Sunday 28 June 2020

Viking Footsteps





                                                             Viking Fire Festival, Flamborough Head




Dear Reader

I think it is a mistake for me to read about  loved authors personal life, it seems to spoil the books that I have so enjoyed.  Over the years I have read most of Charles Dickens's novels and loved them, but knew next to nothing about his life.  Now I have just finished a book about him and feel very disillusioned.  He married Catherine Hogarth, a pretty blue eyed girl of nineteen when he was twenty three.  Subsequently they had ten children in sixteen years, none of whom Charles seemed to care for very much, and then he decided that he and Catherine had never had anything in common. And he said she was fat.  He separated from her and had a love affair with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, an actress. 

I was in love with Thomas Hardy all through my teenage years.  I read all his books many times over and I absolutely loved his poetry.  But when I read about his life I was severely disappointed in him as a person,
and it slightly coloured my view of his work.

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From James Woodforde, June 19th, 1799 in Norfolk

'Very cold indeed again today, so cold that Mrs Custance came walking in her spencer with a bosom -friend.'

Mrs. Custance, as a lady of fashion, would have worn her gowns low cut, in the bosomy manner so often drawn by Rowlandson: in cold weather she would have needed the fashionable item of clothing known as the 'bosom-friend'.


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Viking Footsteps

There it is: a windswept empty beach,
great fields of white sand dressed
in driftwood, seaweed, plastic bottles,
flotsam, pebbles, shells, stones, and kelp skeins.
It stretches away to the horizon.

Seagulls, gannets, terns, twist and fly,
make their repetitive cries, peck the ground.
Small pools of seawater form
as the tide goes out, sea creatures swimming
there.

But is that a long boat, red sails fluttering, I see?
And are those uncovered Viking footsteps in the sand?
And do I smell spitted meat, mead and honey
drifting past me on the sea-scented air?

The sand dunes hug their silent secrets,
letting the quiet southerly wind
rustle through marram grasses.
I ask them, do Viking voices whisper
on that wind,
sometimes, on an icy night under a starlit sky?

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With very best wishes, Patricia

Photograph of Viking Fire festival by Kaye Leggett

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