Dock-walloping with Cicely Fox-Smith
‘We’ve waited for a cargo and we’ve waited for a crew, And last we’ve waited for a tide, and now the waiting’s through. O don’t you hear the deep-sea wind and smell the deep-sea foam, Out beyond the harbour on the long road home?’ The Complete Poetry of Cicely Fox Smith edited by Charles Ipcar and James Saville I asked my friend, the artist, writer and musician, Claudia Myatt. what she knew of the poet Cicely Fox Smith (1882-1954). She was immediately able to point me to a recording of ‘Rosario’, sung by her own Quaynotes group in Suffolk. She used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many people, outside the UK and US folk scenes, have heard of Cicely Fox-Smith today. It’s one of those questions where one hopes to be shouted down by an indignant roar of people; Of course I have, how can you have been so ignorant? But, with the zeal of the convert, I’m going ahead anyway. I’ve had Charles Incar and James Savi