Over the New Year of 1925 Hilda became
convinced she was pregnant and a quiet wedding was arranged at
the parish church of distant Wangford in Suffolk, where Hilda had
served as a Great War landgirl. Only a few family attended, returning
to London soon after the
ceremony and leaving Stanley and Hilda to make their way to their digs
at Mrs Lambert’s cottage to celebrate their honeymoon. He described his
feelings on that walk in a moving reminiscence [printed in full in
Andrew Glew’s Stanley Spencer,
Letters and Writings] ….at
last we were alone. I can feel the gravel and tarmac under my feet
now….We did not hurry but listened to ourselves loving. We stood singly
about like things set adrift. How lovely it was. In our apparently
aimless standing about we loved and mentally hugged each other. I could
have sat on that low garden wall off Hill St for ever….
The marriage was to prove crucial in Stanley’s emotional and artistic
journey, although its
immediate impact was to compel a reappraisal of the content of The Cookham Resurrection which he had planned in his pre-nuptial
state. His mastery of the resulting compositional problems ended for
ever his doubts about marriage and of its 'peril' as a disturber of the
peace.
After Hilda's death in 1950,
Stanley again celebrated the impact of these
marriage-feelings, this time in a series of paintings
he called The
Marriage at Cana. In them he
honoured the up-in-heaven perfection of love through marriage
by recalling joyous down-to-earth moments
('epiphanies') of their life together. In an introductory painting in
the
series, Bride and Bridegroom, he shows
them preparing to sit at a symbolic wedding breakfast.
Hilda is wearing the wedding dress she prepared in earlier years, but
in fact did not wear at the actual ceremony. The wedding cake stands
temptingly on
the table in front of them, but the room is still being prepared and
there are no guests as yet. The detail suggests that Stanley is
alluding to their pre-marriage
lovemaking as having pre-empted the formal event. Equally intriguingly
a
small bridesmaid, not present in the initial
drawing, peeps in from one edge of the painting,
perhaps an afterthought indicating an embryonic attendant
at the occasion to suggest Hilda may have been
pregnant at the time.
Stanley and Hilda could never afterwards decide whether she
had been pregnant or not, and according to Patricia Preece endlessly
worried the
question. But interesting though it was
to them in their down-to-earth life, Stanley's
art tells us that it was no longer of any
creative consequence for him. The miracle of love
had overtaken it.