A beautiful blue sky day; sun rising gold and red. I stand by the window and look out to count the fat sheep in the field across the road; still seven. My eye is caught by a set of bright golden lights, and I wonder if a large tractor or other piece of agricultural machinery is parked idling at the top of the field. I fetch binoculars and focus them there. They reveal a cottage from fairy-tale, every window lit by the low rays of the sun. It is beautiful, mesmeric, I am enchanted. It stands among trees, its tall chimneys quiet, its gable end to the field. A long low wing juts out from the main building. It must stand on the lane we often walk, but back from the road, invisible. The burgeoning trees have revealed it. I hold the thought of it as I take hot drinks back to bed.

After breakfast we drive into town, park in the carpark and walk up the road to Post Office and Basons, so much more than our local hardware store, where we buy bird food, seed trays and a selection of seeds to sow; cosmos, cornflowers, sweet peas, yarrow, salvia, in shades of blue and white with a smattering of pinks. The staff are as friendly and helpful as always. I am tempted to run my hands through baskets of beans, bulbs, seeds, but resist. The lady at the check out gives us a discount. She sold us the winning raffle ticket in the Big Bird Watch raffle and is delighted that we won. The owner has matched up china tea cups and saucers with a twist of loose tea as Mother’s Day gifts. Pickles walnuts, homemade lemon marmalade vie for attention.

Local supermarket for essentials and then into the hand car wash. The van has been travelling “clatty” lanes for weeks and needs it. They are professional, thorough. Soap hits the window with a satisfying smack, the water jet fierce, pleasing.

When we get home, my husband cleans the inside of the van while I plant a shrub by the bins freeing up a large pot by the front door for future sweet peas. We sit on the balcony bench for a while facing the hedge, watching catkins swing and birds investigate. Rooks oar over, conversational, somewhere in the ash tree a pigeon croons. Daffodils have split open their green sheaths, another shade of yellow to add to the palette of the day.

We leave the front door and windows open for the first time this year, flooding the place with air and light. Neighbours wave, stop to speak, pass the time of day. Scraping moss and the debris of winter from the outside staircase, I count my blessings on this ordinary day. Send thoughts of peace, harmony and the deep quietness of the countryside to those far away and so much less fortunate than I am.

An illustration by Richard Kennedy from the Brockhampton Press edition of I Saw Three Ships, showing Polly, her cat Tibby and the Frenchman sitting in the bay

Elizabeth Goudge’s Christmas Carol

Faith and Hope, two qualities that Elizabeth cherished, along with her belief in the common goodness of humankind are treasures I have found increasingly hard to hang onto in these dystopian days. “ May you live in interesting times” is often cited as a Chinese curse, ironic in its meaning of trouble, Something that could definitely be quoted today. Though no such curse exists, the closest proverb being “Better to be a dog in times of tranquillity than a human in times of chaos.” A phrase that would have resonated deeply, with Elizabeth given her love of dogs and their faithful companionship.

But as always it seemed that Elizabeth had been privy to my thoughts. I remembered all the seasonal stories she had written, and how at this time of the year I had usually turned to one of them. It had always been either The Dean’s Watch or Sister of Angels, sometimes The Scent of Water with its ending of the glass ship sailing out on “living water.” Maybe it was that image that put me in mind of her short story “I Saw Three Ships”.

This Regency tale, set in a fictional Devonshire town, is in essence a meditation on a 17^th century carol. The song which was very popular came from a folk tale crafted around the three Magi and their journey to Bethlehem. The imagery of ships had always been an important one for Elizabeth. In her preface to her “A Christmas Book” she says; “In the mid-winter gloom Christmas comes up over the horizon like a lighted ship homeward bound. The arrival has been prepared for and is expected, yet as the archaic shape draws slowly nearer and nearer, the lights of the lanterns reflected in the black water like moons and stars, the sails luminous as huge moth’s wings in the dark, we feel profound relief.”
Bethlehem, of course is a landlocked place, and the “ships” referred to would originally have been camels, “ships of the desert”, being a common medieval metaphor for those exotic animals ridden by the wise men on their way to seeking the birth of the Messiah.

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
the ways deep and the weather sharp
The very dead of winter”
T. S. Eliot

It is vintage Goudge, containing many of the story lines and characters she loved. An orphan child brought up by elderly aunts, a child who is sensitive, fey almost and teaches her elders how to be “childlike” again, obtaining the gifts of enjoyment in the wider world outside their social concerns. There are folk stories evoking an older wisdom and a cast of eccentric characters surrounding the innocence of the little girl. There is the beauty of the natural world under lined with the spiritual which Elizabeth does so deftly; “The stars shone so brightly that they made a weight of glory in the sky.” Memories perhaps of her view from her own bedroom window.

The real heart of the book is that she takes three disreputable old men, men outside of the polite mannered and constricted world of the era and makes them into believable Magi. The sad and haunted French refugee, the irascible “Rag and Bones” and the mysterious seafaring man who turns out to be the most life enhancing figure of them all.

Thank you Elizabeth for extending the hand of friendship and restoring to me a sense of hope and faith that starting from the new birth of Christmas reinvigorates my knowledge that the world is still a wonderous place. Where acts kindness and the unexpected turn lives from the survival to the magical.

Aunt Dorcas and Polly

Outside the ash has laid it’s annual carpet of gold. Pheasants are haunting the hedgerows, the fields edge. Some days the valleys fill with mist, on others the wind moans under the eaves, sends scurries of oak leaves past the window. Acorns crunch under foot and from the yellowing blackthorn a robin sings his sad refrain, poignant.

Today for me is about remembrance. One year on from his death, the silence still hums with his voice. Phil Rickman, storyteller of the borderlands, chronicler of haunted houses and ancient woods, he left behind more than novels. He left us a chorus of voices caught between faith and folklore, and gave us a heroine who dared to walk the line between the worlds. I knew Phil a little, enough to feel the warmth behind the wit, the quiet generosity beneath the gothic. He slipped through Samhain’s door, leaving a hole in the thicket of many hearts.

Born and raised in Lancashire, Phil had a long career in the media, working as a journalist for among others the BBC. He hosted a radio programme “Phil The Shelf” for BBC Radio Wales, a book programme where he interviewed authors and premiered books, and just chatted about the genre of supernatural horror and crime which he so brilliantly wrote himself. He was a self-effacing man, and always manged to bring out the best in the people he chatted with. Elly Griffiths and Robert MacFarlane were two of the writers I remember him interviewing. Sadly, these episodes are currently unavailable to listen to. It would be wonderful to hear his voice again.

He started writing novels in the late eighties with his first novel Candlenight being published in 1991. In all he wrote 29 novels, 17 of them in the “Merrily Watkins” series. But I first stumbled across Phil in my local library in the mid 90’s, when I picked up a copy of The Man In The Moss. In 1991 we had watched an episode of Timewatch; The Bog People, about the discovery of Lindow man. He was found in a bog in Cheshire and through rigorous archelogy, it was discovered that he had been a ritual sacrifice. He was a High Caste Celtic man, and the theory was that he had been a Druid Prince and was possibly sacrificed to halt the Roman invasion of Britain. The title of Phil’s book alone impelled me to pick it up. Although it is set in the Pennines, not Cheshire, the premise of the exhumation of a long buried body being disturbed had connections with Lindow Man. Both haunt the resurrectionists. The archaeologist and Celtic historian Ann Ross who was instrumental in the exhumation of Lindow man, became haunted by him as did her family. The phenomenon only ceased after she performed a Celtic based ritual to appease him and ask for forgiveness, after which she was left in peace.

This deeply creepy, but well written book sent me off looking for others of his work. It wasn’t long before I found Candlenight, and then the first of the Merrily Watkins series, Wine of Angels. Merrily is a vicar, the Hereford diocesan exorcist, who is central to the series unfolding story. She is a widow, a single mother to a stroppy teenage daughter, a smoker, she is grounded and sceptical, caught between her religion and ancient forces she does not always understand.

My delight and interest increased as I realised that he was a local resident and writing about myths, legends and crime set just over the Border in Herefordshire. He in fact lived near the Golden Valley and based his work all along the Welsh Marches.

This was the start of my association with Phil and his writing; a craft I admired for the way he managed to weave myth, local folklore, crime history, and then bring it up to date with themes such as modern murder cases, women in the church, archaeological discoveries, local celebrities, and the rural politics of the Borders. He constructed a caste of memorable characters, one of the most likeable and famous being Gomer Parry. An elderly local man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the area, he is the proprietor of Gomer Parry Plant Hire. He becomes almost a family member, taking the vulnerable Merrily and her daughter under his protective wings. An unlikely guardian angel, but one of them never the less.

I was fortunate to meet Phil; mostly at book signings, two of which took place in my local book shop. He was always friendly, engaging and took the time to speak about not only his work but expressed an interest in the locality and the person he was speaking to. I was so impressed with Phil’s writing, finding his prose poetic in places that I contacted him and asked if he would be prepared to give a talk to the Border Poets I was a member of. He was at first bemused, denying that he had any credibility to speak to such a group. But eventually I persuaded him that we would find him and his work fascinating.

On a cold dark November afternoon in 2010 he finally turned up and met us at The Hurst in Clun and gave a talk to the group. As predicted he was brilliant, and the poets found his easy going nature made him a great raconteur and speaker. He told us about how he had always wanted to write, the hard work it entailed, and his career in journalism giving him the opportunity to interview and speak to a variety of people, from a local major to a drug addict on the street; how he became a reporter on the supernatural, and then eventually how he began to weave these threads together with police and crime reports, sixties bands, and crooked councillors. Finally he told us about sourcing his woman priest and making her an exorcist, his being taken up by a publisher and the elation of finally being able to write full time and make a living from it. The talk produced poems from the group, one of them by Paul Francis, “Getting the Story”
”Not horror, Anything but that. One book
so ghoulish that he threw it on the fire.
Not cosy either. Pick a woman priest
but make her smoke, have a relationship
be an exorcist”

I also have another memory of going to see Phil give an interview on his work, possibly to promote “Secrets of Pain”. It was a cold, frosty drive in the dark and in stark contrast to the warmth and friendly nature of the evening’s talk.

