided to try and get Max arrested for the content of the show.
So he called someone at the Metropolitan Police and said that he
thought they needed to investigate this man, Max Ernst,
because his images were pornographic.
Max, at that time, was married, and this did not help things.
But Max's friends, I think,
rather liked Leonora,
and were kind of encouraging and supporting of her.
And among those friends, of course, were my parents,
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, who took to her right from the start.
Fortunately, Max's friend Roland Penrose got to hear of this threat
and warned Max to go to Cornwall, where Roland's brother had a house.
Max and Leonora came down,
and there was also Man Ray and Ady Fidelin
and Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard, and Henry Moore showed up.
And it was just this amazing,
wonderful 'Surrealism in Cornwall' moment.
They basically laid low for three or four weeks,
until the danger had passed.
Max went to Paris,
and Leonora went to find her parents, to tell them that she had
made a decision on her future.
I suppose it was the culmination of everything he'd had to put up with
from Leonora. Of all her rebellion over so many years,
and now she was coming to say that she was going off to live in Paris
with a married man, a penniless artist.
He was absolutely furious.
And he said to her, "Never obscure the threshold of my house again!"
And that's the last she saw him.
I just left.
I just left!
Paris was very exciting at that time.
I was in love.
I was with someone who was also an extremely interesting person.
I was working and seeing new places.
I knew it was better than being in a convent.
Paris must have been a wonderful moment for Leonora,
like emerging into the sunlight of really what the rest of her life
would be about.
It was a very, very, very exciting moment in Paris,
because the Surrealist movement was at its height.
When I was with the Surrealists, I didn't have to fit in to anything.
Well, Surrealism was much more than just an art movement.
It was a way of life.
They were trying to live in that world of imagination that Leonora
was living in since she was a little child.
So I think she fit in perfectly.
This was a group of radicals.
They were against every single institution.
Society, the government, the Church.
They wanted to break with every rule.
It was anti-bourgeois.
It was anti the very thing that Leonora had just herself
escaped from.
So she couldn't have been in a more marvellous and exciting setting than
she found herself there in Paris.
Leonora was a now 20-year-old woman,
and because she was the lover of Max Ernst,
she was kind of parachuted into the very centre of that circle.
I saw a lot of the Surrealists, including Breton.
He had a way of talking... SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
He seemed pompous, but he wasn't really pompous.
I'd take the mickey out of him now and again.
I liked Picasso.
I also admired him.
I didn't go overboard, but I thought that he was very talented.
People like Picasso lived down the road,
and she said that finally she'd discovered...
..kin people, kin minds,
people who thought the way she did.
I think being around Max showed Leonora, in a way,
what was possible,
but of course, being a woman, she had a lot to push against.
Because, although the Surrealists were these fantastic avant-garde,
modern, freethinking people,
they still had a long way to go before they reconstructed their
ideas about women.
And for many of them, women were sort of like muses,
beautiful creatures that were there to give inspiration,
sex and a jolly time.
They didn't take them seriously as artists.
Well, the concept of female
in the group was the "femme-enfant",
which is cute, but derogatory.
And women were not really considered to be contributors
in terms of art.
But my mother ignored all that and scoffed, scoffed at it.
It was very clear that she did not share those beliefs,
and she was very much a feminist.
Very much.
She refused to be a muse.
She refused to fit into their idea of what she was.
And of course, she had plenty of experience of refusing to fit in,
it's what she'd done all her life.
She wasn't going to fit into the Surrealists' idea of how she should
behave any more than she had ever fitted into anything else.
She always had to remind people that she was an artist,
and that she was a woman, and she had her own ideas about her art,
and she was not a muse
for either Max Ernst or for Breton or anybody else.
Leonora and Max were stayed in Paris for a few months over, I think,
the winter of 1937-8.
They then went to live in the south of France,
in a town called Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche.
Well, Max, you see, it was almost like a learning process,
because he knew all sorts of things I'd never heard of,
so it was a revelation, no?
And it was a love affair, also.
I felt that we would be all right if it went on forever.
She was extremely happy.
This is, in her own words, her happiest time in her life.
She told me this,
and that Max had been the greatest
love in her life,
at the exclusion of anybody else.
They'd had this idyllic year or so in the south of France,
and then the War crashed into their world and changed everything.
