-
I started meeting Auntie Edie in the mirror, so rooted out the tiny photographs to check: her nose and lips were coarser, but the shape’s the same … Great Aunt Edith – to us the funny snob who came to tea on Thursdays and ‘wasn’t used to children’. Shapeless and sagging, she’d never worn a bra, had
-
She had a beautiful mother, serene in a sepia photograph who cried over every debt; her father was happy-go-lucky, a charmer and very bright; a Methodist grandfather killed himself; her grandmother’s hair grew down to her knees. Cycling the three miles to grammar school in a uniform sizes too large with a second-hand hockey stick
-
The flesh drained back on to the pillow so his nose poked up surprising, sharp, a single flower placed beside his head, below his green-pyjama’d shoulders – fragile, like a child laid lovingly to sleep. There were signs his nose had bled – otherwise he looked tidy and so still. His eyes were closed, his mouth fixed
-
I’ve done his shirts. Now I’m on the hankies. I learnt on these. My mother thought I couldn’t harm the plain white squares. He had plenty anyway. First you flatten out and heat away the creases, then fold in half, do both sides, fold again, ending with a steaming, neatly cornered wedge. Clean hankies conjure
-
I fell on to the pebbles from his shoulders: ‘Are you all right?’ my first anxious words – adults had so far to fall. He told my mother how absurd I was to worry about him. I never thought how scared he must have been for me. I couldn’t get my key to turn and kept
-
‘The hills are alive’ he sang every day as he dressed, until he was breathless and pumped full of drugs. In the end his heart couldn’t cope – perhaps it was all for the best. He carried on working and lived with habitual zest – tenacious of life, he’d never call illness a friend. ‘The hills are
-
David Aaronovitch in The Times “This gruesomely entertaining book examines the Tudor zeal for burning people in the name of religion, says David Aaronovitch.” Steve Tomkins in The Church Times Reviews at Goodreads.com Bob Duffy in The Washington Independent Review of Books “An authoritative chronicle of the gruesome era when religious dissenters met their end at the
-
All you know for certain is you’ll die and so will all your friends; you spend your busy life avoiding this, the only thing you know. You don’t know how – a slow death years away, the heart attack tomorrow, the wasting of disease, a sudden accident, gunfire in the morning, or just old age. It’s
-
I was looking for my muse and I found you – sleeping between freshly laundered sheets while wolves you took for dogs were howling in the dark beyond your safety zone. Iced rowanberries in the snow and strong white arms – your concentration in the library at Yuryatin – abandoned weeping on the coffin of your lover: you
-
On staring at a photo of Osip Mandelstam OK Osya, you’ve made your point – you’ve seen it all – you’re right. As your eyes imply, I’ve never heard that knock on the door at night; never drunk for consolation tears of a see-through Petropolis – town where Gogol’s devil lights the lamps; never perched on a ledge
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer 