The Writings of Penny Smith Logan

By D. R. Evans

Couched in the form of extracts from the diary of a young female poet, D. R. Evans carries us intimately from her earliest memories through her college career as a scholarship winner at an elite Oxford college, engagement and marriage, emigration to America, and her eventual death of cancer in South Dakota.

The pages are filled with Penny's doubts (many) and certainties (few), her early successes and mounting failures and frustrations, and her search for meaning in a world in which little makes sense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. R. Evans
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781936211142

Book preview

THE WRITINGS OF

PENNY SMITH LOGAN

A novel by

D. R. Evans

Text Copyright 2009 by D. R. Evans.

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-1-936211-14-2

Author website: www.sff.net/people/N7DR

Publisher website: www.enginehousebooks.com

This book is available in print as ISBN 978-1-936211-00-5 from most online retailers

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Contents

Introduction

Ponselby

Oxford

Santa Monica

Boulder

Friggens

Introduction

I never knew Penny Smith Logan; she waited until after her death to approach me. In early May of 1988 I received a letter from an attorney’s office in South Dakota that informed me simultaneously of her existence, her demise and of a provision in her will in which she bequeathed me the contents of a trunk.

I telephoned the lawyer, protesting that an error must have been made, as I had no knowledge of anyone by the name of Penny Logan. The attorney, however, was adamant that I was the indeed the intended beneficiary, as the will contained a quite explicit description; when he read to me this description, which included the titles of some of my earlier works, I had to concede the point, although he could shed no light on the mystery of why I was a beneficiary.

In answer to my questions concerning Ms. Logan herself he seemed evasive, although perhaps that was merely my interpretation of the perfunctory manner in which a busy man answers questions in which he sees no profit. The only pertinent information he surrendered was that my benefactrix had been the daughter of M. L. Smith, the well-known novelist.

The attorney confirmed my mailing address and informed me that the trunk would be dispatched shortly.

The question of why I had been chosen to receive the rather unusual bequest was answered almost as soon as I laid eyes on the contents of the trunk a few days later. It was filled with journals, papers, newspaper cuttings, piles of hand-written notebooks and what I estimated to be several hundred audio cassette tapes. Neatly taped to the underside of the trunk lid was a slightly yellowed envelope with my name written on the outside in what is usually described as a firm hand. I removed the envelope, opened it and read the brief note that was folded inside:

12 May, 1988

Dear Mr. Evans,

Please forgive my forwardness in bequeathing you this trunk and its contents. You will find recorded in these materials the thoughts, actions, hopes, fears, joys and sorrows of a human life. I have read with delight some of your fictional works and would hope that you may be able to use some of the contents of this trunk in plotting or characterization in future novels. If you find the contents to be unsuitable, please feel free to destroy or otherwise dispose of my bequest; by the time this reaches you, I shall be well past feeling abused by such an action on your part.

Yours sincerely,

Penny Smith Logan.

The signature was accomplished in a very different handwriting from that in which the remainder of the missive was drafted; instead of the firm, forthright characters of the text, the letters of the signature were shaky and almost childlike. Clearly, the bulk of the letter had been committed to paper by someone other than the signatory. But as my thoughts moved from the form of the letter to its contents — and here I must make a confession — my heart sank as I realized that what I had been left was the life story of this unknown person.

One of the burdens that must be borne by writers who have enjoyed some success is an intermittent stream of written material from unpublished writers who aspire to a similar happy state. This particular case, of course, was unique in an essential way: the writer, being deceased, could not hope to benefit from any imprimatur that I might be able to bestow. But, by the same token, the fact of Ms. Logan’s demise thrust on me a sense of obligation which otherwise would have been absent. So, although I had no desire to sort through the papers, notebooks and tapes, much less absorb their contents, I felt that such was the least that I could do for Ms. Logan.

The task of sorting through the written and audio material was considerably less burdensome than I had at first feared. Beginning and ending dates were clearly marked on each notebook and tape. Most of the notebooks were written in shorthand — I was grateful, not for the first time, for my early training as a reporter — and each book or tape, I quickly found, was completely filled. After several hours of sorting, I was satisfied that I had the contents of the trunk, now strewn around the floor of my office, in a reasonable approximation to chronological order. I picked up the first of several notebooks bearing dates in the early seventies and marked My Earliest Years, and began to read.

What I absorbed over the following weeks was the life story of an extraordinary woman. In many ways she was unexceptional; she was, like most of us, battered and bruised by life as it encountered her; to the most important questions which raised themselves she had no certain answers. But in all of this, two indications of extraordinariness shone through: she made a record of everything; and she had an alarmingly unrelenting intellect which showed itself in a remarkable ability to detach herself from her emotions and ask, especially during times of crisis, that most important of questions: what is life really about?

For several weeks I spent every spare moment digesting her words until, when they ended, I felt a sense of loss that mere words had rarely invoked in me before.

In total, I estimate that I had read well over three million words written by, for, or about Penny Smith Logan, and listened to perhaps as many words again from the audio tapes. This was far too much material to be used as the basis for a character, or even several characters. But it could form the basis of a book about Penny herself. So, with as careful an eye as I could muster for veracity, objectivity and fairness, I began to cull the paper and the tapes.

