Why do I write?
Because it gives me an excuse to scavenge, to collect random details that would otherwise escape my attention and, worse than that, be lost forever. We all write – those of us who do – because we hope the writing will survive us, that somewhere along a very long line someone will stumble across our ramblings and find something that interests them, or matters to them, or makes them think, or changes them in some very small way.
We hope that the precious moments we try to capture are worth the ink and blood. We want the stories to be told, not just our stories (our own and the ones we make up) but the stories of the places we wander into, the stories of lives whose fragments we excavate from overheard conversations on buses, the ones we find on gravestones. We write because we think that lives matter: all of them. We write because there is an interconnectedness that we want to unearth and unravel and reknit.
I say ‘we’ because I am hoping it’s not just me. I want my reasons for writing to be somehow connected to everyone else’s.
I write because of John Craggs, a driver with A Battery 320th Brigade, who accidentally drowned. His wife, Margaret Isabella, lived in Mary Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but his grave is in St Andrew’s Churchyard at Blickling, Norfolk. I write because I don’t know why he wasn’t taken back to the north-east, because I don’t know how or why he drowned, because he was buried away from home, because he was only forty-two years old.
I write because in that same graveyard, there was a pot, made of stone, bereft of flowers, holding rainwater and ivy, and it made me sad.
I write because of Cyril, the beloved and only son of F & A Peat, who died at Brooke Hospital on December 3rd, 1915 from an enteritic condition contracted in the Dardanelles. He was 18 years old…and his parents didn’t think their given names had any place on his memorial.
I write because these dead, and so many hundreds of others, are not remembered except in stone, and by the snowdrops that gather round their resting places each Spring.
I don’t want to be lain where the snowdrops drop their silent heads. Lay me where the bluebells dance, or better yet, scatter me on the sands where the waves will take me away with them.
I write because of words like Cenobite, and because there are such things as railed steps leading downwards, ferns and moss and half-hidden doors to under-crofts, crypts under churches where maybe ancient dead are lain to rest, but more likely there are spades and hammers and lead- and stone-workers tools, and probably all the forgotten musty hymn books, damp-speckled and not thrown away, just left to rot into the walls.
I write because of the church walls that need to be noticed for their own selves, in their solid flint, their redbrick, their ancient stone, with their windows plain or coloured, leaded, fragments. I don’t know if they are walls to keep things in, or to keep other things out. Are they sheltering defences or obstructing barricades, these buttressed fortress argumentative church walls?
Sometimes I write because of the things you told me, and I have since forgotten. What was it that you said about sweet amber? And St John’s Wort and the Knights of the Cross?
Elsewhen it is because it seems important to me, that precise way the hellebore hang their heads, the sound of branches waking up to spring and whispering in creaks to each other, the rusting paint of the white bench, the way the morning mists roost in the branches of the birch.
I want someone to know how it felt to be sunbathing this early in March, my feet feeling the heat of the wooden deck and the cold, damp grass…how I listened to the robins squabbling over territory but sounding so sweet in their calls…how, closed-eyed, I tracked the jets across the sky by their roar-trail…how delighted I am to see the moon in daylight.
I write because the world is a wildscape, and wild is a beach in Winter, because my camera is a notebook, because of the riot of waves against sunlight, because there needs to be a reason for letting my fingers get so cold they burn.
I write because you can hide a lot behind words, but only from those who are not listening; because the whole point of poetry is to leak out quietly, what we’d never say out loud.
Because living is hard, and we are all too scared to admit it…because sometimes I wonder how the wine feels as it slips down my throat, what the daphne thinks as she wastes her scent on humans…
…because of that old wooden bench with its broken slats, on the field behind the bungalows… because of the grass camps and insect bites and calamine lotion…because of games of Slam! and tip-and-run and tiggy-on-high and hidey-bo…because of scary old women who never said "yes" to "please may we have our ball back", mostly, I think, because of the field and the willows, weeping;
…because of caravans with gas lamps, and card games and fold-down beds…and the outdoor pool, with a white-painted turnstile, a fountain in the corner, and a blue plastic slide into the deep end, and all those white-sun days that ended with bottles of Pepsi and the flashing light way out in the dark over the sea.
I write because I’m in love…
And because I’m alone.
Because I’m all over the place.
And because the place is home.
I write and I write and I write
because there is always another page.
Because Spring comes again in plum tree blossom, and because I doubt there will be blackberries this year: I cut back too harshly.
Because bread, because cheese, because of the breathless runner with orange shoes and tattooed legs, who sat beside me in the memorial garden…and did not speak.
I write because of all the fountains that have been switched off and no longer throw their rainbows into the air, because of all the stagnating ponds with their floating weed and nothing swimming, and no penny wishes;
I write because of real falling water, and heat shimmer, and storm clouds, and wavelets and breakers…because deckchairs and ice cream…because windbreaks and groynes and an old rubber dinghy…
…because…memories.
I don’t write “because” any of these things. I write to dredge up all the reasons to write. I trawl through the world, deep diving for pearls, open-cast and adit and deep-shaft mining, hunting, gathering…
The phrase "ink and blood" is a nod to two great writers: Hemingway said that to write all you have to do is "sit down at a typewriter and bleed," and Springsteen sings "I wrote it all out in ink and in blood."
