Mrs Robinson's Brief Encounter With a Cocktail at Scarborough Fair!

Dear Mrs Robinson

Okay, bear with me!

I noticed you read a couple of posts about Point Lobos (perhaps while eating a pastrami and rye sandwich?) in the wee small hours.

Good, and the thing is, I like Point Lobos. I like writing about it. I've been three times and I wouldn't mind making it four.

So let's look at it from another angle. After Robert Louis Stevenson might have got the idea for Treasure Island there ca. 1879, the Point featured in quite a few films, including:

Treasure Island (1934)

Rebecca (1940)

Vertigo (1958)

The Graduate (1967)

I think Point Lobos can just about be seen at the start of this excerpt from The Graduate, as Benjamin Braddock shoots north in search of Elaine to the tune of Scarborough Fair.

Funny thing is, I had Dru singing Scarborough Fair too...

"She walked up the stone steps to his grave every day, softly singing Scarborough Fair as she went on her way.

Sometimes she took daisies, often she made posies, but most times she took roses and laid them gently on the cairn as tears scalded her eyes."

(Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires)

And later, I had Spike thinking kindly of her as she softly hummed it:

"Spike heard her humming Scarborough Fair and felt more like the William Pratt he’d once been. The hopeless romantic who’d spent so much time searching out books on poetry at B. H. Blackwell’s on Broad Street he’d been sent down from Oxford. Finding himself lost and idle in a London literary salon in 1880, an ailing mother to care for and no future he could see, fiddling fitfully with words like effulgent which concerned themselves so much with the shining of the light. Coming conversely upon Drusilla in the alleyway. His sire who’d seemingly delivered him into darkness but who…

For a moment he all but forgot everything else. Then as now it seemed he’d been meant to meet up with Dru, and there was such depth of history between them, so sweet and savage in equal measure, that he could find no words to say to the sage old lady who sat by his side. Like the lass in Scarborough Fair, would she make him a shirt of cambric once more? For though he was no longer the true love of his sire, she, sweet rose, had grown only fairer with time..."

(Ibid.)

Adapting the lyrics so they seemed to flow smoothly through Spike's mind was pretty tricky, but Dru would certainly have known of Scarborough Fair as it's at least three hundred and fifty years old. I'd probably have mentioned it earlier in the Quartet, but I just didn't think of it any quicker. There is mention of her inner child's voice reciting a Victorian rhyme in chapter eight of Roses, but I didn't specify which one.

Also, an ensouled Drusilla's voice might have become a bit higher class. I think a fan or commentator once mentioned that Spike's voice became a bit deeper and rougher once he was turned to the dark side. The same thing may have happened to Dru. I'd say she was definitely middle class, but sank into quasi-Cockney once she'd been defiled by Angelus.

I tend to think that the matured and ensouled Dru I ended up with would share Celia Johnson's cut-glass speech, albeit with a deeper duskier edge. Johnson lived from 1908-1982, but as an immortal vampire, Dru would have lived through that period, too.

Anyway, that's my guess.

I've visited Carnforth station, where David Lean shot most of Brief Encounter; and in compiling this thumbnail sketch of the Point's film history, I got the feeling that no one's really taken full advantage of the scenery. 1934's Treasure Island maybe made an attempt, but it was all in glorious black and white...

So Dru, Scarborough Fair and Point Lobos, too. Could be quite a cocktail, that is true.

Love,

James