THREE ACT PLAY. FICTION IN VERSE. And a parody by Marcus Bales.

A version of this poem was originally published in Meniscus. It was an early attempt   to write fiction in verse. After the poem, you can read Marcus Bales' parody.

Three Act Play.

 

1) Hotel Interior, Night

 

You were with me in the darkness, curled

on the unfamiliar bed. The nightlights

of the hotel swimming pool shimmering the room; 

the sound of surf shivering the air. 

Another dream, perhaps, until your nightmare 

shook us both awake. I held you safe until 

your breathing steadied, gentled, signaled 

you had gone far out to calmer water

where stars were fixed and distant.

The rain began, hesitant and then insistent. 

Awake alone, admiring the angle of your shoulder 

the shadows on your back. Although 

come dawn, you’d turn, smile, welcome me, 

everything we did was broken light

dancing on that isolation flesh tries to deny. 

 

2) Exterior: Early Morning Bus Stop Philosophy 

 

You left while I was sleeping. Who knows when we’ll meet again?

So consider the mini bus that will take me to the airport,

stopped at the traffic lights. How many centuries of ingenuity

produced this banal sight? Still too asleep to fumble my itinerary 

I stare out towards the estuary, imagine a rough man knapping flint,

lurching towards comfort. He could not have imagined

the bakery, the weight loss-center, gym and launderette. 

the twisted perfume of a cigarette, the woman smiling at her phone.

He’d know the wind and tide, that space where light and water 

meet and never merge but did he understand ‘alone’?

 

3) Domestic Interior: Evening Rush Hour. 

 

A good day’s work, first home, now dinner’s done. So why

do I imagine a pond too dark to fathom, beneath bare trees;

imagine being dragged down through surface scum of leaves, down 

past drowned and damaged faces adrift in the darkening cold?

Unnoticed daylight is reduced to silvered remnants on a table set for two.

Outside the traffic that she’s stuck in is a wall of noise, inside, 

fear, rising from the shadows to the dark.  

In the street, their day reflected in the way they stride  

or slouch or pause to window shop, parents sheepdog children, 

school kids shoal, all moving to and from but moving on. 

I watch them from the kitchen window, reassured and surfacing,

waiting for her footsteps on the path; the way she struggles with the lock

the way she calls me from the hall before she shuts the door,

starting the ripples which will carry us towards  morning.

If Liam Guilar had written 'I will Survive'. By MARCUS BALES

You left while I was sleeping: no goodbye 

As bad as any talk or any note, 

Because in any case I had no vote, 

And even you could not illumine why. 

I think of how a rough man knapping flint 

Inching towards comfort, could not have thought

Of memory-foam. What he knew was taught 

By close attention to each tiny hint. 

And now you're back that look upon your face 

Which once you knew that I could not resist 

Me wondering what tiny hint I've missed 

But no. Go out the door. There is no place 

For you here any more. I knap this stone 

And wonder, did that rough man know alone?

Jeremy Hooker's 'With a Stranger's eyes'.

 

Published by Shearsman Books 2025.

A longer version of this essay was first published in the Brazen Head as  The Watchful Muse clicking the link will take you there. 

With a Stranger’s Eyes is Jeremy Hooker’s third book of poems since the publication of Selected Poems 1965-2018(Shearsman 2020) and arguably the best of this later group¹. The poetry is divided into three sections, with a fourth, short prose ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words.’ The first two sections record people, places and incidents from his past and present in non-English speaking countries, moving from memories of Holland to Wales, to a final section which looks outwards. The poet moves from being a stranger by nature of nationality and language, to a stranger in the world by reason of being human. The title reflects Hooker’s sense of not belonging. “I am a stranger in the area in which I live, and a stranger to the tragic history of the area. Being a stranger has affected my idea of myself as a poet (p.83).”²This awareness saves the poems from sentimentality and egotism. 

 

If we include 2016’s Ancestral Lines, then these four poetry books are what used to be called ‘a significant and important body of work,’ in their own right, because of the way they explore a maze of writing problems and offer one way out.

 

Hooker has quoted David Jones’ “one writes with the things at one’s disposal” which seems incontrovertible. However, biography is one of those things, and if biography is what makes writers who they are, then how do they write autobiographically without falling into the trap of producing something that is either private or, perhaps, worse, a lyric poem that begins and ends with the egotistical /I/? Hooker describes the problem: “I distrust the autobiographical impulse with its temptation to egotism and assumptions of finality. […] nostalgia came with a horror of being stuck in an idealised version of the past.” (‘A Note on Autobiographical Poetry’, Preludes p. 79).” 

