Authors Electric

‘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 had used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many other 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 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 Ipcar and James Savi...

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 t...

I have a very active Forgettery. We all have one of these - a place where we store idealised images, like an album into which we post nothing disagreeable or upsetting. The perfect summer is always in there - the blue skies, the flowers, the lavish picnic without squabbles, sweat or wasps, the turquoise pool into which perfect children jump and splash quite noiselessly, the perfect affair between a couple of unbelievably beautiful people with sungold skin - remember those two? Thought it would never end, but it did. Endings have no place in the Forgettery, though, so it doesn't show. Most people have lengthy summer sections in their Forgetteries - after all, who wants winter, unless you ski, and even then, things look better when the sun is shining, don't they? I, however, am a winter person. I like a bit of drama in my weather, and I enjoy the cold and seeing my breath clouding in the air, and the pleasure of coming into a warm house afterwards, books, TV, and maybe a whisk...

Mary "great with child" Mum can’t remember the Christmas story any more, she thinks.  “Who are these people, Jul?” she asks, looking at one of the Christmas cards she’s chosen. We set out her nativity crib with the same little figures and animals that she arranges into stories every year.  She is delighted at first but then she begins to worry: “People will expect me to know what it’s about.” In a deeper way she does still know. It’s only the names and events that have gone, not the feelings or the insights. We look at Mary on her donkey and I remind Mum that Mary was “great with child” at that moment. We love that word “great” and look at the folds of Mary’s robe to see how big she is really, how far advanced in her pregnancy.  “She can’t be very comfortable,” says Mum, making an imaginative leap into Mary’s aching pelvis on the long slow journey towards Bethlehem. Mum's de-mentia, this deconstructing of her mind, would be fascinating to observe if it were...