We visited many of the churches that Phil wrote about, from St Cosmos and St Damian in Strefford which makes a dramatic appearance in Midwinter of the Spirit to the church of St George at Brinsop with it’s connections to the military. We visited the churches in the Clun Forest which guard the Sleeping Dragon, the Church of St Michael where the spell Abracadabra is written on the wall, all featured in Crown of Lights, and the church of St Mary at Kinnerton, where the Prayer of the Night Shepherd was set, pilgrimages everyone.

Phil’s other passion was music; he was an avid Nick Drake fan. One of his main characters Lol Robinson was a song writer and guitarist, and his band Hazy Jane became reality, with Phil playing the songs he wrote in collaboration with the music of Glasgow based musician Allan Watson. These can still be purchased on two CD’s Songs From Lucy’s Cottage and A Message From The Morning.

I saw him once or twice over the coming decade, as I attended all his book signings. I remember him saying to me once in Hereford. “Bloody hell Deborah, why do you bother getting the hard back editions, just wait for the paper back to come out!” Typical of the man. The last time I saw him was at Waterstones in Hereford on the launch of his latest book The Fever of the World. Written during COVID it has the atmosphere of the plague about it as did those dark days of isolation and grief. It centres around the death of an estate agent in the Wye Valley. In true Rickman style he makes connections to the dark pagan history of the area, the poet Wordsworth, and a new bishop who dismisses Merrily’s work.

Phil had been unwell for some time and I was shocked at how frail he looked and I was impressed by the dedication to his work and readership, that had brought him out into the hurly burly of publicity. All his followers knew that he was in the process of writing the next in the series, his 17^th Merrily Watkins story. So it was with immense sadness that I and they, learnt of his demise on the 29^th October 2024. He leaves behind his wife, muse and secretary Carol, a woman of great strength who was his lifelong partner and friend. Selfishly, I knew that not only was I saying good bye to Phil, but to his cast of characters too. He was one of my Muses, my poetry too is inspired by locality, Myths, folklore and the liminal spaces that Merrily and Phil occupied. Farewell, my friend, I have followed in your footsteps for two decades, and will feel a little lost without you as a guide. This poem is for you Phil, A lament for all your readers have lost.

Story teller
for Phil Rickman

Snick snack the blades crack
peeling back
the layer of turf to expose, -------
voices calling through stones
their clatter and fall,
wail of flayed grass in the wind.

It is the nothing that gets you every time,
stone keep of his throat
rasping with words he has
to tell. Blood beads
the bough, bryony‘s a wound
in the hedge.

A mouldy warp man, brown as earth,
tunnelling the darkness
of lives, dirt, turning them
over, furrows
his nib ploughs marking
the land.

So, conjuror a heroine
of smoke and mirrors
frail and fragile
as morning mist,
ectoplasm.

Or coat yourself in camouflage,
melt into the hillside
become a song soughed under
black pines, grey rock,
pluck from air stray guitar
chords of grief.

He articulates the stories we need
to be told, less
they bury us under the oblivion
of un-kept places,
a grace of sorts, a marker
of lives.

As a long time poet and member of the Border Poets group, I thought I would start a thread which talks about the poetry work I am currently involved in, the poets of the group and poets who just inspire me to read them. Herding Cats is a phrase often used by our members to describe how difficult it is to organise poets, who all seem to have their own agendas, and preferred routes to arrive anywhere, or at any collective decision.

Next Friday is Samhain, the Celtic New Year’s Eve and I am off to the county town of Shrewsbury to attend a workshop run by my fellow poet and mentor Chris Kinsey. Chris is a master poet, rooted in the Welsh soil and the Marches where we both live. So far she has produced five collections of poetry, her latest “From Rowan Ridge” was published in 2019. Here is a snippet of one of my favourite poems from this collection.

Dear Earthwrecked Foundling

It’s the season of second flowerings
so let’s go out and play

Wales is good for sampling light
We can splash in puddles
shake up fallen clouds and sludge.

I’ll introduce you to birds

Maybe we’ll see a kingfisher streak turquoise
over turbulent waters, watch wagtails waver
then settle and learn still from a heron.

Now is a good time to meet trees

You can build a refuge of fallen leaves
but don’t be alarmed by bombardments of acorns
and conkers. You can forgive them for their shine.

I’ll try not to shiver you with my worries -

Her fluid prose always takes me on a journey. She makes you stand and look. I have been on quite a few of Chris’s workshops, and have always come away inspired. The fact that this particular workshop takes place at this magical time, when the ether is thin allowing thoughts, impressions and the odd ghost through from the past enhances the occasion.

Shrewsbury is a lovely county town straddling the river Severn where old buildings crowd the steep streets. History seeps out of every nook and cranny: from it’s Saxon origins to the world’s first iron framed building, the wonderfully named Dithering Flax Mill, it has multi-layered fascination. There a lovely intimate cinema in the Old Market hall, where the high ceiling is held up by exposed wooden beams. You are allowed to take hot drinks to the comfortable seats to watch the film being shown. The theatre is on the banks of the Severn, on the other hand is a modern creation with wide glass windows and balconies which puts on a varied programme of plays, bands and local productions. The Gateway where the workshop is taking place is in one of the many the art galleries. Supporting a the local branch of a national charity invested in the countryside, it promises to be a stimulating afternoon.

What a fabulous way to spend time in autumn, in celebration of time and place.

We are going to the ancient hamlet of More, to St Peter’s Church, one of many quiet places that lie tucked beneath the skirts of the Long Mynd. The morning is blurred with heat haze, grasses bending and fading, lanes in deep shadow beneath dark foliage.

Along the Hordesley road towards Bishop’s Castle, I watch the parched hills, farms spread open to the sun, and hay rolled in neat carpets across the fields. Mid-morning in the holiday season, yet the road is silent, a blessing we enjoy. Then a narrow lane, a hump-backed stone bridge over the blue Onny, as bright as the sky above, brings us to our destination.

The church stands on its raised circular enclosure, lanes converging around it like pilgrims. Grey-gabled timber houses have settled close: Church Farm, the Old Rectory, More House. The silence of deep countryside broken only by the sound of hooves: a woman appears leading a Welsh Cob, glossy as a conker, mane dark, white socks flashing. She tells me the horse is called “Izzy, and is fat and greedy”, we part with a smile.

Inside, voices rise — the morning service is underway. I sit for a while on a sun-warmed bench against the wall as Nick explores the lanes. The lichened tombs speak quietly of their stories, the Medlicotts in abundance. Another stone catches my eye: Elizabeth Peplow, “Relict.” Harebells tremble above her name, as blue-veined as the life once lived beneath them. Butterflies drift, yews cast soft shadows, stone glimmers silver in sunlight. From within comes the rhythm of The Dismissal, the murmur of cups, the chatter of fellowship.

By the door the font stands in sunlight, flanked by two fragments of Roman mosaic unearthed from Linley Hall’s drive in the 19th century —either from a Roman villa situated there, or perhaps carried home from some long-ago grand tour; no one is certain. The whitewashed walls and barrel ceiling glow with stained glass. One window depicts Sir Jasper Moore with sword; others show biblical roundels of yellow and white. On the north side, the Moor chapel bulges outward, its walls heavy with family crests. A large tomb to Harriet Moor, carved by Field of London, dominates — a monument to permanence in a place haunted by their presence.

The faceless figures in the glass seem more like shadows than saints: ghosts seeping from the walls, walking the lanes, whispering secrets. It is here, in this quiet church, that a story long buried waited to find me — a story rooted in pride, cruelty, and exile. A thorn pressed deep into the flesh of history.

The story this church contains unfolded in the reign of James I — the same king who gave us the Bible whose cadence still breathes through our language. From its pages, Corinthians 2 to be precise, comes a phrase that feels apt for what happened here: a thorn in the flesh.

The Moors were an old family, rooted in this soil since the thirteenth century. They drew their very name from the land, strengthening their power through marriages and service to the Crown. By the early seventeenth century, Samuel Moor stood at their head — lord of estate and tenant, charged with his family’s honour and the prosperity of his land.

In 1611 he married his cousin Katherine at St James’s in Shipton. Though she lived at Larden Hall, her marriage portion included Shipton Manor. The union drew together two great estates: Linley, Samuel’s inheritance, and Larden, Katherine’s. It should have been a triumph, the kind of calculated alliance that secured fortunes for generations.

Katherine did her part. In the space of five years, she bore four children: Elinor, Jasper, Richard, and Mary. A small brood, born dutifully, year by year. But rather than pride, Samuel felt humiliation. To him they bore the likeness of another man: Jacob Blakeway, a tenant farmer and Katherine’s childhood sweetheart.

Adultery, shame, betrayal. The wound cut deep. Katherine did not deny it when pressed, but confessed instead that she and Jacob had once been betrothed — a claim that their marriage was invalid from the start. One can imagine the despair of her parents, the fury of Samuel. Here was no ordinary domestic quarrel, but a scandal that struck at lineage itself.

The baptismal registers listed Samuel as father, yet in bitterness he denied paternity, beginning a long legal dispute. He was determined that no cuckoos would nest in his household. If the children were not his, they would not inherit. Those thorns in his flesh he would pluck out, even at the cost of cruelty.

What was to be done with them?