 

The danger becomes more pressing for a man in his eighties, who has reached a time in his life when looking back seems inevitable. Ancestral Lines was Hooker’s direct confrontation with the problems of writing autobiographically. In ‘Lyric of Being’ the essay that ends that book, he wrote: “My concept of the poet was that of one who struggled to keep open a channel between self and the world and the living and the dead, as opposed to writing a verse beginning and ending with the self (Ancestral lines p.76).” 

 

In ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words’, Hooker writes: “In tune with the thinking of modernists such as T.S. Eliot, David Jones, and George Oppen, I conceive of the poem as a made object, a thing that stands apart from the poet, an act in a transpersonal ‘conversation’ (p. 84).”

 

His poems have a conversational tone that only someone who is tone deaf would call artless. However, art as conversation means more than just tone. He has acknowledged his debt to Martin Buber’s I and Thou ³. According to Buber, the destructive tendency is to turn every ‘you’ into an ‘it,’ into something that can be instrumentalised, or used, or packaged – in poetic terms, to see oneself, like a Wordsworth, as the centre of the universe. The challenge, simplifying Buber, is to see and celebrate the other in all its specific otherness AND not lose the /I/ that is interacting with it. ⁴

 

In With a Stranger’s Eyes Hooker achieves a balance between the person writing and the subject of the writing. ‘Rowan Tree’ offers the most straightforward example. From Wales, or the Welsh poetic tradition, he took the idea of poetry as a vehicle for praise. ‘Rowan Tree’ is a song of praise but made new by the poet’s refusal to pretend the tree cares about him. 

 

It pleases me

that you are no thing

of words, but indifferent

to all I say or think.

 

Yet having contemplated the tree in all its seasonal and historical variations, the poem ends.

 

Rowan tree

that enchants my days

be to me, if only

in imagination, 

an old man’s staff.

Let me stand with you

against Atlantic gales.

Allow me to warm myself 

with your leaves’ red glow

against the coming cold.

 

To write about the tree is to acknowledge what the tree means to the writer. The difficulty is to see the subject not as an extension of self, but as something in relation to self. As he writes about people who were important to him, he preserves their essential strangeness while celebrating what they meant to him. 

 

But I will not insult the man

with elegy, or lessen his ferocity

with emollient words.

                        Let me see him

as the Jeremiah he was, 

                                    prophet

of the death we have dealt a nation,

and the doom we are bringing on our own.

                                                            ‘Gwenallt’

 

Living and working in Wales exacerbated the problem. Acutely conscious of his strangerhood, in a country whose language he didn’t master, Hooker was an unwilling representative of the race some of the Welsh writers he admired and championed saw justifiably as The Enemy. The pressure of this alterity may not be comfortable for the individual, but it is bracing for the poet. It acts against any tendency to ‘egotism and assumptions of finality.’ It makes nostalgia uncomfortable and reminds the poet of the difference between reality and any ‘idealised version of the past.’

 

The Welsh poetic tradition also began in commemoration. Hooker’s poems deal with places made memorable by the people he associates with them, or where tragedy happened. The poet commemorates by finding the image to bring events to the reader’s attention and understanding in ways that journalism cannot. In ‘Passing through Aberfan’, fourteen lines of understatement manage to capture the horror of an event that once reverberated through British culture. ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’ confronts the problem of writing about another, perhaps less well-known disaster.⁵

 

Do not imagine you can imagine it.

Do not suppose you know

what grief is, or terror, or courage

of men entering an inferno 

to rescue their kind. Today 

you may think the scene medieval,

like a picture of hell.

But you will know nothing

unless you catch a distant echo

from the very ground, where

a father calls for his son,

and a son cries for his father.

                                    ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’

 

Following Buber’s lead, the poems explore the rich variety of life. There is anger, and sadness, and humour. ‘Haunted House’ begins as any rural ghost story:

 

Children called it

the haunted house.

It may have been because 

an angry man lived here.

 

But the swerve at the end is both unexpected and highly effective. Made more so by the gentle ghost of Tennyson in the last line suggesting the rest of the quote.⁶

 

Whatever it was, I do not know

why children passed this house

with a tremor of fear.

What I do know are days and nights

when I would have given my life

to feel the touch of a ghostly hand. 

 

It’s easy to confuse ‘serious’ with humourless, but in Hooker’s case that would be a mistake. To be human the poems have to smile occasionally. 

 

But the artist’s soul was in it.