If I had understood the enormity of the task I had set myself, I probably would never have begun. In the early drafts, this book approached a thousand pages. No publisher was interested in such a tome. At one point, I was so discouraged that I almost gave up. But then I walked into my office and looked at everything that Penny had left me, and I knew that surrender was not an option. So once more I set to cutting, trying to smooth over the gaps in such a way as to preserve as much of possible of Penny’s spirit. This book is the result. I believe that it is true to the spirit of its original author as much as is possible given the constraints imposed by the circumstances of publication. I have attempted to include some (although far fewer than I originally desired) of the unimportant events related in Penny’s journal, along with those that were more obviously important to her; most of Penny’s biases as they appeared to me are preserved; in almost all cases, I have preserved her own words — occasionally correcting grammar or Americanizing her spelling where necessary — even at the cost of retaining the youthful, immature writing style of her earlier years.

In some cases I have, as seamlessly as possible, added background to passages that appear here. Generally, such material is taken from other journal entries, otherwise unreproduced, and is inserted where it is needed to understand the correct context of events, places or emotions. On rare occasions, I have taken the liberty of inserting editorial comments into Penny’s text, usually to explain an uncommon word or phrase. All such cases are clearly distinguished typographically [like this].

In the course of her life, Penny wrote a considerable number of poems, many of which were dated and preserved in her bequest. Some of these have been published before[Poesies, by Penny Smith Logan, published by Slithy Toves Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1984]; in this work I have included a representative selection of those poems which have not been previously published; with a single exception, none of those which are otherwise available in print are included here.

In conclusion, this book is dedicated to the memory of Penelope Cordwell Smith Logan. May she forgive me my errors and omissions; and may she never be forgotten.

D. R. Evans,

Colorado,

September, 1995.

Ponselby

The Dale Village

Some would call it sleepy,

Some would pass it by,

Some would deride its peaceful slumber — 

Not I.

In a world of rapid change

And stormy, conflicting demands,

Unyielding to time’s attack

The quiet village stands.

For no matter how near or how far

In this huge world one might roam

Nowhere compares with Ponselby,

Nowhere compares with home.

—Penny Smith

12 March, 1970

____________________________

Friday, 10 March, 1972

[Penny’s recollections of her earliest years were penned at college when she was nineteen years old.]

As I sit down, at last, to write of my earliest years, I approach the task with a strange and almost haunting trepidation, feeling inadequate for the task before me.

What is a human being other than a collection of memories encapsulated within a physical entity? It is surely our recollections of events past that guide us through our daily lives. Through our memories we are conditioned to react to events, to behave, to learn, to live. More than that, in a very real sense, a person’s memories define that person. Would I be the same person if my memory was lost or changed? No, how could I be?

I do not understand memory: how does it work? why is it so selective? when I forget something, is it really forgotten? Occasionally, I see a sight or (more often) smell a fragrance which brings back long-forgotten memories from childhood. Memory is fragile and, apparently, changeable. Once I thought that I remembered things as they truly were, but now I know that often my recollection does not match events as they actually happened.

But, despite its weaknesses, and even though events as they actually occurred may bear little resemblance to happenings as they are later recalled, memory is all we have. How precious then are our first, our earliest memories.

_______________________________

My first memory is of Christmas Day. It must have been Christmas of 1954, so I would then have been two years old.[Penny was born Penelope Cordwell Smith on March 28, 1952.] The memory is a single picture in my mind. There are no words to go with the picture, and the scene is itself unclear. If I think hard about it, I can fill in some of the details, but I suspect that such additions are either the result of my imagination or the incorporation of later knowledge into the scene.

In my memory, I see my arms outstretched and lifting a large teddy bear, a present from my parents. I can sense rather than see torn wrapping paper at my feet. Along with the picture goes an emotion somewhere between love (for the bear) and thankfulness (towards my parents). Somewhere to the right of the bear, hazy and indistinct, is my father; the only detail clear about him is the pipe in his mouth.

Much later, and for reasons now forgotten, I named the bear Aloysius, and as I write this he is propped up on my bed, leaning against the wall, not five feet from where I sit, rather the worse for the love he has received over the years, and distinctly smaller than in that first memory. He remains the most loved Christmas present I have ever received.

That is all there is to that single first memory; it stands in glorious isolation from the later unfoldings. At the time of that first memory my family was still living in the United States, and this memory of Christmas, 1954 is the only one I can definitely place as being from that country.

For a little more than the first three years of my life, my family lived in the state of South Dakota, which, according to the atlas — I have never been there since — is in the north central United States. I have no recollection of the circumstances of our life there. The few family photographs of that period were taken to memorialize people, not a way of life.

I was born at home, in a house in Friggens, South Dakota, a town with a population of about twelve hundred. Dad was a teacher in the town school, splitting his time in roughly equal measures among English, history and geography. Mum, like most women of her generation, stayed at home and looked after the two children.

Dad had published his first book [From Old World to New, by M. L. Smith, Pendeer Publishers, 1952] just before I was born and had had his second typescript accepted for publication by the time of this Christmas of 1954. As part of the research for my father’s second book [The View from the Hills, by M. L. Smith, Pendeer Publishers, 1955], my parents had spent most of the prior summer in Yorkshire, where lay his family roots. By the time they returned to South Dakota in the autumn to start the teaching year and to complete his manuscript, my father had made a decision: if the second book was a success, he would retire from teaching and we would all move across the sea back to Yorkshire.

I do not know how my mother felt about this. When I asked her once, many years after the event, she said merely, I don’t remember that I had any feelings. In those days if the husband wanted to do something, a wife saw it as her duty to support him and see it through with him.

