Dear Miss Salley Gardens...
Jan 19, 2022
4 minutes
Illustration by Kateryna Kyslitska
THE unusual spelling of my otherwise not uncommon name comes from a poem by W. B. Yeats, Down by the Salley Gardens. My dad was a great poetry lover, with Yeats one of his favourite poets, and my mother loved to sing. The song setting of this poem by Benjamin Britten was a favourite of hers. The salleys in Yeats’s garden were willows, so, in essence, I am named Willow and, because I liked the notion of being willowy and graceful, considered as a teenager changing my name to Willow. But I’m glad I didn’t, because of my godmother’s garden.
Before I was born, my mother, aged 21, was critically injured in a wartime bombing and lost both of
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