At that time, the Mayflower’s voyage to the New World was being prepared — a venture of both faith and fortune. The Separatists sought freedom across the Atlantic, and investors, including one Lord Zouche, saw profit in the new land. As secretary to Zouche, Samuel had knowledge of their plans. With calculated resolve he arranged for the four children - then only eight, seven, six, and four years old — to be taken aboard as indentured servants. He paid double the usual passage fee to ensure they would be counted as legitimate settlers with rights to land, though in truth their place was as bound labour in others’ households.

The decision was lawful, perhaps, but merciless. To strip children from their mother’s arms and cast them adrift — this was no act of discipline but of exile. Even Samuel’s peers, though constrained by the letter of the law, censured him quietly. A stain on the family honour remained, a thorn that pricked beneath the polished surface of estate and church.

Such tender ages to be marched away from the familiar sights and sounds of home, of the love of their mother, placed among strangers, and set on a path towards the unknown. One can almost see their small figures ascending the gangway at Gravesend, London slipping behind them, their hearts heavy with dread. The thorn that had pierced Samuel’s pride was now driven through their childhood.

The voyage was no gentle crossing. The stinking dark of the hold, the sea sickness, the endless pitch and sway of storm — these became their companions. As indentured servants they were expected to labour even on the passage: fetching, cleaning, obeying, while terror constantly gnawed at them. Too young to comprehend exile, old enough to feel abandonment.

The children’s fate was harsh. Before the ship even reached land, Jasper succumbed, dying off Cape Cod. Once ashore, Elinor and Mary did not survive their first bitter winter, perishing with so many others from cold, hunger, and disease. The thorn of separation became the thorn of loss.

Only Richard survived.

Placed in the household of William Brewster, elder of the colony, he was set to work at once: hauling water, chopping wood, tending fires, assisting with food and in the fields. The Brewsters’ own two sons, who rejoiced in the wonderful names of Love and Wrestling, were his companions, and together they bound themselves to survival. Through that harsh first winter, Richard found a way to endure.

By fourteen his indenture was complete. Apprenticed to Isaac Allerton, a merchant sea captain, Richard grew into a life upon the waters. He became a seasoned captain himself, navigating not only oceans but politics, and for decades crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, trading with the West Indies, and taking part in naval skirmishes during King Philip’s War.

“King” Philip was the name given by the colonists to the Chief of the Wampanoag Tribe of Native Americans. His given name was Metacom. He was the son of Chief Massasoit who had at first been an ally and friend of the settlers. But it quickly became apparent that he couldn’t trust them. Land Disputes, broken treatises, and ever-increasing expansions showed the colonists real aims and objectives. The war was one of the most ferocious conflicts of the era; and although Richard didn’t actually fight directly against Metacom, he did take part in navel engagements around Maine. He captained supply ships and probably took part in coastal defences.

How bitter the irony: a boy dispossessed of inheritance, fighting for the dispossession of others. Perhaps the deepest thorn of all was this: that an exile from England sought belonging by serving the very empire of exile in a new land.

In time he laid aside the sea and turned to the land, running a tavern in Salem of all places. There, amidst the fever of accusations and trials, one imagines him listening at the bar to whispers of witchcraft, hearing the same sharp edge of suspicion and honour that had once torn apart his own family. If anyone knew the sting of scandal, it was Richard. Married at least three times, perhaps more, he left behind children of his own. He lived into his eighties, one of the last of those Mayflower voyagers — one of the “First Comers,” as they were called A man who outlived, siblings, and scandal. He never returned to England. Whatever thorn had lodged in him there, he carried it across the sea and never looked back. He never told anyone about his lost inheritance, his fraught beginnings.

Richard’s descendants would remember him not as an exile but as a founder, a man who endured when others did not. From Salem his line spread, proud to trace itself back to that one surviving child of the four Mores who took the voyage on the Mayflower. His long life — marked by survival, sea, and scandal — became its own kind of victory, though England never again saw his face. The family that had disowned him, he in turn disowned.

Centuries passed. His true origins might have remained forever hidden, blurred in sea-spume and the mists of England, but for a winter discovery in 1958–59 Remember the stained glass window that caught my attention? The one of Sir Jasper Moor with his sword?. He now steps forward to play his part.

The winter of 1958/59, coincidentally my first winter in this world, was a bitterly cold one with temperatures dipping below freezing, fog and flurries of snow, a bitter season. At Linley Hall, Sir Jasper Moor, barrister, landowner, and MP for Ludlow, rummaged in his attics. Among dust and forgotten papers he found documents that pierced through time.

Until then, the More children had been thought London orphans, plucked from the streets and shipped across the Atlantic. They had embarked from Gravesend after all. But the papers revealed the truth: the bitter legal quarrel, Samuel’s denial of paternity, the payment for their passage, the quiet cruelty that had torn them from Katherine’s arms. The thorn that had once been buried in the briars of family pride surfaced again, sharp as ever.

The revelations went further. Genealogist Anthony Wagner traced Katherine More’s line back to Edward III. Samuel, so intent on erasing the children, had disinherited not only his own blood but a lineage greater than his own. Pride had blinded him; the thorn he thought to pluck out proved an even deeper wound to his name.

Today, descendants from across the ocean journey to England, seeking Shipton Church where Richard was baptised, walking the halls where his parents’ lives collapsed into scandal. Shipton Hall, pale stone rising above its barns and stables, seems gracious at first glance. Yet to me it has always carried shadows, an aura of secrecy pressed against its walls.

Now I know why. Within its history lies a story darker, sharper, more enduring than I could have imagined: a story of love denied, of children cast adrift, and of one who endured. A thorn still lodged in the flesh of time

In a quiet corner of my bedroom stands a modest bookcase with three shelves. It’s tucked safely away from direct sunlight, yet perfectly positioned in my line of sight from bed. This is no ordinary bookcase—it holds the most precious volumes in my collection. Not necessarily the most expensive, but the ones that strike the deepest chords within me. Naturally, it’s where my beloved Elizabeth Goudge books reside, forming the largest and most resonant group. A few others sit beside them, chosen not for their authorship but for their connection to her life and work.

I was found by Elizabeth Goudge at the age of nine, on a wet afternoon at a friend’s house. We were playing hide and seek, and I’d tucked myself into a wardrobe with a light inside—an irresistible hiding spot. No one found me. In fact, they gave up looking altogether. But I didn’t mind. Because in that quiet, lamplit cocoon, I discovered a tatty paperback: The Little White Horse. My friend had been given it by her older sister and dismissed it entirely. I, on the other hand, couldn’t put it down. How could any child possessed of imagination not know that an enchanted, otherworldly kingdom awaited—not only Maria, but for anyone brave enough to follow her?

Over the next few years, The Cathedral books and The White Witch followed, and I began to seek out every title by this remarkable author. Goudge had a gift: she could weave the spiritual into the everyday, transforming the mundane into something fresh and luminous. I set out to find all her books, and was fortunate enough to do so—save for her plays and one early set of stories.

I learned of her death in 1984 quite by accident. By then I was married, expecting my first child, and settling into a new house in a strange town. The news felt like the loss of a beloved, distant relative—someone I’d never met but deeply admired. I re-read all her work, filling in the gaps I’d previously overlooked. Suddenly, every word she had written became doubly precious. There would be no more. I sought out the Omnibus edition of The Eliots of Damerosehay, which included a foreword that offered a sliver of new insight. Her autobiography, anthologies, and Diary of Prayer soon followed. I even found the guide she wrote for the chapel at Buckler’s Hard, and discovered she had penned jacket publicity for books like Rider on the White Horse and Sword at Sunset—both by another favourite author of mine, Rosemary Sutcliff.

Then came a truly Goudgian moment. My husband mentioned he’d seen first editions of The Sword and the Circle, The Road to Camlann, and The Light Beyond the Forest by Sutcliff for sale—signed by the author. Was I interested? Of course I was. When the books arrived, they were pristine, clearly unread, and indeed signed: “ To Elizabeth with love.” One volume even contained a letter:

“Elizabeth, my poor Darling! Jessie told me about your poor pinned leg and I am so sorry! This is really just a Get Well Card, I’ll write properly when you feel more up to letters, and meanwhile I’ll phone Jessie for news. Much love, Rosemary.” Dated April 24th.

For anyone familiar with Goudge’s biography, the names Jessie and Elizabeth in the same note are no coincidence. Sylvia Gower’s The World of Elizabeth Goudge recounts how, in early spring 1978, Elizabeth suffered a fall and injured her leg so severely she was hospitalised. Seven months later, she was still in pain and referring to her “pinned leg” in correspondence.

Elizabeth once told a reporter that Jessie helped her with her files and papers, and was entrusted to burn all superfluous material after her death. It’s easy to imagine Elizabeth corresponding with fellow authors like Sutcliff, especially as they shared a publisher. And what could be more natural than sending a personal gift to a friend in recovery? For most of us, it might be homemade jam or garden flowers. But between authors—first editions of their latest work.

To think that Elizabeth may have held that letter, or had it read to her. That these books came from her library. Like Parson Hawthorne in The White Witch, Elizabeth believed books to be “the best of the earthly meats.” How rich a new book could make them both feel. These volumes are now a treasured part of my collection—a nugget of gold in a jewelled casket of books.

From the moment we turn off the main road, we start to sink backwards in time. Lanes narrow; hedges heighten. We begin to climb. The afternoon is grey, oppressive, the sky a felt underlay of clouds. Verges bear stands of meadow sweet, hemlock, mallow. Honeysuckle waves an occasional spray.

We pass Pudleston a large, impressive court behind stone walls, game keeper woods. There is an air of Victorian melancholia. Pressed flowers and lace. Jet beads of shadow. Saxon Pudleston is more lyrical; “the hill of the mouse-hawk”, in the Wolfhay hundred. A “mouse-hawk” is a type of throwing axe.