The advance copies of The View from the Hills received favorable reviews in literary journals and the daily and weekly press, and so my father determined that he would wait no longer. In the summer of 1955, then, the Smith family made the same trek, although in the reverse direction, that the family had made a generation earlier.

And so we became installed in the village of Ponselby in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the heart of the Dale country of perhaps the most beautiful of all English counties.

I have only fragmentary recollections from our earliest years in Ponselby, and I can date none of them with accuracy. Of the major events in our family life: the relocation a quarter of a world away; the arrival in the bookstores of my father’s second book; the short life of my sister Caroline — of these I have no recollection at all. Of the last, all I remember is holding tightly to Aloysius and crying my heart out, and I have it fixed in my mind that the reason for my grief was that my father had just arrived home from the hospital in Harrogate with the news that my little sister had died.

We have a few photographs, originally in color but now faded to shades of sepia, showing Caroline. She looked like a normal, beautiful baby, even though she was to live only a few months. She remains a permanent cicatrice on my heart. She lives on in the memories of my parents and, barely, in that of my brother Jonathan. The fact that I hold no memories of Caroline leaves me with a sense of loss, of being cheated of a memory I should have.

What of other memories of my early childhood? The common thread that runs through these earliest memories seems to be that they were moments of great emotion. The first one, of receiving Aloysius, was a moment of joy. But there are also memories of intense fear.

I remember one evening in our house on the edge of Ponselby. It must have been in winter, for it was dark, and I remember that there was a violent storm in progress. I was in my room playing alone with my wooden blocks before bedtime. I vaguely recollect a huge thunderclap, then I remember clearly that the lights went out and the room was plunged into pitch black. One moment I had been playing happily, a small child enjoying itself with simple pleasures; the next moment I was absolutely terrified.

I ran out of the room into the adjoining one, in which the rest of the family had been sitting quietly. I must have been screaming with fear at the sudden darkness. I remember being picked up by my father and burying my head in his shoulder, shaking and crying with terror as he comforted me.

Another memory from this time — one of peaceful beauty. Our house, at the bottom of a valley, backs on to a large meadow. I remember one day going for a picnic in the middle of the field with my mother. There were only the two of us. Jonathan was, I think, already in school by now. I cannot remember why Dad was not with us; possibly he was in Ponselby shopping, or maybe he was away researching a book. In any case, the beauty of the field made a permanent impression on me as we ate our lunch. Buttercups and daisies were scattered amidst thousands of red poppies which stood tall, almost as tall as I was, so that from my perspective the flowers seemed to go on almost for ever. Home, rendered small by distance, rose above the farthest poppies, the blue sky reflected in the rear-facing windows.

Naturally, I remember the house itself perfectly, for we still live there, and, apart from extensive alterations when we first moved in and the occasional coat of paint over the years, it has barely changed. When we first moved to Ponselby, we must already have been rather wealthier than virtually all the other villagers. Were it not for the fact that my grandparents had been born there (and their parents and so on for at least three more generations), I dare say that we would have been treated very much as unwelcome outsiders with more brass than sense. As it was, we were received instead as long lost relatives who, for some peculiar reason, had succumbed to an aberrant urge to wander from the fold but now, having seen the light, had returned, presumably for good.

But there is no gainsaying the fact that we were considerably more wealthy than the typical Yorkshire villager, and this financial gap widened rather than narrowed over the years as my father’s books continued to sell well on both sides of the Atlantic. But I do not think (as far as I can tell) that anyone has ever resented us for our money. Dad must have gone to great care, especially in those early years, not to segregate himself from the other villagers. In one detail, however, he did not compromise, and that was in his choice of home.

He bought, for cash, the largest (and certainly the most beautiful) house in the area. It stands apart on the south west edge of the village and was once the abode of the lord of the manor. As such, I suppose it would be technically correct to call it a manor house — and indeed its name is The Manor, but that title gives a rather false impression of its grandeur. It is, certainly, large by village standards, but only by those standards. The house is constructed of local stone, two storeys high, has four bedrooms, two bathrooms (the extravagance of a second inside bathroom was almost unknown in rural Yorkshire until quite recently) and a variety of other rooms including an almost unheard-of luxury for those parts: a small but beautiful library in which I spent many of my happiest hours when I was growing up.

My father ran a sort of private lending library out of the house for many years until the local council saw fit to give Ponselby a real library of its own — a library which, in my opinion, is inferior in some ways to the one which my father ran.

The house stands in its own grounds of about fifty acres, most of them ancient woods of oak and beech. Immediately behind the house the land opens into a seven-acre meadow which permits sunlight to enter the house from the south and west. Looming high a short distance away in most directions are the fells which serve to accentuate the pastoral character of the house’s immediate setting. It is a five-minute walk into Ponselby, a village which time seems to have bypassed. Ponselby has one of everything: one doctor, one bank, one veterinarian, one school (with, it must be admitted, two rooms and two teachers), one grocer, one greengrocer, one chemist’s shop (at which one can also buy newspapers, magazines, greetings cards, paperback bestsellers and similar items), one nurse, one midwife, one Anglican church, one Methodist chapel. Oh yes, several pubs. If an item is not obtainable in Ponselby, then the chances are that you do not really need it, and, if you do, it will require a trip to Pontereen or Harrogate to purchase it.