It wasn’t his fault

that he was a Victorian.  

                        ‘On the Painting called Peace’.

 

One of the ways out of the problem of the ego, is the figure of the man at the window.[i] Looking outwards has been a common theme in Hooker’s recent books. Poems frame a space for thinking through and in language, inviting the reader to look and think again. As he writes in ‘David Jones at Capel-y-ffin’,

 

                        And yes, it is true
the universal is revealed
through the particular thing.

 

Seagulls have been the subject of several memorable Hooker poems. 

 

Gull, gull,

lover of sea

and rubbish dump

devotee of plough

 

take me with you,

the observer asks,

                        let me share

a world that is alive, 

where sea roughens

with flying spume

under the west wind.

                        ‘Man at a window: six observations.’

 

If you live on the coast no poem can make you see seagulls ‘for the first time’. But a poem can colour the way you see them, so the irritating cacophonous chip scavengers will never be the same again.

 

‘Man at a Window: six observations’ ends the book. The sixth poem offers an image that might stand for Hooker and his most recent work. The Man at the Window is alone, separated from what he’s observing, but not trying to conscript what he sees to his own purposes, while celebrating what he sees and what it evokes for him.⁷ It begins:

 

One bright star

solitary, it seems 

in the whole night sky.

 

Not knowing the star’s name it reminds him of

 

[…] the young poet
who never died, but lives
steadfast,
for the holiness that is love.

 

You might miss the allusions to Keats, you might think the ‘young poet’ is the poet’s younger self, it could well be, but it’s hard to miss the affirmation of one possible role of poetry. The passage quoted earlier about T.S. Eliot, David Jones and George Oppen continues. “I differ in emphasising its nature as an emotional process. I have finally come to recognize that I am primarily a lyric poem and a love poet.”

 

Love is a dangerously imprecise word. I’d suggest that for Hooker, ‘love’ is not just the confusion that drives adolescents to attempt poetry but a mature working through of Buber’s ideas about the possibilities of human relationships, and how the self relates to the world in all its variety of people, writings, history and places. ‘Love poetry’ describes an open-ended conversation, grounded in what Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”⁸

 

Footnotes

 

[1] Word and Stone (2019) and Preludes (2024). In the last five years Hooker has also published a book of essays, and three books of mixed poetry and prose in a genre he has made his own: The Art of Seeing (2020), The Release (2022), Addiction, a Love story (2024) and Presence and Place (2025). All  of them have been published by Shearsman. To do it justice, With a Stranger’s Eyes, should be considered in the context of this group of later work, reaching back to include 2016’s Ancestral Lines. But that requires more words than an essay offers.  

2 Unless otherwise stated quotations and page numbers refer to With a Stranger’s Eyes.

3 Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du in 1923, published in English in 1937 as I and Thou – a meditation on human relationships, and a critique of objectification and over-abstraction.

4 ‘Simplifying’ here is an extravagant understatement.

5 In 1913 an explosion at the pit head killed 439 men and boys. It was the worst mining disaster in British history.

6 ‘But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand/and the sound of a voice that is still’  From Break Break Break.

7 I’ve written about the man at the window in the context of The Release. https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2022/02/jeremy-hookers-release-part-three-poems.html 

8 John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817.

 

 

 

 

William the Marshal, or, the Joys of Research.

 William the Marshal, realising that the French King has no interest in Peace:

'Good Sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd explain one thing: in France it's the custom for traitors to be treated like scum-burnt at the stake or pulled apart by horses! But now they're part of the establishment; they're all lords and masters!'

'That's fair enough,' the king replied. 'It's all a question of business now-and they're like shit-rags; once you've done your business, you chuck them down the privy.'

The History of William the Marshal, translated by Nigel Bryant. 

Not much has changed.

Second thought.

The History has to be one of the most enjoyable and 'readable' of early Thirteenth Century texts, all the more so since its central character was both 'Europe's Greatest Knight' and by the end of his life a major figure in the politics of the period.  Interesting too, given that it's such a good story, full of incidents and drama, and that the man himself is a fascinating conundrum, that no one has ever turned the Marshal's life into a film. Though if it were filmed, they'd probably ruin it, so perhaps it's for the best. 

Review of Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire

This review originally appeared in the Brazen Head, July 2025.

Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire (Lothian, 2025, 121 pages) 

 

Set in rural Australia The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems. 

 

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be. 

 

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse’. They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

 

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

 

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

 

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book.

 

The Foal in the Wire opens:

 

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

 

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay. 

                                    ‘Foal’

 

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose. 

