Two ROOKS in a DEWY meadow EARLY one MORNING

They rose into the air.
Oh my Lord...
How they rose into the air.

I was coming down from Old Lodge Hill
Boots heavy with mud, wading
A slough
Of sullen emptiness;
The church below me
Adrift in a grey mizzle sea.

When,
On ragged, tar-slicked wings
That flared with splintered fire,
They rose together
Into the air
Above the shrouded earth.

And if this universe
Could have contained
The three of us,
I swear...
Oh my Lord,
How I swear,
Right there and then
I would have stretched out my arms
And would have risen with them.

WORDS on an EBB Tide

Work (paid and unpaid)... words that ceased to fit my world... that sense of turning inwards (positively and negatively)... shadows in the stillness... have all contrived to take my time and keep me away.

I have long learnt not to fear these fallow times; these times when words dry up... when you pick up a pen and it feels dry and lifeless. For I am dug from a world of ebb and flow; the tide, the sap, the sun's warmth. It is right and proper that those rhythms also pulse deep within me.

These spells are not to be feared - they are a part of us. They make us who we are. It is not as if I rely on words for my living...
No, my need to write is far more important than that.
I write because it reminds me how precious and beautiful it is to breathe.
I write because my heart would explode if I did not.

For awhile I haven't had the heart to open my blog and now that I have, I am touched beyond words (ironically) by the comments I find here.

I know the tide will turn and I will write again, for it feels as if my heart is so heavy with unborn words and with feelings that have no name. I want run up Windmill Hill and to take a broom and write in fire across the skies so that it will rain my heart down upon the woods and fields, and that the winds will find music to those words that lie mute and unformed in my soul.

The nestlings are beginning to flex their wings and I too share their joy of the early summer winds.

BESIDE the JIGSAW table...

Beside the jigsaw table stands a mug of hot water, tepid now and mostly undrunk. All the edges of the jigsaw are complete, bar one missing piece, and a picture emerges, moth-eaten and frayed in the centre. Outside owls hoot as they have always done; a sound so redolent of this little room enclosed in the night time, atop this house where so much life has been lived.

She sits hunched over the board, her long bent fingers brushing the chaos of pieces as if drawing music out of the colours. On the chair next to her is a little, rather threadbare, toy fox. I pick it up. Its stuffing is firm and unyielding, like stuffed toys used to be. "It is over 70 years old." she says, "I had it when I was ten."

There is a story; a story I have known since I was very small. It was always told with the ring of laughter, but its repetition spoke of darker fears. There was a spinster aunt, whom she loved dearly, and with whom as a special treat she would visit to stay for a night or two. This aunt was full of character, and drove a car when it was almost unheard of for a woman to drive; and she drove it with a reckless zeal. She was artistic and bohemian, had a female lover (although we did not talk about it in those days) and she was ferociously clever and independent. On one visit to her aunt, when she was about 10 years old, the aunt jokingly said to her, "My dear, you have been SOO good I think I might want to keep you here to live with me." But she didn't know if she was joking or serious. Every time after that, when she went to visit the aunt, she was terrified that she would never return to her home or see her mother again. She then got this fox and it became her talisman. It was always by her side. She took it everywhere to watch over her and to ensure that she would always get safely back home. She walked together with that fox through the night time valleys of those ten year old's deepest fears.

She tells me the story again and as she tells it she absent-mindedly brushes its muzzle with the back of her fingers and I don't know what to say, no longer knowing quite how to relate to this very elderly woman, bent like the hawthorns on Windmill Hill, but who is also the mother who chased away my childhood nightmares, and who, even now, is this little ten year old girl, with her fox who is watching over her, facing into the dark night from which she fears she will never return.

We turn off the light. An owl shrieks in the tree next to the house and through the dormer window there are stars and the black silhouettes of geese in flight. All I can do is smile a smile of understanding that says 'I understand and that its ok that I understand.'

On a GREY January MORNING we BREATHE grandeur

The stem of grass,
crushed beneath a boot
now growing again
arcing over trampled mud
A green spear of light.

