A freshly composed poem by the somewhat critically scrutinised yet calmly industrious Auckland writer CK Stead
Author's note: Ann Thwaite is the biographer of Emily Tennyson, Frances Hodgson Burnett, A.A. Milne and others. She spent part of her childhood in New Zealand, she and her brother sent out to stay with Kiwi relations when it seemed England was going to be invaded. She is my exact contemporary, hence the fantasy about the Mt Eden Pool where she records swimming as a child. Anthony was a significant poet, books editor for The Listener (BBC), and The New Statesman, poetry editor for Secker and Warburg, and possibly best known as Philip Larkin’s literary executor and editor. They are old friends, and I borrowed two of their homes, the one in Norwich and the other in London, for locations in two of my novels.
Crossing the Bar
Remembering the Thwaites
Ann and Anthony, Anthony and Ann
at Low Tharston, Norfolk punting on the mill stream
through reeds and the purple damselflies
of an English summer,
playing table tennis among the trees
or in winter under oaken beams
before a fire in the Mill House
being bookish together –
he the editor-poet famous for Larkin
(and sometime shaman of the Anglican communion)
she the biographer, archivist of secrets
and family matters
who bounced on their trampoline in the woods
telling me she couldn’t write her life story
while Anthony lived –
and hadn’t she been
my fantasy bossy little Pom
at the Mt Eden Pool of my childhood swims? –
And then at the last Anthony, dying at 90
being read to by Ann
and watched by her –
he silent and seeming unconscious
while she was heard to say
he might be ‘crossing the horizon’
eliciting from the death-bed
in that voice still Anthony’s – ‘the BAR’.
Even at the door
one foot in another world
you must get your quotations right –
that was our Anthony
on his way.
