I know I’ve written about it before, it was just a little thing but it does linger in my mind – and although I’ve jotted thoughts and memories, I haven’t properly explored it. The ‘it’ is a small boat I once saw, a cabin cruiser, moored on the River Cam at Ely, with a wonky ‘FOR SALE’ sign taped to its curtained window. I actually had sufficient funds to buy it – but obviously it was a totally impractical and ridiculous idea. It would have to be transported to where I lived, and although there was access to a river it wasn’t like the sleepy old Cam. I could imagine it being in the boatyard in the village, never going anywhere like so many others, and dreams of sitting in it and writing were a writer’s fantasy.
Last weekend, our writing group went wild writing – sitting outside and being inspired not necessarily by our surroundings, but by being together and bringing our minds to bear on a suggested topic. We met in Apex Park in Burnham-on-Sea, each wrote a couple of prompts on scraps of paper, put them into a hat (an actual hat) and drew out two. I pulled out the first line of a poem, and the word “boat”. I wandered off and found a bench looking across the small lake, and put my mind to writing. I spent a long, long while wrestling with the poetic prompt and was in the end quite pleased with what I wrote. Then, having been interrupted by a friendly passer-by who must have been a descendant of Coleridge’s visitor from Porlock, I wrote about the Leonora, the boat which had been for sale in Ely, so many years before. This is how I set the scene for “meeting” her:
I’ve written about the Leonora before, and she haunts my dreams and my imagination even though our encounter was only fleeting.
My memory is so clear, but maybe it is because although she was unknown to me before that dull day in early December, I knew the setting well. I’d walked and cycled along the towpath, I’d been over the humpback road bridge on the way to Queen Adelaide, and many years ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I’d canoed along the river there.
That day, with cousins, I was going for a walk before a late lunch. It was grey, drizzly, dull,, the sun not long risen was heading to its peak and then would begin its descent. We, however, were cheery, happy to be in each other’s company, and chatted as we sauntered along.
PS:The “person on business from Porlock” was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge at his cottage in Nether Stowey, while he was in the middle of writing the poem, Kubla Khan in 1797. Once interrupted, his muse escaped him and the poem was unfinished. My featured image is of a visit we made to the cottage and couldn’t resit the children’s dressing up box, Fenja Hill, the Poet Macaque – aka Hamish MacNeil, and me. Queen Adelaide is a village in Cambridgeshire.
Lois Elsden 