It is strange as I sit and write these words describing my home — Ponselby is no more than a couple of hundred miles from here, yet it seems like a different world from this most academic of cities. How different is it, I wonder, from the towns and villages of South Dakota? Perhaps one day I shall visit the land of my birth, but it shall be a visit only; Yorkshire is, and always will be, my home.

____________________________

Most village children begin school between their fifth and sixth birthdays. Theoretically, the children of Ponselby were supposed to go to the neighboring town of Pontereen for their education, but in all my time in the village, I can think of only a single family who sent their children to attend Pontereen County Primary School. The Jacobsons, who arrived in the village after winning a fortune on the football pools, sent their twin sons to Pontereen, and thereby confirmed everybody’s low opinion of the ostentatious family. The Jacobsons stayed in the village for about eighteen months, throwing their money around and generally behaving in a thoroughly obnoxious manner before drawing stumps, voicing their disgust at the overrated life of a Yorkshire village.

For the rest of us, it was naturally assumed that we would attend the Ponselby VP (for Voluntary Primary) School. This was a small two-roomed building (which, sadly, closed about two years ago; the current generation of primary schoolers are forced to travel to Pontereen for their education) on a narrow road off High Street. In the term following my fifth birthday, I duly began to attend Ponselby school in the company of my seven-year-old brother. The pupils were split into two groups, roughly by age: those five to eight years old, and those nine to eleven, each group being taught by its own teacher. A specially gifted or an especially slow child might move from Class 1 to Class 2 a year earlier or later than the norm, but that was the only concession made to the concept of streaming. About thirty pupils were customarily enrolled at any one time.

The school was quite typical of Dale schools of its day, but probably rather atypical of primary schools elsewhere in the country. In the first place, it was a church school (hence the designation Voluntary Primary, which meant that it had voluntarily come under the purview of the county, but was still not an official County Primary school). It was not only churchgoers who sent children to the school; all the children of the village, whether they were from church or chapel families, attended the school, since there really was no reasonable alternative.

A VP school required a sponsor; in our case it was the Ponselby Parish Church, whose sponsorship led directly to the two most obvious differences between Ponselby School and official County Primary schools such as the one in Pontereen. The church’s vicar, Rev. R. D. Day, visited the school once a week and would tell a story for a half hour or so to the children in Class 2. Additionally, we had one extra day of holiday each year: there was no school on Ascension Day. The idea, I suppose, was that we should attend church that day, but few of us kept our half of the implied agreement.

What made schools in general quite unusual in the Dales was that children would be taken out of school with no warning for days at a time whenever the family needed a helping hand on the farm. About half the children came from farming families and, small though we children were, there were many times when an extra pair of hands, no matter how small, could be useful around the farm. Oftentimes, especially in the spring lambing and calving season, attendance at school would drop by nearly 50%. But there was never any attempt by our teachers to thwart this parent-sanctioned mass absence; Ponselby was never a village that placed much store in book learning, so neither the pupils nor their families cared much about time off school or, indeed, whether the pupils learned more than the rudimentary academic skills needed to function on a farm. Hardly any of the children of farm families, whether boys or girls, gave much thought to their ultimate station in life; all assumed that as soon as they were able they would leave school to work on the farm permanently. Only the children of the villagers gave much thought to another career, and even they were usually perfectly content to think that they would spend the rest of their lives in Ponselby.

My first teacher was a lady who seemed very old to me at the time, although now when I return to the village for the holidays she looks younger, if anything, than I remember her appearance of fifteen years ago. But, whatever her age, Miss Hawthorn was as fine an introduction to education as one could ever hope for.

She had already been a teacher for many years when I first entered Class 1 at Ponselby. In her time at the school, she had seen a number of head teachers come and go, and she was to see three more arrive and depart in the remaining years before the school closed in 1970. She never married, remaining to this day a staunch and confirmed spinster, owning a small terraced house roughly in the center of the village, about two minutes’ walk from the school. I remember her, of course, as tall and old, but now I know that she was quite the opposite, being little over five feet in height and in her mid thirties when I was in her class.

How well I remember some of Miss Hawthorn’s early classes in the three Rs. All those hours sitting at a small desk with a pencil and paper, trying to add 5s 11d to 3s 6½d or trying to calculate how much 6 lbs. of apples would cost if they sold for 6½d a pound. And the times when we would take out our reading books to read to ourselves the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, the Gingerbread Man (which always made me feel a little uneasy; I was never sure that the gingerbread man really deserved his fate) or Sleeping Beauty.

My father told me later that Miss Hawthorn had her eye on me almost since the first day that I arrived in her class, which must have been in April of 1957; apparently she had marked me out as noticeably different from my classmates. Dad once told me she had said the same about my brother Jonathan as well. I wonder if she thought that we would go as far as we have.

I remember writing some of my early stories — compositions, we called them — in Miss Hawthorn’s class, although I have only the vaguest recollection of their subject matter. Sheep, I remember, figured prominently in those early attempts. It is a pity that my parents did not keep any of my early school books, for it would be marvellous to be able to go back and look at them now. Or perhaps it would merely be disillusioning.