 

As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii]

 

It is very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

 

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

 

However, as Coburn’s poem in the Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse.  

 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

 

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either.  

 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire  is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

 

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable :

 

Sam sneaking out at night:

 

making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

                                                      (‘Furtive’)

 

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal. 

 

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

 

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

                                    ‘Waiting’

 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end. 

 

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

 

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

 

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

 

I can hold on and be anyone.

 

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends: 

 

Maybe this 

scarred and haunted body 

is enough--

 

the wounded animal

is capable of survival. 

 

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving’. 

 

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which  frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

 

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was. 

 

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school; first love; first sexual experience; a drunk abusive father; some form of reconciliation. 

 

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

 

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time. 

 

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first- but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their  own shelter for abused horses.  

 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

 

---

[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these five examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel. 

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries. 

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent. 

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job. 

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.

Shackleton's Grave (A WIsh) Poems I have written #8

Shackleton’s Grave

(A Wish)

 

There will be peace and an end to traveling,

the colour of ocean under a polar sky,

solid as mountains, to bear the brunt

of storms that can no longer trouble

the sleeper in the wind-raked earth.

Time will be glacial, patient as icebergs 

where no rumours whisper, no duty calls,

the strong heartbeat of spring and its flowers:

the tides’ turn, the snow’s fall.

This poem ends Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available on line. Further samples and signed copies from www.Liamguilar.com. 

The Haunting of Borley rectory. The story of a ghost story by Sean O'Connor.

 

The Haunting of Borley rectory. The story of a ghost story by Sean O'Connor.

In my tattered, because old and much read, ‘Folklore Myths and Legends of Britian’ (Reader's Digest 1973) , Borley rectory has its own substantial entry under the title: ‘The most Haunted house in England’. With a half page picture of the building ablaze, and a small reproduction of the ‘Ghostly writings’ that appeared on the walls, the entry relates the ghostly goings on and after a description of the fire at the Rectory, and the burial of some bones found there, ends ‘the nun is still occasionally glimpsed near the site of the rectory and Borley churchyard’. 

 

Sean O’Connor’s book tells the story of this story, which is far more interesting than that entry suggests. Because he doesn’t just relate the odd goings on at the rectory but traces the lives of those involved, he offers a perhaps unintentional insight into just how difficult it is for anyone to establish ‘the truth’, either in retrospect while writing a book, or while living through the events the book describes.

 

Borley rectory achieved its notoriety in the years between the First and Second World Wars. As O’Connor notes, in England at the time, most old houses had their ghosts. The 19^th century is the great age of the literary ghost story and Borley had a dead nun and a ghostly carriage. When the rector, Eric Smith and his wife called in Harry Price in 1929, ‘poltergeist’ activity suddenly became violent. The story became sensational news, and the rectory almost immediately became a target for sightseers. 

 

As this book proves, what made Borley famous was not so much its ghostly occupants but a strange tangle of intriguing characters, who might have had different reasons for publicising or even faking the hauntings; local tensions; underlying racism and conservatism; complicated tangles of professional jealousy, and showmanship bordering on fraud.

 

O'Conner deftly contextualises the story, implying that whatever happened at the Rectory, this story gained the attention it did, because of when it happened.

 

 

While O'Connor leads the reader through the story, something has gone missing. It's the story of a story. But was Harry Price, Ghost Hunter, a fraud?  Or was his reputation tarnished by those who resented his success? Were successive rectors and their wives manipulating local stories for their own ends? Were the locals playing tricks on the rectors to get rid of them. Was there ever a nun, let alone her ghost? 

 

By the time the book reached the 'Afterword' I expected O'Connor to offer his opinion. He’s raised all these issues. Instead, he tries to be impartial and even handed. A little this, a little that, possibly some of the other.  

 

This is probably inevitable, but it is ironic.  

 

As O’Connor’s narrative details, the end of the 19th century saw a rise in 'spiritualism' in Britain. During and after the mass slaughter of the ‘Great War’, interest in Spiritual Mediums seemed almost inevitable. At the same time, between the wars, there was a growing attempt to put ‘psychical research’ on to a scientific footing. Humans had believed in an afterlife for centuries. If the reality of ghosts and poltergeists could be scientifically proven, then they were indisputable proof that there was some kind of existence after the body had died.

 

As O'Connor makes clear, Borley rectory was a test case for ‘the scientific method’. Price had made a name for himself ‘debunking’ fake mediums. If the hauntings at Borley could be documented and analysed; if human fraud could be ruled out; if Facts could be established, then the findings would be beyond dispute.