Today, Nick is taking me to the church of St Michael at Bockleton; It had moved him when he came upon it by accident. We enjoy visiting parochial churches; they give us such a wealth of stories and unexpected art. They enrich us with a sense of community. This one is a well-guarded secret, and we nearly miss the turning, as its approach is through an avenue of horse chestnut and sycamore, making a tunnel, shading it in heavy summer greenery.

The church has a plain exterior to match it’s well mown church yard. A heavy oak door is surmounted with carved pillars, where Saxon faces peer out; a Green Man with foliage sprouting from his mouth. Nick has to man handle its reluctance open for me, and we step into the chill of a chancel overshadowed by surrounding trees. The underwater green light of them, their swaying shadows the only movement but our own. It had been restored by the Victorians, as so many parish churches have.

I had come to see the Prescott Memorial, so walk down the chancel and open the low wooden railing which separates the “Barnaby” chapel from the nave. Little did I know then the stories it would reveal.

William Wolstenhulme Prescott, his marble tomb, with recumbent figure on top. The base intricately carved with his story, depicting him tending to his gamekeeper who died of a fever. Which he passed on to William who succumbed to it not long afterwards. The sculptor has shown the quizzical lift of the gamekeeper’s dog’s head, as he looks up puzzled at why his master is not out and walking the woods on this fine day. His gun propped against the wall ready to deter the next poacher he comes across. His hand is held by his young master William, who is leaning tenderly over him. Each crease in his trousers, the folds in his jacket, the way he has taken the weight on one shoe, perfectly delineated. A latticed window on the cottage wall looks blankly out on the world he is leaving.

William was only 21. His mother erected the memorial to him and her tribute was so affecting; that, after a century, it still resonates with her grief. He had a loving and tender nature and left her “last years, years of mourning.” What a sad demise for one who seemed capable of engendering love in all those he came into contact with. I can find out nothing else about him, and it seemed tragic that all he will be remembered for was the manner of his death. Up in the rafters a sound like a swarm of bees sounded out a tintinnabulation for his short life.

It was a beautifully crafted piece, each hair on his head, each soft bristle of moustache, finely wrought, so that I reached out to stroke his cold cheek. Hidden on the side by the wall, his delicate hand bore a ring on his little finger. Each drape of linen, his fingernails, the way his feet had been covered, all spoke of quality. It came as no surprise to learn that a master sculptor had created this piece of art.

His name was Thomas Woolner a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who led a fascinating life. He advocated for more realism in sculpture and so fitted into the Brotherhood’s ethos well. He also wrote poetry, not very good poetry and wrote for their magazine The Germ. Unable to make a living in England, he emigrated to Australia. His friend, Ford Madox Brown’s painting, “The Last of England” was inspired by his voyage. He was deeply moved by Thomas’s emigrating, and thought it romantic that he had set out to look for gold as well as try to establish an artistic career. In tribute he called the ship in the background of the painting, El Dorado. It is a painting dedicated to Thomas’s courage and the emotional toll his parting imparted to Ford Maddox. An iconic work which we have seen in the Birmingham Art Gallery.

He returned after a year, no gold being found, and had a successful career as a sculptor and artist from then on.

As a young man he was deeply moved by the poetry of the by then well-established poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. He became a fan, and wrote to Tennyson telling him of his admiration and eventually was asked to Coniston where the poet and his family lived. Thomas modelled his own poetry on Tennyson’s, trying to impart the same depths and themes to his own work. Tennyson in return appreciated Thomas’s sculptural sensitivity. He allowed Thomas multiple sittings for him to paint his portrait and his busts and the medallions he produced of him were praised by contemporaries such as Robert Browning, who stated that there were none finer.

Apparently Thomas had a terse, rough nature and had to make a “supernatural” effort to be polite. He shared a house with his friend Palgrave of “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Poetry” fame designing the frontispiece of that work. I was instantly transported back to school afternoons, and second hand book shop finds. They were housemates and close friends until they fell out over a scandal that rocked the art world. Palgrave wrote a piece in an exhibitions fine art section praising Woolner’s work and harshly criticising his rivals. It was viewed unfavourably, especially in light of their close relationship. Favouritism and cronyism were implied and Palgrave was forced to withdraw the piece. It cast a shadow over Woolner’s reputation and he never forgave Palgrave his indiscretion.

His biggest commission later on in his career was for the Manchester Assize Courts, which unfortunately were bombed during the second world war. Although some of his pieces were saved to be incorporated into the new building.

He married Alice Gertrude Waugh, whose sister married another of his Pre-Raph friends Holman Hunt. When this sister died in childbirth a year later, Holman married her remaining sibling, which Thomas thought of as incest, causing a rift to open between them. They never spoke to each other again.

He also corresponded with Charles Darwin, another local dignitary, who named part of the human ear the 'Woolnerian Tip' after a feature in Woolner's sculpture Puck. Woolner had discussed the feature with Darwin when he had been sitting for his portrait.

He was only 66 when he died instantly from a stroke. His wife died in 1912 and their son Hugh, who was a stockbroker in New York, travelled over for her funeral and made his way back on the Titanic.

How Williams mother persuaded Thomas Woolner to take on her commission is also a mystery. Thomas had just returned from Australia at the time of William’s death, and was well known for his funerary monuments. Perhaps they had mutual acquaintances; moved in the same social circles. The poignant story of her son’s death would certainly have moved his Victorian sensibilities.

Amazingly, Hugh survived the sinking of the Titanic! He naturally was one of the first class passengers aboard the ship, and on the night she struck the ice berg he was in the smoking room enjoying a cigar. Initially, he only felt a slight jolt; “not a crash, but a tearing motion that made the room feel as if it had twisted.” These are his words, taken from his testimony given to the U. S. Senate enquiry into the disaster. He assisted women and children into life boats, many of whom were reluctant to do so as they couldn’t conceive it to be necessary; Wasn’t the ship Unsinkable?

One of those he helped was Helene Churchill Candee, a feminist writer and journalist, who was a fellow first-class passenger. He helped her to dress and gather her belongings. She gave him two small items — later revealed to be valuable heirlooms — to carry in case she didn’t survive. “We pulled men out by their legs and anything we could get hold of.” He later recalled, to make room for more children and their mothers to be saved. He was one of the last men to leave the ship, jumping into collapsible life boat D. “I sort of bounced off the gunwale and caught it with my fingers… my legs dropped down into the sea.” They were one of only 13 life boats to be picked up by the Carpathia. I cannot imagine the horror and fear these people must have endured. How cold they must have felt, the sounds and sights they witnessed will have stayed with them all their lives.

Hugh took up his business ventures in London again and just months later married for the second time. His first wife had died in 1906. The five children from this first marriage went on to live distinguished lives. The eldest son became a Major General in the Royal Engineers. The eldest daughter married an Oxford lecturer and had connections with C. S. Lewis. The next daughter married Laurence Irving, an artist and book illustrator who worked with Douglas Fairbanks. While the youngest two married successfully and lived in the home counties. His legacy continued, the family tree expanding and branching out fruitfully. Hugh died in 1925 in Budapest of pneumonia; the very disease his doctor had hoped would be cured by taking the voyage on the Titanic.

The poignancy of William’s life cut short make a vivid contrast with the rich life Thomas went on to lead. I imagine William as a country gentleman whose interests revolved around the small estate he grew up in. Perhaps he was a naturalist; a Victorian Gilbert White? His close friendship with his game keeper implies this. Maybe like B. B. he observed and recorded fauna and flora; went for long walks with a gun broken over his arm. His family might have been friends with Darwin; they would have moved in the same circles. I wonder how his faith and the growing knowledge of the origins of the species were reconciled in his mind? Did he read poetry? Where did he go to school or did he have a tutor at home? At 21, he could have recently graduated from university. He was obviously involved in his local community, as he attended church with his Mother. I’m sure he could ride. I try not to give him modern ideals and thoughts; but don’t want to think of him following the hunt. What plans did he have for a future he was doomed never to see?

These two stories; one international in scope the other played out in a parochial parish, were as intertwined as the Celtic knots carved over the church door. Streams of tales falling from the mouth of a Green Man. The Victorian class structure made it almost inevitable that the families should move in the same social circles. If William had survived he may well have come into contact with Thomas. They both knew Charles Darwin for example. One small country church telling stories that deserve to be remembered. They come to us as unexpected as a “mouse hawk axe” thrown from a hill.

It is late November in London, only thirty years after the Second World War. The buildings are coated with centuries of grime; dust, coal residue, and the more recent pollution has rendered them black. It will be decades before they are restored to the pristine white that the original architects envisaged in their conception. There are still a few bomb sites; although the streets around the British Museum are intact, formal in their Georgian and Victorian hauteur. Great Russell Street is quiet this afternoon, the plane trees dripping forlornly in the drizzle.

I am here to visit the Atlantis Bookshop on Museum Street, and pay scant attention to the gated entrance of the British Museum this time. I am just one in a long line of customers who have visited since the shop opened in 1922: Alaister Crowley probably being the most notorious occultist who came here. The atmosphere is Bohemian, as am I; dressed for the part in long skirt and brown velvet ankle length coat. The shelves are cluttered, almost untidy, and I know that to find the books that appeal to me will take time and diligent searching. The lighting is dim, except along the base of the shelves where we can open and read the books of our choice.

I am drawn towards the antiquarian books; and pick out a green spine with gold lettering and the black and white drawing of a hooded woman, her eyes downcast, her face turned from the darkened window she sits before, where a multitude of unformed children’s faces peer in. “Pan’s Garden.” Published by McMillan & Co in 1912. A volume of Nature Stories by Algernon Blackwood. I don’t know who he is or what his writing style is like, but the title and subject matter appealed to me. His work turned out to be haunting.

