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...

A few weeks ago I went down to the beautiful hills on the Rwanda/Congo border, fancying that I was following in the great literary footsteps of the likes of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, but in reality probably more closely resembling William Boot from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop . I was travelling with my client, Hyppolite, a young man who was just seven years old when he survived genocide. In 100 days he lost eighty members of his extended family and witnessed his beloved father being hacked to death by machetes and eaten by dogs. Born in a mud hut without shoes, water or power, and often hungry, he struggled after the genocide to gain an education and to learn to forgive the killers. By the age of thirty he had a Masters Degree in Sociology from Bristol University , had started a Foundation for Peace and had delivered a lecture at Harvard. I am hoping that in this book we will be able to give a child’s view of genocide, in the style of The Diary of a Young Girl...

     My American friend, Frank, known as “Uncle Frank”, who passed away this year aged 88 years, and who had fought in the Pacific against the Japanese during World War 2, and who later, after retirement as an engineer, constructed cartoons, and model boats, and real boats…sent me a letter last year, accompanied by two scraps of paper.      On the first, were these words: “From W. H. Hudson’s Short Story   The Story of a Piebald Horse People there are like birds that they come down in flocks, hop about chattering, gobble up their seed, then fly away, forgetting what they have swallowed. I love not to scatter grain for such as these. With you friend, it is different. Others may laugh if they like at the old man of many stories, who puts all things into his copper memory. I can laugh, too, knowing that all things are ordered by destiny, otherwise, I might sit down and cry.”      On the other scrap o...