They Took His Life and Threw it on a Skip by Julia Jones
The morning after, with the cable repair in progress ‘I Took My Life and Threw It on the Skip’ Poem by James Fenton Francis Wheen remembers meeting James Fenton in the early 1980s in a state of high excitement. He’d just found an Adana printing press on a skip in the Gray’s Inn Road … The morning after the night before did not bring quiet sorrow. An employee from the National Grid called early. They had been searching for a break in a main power cable. Somewhere, 10,000 volts was pouring into the ground. Their search had led them to our house. On the previous night (Friday 13 th for the superstitious) the two rooms and roof space that contained my partner Francis Wheen’s current and past writing; his letters, articles, books and CDs collected over forty years, had burned down, with a sudden and shocking thoroughness. Now, our grief at what had been lost was moderated by a realisation that we were lucky, all of us, to be alive. One end of the severed cabl...