He was so much more than an accomplished writer of “Super Nature” fiction; he appeared on the first ever television programme, was a popular storyteller on BBC radio, a tireless and energetic traveller, and a secret agent during the 1^st world war. He was also a member of The Golden Dawn and knew everybody from W. B. Yeats to H. G. Wells. His work inspired the composer Elgar and writers such as Stella Gibbons. Dion Fortune said of him that he was “pre-eminent among the writers of occult fiction.”

Later as I read through the tales, it is his short story “The Sea Fit” that resonated with me immediately. As it does for so many of us, the coast and sea seem to satisfy in me a deep atavistic emotion. Perhaps it’s because it’s some where we take our holidays. Though I prefer the old term; “Holy Days.” The sea, which we have used and abused for centuries, has despite this, lost none of its magic, if some of its mystery.

In “The Sea Fit” the main character, Captain Ericsson, is taken over and consumed by the sentient sea. The old Sea Gods take him to themselves. This eerie tale set at Easter time when the full moon pulls the tides even higher explores the hidden forces of nature in ways that have informed my connections to the natural world ever since. Now the sea has become a threatening entity which, in the not so distant future, will inundate our lives, impacting our very existence. Algernon taught me about Pantheism which became a way of deepening my veneration to the world. It made sense.

None of which I knew at the time. But, strangely, I also pick up and buy a copy of The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune. Again, because I liked the cover, but also because her name at least was familiar to me. She was to extend the hand of friendship and accompany me through my life influencing me in ways I could know nothing about then.

Let’s go back a few years. I am standing on top of Brean Down, a rugged peninsular that sticks out into the Bristol Channel. Brean Down is a promontory off the coast of Somerset, at the eastern end of Bridgwater Bay between Weston-Super-Mare and Burnham-on-Sea. It is a beautiful sunny warm afternoon. Out to sea two islands, Steep and Flat Holm float, humped backed against the hazy Welsh coastline. The tide is out, and the infamous Weston sands are shimmering silver and gold. All along the sea front the large Edwardian houses are strung out, their windows catching the sun, winking like sleepy old gentle folk. Behind rise green wooded slopes interspersed with the odd white building. It looks other worldly, caught in amber, a time slipped place. Perhaps we are too far away to see people, but I don’t remember any. The wind catches my hair, whipping it from my face and I turn towards my dad who has brought me here. A rare moment of being on our own without the rest of the family. I say, “One day I am going to live there.” I am about 14 and deadly serious. He laughs indulgently and I can tell he doesn’t believe me. But it’s a harmless fantasy to have and so he turns away to look out to sea. There is a Roman temple here and at its end the remains of Palmerston Fort, built for defence against that old bogey man Napoleon. The grass is salt bitten, short and tiny yellow tormentil stud through. This outcrop of the Mendip hills has drawn people to itself since the Beakers came here. It drew Dion Fortune too as I was to discover.

Five years later I am living in Weston-Super-Mare. I have come here to live with the man who will eventually marry me, and I am in heaven. Not just because I have finally left home, where the disapproval of my mother had grown ever more palpable with my age; not because I am ridiculously in love, in the way one can only be when you find “the one”, but because Weston has charmed me. We get to know the places that the tourists miss in their haste for donkey rides, candy flossed slot machines and the sun burn of the beach. We learn the times of day when the sands are empty except for local dog walkers. That those woods I saw hold pre-historic camps, and that walking through them brings you out to Sand Bay, the next cove along and a favourite evening walk from our flat.

Here I discover that Dion Fortune, nee Violet Mary Firth, attended school and that this whole place was formative to her spiritual and psychic development. Here a temple of The Golden Dawn flourished for a few years, and here was where she set her mystical novel “The Sea Priestess,” the book I had chosen from the Atlantis Bookshop. Her home overlooked the bay and Brean Down, and I like to think that maybe it was one of those houses that faced the sea and so captivated my attention previously.

When Dion lived here Weston was enjoying its heyday. The Victorians and Edwardians came here in droves. The opening of the railway in 1841 facilitated access from the neighbouring towns of Bristol and Bath and even London. The middle classes believed that sea air was beneficial and the tourists came for their health as well as entertainment. There were the attractions of the Grand Pier and The Winter Gardens which had a genteel atmosphere. Wide boulevards and grand houses led to the vistas of the coast. Grand Hotels such as The Royal, with its sea views and gardens, gave their patrons every luxury that they could wish for. Paddle Steamers docked at Birnbeck Island. Dion’s family ran a hydrotherapeutic centre to cater for these affluent visitors.

Brean Down is central to “The Sea Priestess”. The story revolves around two main protagonists; Miss Vivienne Le Fay Morgan a mysterious woman and a young man called Wilfred Maxwell, who narrates the story in the first person. He is recovering from a long illness in a small village and looking for a project to become involved with. He has a talent for what we would call today interior design, a sort of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen of his day. They meet and Vivien, persuades him to renovate the Fort on Brean Down, which she has bought, and help her turn it into not only a home but a temple to the Sea Priestess. A task he willingly undertakes.

In the novel, Dion also used other local landmarks such as Brent Knoll, a steep conical hill situated on the Somerset levels, which she renames “Bell Knowle.” She writes that it was modelled by “colonists from Atlantis”. But I prefer the local legend that links it to King Arthur and the whole of the Glastonbury story.

It was once known as “the Mount of Frogs” and home to three ferocious giants. Arthur, as he so often did, sent one of his knights to slay the giants, thereby proving his worth. Now, although he fought valiantly and succeeded, he was mortally wounded and Arthur turning up to see how he had faired was so remorseful that he gifted the hill and surrounding Brent Marsh to the Glastonbury monks so that they could pray for the poor man’s soul.

Like many high places, it has connections with St Michael and the Dragon, a church to this saint has been here for a thousand years and was erected on an even older sacred site. Dragons are another legend that I seem to have followed around. They have been a powerful symbol for me and my progress both physical and spiritual has been mapped by places connected with their power.

I discover that the hill is on the St. Michael Ley Line, a major route which runs across England, connecting various sites associated with the saint. This line stretches from St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall to Norfolk, where I and my ancestors come from. I climbed the steep grass sides of Brent Knoll, scrambling up to the top on a hot summer’s day purely for the glory of the climb and the promise of a view, and I find that I stood on the line that connected me to my ancestral past, my interior Atlantis, looking out over the Isles of Avalon where Dion found her spiritual inspiration and home.

Forty years on and I’m sitting in my study not more than a few miles as the crows fly to the Clun Forest. Life has moved on; I’m a grandmother now and whole decades separate me from the girl who stood on Brean Down and dreamed. I hadn’t read Dion Fortune in decades, though she still resided on my book shelves. Here, in the forest, a dragon sleeps guarded by a ring of churches dedicated to St Michael. Its body marked out by the ridges and valleys, the forested slopes his crest and scaly wings. We have visited the churches that guard his sleep, inspired by a local author I, in this case literally, became friends with, the wonderful Phil Rickman, whose books are mostly set in the Welsh Marches and Herefordshire. Best known for his Merrily Watkins series, he also wrote stand-alone stories, one of which was inspired by Dion Fortune; “The Chalice”, which is set in Glastonbury.

One friend introducing me to another, or in this case reacquainting me to a long-lost influencer. Re reading his books after his untimely death in October 2024, brought Dion Fortune to the fore front of my mind. As did a visit to my daughter last winter. Walking in a park by the Thames in early evening darkness, I see the lights of grand houses across the river, the trees hiding the frontage of the Bishops Palace at Fulham. London by night becomes Victorian; the modern slipping out of vision, so that seeing at the park entrance, an old flat lit up by an iron lamp post, I could imagine one of Dion’s characters, Murchison from The Winged Bull for example, peering out into the gloom. That novel begins in the British Museum, just across the road from the Atlantis Bookshop.

Her books live next to Phil’s, spanning my years. All three of them have been influencers on my way of writing, thinking and living

It’s a big decision, and an even bigger job, to leave the family home you have occupied for over thirty years. It’s even more daunting when you are downsizing. Add to this mix a bibliophile who has been collecting books since they were five, over sixty years, (where did they go?) and you have a problem. The place you have found is perfect; rural bliss with views to die for from every window. But it is a quarter of the space you have previously lived in. Its cosy, low maintenance, close to family, everything an older couple could wish for.

Its relatively easy to clear out excess clothing, bedding, curtains, even furniture. We never sat in the rocking chair; how many mugs does one need? But what to do with the books? My relationship began with them pre-school, tracing out the lines from The Three Little Pigs, and One Stormy Night, and progressed rapidly when I had started primary school and joined the local library. Once aged ten, I ran away from home, or rather cycled away. My frantic Mother eventually phoned Dad, who told her not a worry as he knew exactly where to find me. He drove to the library where I was sitting happily devouring a book and hauled me home.

Lovingly, I packed them in boxes, and my long suffering husband, who has had to share his life with them too, helped me load up the van and then drove them to the storage unit we had rented. Not all of them, I couldn’t be without books for long; they were my friends, my companions; who had held my hand through the bleak years of teenage angst, the loneliness of a new mother in a strange town. Not only do I love them for the stories they contain, but for the tales they tell me about themselves.

This one bought with pocket money; I got half a crown a week! My parents always took us to a “new town” on a Saturday afternoon. Usually Harlow, and in the W. H. Smiths I would trawl the shelves, buying anything that took my fancy. For a while to would be one of the A Children’s press book. Susan Rushes In, The Rising of the Larks, Summer Holiday A Star for Starlight, so many about the pony I thought I wanted in our narrow council house garden.

