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Poetry Landscapes |
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20 July, 08. Manningtree, second time round, Poetry Stanza 7 July, 08. Garden design, Fair people and a gannet’s head, Strings drawing together 20 June, 08. IPH at the Mercury, Cambridge Fair, Scoffing the Primroses, Wye weekend 10 June, 08. Perfect Day, Books 27 May, 2008. Stockholm with my Fugi, How to Read a Poem, Meg (MR) Peacocke’s new Collection 18 May, 2008. Poignant meetings, Preparations for Stockholm 5 May, 2008. A Norfolk pebble wall, Wells-Poetry-by-the-Sea 22 April, 2008. Lessons from History, an Orpington Stanza, Raised Beds, The Royal College of Art, Stour Community First, Allison McVety 13 April, 2008. Stour Community First’s clean-up, Essex Arts, Raised Beds, Kevin’s Gatty 2 April, 2008. Easter Fair, Anniversary, Tina Peploe’s play, Raised beds, The Naze Tower, Suffolk Book League & Constable country
We’re doing things a second time round, we realise, preparing to pick soft fruit at Stutton’s Holly Farm and noticing my mother’s ancient aluminium colander has its weight inscribed on the underside from July 2007. A heavy morning rain which made the raspberries soft and easily finger-slimed had also made the country lush. Willow herb just outing in purplish red, willows and sallows restless in the breeze, water chattering to the edge of the reservoir at nearby Alton Water, wild flowers gorgeous. It flipped me back to Rutland Water, another reservoir; but ours, being Suffolk, a boskier version, edged mainly with oak, larch and willow trees wet up to their knees in the way of Louisiana’s Swamp Cyprus. We finished the day listening, along with an delirious Royal Albert Hall audience, to the spiky-haired Nigel Kennedy’s rendering of Elgar’s violin concerto.
Two of Manningtree’s Poetry Society Stanza won mention in the Wivenhoe Bookshop 2008 competition. All praise for Judith Wolton’s energetic and imaginative Jazz in a Town Park and Pat Bloom’s Lamb in a Library. The latter written I’m delighted to claim, at the instigation of the group for a locally-based poem to read at our Manningtree Library performance on Poetry Day. It’s another richly descriptive poem, set, this time round the proverbial local Witch Finder.
Garden design The sun is sending slabs of brightness into a garden full of half-spent foxgloves, their knobbly green necks bending under each small frilled head of flowers. From my window, I’ve seen how I can extend the central flower and shrub bed into a rectangle; simultaneously, extending the geometrical pattern of the raised beds and giving me room for more plants. A rave of wild- and the strident yellow/orange Californian poppies is envisaged for 2009, beside the hydrangeas and rugosas. Wind is always a consideration on this North Norfolk coast but without basic unity, a garden will always,, inevitably feel unsatisfactory. At lunch with Pat Galton in Wiveton, we sat at right angles to two huge herbaceous borders that David laid out with a wildlife-lover’s attention to the bird and insect attractiveness of his every plant. Behind this, an old apple orchard which the birds no doubt love too. The garden is beginning to crowd out in the two years since David died, but there’s a lot of its creator still there. John Peace tells me that though on a permanent catheter and therefore restricted in movement, he too enjoys his plantsman’s garden. This grappling with soil is something we hang on to as we age. Fair people and a gannet’s head William lives near Midsummer Common. He said he knew the fair was in town after meeting a gaggle of girls in the shortest skirts he could imagine. Missing him in Cambridge, we passed streams of Heffers on the cockle path, large and small, on a day few others ventured out. William with a gannet’s head sticking from the pocket of his slop. A beautiful tawny head, so soft it looked furred rather than feathered, and an enormous olive-black bill. He’s going to dissolve the flesh and save the skull. A pocketful of death. Hilary Mantel writes, ‘You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing – nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page.’
