Son Of Oscar Wilde

  

Vyvyan Wilde, 1885

        Perhaps my father was at his best with us at the seaside.  He was a powerful swimmer; he also enjoyed sailing and fishing and would take us out with him when it was not too breezy.  I do not think we took to it very much; personally, I was much too concerned with the plight of the fish flapping about on the floor boards.  I preferred helping my father to build sand castles, an art in which he excelled; long, rambling castles they were, with moats and tunnels and towers and battlements and when they were finished he would usually pull a few lead soldiers out of his pocket to man the castle walls.  I remember him so well, in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, no shoes or stockings and a large gray hat which he had probably brought back with him from the United States.  We ourselves were dressed in much the same fashion.  It never struck parents in those days that the most sensible costume for children on the beach in the hot weather was a pair of bathing-trunks; they were much too afraid of their catching cold or getting sunstroke.

Bathing machines, Scarborough

 Beach boxes, Great Yarmouth

        My father lived in a world of his own; an artificial world, perhaps, but a world in which the only things that really mattered were art and beauty in all their forms.  This gave him that horror of conventionality which destroyed him in the end.

Cyril Wilde, ca. 1890

      

        Once in Reading Gaol he discovered that three small children were in the same place for the heinous crime of poaching rabbits; a fine which neither they nor their parents were able to pay had been inflicted upon them and they were sent to prison in default.  This may seem incredible to us now, but not much more than a hundred years earlier they probably would have been publicly hanged.  My father was deeply distressed that children who might be the same age as his own could be barbarously treated by a self-righteous community, and he managed to get a note through to one of the warders with whom he was on good terms, asking what he could do to help and offering to pay the fine.  “Please do this for me,” the note went on to say; “I must get them out.  Think what a thing it would be for me to be able to help three little children.  If I can do this by paying the fine, tell the children that they are to be released tomorrow by a friend, and ask them to be happy and not to tell anyone.” And the children were freed.

Reading Gaol

Excerpts from:  Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, New York, E.P. Dutton & Company, 1954