A sparrow,
amid the havoc of blackthorn
torn by winter gales,
with a soul far larger
than its song.

And we see the glory,
don't we?
You ...
and me ...
and God.

I was BORN into a CATHEDRAL...

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I was born into a cathedral of green water and weeds and light. My small world was bordered by hedges and fields rich with cow dung and hollow dark places, rank with nettle and dock, where archangels and kingcups grew and I was cradled by the sound of wind among reeds; the rush of glassy water in the sluices of the locks; the song of swans' wings in flight; and the wash of rain against a wooden cabin roof. It smelt of wet wood and anthracite and the smell of hot iron from the little Pithers stove that kept the cruel winters at bay and dried the bedclothes when the roof leaked. And then there was the smell of pigs and straw and paraffin and the rich, trouty, earthiness of when still waters are stirred.

The Kathy, Grand Union Canal, Rickmansworth

There were five of us aboard this clinker-built ark, called the Kathy, cobbled together from an open-topped lifeboat that had been salvaged from an old liner. The wood was rotten, but loved. The farmer, on whose land, it was moored kept threatening to break it up, but Mum and Dad just laughed; it was home and it was a good one. There was laughter there and warmth, even when the ice came and our world no longer rocked gently to the secret rhythms and movements of the dark canal waters. There was a port-hole by our bunks and Mum made drop scones in an old frying pan for friends dropping by. There were always friends dropping by.

First there was Mum and Dad. Then there was a cat, Kismus - who (later) would sleep with me on my pram, then my sister, Wendy, came and finally there was me. At 9.45, on a Friday morning right at the end of a wet April; it was the day when the farm's guard dogs were silent, I was born in the little cabin made and fitted out by Dad. Dad and Wendy waited on the canal bank hoping that the rain would hold off. Kismus was the first of our family to see me. The midwife plucked her up, saying that it is only right that she should see this new creature that had come into her life so that her nose would not be put out of joint. Dad bought a marble cake to celebrate.

Dad (looking splendidly bohemian and piratical), Mum, me and Wendy

Records show that there was a long-lasting system of low pressure hanging over the country that spring which made it very wet. Much later, Mum was to write:

"One of the aspects we enjoyed most about the boat was the feeling of close proximity with the elements without actually having to go outside. When it rained we could hear it pattering on the roof, giving a very cosy feeling and the sight of the raindrops falling on the water making patterns was so much nicer than seeing them fall on cold town pavements. The same with the wind, when it blew there was the gentle rocking of the boat, with the added chuckling sound of the water against the clinker built sides." 

Space was tight and sometimes, of necessity, even in the rain I would be outside, in the fields by the bank, tucked up in the pram with Kismus - on guard - sitting under it. Later, once a week, a friend of Mum's would collect us in her dinghy, I would be in a carry cot placed in the centre, and then she would row us upstream, to where she lived, for tea and cake in a narrow boat that was moored around the willowed bend, where swans swam with their signets, and that smelt of rush matting and oil lamps.


What did I stare at?
What captured my mind (young as it was) and my heart in those moments?
And do those things still stir me deep within?
What pleasures did I feel with the rain brushing the canopy of my pram, safe and cocooned while the elms sighed and the heron flew?
Is this why I am still entranced by the sound of rain against window or hood?
Is this why I breathe a little deeper at the sight of rings forming on still waters?
Is this why I still like to press myself up in the corner where the roof eaves drop on stormy nights and listen... and listen?

The cosy warmth of a wooden cabin, the smell of a hot stove, the light that spills from a hurricane lamp, the sound of water lapping against a wooden hull, moorhens swimming through green seas of duckweed, gnats dancing low over water, the slow creak of oars complaining in their rowlocks, the smell of locks and the rattle as the winding gear is released, the white fall of water... These are not memories. They are too old to be memories, too forgotten, too lost; pre-memories, impressions, stabs of emotion, feelings gauze-thin like dreams in the morning's light. But they are somehow still part of me, as strange flashes of recognition that disorientate me and strip me bare. Yes they are still there, for I hear their songs and hear their owl-like call. Not to an Eden lost, but to an Eden that still lives.