It’s happening in both our homes, strings drawing together. In Overy I’m to write a chapter of Ian Scott’s follow-up to The Turn of the Tide, to be called, fittingly, The Return ….. A piece about how people on the salt-marsh coast spend their leisure. This time, he’s going to try and grab North Norfolk’s big-names, Kevin and Louis de Bernieres, even Bill Bryson, along side a few of the old gang - me and Jim Ring, Richard Worsley. Turn on my journalist hat. Should be fun. In Manningtree the anti-Tesco campaign runs hot and fast. The regatta is on, the market in Saturday morning flutter: I know what we’re trying to protect. Why won’t people see that one competes with the other? That supermarkets, with their seduction and their convenience, are also destroyers. We were distributing leaflets in East Bergholt when Michael got chased down the road by a pro. He (Michael) has made a snazzy new web for Stour Community First; it won’t be as sly and punchy as the Wye one (Wye Village versus Imperial College), but it should get viewers involved.
A Stanza meeting hosted by Pat in Colchester saw the knitting of ideas for our Library performance on Poetry Day. At our next meeting we read chosen poems, timing our act. Alison Brackenbury’s painstaking tutorial stimulated some real hard work on my Matisse cycle. I’m hoping Sara will wrap them into a radio play. I’ve also, on Alison’s advice moved into E-Zine (web) submissions. US magazines like Shitcreek and Chimaera, and the funky-looking London-based Trespass run by Sara-Mae Tuson, temporary editor of The London Magazine. Bruce of Heritage Books dropped in for another batch of Fishermen, after selling all the first. Wivenhoe Book Shop sold five out of the six I left. A meal tonight with Sue Everett and the De Whalleys. A Wye party from more than fifty years friendship. Malcolm and my beloved Rennie with us in spirit. I’m thinking about all her visits to the cottage here. Shortly before they assemble, Graham Petts looks in to give us a quote on a pebble wall between us and Julie. It’s already a rollick of roses and fuschias in my mind.
Why was IPH a disappointment? Why was I dull to what was intended to move me, and wanted to laugh at the chorus of dancing girls. In large part, I suspect, it was the language of Colin Teevan’s updating of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis, which seemed to me to be stilted, archaic and cliche-ridden. Clymenestra: ‘I can no longer staunch my tears’. Partly, admittedly, it was acting that can’t compare with a play like Troilus and Cressida at the Barbican. I also have a personal inability to enjoy Shuna Snow.
The billboards for the Cambridge Fair on Midsummer Common say 'FAIR AND MARKET open all day until 10.00 pm'. At 12.00 am on Thursday, the second day of its run, it was dead as a Dodo.
I went to what used to be called the Pot Fair as a Cambridge child and again as a teenager. I remember stacks of delicate china, the smell of roasting and a mystery that remains with me. This time, women in fluttery dresses biked through tree-lined paths on Jesus Green. Houseboats were slung along the banks of the Cam. Someone seated on a lawnmower made circles in the grass. Cambridge was imperturbable. The bridge sported posters for a Suzuki Piano Concert, a Cultural Night of mixed media and a Comedy Festival Punt Show. Nothing about the Fair until I arrived at its perimeter, on Chesterton Road. No music or movement either. But I could see through plane leaves a bright orange Stocks HGV. Fair people were hosing down their trailers, children playing ball games, youths sitting round in groups in windy sunlight. Mark Warner, Swagman sat on the back of his van. Spread beneath a closed stall was a heap of polythene bags of stuffed animals. ‘This is a bad week really. A very bad week. It's not a particularly good fair anyway. You never ever know. I go to a fairground, I can sell a van-load; I can go to a fair and sell one box. The weather's the whole thing. The weather's half decent: it's (sales are) fair. If the weathers bad, then it's bad. They all come from China. I don't actually go there, I've got people go for me. I would go, it's the next stepping stone. Need more money. Getting rid of them's no problem: it's buying them at the right price. The brightest corner was Uncle Sam's American Diner, selling the odd hot-dog, Next door Gypsy Harriet Lee treated me to five pound's worth of palmistry. A beautiful 84 year old Romany from Brighton, whose credentials pasted on a board, mentioned dealings with Royalty. 'There's been five generations of us. Used to come here w my grandmother. It was all china: a pot fair they called it. Not all this stuff. They used to come from the north, come out of factories, but these are all Cowboys what's down here now. They don't sell the stuff like they used to. Now then, put your five pounds in your left hand, please.
