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Wanda Barford’s latest collection tries to put the
pain behind her |
Wanda's odes to love and passion
Wanda Barford proves that it's never too late for passion in love or writing, says Ruth Gorb
What is the Purpose of Your Visit
by Wanda Barford
Flambard Press, £7.50
AT the age of 75, the poet Wanda Barford has written a series
of love sonnets that move, delight and stir the blood. Demurely
she says that she hopes that one of them “5am,” is
not pornographic. Certainly it is passionate – “well,
I’m a passionate person,” she says – and with
others under the title Singing Like a Woman in Love puts paid
once and for all to the idea that sexual love is the prerogative
of the young.
The sonnets are part of her latest collection of poetry, What
is the Purpose of Your Visit? The title, and the picture of
the train on the cover evoke emotions other than of love –
rather of fear and displacement. Barford sees the train as a
symbol of the fractured, restless 20th century. “It was
filled with so much pain – not that this one is starting
so well,” she says.
Her desire to put all the pain behind her sees the book beginning
with poems under the heading Goodbye 20th Century.
They are about disrupted lives and disrupted childhoods like
Wanda Barford’s own. Hers started well enough. She was
born in Milan to Jewish parents, her mother from the island
of Rhodes and her father from Turkey, and the family lived in
considerable luxury – there are memories of a sunken pink
marble bath, of driving in a Lancia, one of the earliest motor
cars in Milan.
Mussolini had come to power in 1922 and at first he seemed like
good news. Then it all changed. “You killed Christ,”
said one of the maids to the child Wanda.
Fearful, the family left Milan. They joined other refugees in
the cafés of Paris where the talk was all of the safe
places to run to, with maps of the world spread on the tables.
Wanda and her parents made for Rhodesia where they stayed for
17 years. It was safe, but it stifled the cosmopolitan souls
of Wanda and her mother.
“As soon as my father died, my mother upped and went to
live in Paris,” she says. “I came to London, where
it was wonderful to have everyone asking, ‘When are you
getting engaged?’ I was in the country of Dickens. I fell
in love with London, and I’ve been in love with it ever
since.”
She lives, as she has for many years, in the heart of Belsize
Village.
Her training was as a musician, as was her first career: she
taught piano at New End School, and at South Hampstead School
for Girls, where both her daughters were pupils. Than in 1990,
her life changed. She had been suffering from bouts of depression,
so badly that she remembers looking up at a tree one black day
and considering which branch to hang herself from.
She recalls: “Then I had my 65th birthday.
“I got my freedom pass. I stopped teaching. I decided it
was now or never. I was going to write. I had so much stuff
I wanted to get rid of, stuff that was festering inside me and
had been for years.”
She started to write poetry. It poured out of her, the pain
she had tried to suppress, the pain of the members of her family,
including her grandfather, who had died in Auschwitz –
“I felt I owed it to them to remember them” she says.
Barford published her first volume of poems, Sweet Wine and
Bitter Herbs, and it was well received.
The depression gradually lifted, and when she had a major operation
in 2001 she remembers thinking: “At least I’ve written
that; I can die peacefully.”
Far from dying, she appears to have been re-born. Youthful and
elegant, full of zest and intellectual energy, she has become
part of the literary establishment. Her poetry is highly regarded,
although she says she is still learning and regularly attends
a poetry workshop at Morley College.
As she grows older, she finds that her Jewishness has become
more important to her.
One sequence in her new collection was inspired by a study tour
of Israel she made in 2000 with the Council of Christians and
Jews.
And she sees that growing awareness of her roots affected her
long-standing marriage to a non-Jew. “It was when I was
writing my first poems, about my family,” she says. “He
said: ‘You are not Holocausting again, are you?’ It
was like a stab in the heart.
The marriage was, she says, sometimes bad, sometimes good. Her
husband died in 1997, and no, the love poems are not written
about him. She has now, she says, “a very good friend”.
It is he who has inspired the sequence she calls Celebrating
Love in Old Age, poems filled with tenderness and mature self-awareness.
“At an age as
ridiculous as ours –
The curving spine, the sagging skin…
Yet love there was,
As vigorous and strange
As any younger love might be
And maybe twice as loyal
For all the
knowledge of deep hurt,
For the life already lived.”
The sense of the ridiculous is always there, and an impish sense
of humour. Poems towards the end of her book make sly fun of
contemporary attitudes, health fears, the impossibility of filling
in forms – is she Caucasian, Semetic, White, Other…?
She wonders.
She writes all the time; there are scribbles, she says, all
over the house. What inspires her? She gives the answer in a
poem: All she needs, she says, is her pen, old diaries, light.
Most of all she needs her heart “with its accumulated baggage…forever
on the edge of something radiant, to take me to the stars and
back.” |
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