A trio of Mary Webb tied up with string and recused from the dusty shelves of a second hand shop in Weston-Super-Mare one rainy afternoon, for 75p! I only bought them for the poetry of their titles. She became a lifelong friend.

As did Elizabeth Goudge, discovered aged eight, in a friends wardrobe when we were playing hide and seek, (The Little White Horse) I didn’t want to be found. Decades later I ended up running The Elizabeth Goudge website dedicated to her life and work as I always regretted not writing to her while she was alive to tell her how much she had helped me through life’s difficulties. A bullied secondary school teenager she held out a helping hand, gave me coping strategies when parents and teachers thought I shouldn’t need any. A lonely first time Mother in a strange town she became the family I wanted to a part of. The spiritual teacher giving me quotes and authors that have stayed with me all my life. “There is in God some say, a deep but dazzling darkness” From Night by Henry Vaughan

Another purchased in Tewkesbury Abbey on a cold winter’s afternoon, the choir practising for Christmas; Wylder’s Hand by Sheridan Le Fanu, an author I had never heard of, but whose prose started me off a journey seeking out lesser known classical writers. A rich vein I am still exploring.

We could fit five bookcases into the flat already; one in the hall, a small old oak two shelve bookcase in the bedroom for my “besties” inherited from Nick’s mother, and three in the front room. The other books languished in storage with me waving at them every time we passed for nearly two years. I felt as if I had abandoned them; that they would think I didn’t care for them anymore. Then one day back in the summer my husband suggested that I had put up with my affliction long enough, and why didn’t we turn the spare room into a Study?

We started by roughing out an idea of what we wanted the space look like and what we needed to store in it. As a poet and a writer, I had to have desk space and we both needed somewhere for printers, stationary, and the photographic equipment my husband uses. This was obviously a job for professionals, and we chose the company with care. A planner arrived and spent a morning measuring the room and asking us questions about what we needed and how we wanted to set the room out.

School girlishly, my excitement mounted as a date for fitting it out was booked and we cleared the space ready for the carpenter to arrive. He came on a grey cool day half way through October, and spent the next three, sawing, fitting, and putting together my dream study.

The night he finished I stood and gazed at the empty shelves and began in my head to arrange books. Soon my friends would be home. I decided that my poetry books, my beloved Goudge collection and all the nature writers and reference books would find a home here; as well as auto-biographies on people and places. Peter Ackroyd, the class room swot and Iain Sinclair, the boy you want to be friends with, Claire Tomlinson her gentle, well researched prose on Hardy, Austen and Pepys, jostling for attention, while Paul Evans, who writes so well about the local area we inhabit, Roger McFarlane, J.B. Priestley, Richard Mabey, and BB begged to be remembered.

Inevitably they have been joined by new acquaintances; my shift at the local charity bookshop ensuring that I find an ever increasing circle of friends. I have found local authors such as Stanley Weyman, John Moore and Frances Brett Young who are enhancing my knowledge of where I live. My poetry section has an ever expanding waistline; recently being joined by Irish poets, Michael Longley and Patrick Kavanagh.

Now it is Spring, and I sit at my desk looking out the window at Stoke wood putting on its new season clothes, the Oak in a neighbours garden that we have christened Odin’s Oak, after his black Labrador, frilled with new life, and I am surrounded by the resurrection of friends. My books crowd round me, giving out I like to think small exhalations of pleasure. You hadn’t forgotten us. We are here all together again, called out of the dark.

We are standing in a field thick with buttercups and daisies. Just below us the Bluebell Steam Railway line chugs on its eleven mile journey towards East Grinstead. It’s early evening in summer, and we have come with our two young children to stay in a friend’s old railway man’s cottage, set on a rise above the track. Woods crowd in opposite like passengers waiting for a train. Our son is in a state of bliss, currently sitting on a tractor drawn trailer that is lugging wood across the meadow towards the farm. Beth, not even a year old, is asleep in her cot, the front door open so that we can hear her if she wakes. It is so peaceful, so idyllic that we don’t want the holiday to end.

We are making plans to move from our current home and make a start somewhere else. Somewhere like this. It is the perfect time. The children haven’t begun their schooling, though its imminent for Oliver, and Nick’s mother Mary is becoming increasingly frail. In 1974 she was one of the first women in Britain to undergo the radical new procedure of a kidney transplant. Eleven years on, and it’s beginning to come to the end of it’s life. We know that she needs care, but she is a proud, fiercely independent women, who has looked after herself competently for many years. As a single mother she brought up three children as well as holding down high-powered jobs. It will not be easy to persuade her she needs help. We need to bring the family together. There is no room for her in our Biggleswade home, even if it appealed to her, and we can’t go and live with her in old cottage in Braughing, as much as I love the house and village, it is not practicable for Nick’s job. And that’s another consideration. After five years and many promotions later, the company he has worked for is being taken over by someone he has no respect for and doesn’t want to be associated with.

We can’t afford Sussex prices, and the trawl round East Anglia has left us as flat as the landscape. But we know the time has come to radically alter our lives. A few months back, Nick had come home from work unexpectedly early and seeing Oliver playing on the floor, had tapped on the window to surprise him. Oliver’s respond had been to yell “Mum! There’s a man at the window!”. If his own children were forgetting what he looked like, it was time to stop doing the high-octane job that he had been focusing on and direct his attention towards them.

The first move was to talk to Mary and gauge her reaction. To our surprise, she is as energised and enthusiastic as we are. So where were we to go? Her only request was that she should be able to get up to London on a train, as she still had many friends who lived in the city, and she loved the art and culture time spent there provided her with. We had thought of various places; The Isle Of Man, ( too damp for Nick’s asthma), Northumbria vast, desolate and beautiful but impossibly far from London for Mary’s needs, East Anglia was in our past, we wanted a clean break, and the West Country was impractical and full of Mary’s ghosts. “Where, Nick asked me, “did I want to move too?”

One of my favourite authors as a child had been Malcolm Saville, especially his Lone Pine series of adventure books. The stories about The Lone Pine Club with its young members, David, Petronella, Richard and Mary, Thomas, Jenny, Jonathan, Penelope and Harriet, had given me a whole set of friends that made my sometimes lonely childhood companionable, as well as adventurous. Later, when I met Nick, we moved to Weston-Super-Mare to begin life together, and I found another author from the same place. On a wet afternoon in a second-hand book shop, I came across three books bound up with string. I bought them because I liked the titles. “Gone to Earth” “The Golden Arrow” and “Precious Bane”. They sang to me like lines of poetry. The author Mary Webb, whom I knew nothing about, had it seemed, lived in Weston with her husband for a while. We could see the school he taught at from the windows of our flat. But what she wrote about and where she had been born and was only ever truly happy living was Shropshire. The same place that “Wings Over Witchend” and other Lone Pine books had been set. My books seemed to be pointing me to a place which I had always seen as a far-off glamour, or as Mary Webb would have put it a place “half in fairy and half out of it,” a dreamscape, not somewhere I could ever hope to live. The thought of living in the countryside was something I had wanted since childhood.

“I would like to move to Shropshire” I say rather tentatively. Mary was enchanted. It turned out that she had been on a week’s course studying geology in Church Stretton, and thought the countryside remarkable. Although distinctly rural, surely Shrewsbury would have a train connection with London. We decided there and then to have a weekend away and see if it would be somewhere we would like to live. We had already decided that perhaps we could run our own restaurant; Nick’s years of experience in catering, and his current job which had entailed him overseeing the opening of new restaurants for the chain he worked for made him eminently qualified. Owning his own restaurant seems the next logical step. We just needed somewhere big enough for a new enterprise to be viable. We decide on Ludlow, and book into the Cliffe hotel for two nights. To say I am excited about the prospect of leaving boring Biggleswade is an understatement.

Imagined futures; I have one of my great colds the weekend we go. Not bad enough to keep me in bed; being a mother I’m learning means you are permanently on duty, and anyway, I wouldn’t have stayed at home if I had been strapped to it. I was however experiencing the world through a bubble; sounds muted, colours enhanced, feeling myself distanced from the physical.

It's a journey of over three hours, and it takes us to a different world. As we get closer to Shropshire, we start to see a marked difference in the landscape. Trees are centre stage, the Wyre Forest is putting on its best autumnal colours, almost overwhelming coming from the flat monochrome lands of Bedfordshire. Crossing the river at Bewdley with its Georgian houses squaring up to the flow, Mary wonders aloud at its familiarity, as she doesn’t think she has been here before. A case of dejavu? From the flood plain, where the river loops round the base of Bridgenorth, the land begins to rise, our excitement matching the gradient. We wind through a street of elegant houses, the pavement lined with pollard trees, which appear to be holding hands. This I learn is Cleobury Mortimer, the name Mortimer, will come to mean much to me in the coming years. Then the first spell is cast. We have climbed out of the town even higher, and crossed a cattle grid, those barriers heralding a different world. The hairs on my arms rise and we are stunned by the views which open out on the lefthand side of the car. We are crossing Clee Hill and we “can see for miles and miles” as the Who song chants. I don’t know the names of the hills yet, but am told we can see into Wales one way and as far as the Malverns in the other. Immediately before us, the land is full of gorse and sheep and falling into the valley, is the classic patchwork of small fields and hedges from every country picture book I have ever seen. The sun is low, casting shadows of dramatic quality. Even the children quieten knowing we have arrived somewhere special.

We arrive at the hotel mid-afternoon and decant into the family room we will be occupying. Mary has her own room on the floor below us. We have barely unpacked when we get an excited message to join her NOW. Racing down the stairs we pile into her room and she points speechlessly out of the window. The sun is setting and the view of the castle stunning; painted in old gold by the light, lending the stones a warmth, softening the harsh history they undoubtedly contain. Trees reach up to its feet, and below a river roars over a weir. It is the only sound I can hear.