On my way out I passed the elaborately decked stall of Mr Carter of Carters Fine Porcelain, whose family have been coming since 1839. He, personally, for 62 years. 'The only opposition we had was a firm called Barrets, but they closed down.' 'Now it's like a car boot sale with all this rubbish from Ikea. There are two Polish girls selling fish. They've never heard of Tartare sauce. They don't even speak English. Perhaps I'm going barmy’, said the Current Mr C in an acerbic mood. A painted fruit bowl by Royal Worcester was for sale at £14,000 and a neat little glass caravan, ('It's not glass, it's a Waterford'), for £5,000. Two Irish girls coming along, purchased a small item for their trailer. 'When you see something like this, you've got to have room for it.' Even their pleasure didn't seem to have brightened Mr Carter's day.
Passionate gardener, Alex Pankhurst, has a very pretty Beth Chatto-type of garden round the old half-clapboard Malt Cottage in Dedham. Here she’s written a book about the source of plant names, Who Does your Garden Grow, Earl’s Eye Publishing,1992, followed by Scoffing the Primroses, a fictionalised account of saving a garden. Both she published herself, making more money than I did with my smart agent and smart publisher.
A weekend in Wye where the V’s natural garden has somehow survived the predations of 2 lively and disobedient collies. Woody, as it happened, on his own while Tiger spent part of his 5 days with the vet. Trust Tiger to get bitten by an adder on the Downs. Snake bites must be rare, we know this because neither vet nor Ashford Hospital had anti-venom serum, which had to be rushed by courier from Guy’s. They were reluctant to part with the small quantity reserved for humans. Tiger is reunited with a family longing to see his little butter face and wagging tail.
Overy is perfect. From the Staithe you can see the windmills in Skegness which must be as much as 40 miles away. Digitalis rearing up all over the garden, the first raised bed is a frolic of green, e’ve had to throw away most of the gooseberries which aren’t supposed to fruit heavily in their maiden year; only the fig looks less than happy. Instead of losing half its figs (5), it’s lost them all. And it looks a short of iron, which has been remedied. Issy says the Barbican’s wonderfully entertaining Troilus and Cressida we saw together, sent her back to the Iliad, and Daisy, down in Wye, is sixteen years old. A stream of non sequiturs.
On Sunday I picked up 50 copies of Fishermen from publisher Shaun Tyas in Donnington. Long straight roads through miles of Lincolnshire’s uneventful agriculture with the odd ribbonside development of small houses and massive roadside signboards– US style up the A17. Shaun has published 180 books over the years. Three years ago he bought an old seven-bedroom house in the centre of the village, every one of which is stuffed with books: most of his own bought second-hand. A Medieval historian to the core, he’s an opera buff with a heap of passions, the history of cinema, history of photography. But he rue’s the day he left Stamford with its so-much-going-on and people constantly dropping in. He tells me that OUP produce 800 books a year with a slightly greater number of staff. That’s more than one per book. Heritage Books have given me a web page in the illustrious company of Jamie Dodds, Martin Newell and Katrina Porteous. They’re bent for East Anglia’s book shops with ten of each title. May they sell well.
Once upon a time I had a camera I was very happy with. Over the years, it took some excellent picts for garden history classes. Then the burglary and I never felt happy with its successor but I think I might do, once again with my Fugi FinePix S8000fd. Here, from Stockholm, are the first picts, starting with the lift at the Elite Hotel in Eriksgaten to which we trundled our trolly cases on a windblown Monday afternoon. Close to the Karolinska University Institute where Michael was teaching, and round the corner from a vast and tantalising, Pricefix supermarket. A prohibitive exchange rate discouraged purchases barring a large tube of crab paste of which I was divested by Ryanair before it left the country, and cream cakes so large we cut them in half and smeared our lips while watching the traffic pass.
A week or so before our visit, Stockholm had a brief wave of full summer. Its inhabitants were back in long boots by the time we arrived but the heat had brought out the lilacs. A finer-leaved, floppier-panicled species than our ubiquitous S. vulgare. Dark and pale, everywhere against stucco buildings in ochre, brick red and various earth-colours in between.
You think of Sweden as being civilized, home and occasional begetter of the Nobel prize and Stockholm, the Venice of the North. See the view from Gamlastan: there is water and naturally, bridges, everywhere. The city is remarkably free of rubbish though re-building projects scar from the centre to the north-western limits where a block of flats is making way for a new hospital. The hotel restaurant had a library of breakfast books. Not that I noticed anyone reading from them. There was background music in the internal pub, in the foyer and in the lift – all different, yet strangely samey. Remembering the cry from Daniel Barenboim, the year he gave the Reith lecture, I suspect things are getting worse. The legs are part of a twenties shop display in a department stores on Hamngaten. Fashion-conscious mostly-blond women in double-looped scarves trip up and down listening to their mobile-phones.