All of a sudden, the French start rounding up people
of German extraction, and putting them in prison.
Max was put by the French in a concentration camp.
I eventually...
I eventually went mad.
My mother was destroyed by this.
It was too much for her.
She had a breakdown, and at that precise moment she was visited by a
friend from England who was obviously very worried by her state,
and persuaded her to leave Saint-Martin with her in her car,
and to go with her to Spain.
She found her in a terrible state.
She hadn't eaten in days,
and she was eating roots or something like that from the garden,
and in a very bad emotional state.
They put her in a car and took her away.
"No, no, no! I have to wait for Max!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry but the Germans are coming."
And they were, like, 13 miles away, or something like that,
and they just got in the car and left.
She was completely destroyed.
So, I think it was my grandfather that decided that it would be best
to put her in a mental institution.
Best for whom, I don't know, but that...
that was a "family decision".
The solution that was found was that she should be taken to a sanatorium
for people who had mental illness, in the north of Spain.
She was tricked into going there, basically.
She was told that she was going for a day out to the seaside.
The doctor went with her, she was drugged on the way there,
and she woke up in this place that she, all her life,
called "the asylum".
That was the beginning of the darkest chapter, really,
in her life.
"My first awakening to consciousness was painful.
"I thought myself the victim of an automobile accident.
"The place was suggestive of a hospital,
"and I was being watched by a repulsive-looking nurse
"who looked like an enormous bottle of Lysol.
"I was in pain, and I realised that my hands and feet
"were bound by leather straps.
"I learned later that I had entered the place, fighting like a tigress."
It was the treatment she received there that was so terrible.
She was treated by being given a drug called Cardiosol,
which induced an epileptic fit.
"I don't know how long I remained bound and naked.
"Several days and nights lying in my own excrement, urine and sweat,
"tortured by mosquitoes whose stings made my body hideous.
"A new era began with the most terrible, blackest day of my life.
"How can I write this when I'm afraid to think about it?
"I'm in terrible anguish,
"yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory.
"I know that once I've written it down, I shall be delivered.
"But shall I be able to express with mere words the horror of that day?
"A stranger entered my room.
"He carried in his hand a physician's bag of black leather.
"Each of them got hold of a portion of my body,
"and I saw the centre of all their eyes were fixed upon me in a ghastly
"stare. Don Luis's eyes were tearing my brain apart,
"and I was sinking down into a well, very far.
"The bottom of that well was the stopping of my mind for all eternity
"in the essence of utter anguish.
"With a convulsion of my vital centre,
"I came up to the surface so quickly, I had vertigo.
"When I came to, I was lying naked on the floor.
"I went back to my bed and tasted despair."
I think that experience sealed her.
Sealed her life, the rest of her life, no?
And the fact that it was in some way an order of her father, no?
So, you see there, families worked in a very peculiar way, there, and
I don't think Leonora ever really forgave that.
I came out...different.
Much more frightened.
What it mainly did for me, in a conscious way,
was to have suddenly become aware that I was both mortal
and touchable, and I could be destroyed.
I didn't think so before.
She was still only in her early 20s.
She was really completely alone.
I was frightened, so frightened all the time.
My family wanted me to go back to England,
so it was, you know...
I didn't want to go back then.
Leonora ended up meeting Renato Leduc.
Renato must have been a terribly nice man who undoubtedly took a
great deal of interest in trying to save Leonora,
because he realised that she was a very special person.
He married her, to get her a Mexican passport,
just simply to save her life.
He actually got me out of Europe, Renato.
I met him in Madrid.
He worked in the Mexican Embassy,
and the whole Mexican Embassy left to come back to Mexico.
She decided to go to Mexico, and she didn't know a word of Spanish.
She had no idea how she would live,
and she went on this great adventure of going to a country she had
never...she didn't even imagine what it could be like.
Once you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico,
you will feel that you are coming to a place that's haunted.
Spirits, the presence of spirits.
Whatever spirits are.
It was like going to the other end of the earth.
It is very extraordinary, and very...very exotic.
Sometimes I found it marvellous, sometimes I found it horrifying.
There's a lot of similarities between the ancient Mexican
civilisations and the Celtic cultures.
