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belonged to a bohe—mian, educated uncle — her mother's brother. So she kept it and I read it.
    The stories of Arthur, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Merlin, of Camelot and the Grail, docked into me like the missing molecule of a chemical compound.
    I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances. I used to have to put the book down and run past the part where Perceval, searching for the Grail, is given a vision of it one day, and then, because he is unable to ask the crucial question, the Grail disappears. Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing that he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not.
    Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost or turned away from something I couldn't even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance . . .
    In fact, there are more than two chances — many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/ losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
    And of course I loved the Lancelot story because it is all about longing and unrequited love.
    Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
    I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule — even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
    I was scared and unhappy.
    I remember going down to the library to collect the murder mysteries. One of the books my mother had ordered was called Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. She assumed it was a gory story about nasty monks — and she liked anything that was bad for the Pope.
    The book looked a bit short to me — mysteries are usually quite long — so I had a look and saw that it was written in verse. Definitely not right ... I had never heard of T. S. Eliot. I thought he might be related to George Eliot. The librarian told me he was an American poet who had lived in England for most of his life. He had died in 1964, and he had won the Nobel Prize.
    I wasn't reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PROSE A—Z.
    But this was different . . .
    I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy .
    I started to cry.
    Readers looked up reproachfully, and the librarian reprimanded me, because in those days you weren't even allowed to sneeze in a library, let alone weep. So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.
    The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family — the first one was not my fault but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.
    I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.

    I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.
    So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.
    It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
    In many ways it was time for me to go. The books had got the better of me,