Since reading Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem, (Blackwell Publishing, 2007) ( yes, the Manchester Prof of Creative Writing; he of the Martin Amos quarrel) I no longer think of form as being simply structure. ‘Form concerns such aspects of the poem as tone, pitch, rhythm, diction, volume, metre, pace, mood, voice, address, texture, structure, quality, syntax, register, point of view, punctuation. ‘Content is a matter of meaning, action, character, idea, storyline, moral vision, argument, and so on.’, His analysis is brilliant: I have to read the early chapters slowly to absorb all he says. Meg (MR) Peacocke’s new Collection Meg can capture the essence of an animal in a few taught Hopkinesque phrases. She has a penchant for the natural world and a general concern for the old, deceased, voiceless, underrated or dumped which includes animals from whom, by observation and through interaction, it is understood, we have much to learn. Amongst lots of death and quite a bit of pain, there are brighter poems about art and looking, world concerns and poems full of assonance and alliteration which simply dance on the rhythms and resonance of word-sound. There is humour, and delight in turning received wisdom on its head (The Bind Men Look at an Elephant) but a moral vision, strong in In Praise of Aunts, has more conventionally religious overtones than previous collections. New too is the self-depreciation. In general, the poems are very shorn, with minimal punctuation – commas being frequently replaced with an extra space. The language is authoritative and colourful, the texture robust. The voice with its varied viewpoints often within a poem, strong and bravely felt in a climate in which it is fashionable to be laid back; caged as it were into neat stanzas, so that form and content work productively against each other. Some of the mimetic words, ‘Crud, (By the Canal), ‘chicker’, (Gardener) ‘scrit (Dog) – had me stretching for a dictionary. Not always finding an answer. Take the longest poem, The Place, which is a paean to the power of place discovered, as TS Eliot’s said in Four Quartets, when the seeking ends. This is a religious poem that discovers gratitude for the present through the memory of a shrine in Northern France; its song releasing its music in one unevenly long line, ‘Thanks to our Lady, our blessed Lord, I go along with the notion that the power of place give an emotion of religious quality and intensity but the tone of its Catholic imagery seems a mite too heady for my comfort. It’s a matter of tone that again makes me hesitate on reading the first, title poem. Here we have sturdy, indulgent creatures, placed Betjamenesque, in the Home Counties: ‘Cold cuts, scones and tea’; somehow graceless in their singleness. We remember do-gooding aunts whose genuineness was largely passed over and the first line’s ‘sly laughers’ tells us that the poem’s intention is to share their laughter, but the use of their own schoolgirl language helps to make them caricatures whom the reader inevitably, laughs at. As always with this poet, there is lovely word play. In By the Canal, the festering detritus of a ditched supermarket trolly implicitly takes to task the habits of a throw-away society, in heavily painted four lined stanzas. A deliberate mismatch of form and content makes dumping an occasion for some suitably baroque imagery: ’before the greyblue mould began to bloom’. But in the poems I ‘specially like, Afternoon, and for its mystery, The Value of X, the imagery is perfect, nothing overblown. The latter might be described as a quest for identity in which both looking and the sense of touch play a part. A poem neat as a sonnet, evenly separated into quest and find. ’ ..yes, there she is, / unfinished as ever, blocked face sleepless hair, / boxed in the cube of window glass
A bonny niece married a tall dear man beneath the new-painted wooden angels high in the roof of the church in South Creake. He smiled often, she, throughout the service. The angels smiled on a far flung families under a single roof. I met Bob Malster, my correspondent of 30 years ago, when I was writing Fishermen. Author of an impressive 20 books and publisher of the Malthouse Press, he left school at 16, spent most of his life as a journalist and even got fired, he claims with pride. Bob has one of those incredible minds for the mysteries of East Anglia’s local history, his tramping ground stretching from Norwich, where he was born, to Colchester and Ipswich, between which he now lives. He didn’t even know that my book had come out in a second Edition, and I felt bound, for old times’ sake, to give him one. Shaun Tyas, another one-man-band, and publisher of this elegant paperback, tells me he has hundreds in his store. The first edition sold well. I’m contacting Heritage House, who get books into shops throughout East Anglia, see if they can put a bit of stamina behind sales.
