Jennifer Juniper
Barbados, 1966
Photographs can arrest waves before they crash on the shore: they have the power to extract moments from the flow of time. Hence the attraction of happy snaps such as this one, which presents a honeymoon as the prolongation of playful childhood, not the start of adult life. It is a reminder of how infectiously boyish The Beatles were, before their protests against the Vietnam war and their blissed-out flirtation with eastern religion.
Pattie Boyd seems to have been a playmate as much as a lover. George asked her to marry him the moment they met; when she demurred he asked her out to dinner instead. On this beach in Barbados, they are not exactly trying out the copulatory callisthenics of the Kama Sutra. She bestraddles George’s back like a papoose, and reads the contours of his face with her fingers as if she were a baby deciphering the world for the first time. He clearly relishes her touch, which is why he closes his eyes to isolate the sensation.
The scene is happy because innocent, though maybe the surfy waves blab a more confidential story about the pair. Botticelli’s newborn Venus floats on just such a bed of foam, which according to Greek myth was a spermatic froth left behind by the butchered testicles of a god. George lifts Pattie out of the wet mire, but his knees are mucky; they are honeymooning beside an ocean because that is the fertile source of life itself.
