As for me, as for Stephen Anthony, I would just like to point out that the ‘Anthony’ comes down through my father’s family, which if you trace back a few generations lived on the island of Ireland. Not thirty miles from Dublin, where one fine day – actually it might not have been fine, but it was, I’m told, the summer—not two months after his eighteenth birthday, Great Uncle Anthony Kemp upped and left and joined the circus. Whether it was more than a whim, more than a spur of the moment, nobody ever found out, because one night the circus was in town, and the next day it was gone, and Great Uncle Anthony, having glimpsed the future no doubt, a future of work and procreation, and quickly weighed the odds, was gone with them. Just like that. That’s how it was. And nobody ever saw him again, though sometimes the family would get news, of Anthony Kemp celebrated acrobat and sometime clown. Travelers would bring back tumbling stories from America and Europe. It has occurred to me recently it might be him I take after.
As for ‘Stephen’, that comes from nowhere. The way my parents told it they just plucked it out of a hat. I don’t think they actually had a hat, just a finely tuned ear for what might pass as the norm. Suffice to say there were three other Stephens in my class, which meant there was no danger of any of us ever standing out. Even when my teachers defaulted to Kemp, what was understood was a stand-in for Stephen.
Call me Kemp, I once said, to an exasperated teacher when four hands shot up at once. She nodded wryly, I remember, if somewhat dismissively, as though to suggest this was all too common a problem. The more so because all of us were ‘ph’, four sets of parents having alighted all but simultaneously not only on the same name but on the same, if I might say so, variant. It was many years before I identified a Stephen it was possible to admire.