Preparations include typing copies of MR Peacocke’s Afternoon, no sooner spotted in the Indi and read aloud out to Michael, both in deck chairs, in the Overy garden,.than Helen and Joe sent me a copy of Meg’s new purple-covered book from Peterloo, In Praise of Aunts. (good title) I can’t think of anything I would have liked more. Pondering the impending birthday of will-be-sixteen year old Daisy, I wonder whether to pass on Karel Capek’s The Gardener’s Year, and discover I can’t quite part with it yet. ‘A gardener will sow seeds for the future lawn, which he will call English rye grass and bent grass, fox-tail, and cat’s tail grass; and then he will depart leaving the garden brown and naked, as it was on the first day of the creation of the world.’
5 May, 2008. A Norfolk pebble wall, Wells-Poetry-by-the-Sea
The Malus florentina has opened its pale serrated leaves; the lusty new plum (Oolin’s golden gage) has three fruit flowers; one of the raised beds is trickled with seedlings and a nine inch fig tree snugging the east-facing wall of the house bears 10 tiny figs. It doesn’t get quite enough sun, or enough water. M says give it two years and see.
Roadside sproutings on the first May bank holiday bring notices for Wells festival of Poetry-by-the-Sea. Who has come, who might feel neglected, awed, shy? Brian and Graham maintain a friendly local touch while Kevin keeps a paternal eye on proceedings. I’m not sure that the best poets / readers get the biggest audiences, as is often the case, but I may not be the best judge as my surmise stems partly from hearsay. I made only one of the four big events and one of the fringe ones. Four young poets who read at the Golden Fleece would have improved their act if even one have them had glanced at their considerable, late (9.45 pm) audience. Not having a mike, they were difficult to hear and what we heard didn’t grab us. I may be unfair, but these days, poets know how important their delivery is. To meet an audience half way is a kind of courtesy. The Laskey / Mangeot reading was a good choice. Starting with his sad clever poem about a marriage spooled backwards, Home Movies, in The Tightrope Wedding, the ever thoughtful Michael, read several new poems from his Smith/Doorstep pamphlet, Living by the Sea. A collection prompted by an awareness of death, both of others’ and our own, and simultaneously aware that the collapse of traditional belief systems leaves us vulnerable, is encapsulated in the title poem’s hymn to the sacredness of the sea. Laskey can make few words resonate. I’d read and reread The Right Place in the tiny booklet put out by the Festival, wondering how something at first glance so simple could send such messages up my spine. It’s a dedication to a friend who had died, Laskey explained. And the depth came through. As always, two poets in succession clarify the strengths of each. Andre Mangeot came over as something of an actor, vibrant and natural, with a wide range and register. From tongue in cheek humour to politics and social concern, from found poems (a google search on Dante) to an autobiography in 52 seconds, slightly altered since I heard it two years ago, to include a marriage that would seem to have had a settling quality on someone who needs to take risks both with life and in his poems. What did Michael, as an editor, look for, in poems submitted to Smiths Knoll; this was to me the most interesting question asked at the end of the reading. A question to which he replied, freshness, surprise, poems that communicate (‘I don’t like ones that make me feel stupid.’) Poems he wants to enjoy knowing better. Are readings a bit predictable? Self-indulgent? He is always looking for ways of doing things in new ways. What do you do if poems are rejected? Read modern poetry, (Andre) submit again (Michael).
‘Bring two poems and a pen or pencil’ Was it my interpretation or did the ‘or pencil’ sound schoolish? Either way, I felt lucky to have a slot with Michael Laskey, spent ages deciding whether to bring two of the poems I reckoned the sort of material I might submit to Smiths Knoll, or more quirky poems I’m still playing with. What did I mean by a Smiths Knoll poem? To be honest, one that’s not only well made but works within an essentially realistic framework. As do Laskey’s own poems. Here I was upbraided, Michael thinks the range in S-K has extended ‘hugely’ since 1991. ‘I wont talk about a ‘Smiths Knoll poem in future’, I agreed. To which he replied ‘you mustn’t even think it.’
