The first clue should have been the unmistakeable evocation already of ramps, the wild garlic, whiffs of which we got in spring tramping through wet woods in Wales. The second was less ignorable: a few snips on some corn chowder for lunch and we stank until the next morning.
A familiar in disguise? A twin? Zygote-mate unseparated at conception? I prefer to think Edith is anima, the feminine aspect of the soul, or perhaps better yet guardian angel—a figure that recurs in all my writing.
It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then of the Profumo affair, of Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler—the hot topic of conversation at the trucking company, largely because my fellow rate clerk happened to be an expatriate Brit.
The old Danish Christmas carol, repeated endlessly on Christmas Eve, dancing round the tree—or, in a big house, snaking in and out the parlour doors—asks if Christmas will last till Easter.
The experiences of that winter and spring went into the writing of my novel Luggas Wood, including a mention of the daffodils, and many people and situations encountered then, and this I have decided is the problem with that book.
A sturdy stockman’s cane, made of ash, octagonal in cross-section, with a rather large crook, the kind of stick used to prod unwilling cattle into a pen or up a chute.