I was permitted by Mr. McDougall, the headmaster, to move up into Class 2 a year ahead of schedule, the only pupil in my year to do so. This was the first inkling I had that perhaps I was a little different from the others in the school. So I must have moved up when I was seven years old, in 1959. Jonathan and I had a year together in Class 2 before he passed the Ten Plus examination to go to the boys’ grammar school.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The teacher for my first year in Class 2 was Mr. McDougall. I do not remember much about him at all, he being one of the unreasonably large number of teachers who have stayed only a short while in Ponselby. I do remember that it was in that year that I was taught to use pen and ink and to write cursively. The first afternoon when the incoming pupils were taught the rudimentary mechanisms of writing with pen and ink sticks firmly in my mind. We had to march to the front of the class, pick up a full inkwell and carry it safely back to our desks in the front row. Annie James, poor thing, tripped and spilt the blue ink all over her dress, a cotton print of pink and white flowers. She burst into tears and could be neither consoled nor cajoled into ceasing, so that eventually Mr. McDougall had to send her home. When my turn came to collect an inkwell, I was especially careful.

____________________________

One of the great benefits of going to school in the Yorkshire Dales is the number of opportunities it presents for countryside walks and visits to local farms. Several times a year, we would go for walks as a class, usually starting in the meadow behind our house. The purported reason for these walks would be nature study, and indeed the teacher would invariably point out trees, wildflowers, butterflies, cocoons and similar examples of nature; but mostly it was simply an excuse to spend time out of doors enjoying fine weather.

In the springtime, our outings sometimes took on a quite different character. The teachers made it a point to take us out to at least one farm each year at lambing or calving time, always with stern warnings that we were not to get underfoot.

Most of the class would relish such opportunities to get out of the classroom and back to a farm, where many of my classmates felt most at home. I could never understand the attraction of the muddy, odiferous and filthy farms. Such trips were always conducted in biting cold springtime winds, which took my mind off any of the lessons that we were supposed to be learning; I never needed to be told that I would never be a farm girl.

____________________________

It is always hard to know what others think of one, because people are so rarely honest about such things. Even though my father has always gone to great lengths to be liked by the other adults in the village — spending at least one evening a week in the Duke of York, and becoming a mainstay of the village cricket team — there was never any mistaking the fact that we really were quite different from the other villagers.

In the first place, and most obviously, my parents spoke differently from the other grown-ups. Even now when I return home I hear an occasional twang of American drawl from one or other of my parents. More than that, my parents have a much wider vocabulary than other villagers. After all, my father went to Yale and earns his living with words, whereas most of the villagers reached only the third or fourth form at the local secondary modern [A type of school with a vocational rather than an academic emphasis]; there was little Dad could do to hide that difference.

I was fortunate in that we had left the States when I was still sufficiently young that I had not developed any long-lasting accent. Jonathan was not so lucky, and he was teased mercilessly for the first two terms at school. Twice he was sent home for fighting in the playground, his anger spilling over at one or another unthinking mimic. For all of my parents’ instructions that he was to ignore such taunts, he developed, characteristically, his own solution to the problem, attacking it from two directions. He spent the entirety of one three-week Easter holiday carefully dropping his American accent and vocabulary and replacing them as best he could with good Yorkshire Dale country speech. And then, the very first day back at school, when Billy Roberts, the biggest and loudest pupil in the school, taunted him during playtime, Jonathan walked up to him and proceeded to thrash him so hard that Mr. McDougall had to drag the two of them apart and then sent them both home. When Billy reappeared the following morning, his eye was a marvellous shining blue-black, and he never spoke another word against Jonathan.

____________________________

I have referred already to my family’s relative wealth in the community. While Dad was always careful never to be showy with his money — overt gestures of wealth being frowned on by the sensible, careful Yorkshire villagers — there were some things he felt he had to provide us that most of the village families had to do without.

In the first place there was the telephone. While it was common (and had been for fifteen or more years before this) for village businesses to possess such an instrument, it was equally uncommon for a house to have one. But my father’s style of research, in which he would often interview an expert in some obscure field for the sake of veracity, required that he have unencumbered access to a telephone, and so we became one of the first private homes in the village to be connected to the telephone system.

Then there was the matter of transport. Most village families owned a car or were kith to such a family. But we, somewhat guiltily I think, had the unheard-of luxury of owning two cars. Not that a second car would have done most families any good, because, apart from my mother, I cannot think of another adult woman in the village who knew how to drive. Indeed, the major use of our second car (other than sitting out in the rain getting wet and slowly going rusty) was as a sort of chauffeur-driven communal vehicle, with my mother acting as the chauffeur. Whenever she visited one of the nearby larger villages or towns, she made a point of asking around a day or so beforehand if anyone else wanted to join her for shopping, pleasure or visiting; and so it was a rare occasion when such trips did not feature a whole carful of women.

And then there was the television....

Television had come long before to the larger towns and cities of Britain, but it was only shortly before we arrived that anything resembling passable reception was possible in most of the Yorkshire Dales. And so it was that we were the first family in the village to purchase a television. I’m not exactly sure why we bought one. Mum and Dad, of course, had long known television back in the States and, given Dad’s (in particular) loathing of what he still calls puerile, intellect-lowering, playacting drivel, it might seem surprising that we purchased a set in Yorkshire. I can only think that, since commercial television was unknown in these remote parts which were still served only by Auntie BBC, he was expecting a quite different standard of television from what he had experienced in the US.

In those early days of the late fifties and early sixties, I suspect that my father’s hopes were, in most part, fulfilled. I still remember some of the children’s programming, in particular the Watch with Mother programs which would air during weekday mornings. Names such as Andy Pandy, or Bill and Ben still evoke happy memories for me. Of all of these programs, I enjoyed Tales of the Riverbank the most, although I now remember almost no details of the program at all, save merely that I enjoyed it tremendously and that it featured a live hamster called Hammy.

