For the Silent - an anthology of poems in aid of the League Against Cruel Sports

Yes, foxes can be a pest on farms, and sometimes their numbers need to be controlled, but I've never been able to imagine my way into the mindset of someone who would hunt animals to the point of exhaustion, and then kill them and call it 'sport'.

Nor can my publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, and to spread the word (literally), they have produced this beautiful anthology of poems, For the Silent, proceeds from the sale of which go to the League Against Cruel Sports.

I'm delighted to have a poem in it, rubbing its humble shoulders with poems by Mary Oliver, Simon Armitage, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Atwood, Pascale Petit, Liz Berry, Seamus Heaney, Alison Brackenbury, Siegfried Sassoon, John Clare, Ted Hughes and many more.

If you have a heart and a soul, this book is for you. It costs £10 + p&p and is available from the Indigo Dreams website. (Buying directly from Ronnie and Dawn will maximise funds for the League.)

Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door - Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

My father announced some years ago now that he would like to visit Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door in Dorset, a desire he's often repeated since.  I've lost count of the number of times I've offered to drive him there but he's always had a reason not to go - too cold, too wet, too hot, too pretty much anything really.  To which he'd add, 'There's plenty of time'.

I began to think that I would never get him there, and that when I did eventually visit myself, maybe after his death, I would be consumed with guilt at my failure, even though I'd know I'd tried my hardest.  Three years ago, I even wrote a poem about not taking him to Lulworth Cove.

When my sister announced that she and her husband would be taking the parents on holiday to Dorset, I heaved a sigh of relief. Far easier to herd them there from a distance of six miles. And I could go down too, and spend the day with them.

So as soon as I'd cast my vote in the EU referendum, I set off. It was a good day for a jaunt, beautiful in a grey sort of way, as this country so often is. And despite worries about which way the vote would go, I was glad I was finally going to cross Lulworth Cove off the List of Places To Take My Parents.

Except that they are 94 and 88 now, and their mobility is poor.  The Cove proved too far for them to walk to from the pub by the car park. There was no vehicular access, not even to drop them off.  And the wheelchair I bought when I broke my leg, in the hope they too would get some use out of it, was 100 miles away, right at the back of their cupboard under the stairs, rejected.

So it was just me, my sister, my brother-in-law and their large and exuberant puppy who saw this.

We wondered if there was a way of seeing the shore from the cliffs. There'd be panoramic viewpoints, right? My sister went into the Tourist Information Centre. Nope, no way of seeing the Cove or Durdle Door from the cliffs without trekking quite a way. 'How are they at walking over grass?'

We drove up there anyway.  Rooks watched carefully to see how we were going to resolve this.  We made preliminary forays along various paths to see if they were worth a try. They weren't.

In the end only my brother-in-law, the dog and I made it down to the beach to get a proper look.

And it was beautiful ...

... Durdle Door to the left, Durdle Cat Flap to the right, with waves like perfectly scalloped lace. 

Leaving my sister pondering the possibility of hiring a wheelchair and returning the next day, I bade the merry band of holidaymakers farewell and headed for home. On the way I stopped off at Bere Regis and had a look around the stone and flint Church of St John the Baptist.  

There are some churches you go inside, look up and marvel - Muchelney is one, as are Martock, Long Sutton, and the Church of St Thomas and Edmund in Salisbury - and now there's another to add to the list.

Constructed in about 1485, the carved figures on the nave roof are believed to depict the twelve apostles. There are also huge bosses and carved heads on the wall plates between the trusses.

Meanwhile in the chancel there are angels.

The stone altar was discovered buried under the chancel floor in the 19th century, having been put there at the time of the Reformation to avoid destruction.  It's now hidden away under embroidered drapery.


I loved the 12th century carvings on the pillars of south side of the church, especially the ones of man with headache and man with toothache.  

They reminded me of the sheela-na-gig at the Church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck in Herefordshire, which was built around 1140. 

Time was getting on. Tempting as it was to visit Shitterton, Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide, I decided they must wait for another day, and it was as well, as an accident outside Dyrham Park meant that it took me over an hour to travel the last five miles up to the Bath junction of the M5. 

Sitting in my car looking over verges of long golden grass and poppies to a sky with clouds layered like the side of a Walls Viennetta which someone took from the packaging too hastily and smudged with their thumbs, I thought how beautiful this island is and how much I love it, and I hoped so hard that its people would not vote to turn their backs on our neighbours and close borders and minds. 

Meanwhile three men in the car in front tipped their rubbish out through the window. 

The AA New Book of the Road

He has abandoned

his forties atlas of the world,

the one that takes him back

to Castel Benito, Tripolitania, the capital

city of old Brindisi,

Palestine.

Instead he’s tracking the A37,

planning advances on

Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door, 

the skin on his finger paper thin,

the back of his hand a Spaghetti junction

of knotted highways.

Let’s go tomorrow

I say quickly. No rain forecast.

Some sunshine. 

We’ll wait till it’s warmer

he decides.  No need to rush.

There’s plenty of time.

© Deborah Harvey 2014 

Arthurian Mists

Rain was scheduled for the morning, clearing later from the west, so we headed west to Cornwall to make the most of the day. 

My partner was keen to visit Tintagel, but first we stopped off at Port Quin, which I love for its solitude, and its sad story of all the men of the village lost at sea in a terrible storm, and the surviving fish cellars which give such insight into the hard lives of past inhabitants ... 

... or would do if they hadn't been turned into luxury holiday lets since the last time I was there. What cavalier treatment of our social history. How disappointing.

And so the National Trustification of the place is complete. Apart from this door - quick, someone paint it a tasteful shade of Cotswold green! 

