the storyteller’s trapdoor: ‘And it so

happened…’ But it does sometimes. Aristotle

called them ‘accidents’ – and here’s a pile-up!

 

It is a Thursday night – and bell ringing

practice at the parish church we can see

from the long window on the half landing.

Our house was here years before the church

or the houses behind us or in our street.

The Shoulder of Mutton Field was bought

at auction and the first built was ours

more than a hundred and sixty years ago.

From the window, uninterrupted,

there would have been Cheshire countryside.

The first tenants were the Caldecotts,

one of whose sons was the illustrator

Randolph Caldecott. I attended

the same school he had done. The first grown up

poem my mother read me was Cowper’s

‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’.

How I loved the drumming of the metre,

the slam-dunk of the rhymes and Caldecott’s

gaudy, storytelling illustrations!

 

A city infant, he was certain

the hedgerows, pasture, dew ponds of his boyhood

had inspired his art. He died, not quite forty,

in an unseasonably damp and cold

St Augustine, Florida, where, of course,

he had gone for his health. The cause of death

was the heart disease he had developed as

a child. I imagine him descend,

say on some early summer morning,

the wide, sunlit stairs, one hand carefully

on the banister, the other gripping

a pencil and sketch book; edge through the back door

kept ajar for the air, cross, as quickly

as he is able, the swept, cobbled yard,

lift the latch of the door in the high wall

and step through into the brightness of the fields…