An absolute joy!

I loved this .A beautiful reading by Elspeth’s daughter Rafaella Barker exudes the love she has for her mother. Her admiration is also shown in her introduction and in her choice of these selected essays which present such a superb portrait of a highly idiosyncratic and brilliantly creative woman.

Elspeth had always wanted to marry a poet. Her first attempt failed when her poet-fiance stamped on a frog, but she she was more successful the next time. Her often tempestuous marriage to the poet George Barker endured despite the large age difference and his already having 9 children when she met him. Words and poetry , including Greek and Latin , are the warp and weft of her life . I just loved the richness of her language and her many embedded references. These are often funny: even a pig munching pumpkin pie takes William Blake’s advice and kisses ‘ joy as it flies’ . Her descriptions of trees and flowers in particular are lifted into poetry by a phrase or even a single word, like the cliffs ‘starry with thrift’.

Elspeth recreates her wildly eccentric childhood in a remote Scottish castle surrounded by a crazy “gallimaufry” of pet animals and birds great and small, including her beloved pet jackdaw . The joy of calling him in from the sky into her iguana-filled bedroom is one never quite matched in later life. Married life followed in the chaotic and barely heated Norfolk home quickly filled with five children and a host of animals. Cats copulate at the back of the Aga, the lowest shelf being used for reviving dead kittens. Labradors continue to eat the hens, despite the punishment of hanging the dead bird around the guilty dog’s neck. And there’s Elspeth’s particular love, Portia the pig ,who requires oceans of special care including sedation for nail cutting, and makes a noise when eating like “sex noises on television” - and takes a chunk out of her son-in-law’s hand.

I laughed out loud on many occasions through these six hours, but there are also some profoundly moving essays . The final days of her confused and strong-willed mother vainly trying to pack for India is intensely real. I can’t forget the image of the body of her red sari-clad ayah being tipped into the sea after she had died onboard the ship bringing Elspetth back to England. In the extended piece on grief she quotes to moving effect Tennyson’s bleak lament for his dead friend Hallam – and also explores the Latin derivation of the word ‘widow’ meaning emptiness. Elspeth’s intellectual and physical analysis of her grief, rage and disbelief following George Barker’s death is exceptionally powerful

There is so much in these essays. I have listened to them all twice and I’m sure I’d find even more on a third listening!

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