There's this concept of Surrealism we have, of imagination, freedom,
magic as a way of life,
and I think that resonated with her own culture.
Mexico became a refuge.
She found it painful
to leave Europe, and she was always
nostalgic about Europe.
But then she made a life in Mexico.
But Leonora didn't know anybody, clearly, in Mexico City,
and suddenly found herself all alone there.
Renato seems like he was probably quite a man's man,
liked going out to bars, the cantinas,
and understandably, she wasn't very happy.
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
Renato was a nice man, but he had an attitude
which was that it didn't matter if I was alone, you know,
most days of the week, without speaking Spanish...
..and not knowing anybody.
I think it was more than just a marriage of convenience,
but it didn't have the deep roots that a relationship needs, to go
through many, many years.
I asked Renato,
"Why did you separate such an extraordinary woman?" and he said,
"Because she would talk to the dog more than she did to me."
Leonora settled into Mexico,
into a Mexico where a great number of intellectuals
were coming to Mexico at the time,
of all nationalities and all races,
and Leonora undoubtedly found a very interesting life
in which to live.
Now, did that make her happy?
God only knows.
She made new friends there, and they were, crucially,
other people like her, who had fled from wartime Europe and who had no
family, and most of those people,
who became her closest friends in Mexico City,
would never see their families again, any of them.
At one of the parties, she met my father...
and the way she describes it, she says,
"I decided this man would be a good father for my children."
That's how she described him.
Nothing more, just that.
Chiki was a Hungarian photographer
who had fled Hungary and made
his way to Paris on foot after
witnessing from the window of his apartment,
with his mother, a parade of Nazis going by, saying...
you know, flourishing knives and saying they were after Jewish blood.
Leonora and Chiki were both people who'd ended up in Mexico from
war-torn Europe. They were both people who'd left their families
behind. Chiki's family were mostly dead.
They were at an exciting moment, in a way, in their lives,
because they were there in this new country and they were young people,
and Chiki, unlike Leonora's previous lovers, was a younger man.
I think she liked Chiki, no? At the beginning.
He was good-looking, and Chiki was always a very,
very good man, but he was very shy.
And so they got together and married after a little while,
and then my brother appeared, and I appeared.
I believe motherhood was the most amazing experience she ever had.
She told me once that having children was, for her, so important,
because it's the only unconditional love you can have in your life.
She said, "They are the only ones that will never leave you."
When she was pregnant, she was scared,
but she was painting like crazy.
This creative instinct came to her at the same time of being able to
create life.
And I think that gave her a very powerful sense.
I think her best work did come at the time when she was painting with
the brush in one hand and the baby in the other.
She probably adored her kids.
In fact, I would say, she did love her kids,
but in Leonora's own way.
Certainly not in the traditional way that a normal mother would have
loved her kids.
I think she was terrified that, if
she loved them the way her parents
loved her, they would be as unhappy
as she had become with her parents.
AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS
She realised, when she had Gaby and Pablo,
how important this new family was
going to be to her, because she was
somebody who'd left her family behind.
She realised that she was going to have a second chance at family,
and she was determined that that second chance was going to go a lot
better than the first chance had gone.
I don't think she could have loved two children more than my brother
and myself.
I don't think that would have been possible.
And my father was the same, in a different way.
He was a little more realistic in
terms of getting us to get through
school without flunking and things.
He instilled a little discipline into this marvellous world
that we were enjoying.
The boys were very near her.
The boys were always walking, one on this side, one on this other side,
and always with her.
She shut herself in her studio,
but we used to open the door and come in.
She would say, "I need to work, so be very quiet.
"Here's a piece of paper. Draw."
And that's how I started drawing.
Sometimes it was dreadfully difficult.
She was paralysed and desperate,
that no images came,
and it was barren,
and she was extremely depressed sometimes.
But sometimes it just flowed, like that,
and she was very excited, and she wouldn't leave the studio, because
there were so many things coming.
Leonora was always very reluctant to
talk about her work, about her art.
She would never explain what anything meant.
She just said, "It just came that way."
She didn't do anything to promote her career.
She was totally foreign to anything
resembling public relations.
She did the work and put it out, you know, in public, and that was it.
It's difficult for me to put, verbally.
I leave that to all the people who do the writing.