During the holidays, we often had other schoolchildren around to watch a children’s show either before or after going outside to play. What with the cars, the television, the library, the meadow and the largest house in the village, we became quite popular with grown-ups and children alike.

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It was during my latter years at primary school that I began to become aware that my approach to learning was quite different from that of my friends. The school had a system whereby good work was rewarded by a gold star being affixed next to your name on a chart on the classroom wall, and I discovered, as had Jonathan before me, that earning those gold stars seemed very easy. I could never understand why the others in my class had far fewer stars next to their names than I did. After all, they were simple enough to get; were my friends not interested in amassing the stars? A considerable period elapsed before I realized the awful truth that not only did most of them not care but, even if they had, they would have been unable to earn them as easily as I did. I was lucky; my parents valued education highly. They gave me a penny for every gold star I earned, so that several times a year my account at the Yorkshire Penny Bank was augmented on a trip to Harrogate which always included lunch in a Wimpy [A hamburger restaurant] and my choice of book from W. H. Smith’s [A national chain of stationers].

Still, my pride took a severe blow at the age of ten. The English education system requires children to be graded according to academic ability at an early age. At the age of eleven, all pupils in Ponselby sat the infamous Eleven Plus examination, which determined whether a pupil

would go to the grammar school in Glendown or the secondary modern school in Pontereen the following year. Surprisingly, in view of the low esteem in which education was generally held in the area, and as a testament to the quality of our teachers, we sent some 25% of our pupils to the grammar school, a pass rate considerably higher than the average for the district.

But in addition to the Eleven Plus, there was also a Ten Plus examination which was taken a year earlier and was quite different in character. Whereas the Eleven Plus was a traditional kind of examination, with papers on arithmetic, comprehension and writing ability, the Ten Plus was a pure IQ test: one of these things where you are given a series of five shapes and you have to find the odd one out, or predict the next letter in a sequence, and other similar tests which are supposed to measure, in some sense, your intelligence. The pass rate for the ten plus was low indeed, requiring an IQ (as measured by the test) above 150. If a pupil passed the Ten Plus, then he was admitted to the grammar school a year early.

In the twenty five years before I took the Ten Plus, only one person from Ponselby School had passed the examination — my brother Jonathan had scraped through with a measured IQ of 152. I was interested to see how I would compare with him, since by now I had made a tentative assessment of our relative abilities, and I felt that I was at least his equal.

It was therefore quite a shock to fail the Ten Plus. Of course, my parents came to see me while I was crying in my bedroom after receiving the news, and they assured me that there was really no passing or failing the Ten Plus, that it was simply designed to help single out the children who would be bored by another year of primary school.

Parents (and, especially, children) are not supposed to have access to Ten Plus scores, but my father seemed to have had no difficulty in discovering my brother’s score, and I am sure that he knew my score too. But he refused to pass it on to me, and merely told me not to worry about it.

So I spent one more year than my brother in Ponselby VP School. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, it was good that I did so because, for that last year, yet another head teacher came to Ponselby to teach Class 2, and this teacher had a greater impact on me than any I had met before.

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Mrs. Goldsmith was the latest in a long string of teachers to arrive in the village to take over the headship of the local primary school and to teach Class 2. I can only suppose that Miss Hawthorn preferred teaching the younger children, for certainly she could have had the job as head teacher at any time had she desired it. Instead, she put up with a succession of more or less competent, more or less dedicated teachers to teach the older children over the years.

But with Mrs. Goldsmith, Ponselby school finally found someone to match Miss Hawthorn. Unlike her predecessors, Mrs. Goldsmith fitted into the community immediately and, with her husband (who took over the local chemist’s shop a few months after their arrival) she still lives in the village, even though the school has now closed.

During my last year of primary school, Mrs. Goldsmith introduced her pupils to something that had never before entered our universe: poetry. Until that time, the only real use for words I had encountered was as a way to tell a story; after all, that was how we used words at school, and it was how my father made his living. But mere story-telling was a far cry from the revelation to which Mrs. Goldsmith exposed us.

Until that time, my career as a pupil had run along essentially the same lines as that of my brother Jonathan. I, like he, had excelled in all the subjects in which we had been instructed, with, if anything, a leaning towards arithmetic skills. Writing had been important because it was a way of communicating my ideas and thoughts in stories, and reading was important for gaining information, but it was in arithmetic that the gold stars came most easily, and, insofar as I had thought about my future life, it was in terms of earning a living in some occupation involving numbers. I was quite unprepared for the revelation which Mrs. Goldsmith had in store for me.

One of the good (and, at times, bad) things about the relatively unfettered curriculum of a rural primary school is that the teachers are free to indulge themselves by teaching ancillary subjects in which they happen to have an interest, just as long as the basics are taught as well. For example, I remember Mrs. Jackson, an inelegant, dumpy teacher who lasted only a single winter and who enjoyed classical music. She would bring in gramophone records and play scratchy recordings of extracts of famous classical music on the school’s ancient gramophone, calling the lesson Music Appreciation. It was terrible. I don’t know whether my loathing for most classical music was already present or merely incipient, but Mrs. Jackson’s so-called Music Appreciation classes certainly gelled my attitude. Mrs. Goldsmith’s interest in poetry was to affect me even more deeply, although in quite a different way, than Mrs. Jackson’s Music Appreciation classes.

