When We

Someone once told me that lots of people from South Africa & what was then Rhodesia moved to Perth in Western Australia after things changed politically in their home countries. According to my informant, these immigrants quickly became known by the Western Australian locals as “when wes” because they began most sentences with “When we were back in South Africa/Rhodesia”. 

They were the nostalgic "when wes", whereas I’m a "when we" of the future. That is to say, most of my sentences now begin “When we go back to normal” or “when we can travel again.”

My “when we” today is about when we are next able to go to England. It goes like this:

When we can travel in England again, let’s go to All Saints’ Church in Daresbury in Cheshire. There we can look at a set of stained-glass windows showing scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  Carroll (really Charles Dodgson), was born in the parsonage at Daresbury.

I learned of the windows thanks to a charming article by Lucinda Lambton that I kept from a 2017 copy of The Oldie but have only now got around to reading.

The article also contains this passage, which I’m sure will delight all Australian readers:

According to the painter Ford Madox Brown, Dodson based the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party: 

“on a pet wombat belonging to the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who described his much-loved animal as ‘a joy, a triumph & a madness’. It slept a great deal & James McNeill Whistler wrote of dining in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea with, among others, George Meredith & Algernon Swinburne, with the somnolent wombat curled up on the epergne throughout the evening.” (What acquaintance I've had with wombats suggests that must have been an extremely sturdy epergne).

For those unfamiliar with wombats, perhaps the most famous of the species is The Muddleheaded Wombat. I once left a copy of The Complete Stories of the Muddleheaded Wombat on a Vienna tram and when I went back it was gone, which has left me with the delightful possibility that there is one person somewhere in Vienna who is guiltily expert on the Muddleheaded Wombat's exploits.

There was also an alternative wombatesque Sydney Olympics mascot, creation of Roy and HG (whose nightly television programme, I am reliably informed, became a great favourite of Viktor Orban during his visit to the Sydney Olympics - and quite rightly as it was totally hilarious, but also hugely impressive that a European could quickly grasp Australian humour; even some Australians are a bit slow to a laugh at times).

The really big question though is: was Rossetti’s wombat the glow in the dark kind?