A few personal snippets, none important....
I’m broadly with John and Holly on this one – though, unlike John, I do read (some) Pound. But then I read only some Georgians, of course. (I, too, have James Reeves’s anthology.)
We have a hawthorn tree in our garden. There are hawthorns all along the lane (Park Lane) which begins only two hundred yards from our door and runs away through the fields. There were two hawthorns in the garden I knew as a boy. They have nasty thorns but pretty blossom and berries; their branches have a tendency to grow together in a dense mass.
John Drinkwater is buried in the churchyard of the tiny north-Oxfordshire church in which my paternal grandparents, Job and Phoebe, were married in 1908. Job was an agricultural worker and particularly adept at making quickset hedges, in which hawthorn was prized for creating an impenetrable barrier.
Clive
|