Those we have loved

What an odd bunch! Six months ago, I’d have thought these four had been grouped together for a particularly hard question on the BBC quiz Only Connect. Willie…Young…Diane…D’Angelo…Is there an anagram there? Nope. Robert. Redford. Red. Wille Young had red hair…Nothing. But now, of course, we know what binds them. They have all died recently. Millions of people die every day, and scores of famous people die every month - Wikipedia, I have just discovered, keeps a grim tally of notable deaths, and by the time you click on that link, it will be longer than the list I just looked at. But these particular notable lives meant something to me, so their deaths gave me that now sadly familiar little shock.

When I was younger, I was always taken aback when my mother reacted to the news of the death of a famous stranger, someone who to me seemed old and no longer relevant. In 1973, for example, a year chosen because I was sixteen and snotty, she would probably have been upset by the deaths of Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Edward G Robinson, Jack Hawkins, Noel Coward. Why? What’s the problem? None of them seemed very busy. They had had their time, and their pictures, both still and moving, were in black and white. But when I look at their dates of birth now, the brevity of their lives seems truly shocking. Betty Grable was 56, Veronica Lake 50, Jack Hawkins 62. Only Edward G Robinson and Noel Coward were born in the nineteenth century; only Robinson lived to be eighty. No wonder my mother was rattled. She was forty-eight.