No sooner do I mention Gatty than Kevin is in the Indi (18 April, p9), - being Crossley-Holland, the first of seven in line for the 2008 Carnegie Medal- (which he won before with Storm). Like another book on the list, Gatty’s Tale draws on the theme of the Crusades but Kevin’s bold and beautiful young heroine making a pilgrimage from North Wales to the Holy Land is all his own. Another children’s author whose work has full marks from the girls, Meg Rossof, is there too for What I was.
Reciprocal visits are well worth making and I had the added pleasure of staying with Beryl – frilly pillow cases, fish pie and a three-orange drink for breakfast in her conservatory, sussing out Bill Manhire’s poems in P. London. Later on, six of us sat round a table in a comfortable back room at The Two Doves on Bromley Common’s Oakleigh Road, listening to each other’s poems. Some insightful feedback from Anne confirmed a weakness I’d already felt at the end of the sestet. So here, with thanks to Orpington’s stanza, is
All morning he dug and raked and levelled. I do most of my gardening in the night.
In London, Beryl and I tramped up a windy Exhibition Road in search of Royal College of Art which turns out to be a 60s building on Kensington Gore, next to the Albert Hall. ‘Not terribly pretty’, the receptionist said; he probably meant the outside. It’s whiter than white corridors are stunningly set round a glassed area featuring the trunks of two great plane trees. ‘The RCA have identified a certain vogue in art for reworking history and, in response have organized a show on this theme.’ (The Guardian Weekly Entertainment Guide) Promised an exhibit by Turner-prizewinning Simon Starling and an ‘emotive’ installation by a Russian couple that imagines the stories of the thousands who disappeared during Stalin’s rule, we couldn’t help but wonder what we’d have made of these reductive exhibits unless we’d been told by the artist what they represented. Current art, it seems, has a tendency to be think-piece more than artwork; designed to challenge beliefs or extend credibility. Not a lot wiser, we made for a pleasant canteen.
Tesco have put in an invalid application for a store in Manningtree. We do not know why they made such errors but assume that they will put another application in very shortly. My pic shows one good reason why the smallest town in England with 11 neighbouring Tesco’s oppose the plan. Only one, mind. We also want a town that has retained its character, a place that’s instantly recognisable and distinctive. Not a cloned town, like too many others. I’ve just caught up with David Cleveland’s book on Manningtree and Mistley, out last year, lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced by Suffolk’s Malthouse Press. Local history can be deadly: this is a gem of individuality that brings historical facts into a busy present in a thoroughly engaging read. The author, an Essex archivist, doesn’t oppose change, though one or two of his picts tell their own story. The police station, for instance on New Road replaces a perfectly presentable Victorian house for an unsightly red square of lego. It’s the book’s underlying understanding that everything is propelled by the interests and work of its people, that make it a joy. This sharp bend of the High Street, immediately before (travelling the opposite way from the bicyclist) the estuary sweeps into view, is known as Wherry Corner after a pub that stood there. Wherries, of course, are river boats. Thanks to DC I now know that the landlord of The Wherry owned a passage boat called Sally in 1839. In it he transported passengers to Harwich.
So Wivenhoe didn’t know about Allison McVety: more fool them. To an audience of eleven, she gave a sparkly and entertaining reading from her first, Arc collection with its William Scott-painting cover, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay. ‘It rained the whole fortnight’, ‘Absence is the thing to cling to’, from the first line, McVety slips her reader into her world, wry, weird and witty. Ordinary things – prams and street lamps sparkle and resonate. The language is precise, the intellectual questing pertinent. Back she goes, again and again, for her starting point, to the Mancunian family history; from small details, her poems rise, sharp as scrapers.