In Tintagel, the familiar was swallowed in mist.  My partner in poetry set off for the castle. I wanted to revisit the Church of St Materiana, otherwise (possibly) St Madryn, a 5th century Welsh princess (though I suspect they made her up). 

Ooh but it was atmospheric walking up the lane.

Eventually the Celtic cross that is the war memorial loomed from the churchyard, followed, as I drew closer, by many graves and finally the Church itself. 

It was like being in a Radio 4 afternoon drama.

I did get to spot some old friends, however, like this the altar tomb by the south door which commemorates, in beautiful lettering, Thomas, the son of John and Tamsin Heming, who was killed by lightning in 1702:

                               

'The body that heere buried lyes,

By Lightning fell death's sacrifice.

To Him Elijah's fate was given

He rode on flames of fire to Heaven.

Then mourn no more Hee's taken hence

By the just hand of Providence.

O God the judgements of thy Seat

Are wonderous good and wonderous great.

Thy ways in all thy works appear

As Thunder loud, as Lightning clear.'

And this life belt which serves as a memorial to Cantanese Domenico, a 14 year old cabin boy who died on 20th December 1893 when the vessel he worked on, the Italian barque Iota, was wrecked on Lye Rock. Two other members of the crew also died, the remaining nine having been rescued by stalwart locals. 

The church is lovely, dark and deep ...

... and it has just about my favourite font of all time. Far less fancy than some, it is massive, Norman and carved with four heads at each corner and serpents in between, their heads and tails curved upwards representing, so the guide book says, the evil spirit expelled by grace. So there. 

By the time I met up with my partner, we were both so wet we decided to give Boscastle a miss and head back to Devon - no real hardship since he'd been totally beguiled by the castle and had already decided he wanted to revisit it on a fine day.

No sooner had we crossed the top of Bodmin moor when it stopped raining and the sun came out. But we'll be back soon, armed with a copy of the collected poems of Thomas Hardy, on another foray into poetry.  

The Heart of Thomas Hardy

There are two routes from the car park to Hardy's cottage in Higher Bockhampton.  We took the one that led through Thorncombe Wood,  his birthplace suddenly coming into view between trees and looking very much the rural idyll his tales belie.  

Inside the guide warned me that none of the contents belonged to the Hardy family.  I don't think it matters.  TH left us so much that is of him.  Just open a book.  

And anyhow, the most interesting aspect of the cottage is the fabric of the building, with its humped floorboards and cracked plaster ...  

... and its fiendishly steep back stairs. 

One display solved a 15-year mystery for me.  By ruling out what it wasn't, I had deduced that a skull one of the kids had picked up on Dartmoor was probably once wrapped in badger.  An identically shaped (though possibly slightly larger) one stencilled badger on this shelf confirmed my suspicion. 

The National Trust are in the process of building a visitors centre which means that £4.50 slices of cake and William Morris-patterned trowels will soon be the order of the day.  I was glad we slipped in while entry fees are still collected in a shed and the nearest refreshments are to be found at the Wise Man pub in nearby West Stafford.  Which is where we went next. 

After dinner we went to Hardy's local church, St Michael's in Stintsford.  It was Hardy's wish that he be buried next to his first wife, Emma, who had died a quarter of a century before him, but only his heart made it, the rest of him having been cremated and interred in Westminster Abbey ... 

... unless you believe the story that the doctor's cat ate his heart. (And was subsequently killed and buried in the tomb also.) I prefer not to. If Hardy's heart is anywhere, it is in his poems.   

Also in the tomb with Emma and Hardy's heart, half-eaten or otherwise, lies Florence, TH's second wife - and lover, prior to Emma's death.  It must have been galling for Florence to witness Hardy's grief and the beautiful elegies he wrote for Emma after her sudden death, but I can't help feeling sorry for Emma also.  I'm sure she would have preferred not to share her grave with her husband's mistress.  

I was surprised to spot poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis's grave next to others from Hardy's family, with that of his wife behind.  Apparently CDL was greatly influenced by Hardy and arranged to be buried as close to his tomb as possible. 

Shall I be gone long?  
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.  

In the church a Saxon stone carving - rather more weathered than the one in Flax Bourton - of St Michael vanquishing the dragon ... 

... the Norman font discovered in pieces in the churchyard in the 20th century ... 

... and a striking memorial window to Stinsford's most famous son.  

I liked the sunny serenity of Higher Bockhampton and Stinsford, but it was time to move on to Max Gate, the house near Dorchester which Hardy designed for him and Emma to live in, and where he died.  

I should like Max Gate.  It has an Arts and Crafts feel about it, and was built in a prehistoric landscape.  Hardy wrote 'The Mayor of Casterbridge', 'The Woodlanders', 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' and 'Jude the Obscure' there, as well as much of his poetry.   

But I didn't. I found it profoundly depressing.  Whether it was the colour scheme - a heavy terracotta almost throughout ... 

... apart from in Emma's attic rooms, which are a dispiriting dark grey ... 

... or a transference of remembered energy from two less than happy marriages ... 

... but I emerged feeling deeply despondent and with the impression of a couple - first, Thomas and Emma, then Thomas and Florence - for ever punishing themselves and each other.  

After a quick visit to the pet cemetry, where, amongst others, Wessex the dog who famously bit almost every distinguished visitor to the house and Snowdove the albino cat who was cut in two by a passing train and inspired the poem 'Last Words to a Dumb Friend' lie buried, we left.  

Time to finish the day by the sea then, except that both Fleet and Abbotsbury seemed to have turned their backs on their respective sections of the coast.  





We had a quick pint in a roadside pub instead, and made do with this view from the B3157, approaching Burton Bradstock.