That evening we drive out towards Richards Castle and find the steeped woods of Moor Park, the lit school in the valley. Everywhere is colour, bird song, the promise of berries. The grasses seeding. Looping back to Ludlow we take to our beds. The children over excited by sleeping in the same room as Mum and Dad take a while to settle. But the fresh air and journey has tired them and eventually they do, leaving us to murmur of our plans for the morning.

After breakfast we stock up with a picnic in the town and head out. Mary wants to show us Church Stretton and the impressive hills surrounding it. This is the town that Mary Webb and her husband stayed in for their honeymoon. I don’t retain my first impressions of the town; we barely see it as we make for the precipitous road that hugs the hillside and scrambles up to the high moorlands above. Oliver who is sitting nearest to the drop tells us in no uncertain terms that “he is frightened for mine self!” and I don’t blame him. The road is narrow and winds with only a couple of passing places, none of which look wide enough or safe. I pray we don’t meet anything coming the other way. He grips my hand tightly until we burst into the expanse of heather and blue skies.

Here we picnic looking out over the whale backed hills that swim away from us, inhaling the scent of heather, lulled by the sound of bees. We drive over the moor, passing the glider station, where the white shapes of the planes loll on the grass in the heat. The “Wings over Witchend” of the book. The descent less intimidating as the expanse of fields before us draws the eye. It’s Tolkien’s Shire mapped out below us, the most entrancing view I have ever seen. Below in the rutted lane, the hill vast and dominating on one side, farmland on the other, we pass the roofs of what I am convinced is Witchend, the holiday home of the Mortons I must have missed the Lone Pine they met under. I leave, certain in the knowledge that we will be back. That somewhere in this Border Land of moors, green fields and wooded river valleys, we will find a place to call home.

Back in Biggleswade, Nick gets a phone call from his brother; has he seen this week’s edition of the Caterer? There is a restaurant for sale in Ludlow.

The relentless grey days of anti-cyclonic gloom made me internalise. I have been treading the path that brought me here; to this seat above the meadows, next to a Roman Road, surrounded by hills….

I am standing in a muddy patch of ground. Around me in the bleak grey light a housing estate is under construction. A dumper truck chugs away up a road, heading towards a semi built house, waiting undressed, for its windows and doors. Some of the roads are already lined with homes; fledgling gardens, curtains, cars in the drive. They are named; Osprey, Franklin, Kingfisher and where we stand the signage reads Heron Close. It’s poignant to think of the birds we have displaced from this wet meadow land by the river Ivel. Yet at this moment I am intensely grateful to them.

I am pregnant with our first child and we are homeless. The charity Shelter has directed us here, to this raw Housing Association development on the outskirts of a town I never knew existed until recently. It is my first visit. My dad who standing next to me clears his throat in a familiar way. He has brought me from the comfort of his home and garden, on this wet, grey, Saturday afternoon as my husband Nick is away on a training course for his new job. If I can’t be with Nick, he is the perfect companion. Non-judgmental, insightful and eager for us to begin a life somewhere within an hour or so’s drive of my childhood home. You wouldn’t chose the weather we have for a first look at a potential home; but I remind myself, that if you like it in the rain, it will be ok. It’s mid-summer, and not roses round the door. Mud spatter and the distant sound of the A1 roaring like an animal in pain a field or two away.

At least the house we are to view is complete, and it has a small plot in front, so that passers-by can’t peer in the window. I try and visualize grass, flowers, maybe a honeysuckle draping the small brick cubicle where the dustbin will live. Dad gives me the key and I open the front door.

Biggleswade is a strange hollowed out town, with at its centre a large undistinguished market place surrounded by shops. A fire ripped through it on 16^th June 1785, which started at The Crown Inn, due, local lore has it, to the carelessness of a servant who dumped ashes from a kitchen fire in the yard near some dry straw. It still seemed to me, to be a neglected sort of place without a heart. The town sits in the flat lands of Bedfordshire, where the fens meet the cojoining county of Hertfordshire. The smell of Brussel sprouts infiltrated the streets. Winds picked up fine field tilth and blew it through the air. It stood beside the A1, or the Great North Road as it’s known, making it possible to get North and South in an uninterrupted vrooming snarl. I wondered if anyone stayed long.

The house was mid-terrace, and comprised of a large through living space with a small kitchen off to one side. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a bathroom. It appeared palatial to me and just perfect for our current needs. Large windows back and front gave it light. It had a small, fenced back garden, with a door that led to garages, one of which belonged to the house. We had no furniture, no white goods, but it seemed on that dismal afternoon to be the answer to a prayer tossed to the fates and answered. Here, for now we could make a home.

Five months on and we are in. Our first child is born, and I am learning my way not only around motherhood but the town too. I discover that the surrounding foreign fields are a series of huge market gardens owned by Dutch families, who grow crops and flowers for the London markets. Biggleswade grew due to its situation on the river which transported goods to the capital until the railway was constructed; it was the first Bedfordshire town to have a mainline station. The other local employer is Jordon’s flour mill, still there, established in 1885 on the banks of the river where a mill has been for over a thousand years.

I have never learnt to drive and fortunately the town still had a range of shops that I could walk to. A supermarket, where I once infamously left Oliver outside asleep in his pram reaching home before I remembered him! (He was fine and hadn’t even woken up, a miracle in itself in those early days.) It had a green grocers, two bookshops, very important for me, one new, one second hand, and a fabulous Dutch bakery with café. There was a weekly market on a Saturday where I bought in a strange twist of fate, Shropshire Blue cheese, a lunch time treat which I ate with a beautiful flat seeded loaf the Bakers sold. There were also a bank, a chemist and a dress shop. The town had a well-stocked library, it was the late 1980’s, long before government cut funding to the bone, which is still thriving, and a doctor’s surgery. Here I took our baby for all his health checks and inoculations. The doctor was a good looking young man who specialized in paediatric care. I couldn’t have chosen a more caring professional.

Sounds idyllic doesn’t it. But I was a new mother with no friends in the area and a family who lived too far away to be any help day to day and I was lonely and afraid. Nick by necessity worked long hours to support us. He was my best friend and I missed him. This heartless town, empty of connections seemed unfriendly. Although perhaps that was just a projection from a newbie who had no roots.

Sundays were the worse day of the week. Nick often worked a twelve hour shift, getting home at gone midnight and everyone else it seemed had a family or friends to spend the day with. I would push the pram in the gathering dusk up and down the estate roads, looking into the lit windows where other people sat together, carried out their lives en masse. Connecting, to each other, strengthening family ties. The motion of the pram soothed Oliver, and the fresh air at least did both of us some good. The town was empty and I spent time gazing into shop windows, or read the names of those lost on the war memorial, wondering who they were and how they had lived their brief lives; imagining them walking me through their town, their history. The church of St Andrew’s seemed a gloomy place, unwelcoming, hiding behind yews and parochial respectability.

My chief solace was and to some extent always has been my books, whose companionship I returned home to. I would run my fingers over their spines, checking in with my friends and promise them a good natter once the baby was bathed and asleep.

As Oliver got older and could walk, one of the places he liked to go was the train station. We would stand on the bridge waiting for the trains to roll underneath pulling into the station, with a clatter of couplings. Sometimes passengers would alight, or board. But even more exciting to him, was the roar of an unstoppable through train; it’s sleek tube of speed and noise always lit up his mischievous eyes.

But his favourite walk was to the local park. Not for the swings and rides but because a funfair over wintered there. He loved the mystery of the shrouded rides, the splashes of colour on the awnings and amusements. He even liked the clown’s face, which gave me the creeps. We would spend time wondering where the people were who ran the fair. We never saw a soul. He would always end by asking me when it would be open, when he could get a ride, questions I could never answer. He was a cheerful child with abundant energy and I mourned his lack of cousins or friends that he could interact with. One of the chief losses of our times is the disconnections we make of families, friends we grew up with, the rarity of being able to or indeed even wishing to stay close, has its down sides which I was experiencing.

Eventually we found a pre-school that he attended, and a sister came along to tease. But by that time, we were already making plans to move on towards the next phase of our lives, which would be somewhere completely different. What I would take with me and what I would leave behind were things I had neither worked out or anticipated.

Two Towns

The relentless grey days of anti-cyclonic gloom made me internalise. I have been treading the path that brought me here; to this seat above the meadows, next to a Roman Road, surrounded by hills….

I am standing in a muddy patch of ground. Around me in the bleak grey light a housing estate is under construction. A dumper truck chugs away up a road, heading towards a semi built house, waiting undressed, for its windows and doors. Some of the roads are already lined with homes; fledgling gardens, curtains, cars in the drive. They are named; Osprey, Franklin, Kingfisher and where we stand the signage reads Heron Close. It’s poignant to think of the birds we have displaced from this wet meadow land by the river Ivel. Yet at this moment I am intensely grateful to them.

I am pregnant with our first child and we are homeless. The charity Shelter has directed us here, to this raw Housing Association development on the outskirts of a town I never knew existed until recently. It is my first visit. My dad who standing next to me clears his throat in a familiar way. He has brought me from the comfort of his home and garden, on this wet, grey, Saturday afternoon as my husband Nick is away on a training course for his new job. If I can’t be with Nick, he is the perfect companion. Non-judgmental, insightful and eager for us to begin a life somewhere within an hour or so’s drive of my childhood home. You wouldn’t chose the weather we have for a first look at a potential home; but I remind myself, that if you like it in the rain, it will be ok. It’s mid-summer, and not roses round the door. Mud spatter and the distant sound of the A1 roaring like an animal in pain a field or two away.