‘Have you any other comments about this performance, event or about the arts in Essex in general’ asks one of those forms that sit on your seat at the start of an evening. Because my views invariably split the categories allotted, or the questions seem ambiguous, I avoid filling them in. But the peach-coloured paper stares me back. ‘Your views are important to us’. We’d opted for an arty film at the Ipswich Film Theatre. Then the website came up with ‘Error and phoning called a blank. As it turned out the highly subsidised cinema closed at the end of 2007, and Colchester’s Mercury was an excellent substitute. ‘How much did you enjoy the performance.’ To a response calibrated from 1 to 5, we gave full marks. Limbo’s rambling story concerned the seduction by an older married man of an innocent from a ‘little town on the border’ between North and southern Ireland on the night of her 17th birthday. There were a lot of borderlands. What happened was shocking but the monologue didn’t dwell on the fact. From the moment the lights caught Claire on a windy night beside Camlough Lake, the actress’ facial mobility carried her beyond simple naivety, infusing an otherwise sorry tale with humour that bore little antagonism towards the father of her unborn child, or indeed for anyone else. Something in the stream of consciousness of the tangle-haired girl who refused to engage with intellect, who was indeed all physicality & quite a bit of heart, left a singular impression of vulnerability. The play had been well reviewed in the Essex Standard, someone in the audience told me. That could have been why the black-walled Studio had a full house. Titled from a poem by Seamus Heaney, Limbo was a first full-length script by Decan Feenan, a first production for Real Circumstance and a stage debut for its single actress, Caroline Williamson. Supported by Essex CC, it came to Colchester via acclaim at York Theatre Royal and the Edinburgh Festival. Everyone concerned was youthful.
During another Norfolk sojourn, we planked up the side of the vegetable area, planted a couple of gooseberries and removed enough soil to start planting the single bed. Unable to purchase seeds in Burnham Market, or at Creake Nurseries, we left a single row of 2007 radish. Seed catalogues arriving on the door mat suggest that most people order through the post. Browsing, I’ve upgraded our requirement to Italian salads with names like Chichory Rosa de Verona, Broccoletto sessantina, Marzona and Red ribbed dandelion. I wonder how they’ll fare in North Norfolk’s coastal breezes.
I’ve at last read Kevin’s, prizewinning children’s book, Gatty’s Tale, so I was able to recommend it for friends whose granddaughter lives in Jerusalem. Thoroughly researched and tightly written, it’s the story of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by nine travellers. One of their number being Gatty the spirited village girl who first appeared in the Arthur trilogy, and was clearly destined for things beyond the confines of feudal, 13th century Caldicott, on the border of England and Wales. The beguiling heroine is an unselfconscious innocent who unaware, brings joy, imagination and the occasional epiphany to her hazardous Chaucerian undertaking. Far from being the downtrodden issue of her unloving father and dead mother, Gatty becomes the spirit in whom her companions confide, the plucky girl who wins the heart of her aristocratic protectress, and on her death, takes on leadership of the party. There is some apt moral teaching about the Saracens, who turn out to be not the least like their stereotype but as varied as the Christians with whom Gatty is familiar. Leaving Gatty in Overy to tempt the girls, I’m reading for the first time a book that’s been in print for 300 years - Gulliver’s Travels, and realise how much of it lurks behind Brit lit. My copy’s a children’s classic and no doubt thoroughly expurgated. On Molly’s account, I started with the Huynmhumns; by the end, I still like Book 4 best. According to a writer, Joseph Epstein, ‘You are what you read’.
Easter was earlier than it’s been for donkey’s years, and the weather forecast was terrible, despite which we decided to look at the Easter fair on Hampstead Heath, where Michael went as a child. Not too often ’because it’s too expensive’. In fact we went twice; to the Upper Fair the Saturday it opened and the Lower Fair on Sunday, after a bracing walk from the east up Parliament Hill. Very few public braved hail and wind on the fairgrounds. You can’t park nearby and the grass had become squishy mud. Unleavened carcases of stalls lay flat on the ground. I was surprised the Showmen went at all. It was pretty dire, they admitted. Sorry for them, we spent more than we’d intended and lost a Frisbee in a plane tree. Julian sulked because we wouldn't purchase anything to eat and Sasha dawdled back with a cold nose, then cold hands. And they were cold. A bit of ultra-British stoicism or perversity depending upon your view. Easter Fair, 2008 I walk to the fair on Hampstead Heath Up Parliament Hill and I catch frayed notes that fraying in register or maybe a sense that as my eyes a hole has opened up Somewhere, buds burst to life, birds sing, 'It's diabolical', says wooly cap. Used to be full. They've raised the rent too high.
