Paperback writer

 

So, there I am, in the mid sixties, early twenties, married. Are you following this?

 

Perhaps I should explain the circumstances: working in an ad agency, lowly paid, my wife also working (in a bank) but not for long (because our first baby is due, almost immediately after we get married). I still have connections with my bohemian/writer friends, but not quite so often. Conventionality is taking over.

 

We live in a rented flat in Islington in London. The flat is large and on the ground floor, the landlady is old, frightened and living on the top floor - we get on like a house on fire! I try to live a dual existence: normality in the day, writing at night. I say goodnight to my dear wife at a normal goodnight time and then retreat to the lounge where there is an old wooden desk at which I assign my thoughts, my feelings, my poems in the dead of night. Until I stagger to bed in  the middle of the night and then get up in the morning, trying to be ready to do another day's work. Those nights in the oily dark with just a desk light to keep me company were character building. Most new wives would have complained like hell, but not mine.  NO you are talking here about a woman who bought me the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for my twenty first birthday, who was prepared to indulge my every whim. I have already said that she was my White Goddess and as this story unfolds you will see the majesty of her being in what I was, and still am, able to do.

 

As a further taster, and as progression within my poetic life, here is a poem that was published in The Hillingdon Writer (Hillingdon is a small suburb, just outside London) as the 'poem that leads the way.'

 

 

Of the lame-foot shepherd

he prayed:

across his mountains

through the streams and rocks

where many times he lay and rested

the sheep roamed without master.

 

Through decades

hours, lines, winds, fallen thorns

clear eyes to see the mist;

ability to catch his sheep.

 

He thought of the boy

and how he had lost the sheep

Go, said the shepherd

You cannot know the hills.

 

How am I to judge

whether the rock is mine

or I the rock - lame-foot?

 

 

That was in the Winter of 65. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a nomadic existence, and still Pound was to rear his godly head. There is much to come, but each episode must be a point of the cross, for me and thee.

 

Be patient; I am living out my life and each cupboard is a landing on the spiral of life.