Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

20 Julia and Her Daughter
It was permanently recorded in the History of Youngstown that ‘‘Mrs.
J. Edgar Rudge is residing in London, superintending the musical education
of their daughter, Olga, who inherits a large measure of her talented
mother’s gift of song. It is the parents’ intention to give their daughter
every educational advantage. . . . Both Mr. and Mrs. Rudge cross the
Atlantic almost yearly.’’
Olga remembered that their dollars seemed to stretch further because
of the favorable exchange rate. ‘‘The money didn’t come with regularity, it
never was to, but the English system of books and bills seemed to ease the
strain.’’ They could a√ord a cook and a manservant, with enough left over
to take long summer holidays, sometimes at Easter. There are snapshots of
the three (very small) children at St. Helier’s in Jersey, the Channel Islands,
La Panne Bains on the Belgian seacoast, and ‘‘the summer that
Teddy fell on the rocks at Lyme Regis.’’ Peace and contentment were the
theme of the years at St. John’s Wood:
The first room I ever had of my own was at 12 Hill Road; it looked
on the back garden, . . . [it was] a lovely house, and my mother had
made it charming. . . . it had a small conservatory, a small front
garden, which was very nice for tea outside, but not big enough for
garden parties. . . . I had a collie pup that cost two guineas and had
a pedigree. Since it howled when kept outside, I once put on
moccasins and sneaked down to the kennel and slept with the pup
’till it fell asleep. After that, the pup was allowed to sleep in the
scullery, but mostly managed to get up to my room.
To her granddaughter Patrizia, who visited the neighborhood in the
1980s, Olga wrote: ‘‘I used to take my pup (though it was really taking me)
to Primrose Hill. . . . it used to have a flock of sheep grazing there when I
knew it.’’
Many leaders in the turn-of-the-century music world lived nearby,
among them the composer Sir Edward Elgar and the conductor Sir
Thomas Beecham (one block down, on Grove End Road). ‘‘In the musical
circles in which I grew up in London in the early 1900s . . . my mother was
‘at home’ on Sunday afternoons,’’ Olga remembered. ‘‘ ‘Little pitchers