It comes with a feeling more than an image.
It's not that you actually see it.
There's a kind of sense that it's quite right.
Let's say, that green was quite right.
Or that green was, oh, no, no, not quite right.
Then you don't stop to wonder where that's coming from.
To be an artist, it was so natural in her, no?
And to be famous, she didn't like at all.
She didn't like journalism, she didn't like...
She hated interviews. She didn't like questions,
she never even answered them.
I don't think she was really that much interested in the art market.
Of course, she wanted to sell the paintings, because she needed money
to eat and to raise the kids and to feed them,
but I don't think she was that interested in the public recognition
of her work. That was part of her life.
I don't think she could have survived without painting.
She would use any kind of little room for her painting.
It was not important to have a studio, like many of the other
quote-unquote "great artists" had.
She had a little studio upstairs,
a very poor little studio with electricity and things that were all
like this, you know? Cords all the...
Very... Things... You said, "My goodness!"
And the rain, it got in.
And she had a very uncomfortable chair.
Everything was, sort of, very difficult and uncomfortable,
and that's where she painted.
But it was very funny,
because you saw all these Mexican painters, that weren't 10% as good
as she could be, that had all these enormous studios,
horrible white studios full of horrible paintings,
and she had this, and she was doing all this marvellous painting, no?
In this little room.
I think it's in Mexico that she found her real way, artistically
speaking, because that's where she had, I think,
enough time to dedicate herself fully to what she was.
An artist.
She'd kind of run and run and run and run and run,
and she got to the end of the line, really.
There was nowhere else to run to.
She could have gone back, but she was never going to do that.
And there was nowhere else to go.
Did she want to go back to England?
Well, she was terribly homesick and nostalgic,
so her relationship to England was always sort of a
lost home.
Well, a home is a kind of illusion a lot of us have.
Being settled doesn't exist, really.
I need change.
Because I get sort of suffocated by my own atmosphere...
or things that become too familiar.
She never quite
fitted anywhere.
Not England, not Mexico.
I don't think she was comfortable anywhere, that's the truth,
and if there was one country where my mother was very comfortable,
was art. Hmm?
That was her country.
Even though she may have never accepted this, I told her myself -
"Mexico has received you with open arms,
which would never have happened in Europe.
Never.
Well, Leonora is considered one of the greatest Mexican painters.
She's always been considered a Mexican artist.
Even though she was born in England, for us, she is our artist.
She belongs to Mexico, and she has always been recognised here.
She's always had a very good name.
Leonora's work is so unique, and I think that's a legacy that,
even though she was surrounded by all these big shots of Surrealism,
she was able to look inside of her and create something that was really
unique and visionary.
Being tucked away in Mexico City certainly did not help her achieve
recognition in the way that she could have done, should have done,
but Leonora certainly did not achieve the recognition in this
country that she so richly deserved.
Leonora, as an artist, may still be in her infancy in terms of how
well-known she will one day be,
and I do think that Leonora's moment is still ahead,
in terms of her being really well-known and acknowledged as an
artist, because so many of her themes were ahead of their time,
and are probably still ahead.
I think she was ahead of all of us.
She was so extraordinary, so...
so, anyone who's ahead of you, you always...
they are always there.
The idea of saying that, as you can't explain or you can't
understand, you say things that are
under...under the personality of that person, no?
And Leonora was like that.
She walked in another world, she lived in another world, no?
She was a little bit like...
..like a genius, but also like a monk of the Middle Ages,
or like someone that doesn't exist any more.
Lots of things died when she died.
A lot of my journeys were running away.
But in old age, I feel that I'm beginning a journey in a way.
Death is of course inevitable.
Somehow I have to go with it a bit,
as a way of discovering or uncovering,
because, really, we know nothing about death.
Nothing.
Yes, well, her son Gaby has said
that almost her final words before she died was, she looked at the
wall, and he said, "What are you looking at?"
And she said, "At the blackbirds.
"The wall is filled with wonderful blackbirds."
You know, which seemed...
a marvellous thing to see at the very end for her.
Yes, we were impressed, because it's
like the blackbirds coming for her.
To take her to the fantastic world she was living in already.
BIRDSONG
GENTLE MUSIC PLAYS
PIANO PLAYS GENTLY