I’m sorry to say that I cannot now remember which poem it was that Mrs. Goldsmith first read to us. I do remember that her poetry readings soon became part of our daily ritual: in the few minutes before school finished for the day, she would pull out one of her many books of poems and read aloud to us, often telling us beforehand how the poem was supposed to make us feel, or the circumstances which led to the writing of the poem. She never read a poem a second time. As she explained when I asked her about this: If you want to hear a poem again, I will lend you the book and then you can read it to yourself, which is the way most poems should be read anyway.

I’m still not sure why one particular poem affected me so much; it is certainly a good poem, but not, I think, a great one, at least as most people seem to judge. It was John Masefield’s Sea Fever. I still remember, as clearly as yesterday, the sound of Mrs. Goldsmith’s voice as she read the haunting words:

I must go down to the seas again,

to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship

and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song

and the white sail’s shaking,

And a gray mist on the sea’s face,

and a gray dawn breaking.

Just words, easily written and no more evocative to most people than most other words. But for some reason they grabbed my mind and stole it away. As I heard them, my thoughts went out to the wide sea; I could picture myself at the helm of a sailing boat, the wind whistling through the halyards, feeling the tug of the wheel as I steered, a dull, gray sun parting a wind-driven mist in the chill dawn. For the first time I experienced what all poetry is supposed to engender: emotion.

It was not as if I had had much experience with the sea. Far from it; at that time I don’t think I had been to the seaside more than twice, and I know that I had ventured out in a boat only once.

My father has always maintained two traditions concerning the family’s annual holidays: the same place must never be visited twice; and all holidays are to be spent somewhere in Great Britain. I can remember with any clarity only two holidays from my early childhood. One, when I must have been about seven or eight, was spent in Scotland. I remember it mostly for cold and rain; either the weather was exceptionally bad, or we must have taken our holiday early that year. I have a firm picture in my mind of wind-driven rain slashing down out of a gray sky and falling on gray-green-purple moorland. We went for a walk in the rain, and I don’t think any of us had anticipated how cold, wet and generally miserable it would prove to be. When the walk was finished, our mother sent Jonathan and me for a hot bath to get warm again.

The other holiday I remember, in considerably more detail, was the one that occurred when I was ten, in 1962. It was one of several holidays we have spent in the southwest of England.

This holiday took place somewhere on the north coast of Devon, and it was the first time we had holidayed at the seaside. We stayed on a farm — fortunately, one considerably less odiferous than those around Ponselby — and I have a clear recollection of us all eating freshly made scones smothered in clotted cream and home-made strawberry jam and drinking a fresh pot of tea late one afternoon when it had been raining most of the day. Some days we spent out walking the footpaths around the farm — a favorite pastime of my parents and one that Jonathan and I have both grown up to share — and other days we would go down into the nearby small seaside town — I forget its name — and spend the day either exploring the narrow, lane-like streets or, more often, especially when the sun shone, lying on the warm sand of the town’s golden beach. Jonathan and I were given buckets and spades to play with, and we have rarely been happier than we were those glorious days when the sun shone warmly on our backs as we dug in the sand. I would delight in spending hours building great forts and castles in the sand, which Jonathan would then proceed to undermine with a network of tunnels.

One day, Mum and Dad offered to take us out in a boat, and the two of us jumped at the chance. There were little motorboats for hire in the town, advertised without regard to truth-in-advertising laws as speedboats. One morning we hired one of these for two hours, which we spent puttering about on the rippled sea within a mile or so of the town. How different everything looked. The town, which had seemed large and busy with holidaymakers, was exposed as little more than an isolated, tight cluster of shops surrounded by stone cottages at the bottom of the hill. The beach was a patch of yellow flanked by miles of stone cliffs. Jonathan and I enjoyed the two-hour trip so much that Mum and Dad offered to take us out next day for a trip on a pleasure launch that left the town a couple of times a day to show people some of the sights along the coastline.

How excited we were at the prospect of being on a real boat, albeit one powered by diesel rather than the vagaries of the wind. The next day was sunny and warm, and we piled on to the nearly-full launch, which held perhaps twenty five people. The morning flew by as we first chugged up the coast a little way and then returned past the town and carried on down the coast to a cluster of small rocks, known locally and somewhat optimistically as the Seal Islands. We caught sight of one seal as the boat approached the rocks, but it slid into the sea as we neared and, after showing its head and convincing itself that we were serious sightseers, it dived out of sight and we saw it no more.

As we were making our way back to town, a veritable regatta of small sailing dinghies passed us in the opposite direction, burgees and pennants flying proudly in the wind. And then, just before we completed our return to the town, a true sailing ship, seaworthy and bound for some unknown port, passed within a few tens of feet. The captain of our boat cut the motor as the sailing ship passed, so that the slapping of the water against the sailboat’s fast-moving, glistening hull was clearly audible against a background of creaks and groans of halyards in tension. The moment passed, but it was that sailboat — albeit with myself at the helm and under quite different circumstances — that came to mind as I listened to Masefield’s evocative words.

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In that last year of primary school, a second interest entered my life; the original cause of that interest is, sadly, no more.