 

However, for the scientific method to work, the question ‘Do Ghosts Exist’ must be a binary proposition. As O’Connor’s narrative amply demonstrates, it could never be.

 

If you wanted practical examples of the idea that  the observer affects the observation, or knowing about the observer undermines the observation, this book is full of them. O’Connor’s biographical approach casts doubt on the reliability and objectivity of almost everyone in the book.  

 

The chapter devoted to details of Marianne Foyster's life after she left Borley, doesn't add anything. She was the wife of the second Rector in the story, and their relationship was strange by anyone's standard. Price initially thought she was guilty of faking the phenomena. She insisted she wasn't. Knowing how many men she had sex with or how many children she adopted and passed off as her own to snare lovers and husbands, doesn’t prove either right. Her story is strange, it undermines her credibility as a witness, just as Price’s biography undermines his, but it doesn’t solve the argument either way.  

 

Price, the man who did more than anything to make Borley famous was accused of faking some of the ‘Poltergeist’ activity. His biography, as presented here, details his desire for applause and recognition, and an early attempt at fame based on forgery. By the time his story arrives at the rectory, he has been portrayed as an unreliable attention seeker.  He was guilty of fudging details to make his books more interesting. He made claims he knew to be false. His scientific methods simply were not very ‘scientific'. Where there were rational, mundane explanations for almost everything he ignored these in his published work. But does any of that mean there were no unexplained phenomena at Borley?

In a fictional ghost story the unreliable characters or the unreliable narrator might undermine the credibility of the narrative. But the effect, in real life, is less clear cut. Does someone with a history of lying never tell the truth? 

 

So was Borley rectory haunted? If you want an answer to that question, then this book will not provide it. It can’t. It will tell you who thought it was, and who doubted. It does tell a fascinating story about the characters involved and demonstrates how untidy, inconsistent, and irrational people are.   With their own ambitions, needs and desires, ranging here from the mundane to the extra ordinary, they can’t be reduced to the simplicities of fiction that would bring the story to a satisfying close.  

1217 The battles that Saved England by Catherine Hanley A review of sorts

1217 The Battles that Saved England. By Catherine Hanley. Osprey 2024

 

1217 tells the story of a siege and two battles; one on land, one on sea, that ‘saved England’.  As a story it has a great plot and a fascinating cast of characters. But while Hanley writes with the skill of a novelist, her story is true and grounded in a careful use of the available sources.  

 

Background.

 

By 1215 King John and his barons were at an impasse. He had been forced to concede what later became known as Magna Carta, but he had placed England in the hands of the Pope. In a radical about face, the Pope moved from excommunicating John and putting England under Interdict, to declaring the Charter null and void and threatening to excommunicate anyone who rebelled against the rightful King.  In response some of the barons invited Louis, the son of the French King, Phillip Augustus, to become the King of England. 

 

The first French contingent landed in December 1215. Louis set sail with a small invasion fleet in 1216, landed unopposed in May, and was proclaimed King of England on the second of June 1216. Proclaimed, but not crowned. Hanley suggests this was a crucial error while accepting that as an excommunicate he couldn’t take part in a church service.

 

John died in October 1216.  Hanley sees this as the best thing he could have done to help his cause. To anyone placing bets it looked like the Angevins were finished. Large parts of the country were in rebel hands and John’s son, Henry, only nine years old, and surrounded by a shrinking group of royalists. However, while John had often seemed to go out of his way to alienate everyone, Henry was surrounded by a small group of exceptionally capable men. Their acknowledged leader was William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest Knight’. His loyalty to the royal family was both famous and so unshakeable that it could be described as pathological. 

 

 

1217

Hanley tells the story of how those loyal to Henry  staged an improbable military comeback to insure that an Angevin King would stay on the English throne. It is far more entertaining and interesting story than most fictional ones set in the Middle Ages.

 

How much was at stake in 1217 is hard to see in retrospect. For the 90 percent of the population living below the nobility, would it have mattered if a French (Capetian) or a French (Angevin) king were ruling them? 

 

However, Hanley presents the events as crucial in the development of a sense of Englishness. She frames the sea battle off Sandwich as an English fleet defending England against a French invasion. The defeat of the French fleet is compared to the later, more well-known destruction of the Spanish Armada, with Hanley arguing the latter was of lesser consequence.  Hanley also suggests that throughout the war there is a definite shift towards a sense of ‘England vs France’. 

