was reading me stories, or poems, or encouraging me to do the same.
I would walk in her wake in deep attachment, a jealous little copper-headed blur of admiration. When she directed the mummers play one Christmas (the worthies of Bisley revelling in the fact that they had a RADA-trained actress to bring the show back to life) I, although playing the Doctor, learned every part by heart because, though I really wanted to be Saint George, I was ready to do anything for the show and wanted to impress upon my mother that there was nothing that I could not do. I remember dancing on the sidelines, waiting my turn to speak, in the cold main street of Bisley, outside the old gaol, my back to its heavy, barred and lidless eyes, breathing out Saint George’s lines in clouds of shivering steam.
I learned poetry by rote with her as well (not because she insisted, but because it was natural to do so) and learned to listen to the cadences and rhymes of the poetry she rehearsed for shows she toured with Robert Gittings celebrating Hardy and Keats, listening out with an eager ear for new sounds and meanings. Often the valley answered us back, reinforcing poetry that was being read aloud with interpolations of its own.
Charles Causley was a particular favourite of mine – his collection of poems for children, Figgie Hobbin , was stuffed with memorable characters such as Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth-Toast and vicars who didn’t recognise their own daughters, all of whom were dressed in the most delicate mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme.
One Causely poem that particularly stuck in my head, and delighted me enough to wake my parents one Sunday morning, leaping on their bed and demanding they listen to me read, was ‘I Saw a Jolly Hunter’, a bouncingly gleeful poem about a hunter out after a hare. The Jolly Hunter shoots himself dead by accident whilst the Jolly Hare gets away; the perfect poem for a vengeful seven-year-old vegetarian who instinctively requires the animal to survive at the expense of the hunter.
I launched into the poem as my parents blearily sat up in bed, enunciating every word in punctilious imitation of my mother and, at the exact moment I read the line Bang! went the jolly gun , a shotgun gave its retort deep in the woods, echoing through the closing lines of the poem:
Hunter jolly dead
Jolly hare got clean away.
Jolly good I said.
‘Jolly good!’ said my father, bounding up from under the covers in naked refugee sympathy for the escaping underdog, meat eater though he was.
‘The valley’s listening,’ said my mother.
Later, quietly, I hoped that it had not been listening too hard and consumed one of the Lloyds as they stalked through the woods for pigeons with their shotguns.
Those early, unshorn days of my childhood were as perfect as my mother could make them. Free of London, she threw her all into writing, teaching and keeping me occupied. We were just about comfortable – poets tend to swing through life on the breadline, leaping occasionally up into the baker’s window when a commission or a reading comes in – but much time and money was put into the paperwork that surged like a sea through the attic, letters and poems and paintings for my father’s endless un-commercial but extraordinarily richly textured countercultural magazines. My mother battled continually to stem the tide of paperwork at the attic stairs.
The front door welcomed one into a cosy little corridor lined with books and coats and boots and binoculars. The kitchen, to the left, was a cork-tiled haven – a narrow, yellow-walled galley filled with flowers and bits of pottery she had carefully accrued, plus a long pine table that filled one end of the room and looked out into the sunset, westwards to Slad through a pair of Liberty print curtains that drew together like a tangle of flowers. Arwen would lurk behind them, staring in at us with one green eye, the other hidden by Liberty.
The front room was all bare stone and
I would walk in her wake in deep attachment, a jealous little copper-headed blur of admiration. When she directed the mummers play one Christmas (the worthies of Bisley revelling in the fact that they had a RADA-trained actress to bring the show back to life) I, although playing the Doctor, learned every part by heart because, though I really wanted to be Saint George, I was ready to do anything for the show and wanted to impress upon my mother that there was nothing that I could not do. I remember dancing on the sidelines, waiting my turn to speak, in the cold main street of Bisley, outside the old gaol, my back to its heavy, barred and lidless eyes, breathing out Saint George’s lines in clouds of shivering steam.
I learned poetry by rote with her as well (not because she insisted, but because it was natural to do so) and learned to listen to the cadences and rhymes of the poetry she rehearsed for shows she toured with Robert Gittings celebrating Hardy and Keats, listening out with an eager ear for new sounds and meanings. Often the valley answered us back, reinforcing poetry that was being read aloud with interpolations of its own.
Charles Causley was a particular favourite of mine – his collection of poems for children, Figgie Hobbin , was stuffed with memorable characters such as Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth-Toast and vicars who didn’t recognise their own daughters, all of whom were dressed in the most delicate mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme.
One Causely poem that particularly stuck in my head, and delighted me enough to wake my parents one Sunday morning, leaping on their bed and demanding they listen to me read, was ‘I Saw a Jolly Hunter’, a bouncingly gleeful poem about a hunter out after a hare. The Jolly Hunter shoots himself dead by accident whilst the Jolly Hare gets away; the perfect poem for a vengeful seven-year-old vegetarian who instinctively requires the animal to survive at the expense of the hunter.
I launched into the poem as my parents blearily sat up in bed, enunciating every word in punctilious imitation of my mother and, at the exact moment I read the line Bang! went the jolly gun , a shotgun gave its retort deep in the woods, echoing through the closing lines of the poem:
Hunter jolly dead
Jolly hare got clean away.
Jolly good I said.
‘Jolly good!’ said my father, bounding up from under the covers in naked refugee sympathy for the escaping underdog, meat eater though he was.
‘The valley’s listening,’ said my mother.
Later, quietly, I hoped that it had not been listening too hard and consumed one of the Lloyds as they stalked through the woods for pigeons with their shotguns.
Those early, unshorn days of my childhood were as perfect as my mother could make them. Free of London, she threw her all into writing, teaching and keeping me occupied. We were just about comfortable – poets tend to swing through life on the breadline, leaping occasionally up into the baker’s window when a commission or a reading comes in – but much time and money was put into the paperwork that surged like a sea through the attic, letters and poems and paintings for my father’s endless un-commercial but extraordinarily richly textured countercultural magazines. My mother battled continually to stem the tide of paperwork at the attic stairs.
The front door welcomed one into a cosy little corridor lined with books and coats and boots and binoculars. The kitchen, to the left, was a cork-tiled haven – a narrow, yellow-walled galley filled with flowers and bits of pottery she had carefully accrued, plus a long pine table that filled one end of the room and looked out into the sunset, westwards to Slad through a pair of Liberty print curtains that drew together like a tangle of flowers. Arwen would lurk behind them, staring in at us with one green eye, the other hidden by Liberty.
The front room was all bare stone and
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