One of the modern conveniences that the Smith family enjoyed, and which was almost unknown in other houses in Ponselby, was the luxury of what we then called a gramophone. Our gramophone was of considerably better quality than the one owned by the school and, in addition, our small record collection was in much better repair than the school’s, as well as being of rather different character. At school, the only use of the gramophone was to play ancient, scratchy recordings of pieces of classical music. At home, although we had a small collection of classical music, my father had amassed quite a collection of modern popular music, augmented by my mother’s sparser collection of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin records. It became a ritual that whenever chores were to be performed, Dad would play a record for us to work to, often explaining to Jonathan and me why he found a particular piece of music enjoyable.

There were also several transistor radios scattered around the house, including one that I had been given for my eighth birthday and which I kept on my bedside table. Reception was surprisingly good, for Jonathan had by now acquired a keen interest in electronics and radio, and understood how to make a good aerial for wireless sets. He made one for me; it looked like no more than a piece of wire attached to the set and snaking its way through a small hole that he drilled in the window frame and thence to an oak tree some distance from the house. But whether by luck or good design, the aerial worked very well. The Light program [A BBC station dedicated to light music and programming] came in beautifully in the early evening just when my favorite program, Roundabout, was broadcast.

It must have been sometime in December of 1962 when I first heard a record that I just had to own for myself. I was lying on my bed, looking at the glowing fairy lights that Dad had draped across the diagonals of my bedroom ceiling, presaging the coming Christmas. Whenever the radio went quiet, I could hear the incessant pattering of rain hitting the tiles above my head.

And then the announcer said, And here’s a song from a new group from Liverpool. The Mersey sound of the Beatles with Love Me Do.

If I play the song nowadays, it seems thin and uninspiring, although there remains a trace of the magic that captured me that December evening more than nine years ago. But to understand the true impact of the recording, one would have to listen to other popular music of the era. Put in context, there was simply no comparison between the Beatles’ Love Me Do and the other groups, singers and songs of the period. Although the Beatles were not an immediate, overnight phenomenon, their music caught on with amazing rapidity. All over the country there must have been many other young people — teenagers, and what we would now call preteens — who were immediately captivated by the sound of those voices singing in harmony with a gusto that we had never before associated with pop music.

As soon as the song was over, I rushed down to tell my parents. Even if they didn’t take my words seriously, they must have known what an impact it had had on me by the simple fact that I didn’t care that I was missing the rest of Roundabout.

Now, like Jonathan, I began to be glued to the television set on Saturday evenings, hoping that the Beatles would sing their song on David Jacobs’ show, Juke Box Jury. By this time, we could receive ITV as well as the BBC — although the picture quality left a lot to be desired — so, after a quick supper following Juke Box Jury (which in turn followed the football results on Grandstand, which Dad and Mum always watched together, checking the results against their weekly entry in the football pools) Jonathan and I would gather around the television again to watch Brian Matthews’ Thank Your Lucky Stars. I don’t remember seeing Love Me Do performed on either program, but that Christmas I received my first record as a present from my parents.

Apart from my introduction to poetry and my out-of-school interest in the Beatles, that final year in primary school was rather boring. Sometime in the middle of the spring term, the boredom was interrupted by the imposition of the Eleven Plus examination. Unlike the Ten Plus, this was a real exam, not a glorified IQ test. Although, of course, no one had said anything to me, it was common knowledge that of the five pupils taking the Eleven Plus that year at Ponselby School, two of us — myself and my best friend, Wendy Dibble — were regarded as good bets to pass, and there was one other, Cindy Macintosh, who might scrape through. I don’t remember anything about the tests themselves, except a remarkably stupid two-part question which asked: 1) In which continent is Aberdeen situated? 2) In which country is Aberdeen situated? Most unfortunately, I had spent part of the prior evening talking with my father about my parents’ home in South Dakota. When I saw the question on the paper, my mind returned immediately to the map of South Dakota we had been poring over the night before and, in a moment of blinding idiocy, I completely forgot that there was an Aberdeen in Scotland as well as one in the state of my birth. And so I answered both parts of the question wrongly. I was furious with myself afterwards, of course, especially since Wendy and Cindy had both given the correct answers; but, naturally, there nothing I could do to change the situation.

For some time, I was convinced that I had failed the exam, simply because of my error on that one question — a tendency which still haunts me to this day. A month or so later, two well-dressed gentlemen came to school and interviewed two of the candidates: Cindy and a boy named Michael Williams. Mrs. Goldsmith was careful to explain to Wendy and me privately that only borderline candidates were interviewed, and we should read nothing into the fact that we were not chosen for interviews; it meant merely that we were firmly on one side or the other of the dividing line.

The results were published towards the end of term: Wendy and I were the only candidates to have passed. So, come autumn, Wendy and I would be travelling to the Glendown Grammar School for Girls, while the others would be travelling in the opposite direction, to the coeducational Pontereen Secondary Modern School.

Mum and Dad were delighted with my performance, although, as my mother once confided to me: there was never any doubt in our minds that you were going to pass; we just didn’t want to put any pressure on you. The family all went out for a grand meal in Harrogate to celebrate, and my parents bought me a beautiful watch, which I still wear, engraved on the back in tiny letters: Congratulations, Penny. Love, Mum and Dad.

That summer, for the first time in many years, we had no summer holiday away from home. Dad was finding it difficult to complete his latest book and, in addition, he was beginning to be in demand for radio shows of one sort or another, so it was agreed that we would give our holiday a miss just this once and simply relax in our own back yard, so to speak.

I think that Dad must have been going through a lean patch during this time. Until I was eleven or so, he had produced a book every couple of years