 

At the time, however, nationality might not have played a decisive role: it may have seemed clear cut. Henry was the King’s son. The royalists risked everything and stood by him.

 

Not all the rebels stood by Louis. As the war went on there was significant wavering in their ranks. This may have had little to do with nationalism either. Men who had hated John had no reason to hate his infant son and if successful Louis would be obliged to reward his French followers, but at whose expense? 

 

Hanley has a healthy scepticism about some of the leading players. Without denying the Marshall’s role in the war, she acknowledges his failure to protect the citizens of Lincoln and notes his acquisitiveness.  The Marshall’s flattering biography is one of the chief sources for the period: Hanley avoids both uncritical acceptance and uncritical dismissal. 

 

Likewise, while acknowledging Hubert de Burgh’s essential role in the defence of Dover, her description of his actions at the battle of Sandwich, often claimed as his great victory, doesn’t make his participation a deciding factor in the battle.

 

IF 1217 has a great plot, it also has an outstanding cast. At the centre, though missing from the action for obvious reasons, is Henry III, a nine-year-old boy whose father was disliked by almost everybody, overwhelmed by his coronation. William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest knight’, who at 70 was given the task of regent and the job of saving the Angevin line, enthusiastically charging into battle at Lincoln. Eustace the Monk, renegade pirate who had turned his coat so many times no one knew which was inside or out anymore, leading Louis’ fleet. Wilkin of the Weald, a commoner who led a ‘guerilla’ war against the French; Blanche of Castille, Louis’ wife who could be described as formidable without any exaggeration.

 

Hanley’s contribution to the story is to bring others into the limelight. Phillip D’Albini, who may have been as responsible for victory at the battle of Sandwich as De Burgh. Nichola de la Haye, who in her sixties held Lincoln for the Royalists, held her nerve throughout the siege, and was rewarded by being removed from her post so William Longespee, who had swapped sides during the war, could be rewarded. Hanley describes the regency’s treatment of Nicola as ‘one of the most astonishing acts of ingratitude imaginable’ but adds in a footnote that it was Nicola who ‘had the last laugh’. 

 

If one of the advantages of a book like this is it gives 254 pages to events that are covered in one paragraph of David Carpenter’s biography of Henry the Third, some characters still seem inscrutable. 

 

Louis is a shadow in the narrative. His father had refused the military and financial support that would have given him a formidable invasion force. His campaign stalled first in front of Dover Castle, and then came to a halt when, after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, the reinforcements sent by his wife, Blanche, were destroyed off Sandwich. He wasn’t present at either of the two decisive battles. Hanley’s narrative suggests one of the contributing factors to the French defeats was that no one seems to have been in overall command at crucial times.

 

Floating through this, as invisible as usual, is Isabella of Angouleme. John’s marriage to her in 1200 had been politically disastrous. In 1207 she had given birth to John’s first legitimate child, Henry, and had then given birth to three more children.  She was offered no part in the regency. This seems strange but so was her response. She returned to France at the end of 1217, leaving her son a crowned King, but a child surrounded by advisors. 

 

Because of the limitations of the evidence, there are always questions that will never be answered, but the book also shows history as a series of accidents. Dover did not fall to Louis because it was a strong fortification held by a commander who held his nerve and Louis didn’t have the manpower he needed. But the battle of Lincoln was lost by the French when an inexperienced commander miscounted the oncoming royalists and instead of going out to meet them, where superior French numbers might have won the day, decided to stay inside the city walls. There’s also the secret entrance no one seems to have noticed which would be considered a unacceptable flaw in a fictional account. If the wind had been in the right direction when the French relief fleet originally sailed, then the English would have struggled to meet it, and the reinforcements might have landed. If …

 

1217 surprised me. I don’t like writers who use the first-person plural. Although it used to be common in factual writing it has become corrupted by politicians using it as an invidious positioning technique. But Hanley returns it to its courteous usage. Her style is that of a well-informed, capable guide, and while the tour goes round the usual places, she paces it carefully and stops to provide useful background information. She is very clear in her discussion of the sources. 

 

Books about the Middle Ages that focus on battles tend to misrepresent the period. There’s so much more to Edward III’s reign than Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers and deeds of daring do, but in this case the siege/s of Dover castle, the battle of Lincoln, and the sea battle off Sandwich are crucial events in a pivotal year.  There are times history swings on a hinge and at the end of 1216 a King of France on the throne of England was a distinct possibility. 1217 as a date would then have had had the same prominence in collective memory as 1066. Hanley’s excellent book, ironically, explains why this isn’t so.