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things-as-they-are, which includes falcons and everything else. ‘The Windhover’ seems to me a wet poem and twittish. But my judgement has become so subjective that there are many things I must avoid. For some time I’ve been avoiding poetry when possible but in an unthinking moment I opened
The Faber Book of Modern Verse
and there was Hopkins. Windhover is the old name for the bird that is now called a kestrel. I’ve seen them hovering over hedgerows, they don’t want mannered words but only the simplest and fewest, certainly nothing longer than haiku and preferably no words at all. I’m less reasonable than I was when young.
    There was a kestrel a long time ago, perhaps that’s why I was so annoyed by the poem. We were lying in a field, we looked up and opened our mouths and said nothing.
    The range of human types and actions is not terribly wide. I have seen the same face on a titled lady and a barmaid. And there seem to be only a few things to do with life, in various combinations. I could not have accepted the idea of myself as a stereotype when I was young but I can now. I’m a more or less arty-intellectual-looking lady of forty-three who is unmarried, dresses more for style than for fashion, looks the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian.Looks, I think, like a man’s woman and hasn’t got a man. When I was a child grown-ups often told me to smile, which I found presumptuous of them. People still tell me that sometimes, mostly idiots at parties.
    Sometimes I wonder if I ought to give up the push-chair that I use instead of a shopping basket on wheels. It has red and white stripes like the little tents one sees over holes in the street. It may well be that the same company makes both, I’d like it if they did. It was lent me by a friend whose children have outgrown it on the occasion of her giving me an orange tree and I’ve never returned it. One sees a certain kind of poor old person wheeling battered prams loaded with rubbish or shabby push-chairs full of scavengings. My push-chair is still smart however and I am not yet poor and old.
    Somehow I keep up with my work, always in arrears, often uncertain whether I’m sleeping or waking. My files decline gently from order to chaos, all kinds of things are accumulating dust in the spare room. I can’t always find what I’m looking for. Easy is the slope of Hell. I sit at the typewriter, I sit at the drawing-table, proof copies appear from time to time, then bound copies, so I seem to go on doing what I do. Royalty cheques twice a year.’
Gillian Vole’s Jumble Sale
was absolutely the hit of the sales conference,’ writes my editor, ‘and we expect it to do even better than
Gillian Vole’s Christmas.
Whatever Gillian is up to now, we and all of her other fans look forward to her next appearance.’
    Well, Gillian Vole may jolly well have packed it in. I couldn’t think of another Gillian Vole story right now to save my life. I’ve become quite fond of Madame Beetle but simply as a flatmate. Suddenly I don’t know, haven’t the faintest idea how people make up stories about anything. Anything is whatever it happens to be, why on earth make up stories.
    At three o’clock in the morning I sat in the dark looking out of the window down at the square where the fountain is not and I thought about the turtles. The essence of it is that they can find something and they are not being allowed to do it. What more can you do to a creature, short of killing it, than prevent it fromfinding what it can find? How must they feel? Is there a sense in them of green ocean, white surf and hot sand? Probably not. But there
is
a drive in them to find it as they swoop in their golden-green light with their flippers clicking against the glass as they turn. Is there anything to be done about it? My mind is not an organizational one.
    What is there to find? Thomas Bewick diligently followed the patterns of light from feather to feather, John Clare