‘He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds…’ by Julia Jones

And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay and wished he was going too. 'Going foreign she is, to blue water,’ he said to himself. And he thought of other little schooners he had known, on the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas. He thought of flying fish and porpoises racing each other and turning over in the waves. He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds, and the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card, and tall winds swaying across the stars at night. And he wished he could go to sea once more and make another voyage before it was too late.

I don’t think it’s possible to read this passage (from chapter one of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck) without a sense of longing. I’d like you to read it at my funeral, should you happen to be there. We printed it as the frontispiece for my mother’s service sheet, together with a photo of her climbing up the jetty at Eversons in Woodbridge in about 1947. 

The cruellest thing I ever did to Mum was to bring her inland. For many good reasons of course, just as Arthur Ransome’s character ‘Peter Duck’ has settled, apparently contentedly, on the inland waters of the Norfolk Broads, visiting his three daughters whenever the breeze sets fair in their direction, but privately compelled to come and sit on a bollard in Lowestoft Inner Harbour 'to look at the boats and the fishermen and to smell the fresh wind blowing in from the sea’.

Carl Herman Sehmel, Arthur Ransome's original 'Peter Duck'

Once Mum was stranded in agricultural Essex I had to stop reading her John Masefield’s Sea Fever -- it was too painful. We cheered ourselves with Wordsworth's daffodils and shivered at Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners which she loved both for the traveller’s horse and the reliability of the traveller himself, ‘“Tell them I came and no one answered / That I kept my word,” he said’.
As music lasts longer than speech so poetry outlives prose. Try this with scansion and line endings and the secret of its power becomes clearer:

And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay

And wished he was going too.

‘Going foreign she is, to blue water,’ he said to himself.

And he thought of other little schooners he had known,

On the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas.

He thought of flying fish and porpoises

Racing each other and turning over in the waves.

He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds,

And the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card,

And tall winds swaying across the stars at night.

And he wished he could go to sea once more

And make another voyage before it was too late.

On the morning of Mum's death my brother, Nick, who insists (believably) that he never opens a book from one year’s end to the next and scarcely looks at a newspaper, went immediately to her bookshelf and turned to a poem. 

Iken Church

From the river’s edge

The sunlit tower invites you

To a pilgrimage.

Larks rise to meet you.

Round the tower in flint and stone

Saints wait to greet you.

 His single poem became two more when he looked a little longer in the slim, privately published book Wave Watch written by a family friend, Dr Ian Tait. 

The Need to Let Go

Today the waves are leaden,

Surprised by their own weight.

They lift themselves

For one last time

And collapse on the beach.

After so much travel, for ever

Holding themselves in shape

In all kinds of weather,

Their only thought

The need to let go. 

The Gulls

Orford disappears.

The sky sits down on the river’s edge

And sheens the tide-laid mud.

Sheep graze the river wall,

And little terns catch the eye

As they plummet into water.

I am sailing down river

On the last of the ebb

And the sea is waiting.

So, Nick and his children read Ian Tait's poems in the service and Claudia Myatt followed them with her lovely ‘June’sSong’. Francis recited a psalm, from memory, confirming it as poetry (or song). There were more words and hymns: a solitary flautist and the ever-evocative organ.

But when Nick and I took Mum’s body to the crematorium – just the two of us (our other brother Ned was unavoidably away) – we had no music, only poems and a prayer. The final poem I read to her before the curtains closed across the catafalque, the poem that had lasted longest in her life, almost to the end, was Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat 

The voyage was over, the wind in the shrouds had stilled

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, 

   They danced by the light of the moon, 

             The moon, 

             The moon, 

They danced by the light of the moon.

Peter Duck off Everson's jetty