At least the house we are to view is complete, and it has a small plot in front, so that passers-by can’t peer in the window. I try and visualize grass, flowers, maybe a honeysuckle draping the small brick cubicle where the dustbin will live. Dad gives me the key and I open the front door.

Biggleswade is a strange hollowed out town, with at its centre a large undistinguished market place surrounded by shops. A fire ripped through it on 16^th June 1785, which started at The Crown Inn, due, local lore has it, to the carelessness of a servant who dumped ashes from a kitchen fire in the yard near some dry straw. It still seemed to me, to be a neglected sort of place without a heart. The town sits in the flat lands of Bedfordshire, where the fens meet the cojoining county of Hertfordshire. The smell of Brussel sprouts infiltrated the streets. Winds picked up fine field tilth and blew it through the air. It stood beside the A1, or the Great North Road as it’s known, making it possible to get North and South in an uninterrupted vrooming snarl. I wondered if anyone stayed long.

The house was mid-terrace, and comprised of a large through living space with a small kitchen off to one side. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a bathroom. It appeared palatial to me and just perfect for our current needs. Large windows back and front gave it light. It had a small, fenced back garden, with a door that led to garages, one of which belonged to the house. We had no furniture, no white goods, but it seemed on that dismal afternoon to be the answer to a prayer tossed to the fates and answered. Here, for now we could make a home.

Five months on and we are in. Our first child is born, and I am learning my way not only around motherhood but the town too. I discover that the surrounding foreign fields are a series of huge market gardens owned by Dutch families, who grow crops and flowers for the London markets. Biggleswade grew due to its situation on the river which transported goods to the capital until the railway was constructed; it was the first Bedfordshire town to have a mainline station. The other local employer is Jordon’s flour mill, still there, established in 1885 on the banks of the river where a mill has been for over a thousand years.

I have never learnt to drive and fortunately the town still had a range of shops that I could walk to. A supermarket, where I once infamously left Oliver outside asleep in his pram reaching home before I remembered him! (He was fine and hadn’t even woken up, a miracle in itself in those early days.) It had a green grocers, two bookshops, very important for me, one new, one second hand, and a fabulous Dutch bakery with café. There was a weekly market on a Saturday where I bought in a strange twist of fate, Shropshire Blue cheese, a lunch time treat which I ate with a beautiful flat seeded loaf the Bakers sold. There were also a bank, a chemist and a dress shop. The town had a well-stocked library, it was the late 1980’s, long before government cut funding to the bone, which is still thriving, and a doctor’s surgery. Here I took our baby for all his health checks and inoculations. The doctor was a good looking young man who specialized in paediatric care. I couldn’t have chosen a more caring professional.

Sounds idyllic doesn’t it. But I was a new mother with no friends in the area and a family who lived too far away to be any help day to day and I was lonely and afraid. Nick by necessity worked long hours to support us. He was my best friend and I missed him. This heartless town, empty of connections seemed unfriendly. Although perhaps that was just a projection from a newbie who had no roots.

Sundays were the worse day of the week. Nick often worked a twelve hour shift, getting home at gone midnight and everyone else it seemed had a family or friends to spend the day with. I would push the pram in the gathering dusk up and down the estate roads, looking into the lit windows where other people sat together, carried out their lives en masse. Connecting, to each other, strengthening family ties. The motion of the pram soothed Oliver, and the fresh air at least did both of us some good. The town was empty and I spent time gazing into shop windows, or read the names of those lost on the war memorial, wondering who they were and how they had lived their brief lives; imagining them walking me through their town, their history. The church of St Andrew’s seemed a gloomy place, unwelcoming, hiding behind yews and parochial respectability.

My chief solace was and to some extent always has been my books, whose companionship I returned home to. I would run my fingers over their spines, checking in with my friends and promise them a good natter once the baby was bathed and asleep.

As Oliver got older and could walk, one of the places he liked to go was the train station. We would stand on the bridge waiting for the trains to roll underneath pulling into the station, with a clatter of couplings. Sometimes passengers would alight, or board. But even more exciting to him, was the roar of an unstoppable through train; it’s sleek tube of speed and noise always lit up his mischievous eyes.

But his favourite walk was to the local park. Not for the swings and rides but because a funfair over wintered there. He loved the mystery of the shrouded rides, the splashes of colour on the awnings and amusements. He even liked the clown’s face, which gave me the creeps. We would spend time wondering where the people were who ran the fair. We never saw a soul. He would always end by asking me when it would be open, when he could get a ride, questions I could never answer. He was a cheerful child with abundant energy and I mourned his lack of cousins or friends that he could interact with. One of the chief losses of our times is the disconnections we make of families, friends we grew up with, the rarity of being able to or indeed even wishing to stay close, has its down sides which I was experiencing.

Eventually we found a pre-school that he attended, and a sister came along to tease. But by that time, we were already making plans to move on towards the next phase of our lives, which would be somewhere completely different. What I would take with me and what I would leave behind were things I had neither worked out or anticipated.

I have spent the day indoors; reading and writing in the comfort and solitude of the study. I say solitude but as always I feel surrounded by friends, bound between the pages of the company of books which line the room.

So good to reach for the hand of a poet, a biographer, a book of nature writing, a well loved story by an author who has been with me for decades, or a newly found friend. I have just finished “The Darkening Green” by Elizabeth Clarke. The title she used is a quote from William Blake’s poem The Echoing Green. “And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green”. It is a richly textured book, written from the stance of a farmer’s daughter in Devon who is going blind and wishes to chronicle her last year of sight. Elizabeth Clarke’s farmer husband suffered the same fate. For the purpose of the story she transferred the family to the West Country and altered the relationship. It works; and ties in with the Carol Ann Duffy lesson on writers needing to use all their senses in a poem.

This was a book gifted to me by a friend and neighbour; it’s dark green cloth cover and the woodcuts heading each chapter a quiet pleasure to hold and look at. I have a database for my extensive library and as I entered it, I realised that it was a first edition, even more pleasing. I also noticed that on the frontispiece there was a name; Edward Storey. Now, the Edward Storey I know was a writer who wrote about the Fens. an area which resonates with me as my DNA was formed there long before the Romans came. What I hadn’t realised was that he had moved to Wales and died there in 1999. A journey that we too made in the mid eighties. Was it his signature? Looking it up online, it was obvious that it was, the way the E had been formed was very distinctive. Could these two, who wrote on similar themes have known each other? They both shared the same publisher. That the book belonged once to him seemed very likely.

Heard my first thrush of the year, singing out across the meadows. I never see him. I assume it’s a male, the repeated phrases of his song is unmistakable. The sheep have disappeared from the field; maybe to the lambing sheds.

Narrated by Brian Cant it was melodic and soothing, the regular heart beat to each gentle, community based story.

Instead, I have found myself in an entirely different era; a dystopian, one ruled over by Trumptonian values of a world I want no part in. Where community is undervalued, if not completely disregarded in favour of a class supremacy destructive in its nature.

Now, I am well aware that the three villages of Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley were not known for their multi culturalism. No refugees were part of the villagers lives; nobody bombed them, the countryside was that of an almost pre-industrial revolutionary idyl. Though Chigley was more urban than the other two hamlets, with it’s railway and Biscuit Factory. I can only plead that the times they were written in and about were more insular in their makeup and outlook. Class distinction limited itself to the buffoonish Lord Belborough and his stylish butler. The other villagers lived and worked together happily, sorting out their local calamities, such as bee swarms, a shortage of flour, and the more Anthropocene ones of water shortages and the threat of an unwanted electricity substation being built in the village, by the end of each episode together, harmoniously.

In the meantime, President Trump’s world view includes believing that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese in order to make U. S. manufacturing uncompetitive, that Gaza should be made into a Middle Eastern Riveria, with no Palestinians, as it is such a devastating mess, (wonder whose fault that is) it should be demolished, that walls must be built to keep out refugees who help to keep the American economy going, and funding the arms and drugs manufactures rather than looking after his own citizens.

Looking out of the window today, the skies an unrelenting grey, the wind whipping the stems of hawthorn, its intertwined bramble castigating the trunks, I look for the glimpses of light and colour. The yellow flash of a siskins underwing as he gives it a “have-some-of-that stance on the feeders, a bluetits yellow waistcoat, catkins jaunty earrings in the alder, the lights coming on in the farm across the lane. A fire red tractor trundles through the hedges, and a group of starlings congregate in the oak. A pair of kites dance over the meadow where shortly lambs with be put out with their dams.

How fortunate am I that I live on the edge of a small market town in sight of the hills with all the wild life we will allow on my doorstep. One that still values community; where I can walk into town and be greeted by friends and neighbours, who smile and care enough to pass the time of day. Not Trumpton, not a make believe, but a town living it’s life in 21st century Bri

tain.

Through the clear air the sound of a steam trains chuff and whistle carries; and in my minds eye I see it chunder through our small station, cross the road bridge, and make it’s way into the Heart of Wales.

It seems inconceivable that this sleepy little town could have been what Crewe became. A hub of interconnecting railways, a place of industry, making the infrastructure needed to run and maintain the system.

Mike Lynch announced his retirement today. A magnificent advocate for the railways and the men and women who run them. He called out the media and their biased reporting of the strikes and the reasons the unions had for taking action.

If the town had become a “Crewe” he may have visited on his way to Manchester, Liverpool, or London. Had a pint in the hotel built for rail travellers. Listened to the staff who worked at the station.

This was once a town of sheep and steam, and now only the sheep remain. It has sunk back to sleep, pillowed by the hills that surround it.

In more clement weather we will walk the disused railway line that runs to nowhere through the meadows, greet the sheep that graze t

here.