Celebrating our anniversary in Manningtree I turned cheese straws into charcoal biscuits and refuelled glasses of mulled wine, learning from Auriol that the Lexton brothers who built our Maltings complex came to grief when one of them ran away with the other’s wife. All the profits got gobbled up in the ensuing quarrel. This must account for the dicey plumbing. Liz came in sparkly from a trip to India, Kay looked happy – is she really 93? David looked well, which he feels he shouldn’t, with a heavy programme of radiotherapy to come. John is about to launch a boat he’s made by hand, and Penny nearly had the same speaker for her Constable organization that David and Stephanie have lined up for the Suffolk book League tonight: an old friend of Kevin, Tony Bailey who is one of Constable’s biographers.
Later that ervening, Tina’s Forgiving, produced by Sara, was broadcast as Radio 4’s nine o’clock play. Michael gave it seven out of ten. There was mystery to an unfolding story of a sudden, inexplicable daylight murder of one of three sisters (A), mistaken, it evolved, for sister B, who had married someone with murky dealings in the druggy underworld. As a protective measure, the police took the parents into hiding with sister C. We heard everyone’s point of view; but what came over was the damage caused by refusal to forgive. The play was contemporary, a judicious mixture of dialogue with soliloquy, and I caught snatches of the free-flowing questioning that Tina’s so good at. For me, however, it was a little too realistic. Like a landscape painting when I long for the strength of an abstract. Too much same-tone earnest hurtfulness in the women’s voices; they seemed to go on and on.
An enormous Pallet-delivering van backed up Glebe Lane carrying £650 worth of tannilised pine wood sleepers. Too long to swivel sideways and remove from the back end, the wood was something of a problem for the young Polish driver. So Michael and I were raised up and down on a fork lift platform at the end of the van to help, before carrying them to a half-way spot outside the garage. Measuring 3m x 500mm x 250mm, and slightly waterlogged, they were of such weight as to be only just handleable for two people. And devilish to get flat, with the ends nice and square, on new raked ground before long bolts went in. A further problem was what to do with all the soil when surrounded by lawn and wall. First we dug it to one side, then we lowered the timber, piece by piece, spirit levelled our tomb and tossed the soil inside while working on a second bed. In my mind they already burgeon with the salad, parsley, winter cress and lambs lettuce we’ve been without for a year.
To Walton on the Naze to climb up the Trinity coastguard tower, erected, we find as early as 1720, and now full of paintings and pottery dispayed round tables for a cuppa. Michael Checketts has a nice oil view from the interior of his beach hut at Wrabness. Beneath the tower, the chopped and fast receding headland rises and falls in ochre and dull grey sand. The flat foreshore is paved with slabbed grey mud we slipped on, walking north towards the cranes of Felixtowe. Gun placements once on the cliff tops, are a reminder of how fast the shore is eroding.
If I don’t manage the Suffolk Book League’s AGM, Sarah’s pic of a happy weekend will have to take place of a report. John, Sarah, Sally, Michael, sitting, appropriately, in front of Flatford Mill. Michael and Sarah shared picture-taking, and Sarah made the adjustments. Clever!
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And how was the previous night’s official opening? 'It was shit', said a young showman. 'Not much going on now. The place is dead isn't it? No good worrying about it.'
'I didn't tell her I'm a sceptic, but she agreed, after a minute or two of clever questioning and telling back, that we could concentrate on her instead of me.
The girls were trying to dredge duckweed from a field pond in preparation for the arrival of 15 goats.
The valley of orchids at the end of the wall is at its peak and two days of solid rain has brought out hundreds of black slugs, delicately horning their way from the edge of the path, hesitant antlers probing as they hunt on what is surely a wasteland of yellow rubble and sand. I’ve swum in Bank Hole and Michael in the Pool.
Viewed from upstairs, eleven meters of handsome pebble wall have sprouted in front of John & Sally’s house over the Bank Holiday weekend. Fun and games started late Friday afternoon when two men rapidly began cementing piles of bricks into a double length. Then arrived an open truckload of pebbles from Holt driven by Garry complete with family. ‘I promised I’d bring them with me.’ Accompanied by much squealing, Sophie and Lily helped scoop up the pebbles and threw them onto the grass verge. 
All day Saturday and Sunday the men worked. The outer brick length being built with niches to hold pebbles which are individually cemented in. We’ll be in Manningtree for the second half.
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