A number of people have written to me about my poem 'Little' whose subject is the death of a disabled child. I feel a bit of a fraud when I cannot, as it were, produce the child out of my own life. I feel as if I have pulled wool over the eyes of a number of good and worthy people. The child, Archie, is a conflation of three children my daughters knew at a care home where they worked. Only one of them died. Or has died up to now.
I hope, when my poem 'Tobacco and Boies' appears in Quadrant... Dammit, I haven't smoked for years. Oh well!
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