Bruce Ross-Smith

Bruce Ross-Smith interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24 September 2015

0:04:16 Born in 1949 in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a twin brother; my mother descended from a long line of Welsh clerics called Pryce; she was born to John Roland Pryce and Lilian nee Darlington who came from a family of Cheshire yeoman farmers; the contrast between the families is one of physical size - the Pryces were tiny, the Darlingtons were huge; John Roland Pryce went to Westminster School; it was part of the social pattern at that time that if you wanted education and were a Welsh-speaking family, the Welsh was educated out of you; he spoke no Welsh but one of his sisters and (a brother) did stay in Wales and spoke Welsh; he regretted that he could not make a claim to Welshness because of this; he was a parson in Wales when my mother was born; he then moved to Benson near Oxford, to a Christ Church living as he had a friend who was Sub-Dean of Christ Church; that was where my mother spent her teenage years; she then went to a Froebel training institution in London, at Lancaster Gate; qualified, taught in England, then very bravely, I think, set off to Canada, to be a teacher in Montreal; that was where she met my father; my father was born George Denson Smith; his father was Professor of Mathematics at University College, Hull, and always remained Smith; my father & his brothers, who migrated to Canada in the late 1920s, for social and commercial reasons put the name Ross ahead of the Smith; on my father's side his Rosses come from (Alness)in Ross and Cromarty; my great, great, great-grandfather actually died at the Battle of Waterloo; so my father's family were socially not as well established as my mother's family, and I think he was thrilled at marrying the granddaughter of the Dean of Bangor; my father did not go to university; although his father was a university professor, he would not pay out money for any of his children to go; my father left school at eighteen, played Rugby League professionally, worked heaving coal in Liverpool, and finally went to Canada in September 1929; the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 left him living in (the Montreal) docks for about two years, then gradually he recovered and set up a business in Montreal in the 1930s which was very successful; it dealt in canvas goods for camping, called Quebec Canvas Goods; my parents married in 1939; in September 1939 he was already in the Militia, the equivalent to the Territorial Army; he was immediately posted as a Major in the Canadian Army and went overseas in 1941; by that time they had one child, my sister, and my mother was pregnant with my older brother, Graham, who was born in January 1942 when my father was over here; they were that unfortunate generation for whom the War interfered a great deal; at the end of the War my father returned to Montreal and wanted to move to France; however post-War France was impossible, so instead they moved to British Columbia; he sold his business, although there was a lot of rancour with his brothers who had looked after it during the War, and set up a business in the Cowichan Valley; unfortunately in October 1954 on his 49th birthday I set our house on fire by accident and it burnt to the ground; at the same time his businesses had also started to fail and he was also starting to suffer from brain cancer, so for most of my childhood my father was ill and not always capable of making good judgements and decisions; but we did not know this until he was finally diagnosed with brain cancer, came to England for an operation; as it was terminal, my mother decided to bring the younger children over; initially we lived in Worksop in Nottinghamshire, where my mother's sister lived; then we moved to Oxford; that, roughly speaking, is my background; the Rosses were victims of the clearances, the Pryces were essentially conservative, theological, Welsh parsons; a former fellow of this college(King’s), Rowland Williams, married my great, great-aunt, Emily Pryce, was (progressive) and heterodox, got which he got into great trouble for - preaching (Cambridge)select sermons here in 1854 called Rational Godliness, followed then by an essay on the latest developments in scientific theology in Essays & Reviews, and that did it for him; he lost his job here, he was vive=principal at St David's Lampeter, and he lost that job as well; (the Church) put him on Salisbury Plain to keep and eye on him; that is my social background more or less

5:57:05 We did live in very beautiful places; at the house that tragically burnt down, behind was a mountain (and beyond) the Pacific Ocean and in front was the Lake Cowichan, we in the Cowichan Valley, on the edge of a forest; when the house burnt down we had to move into one of my father's restaurants; it was very small and we had to sleep in the bathroom; then in 1955 my father got a job in Victoria, at the end of Vancouver Island, and lived in a beautiful rented house on the coast; unfortunately by then his health was so bad that he was taking great chunks of time off work, and there was no form of welfare payment at that time; so we lived in beautiful places with no money; at that time British Columbia was a relatively impoverished province and in Victoria you could buy houses for almost nothing; then he started getting better and decided he would build a new house on the beach, but as the house was being built he became very ill, and came to England and died; but my childhood was lovely; I think I went to about seven schools by the time I was thirteen because we did more around quite a lot; I got rather used to being somewhere for a couple of years and then moving again; that rather defined my life until I got married

8:09:10 Reading was my hobby from the age of four or five; my father had a very good library which went up in the fire, unfortunately; swimming in the Pacific Ocean (was my other passion) - I still cannot swim in swimming pools because I learnt to swim in the sea; so reading reading reading and rambling beside the ocean where we would swim for two hours a day when I was a child; I was twelve when we came to England which in terms of education was quite complicated; we had been in elementary schools up to that age and were about to go to junior high, but that didn't happen; when we came here in January 1961 we thought we were in hell on earth; we had been led to believe from my parents that England was a beautiful, green, placid, tranquil place; it took us nearly ninety hours to get from Vancouver to Heathrow; when we saw London for the first time it was all black, there was war damage, Westminster Abbey was unbelievably dreadful, covered with coal dust, so this was a shocking experience; then we moved to Worksop, and what about education because we hadn't been brought up in the British system; so we went first to a secondary modern school, then we did a 12+ exam and went for a short time to Retford Grammar School in Nottinghamshire; then my father died and we moved for a short time to North Wales to a house that had been vacated by the death of one of my great-aunt's; then we moved to Oxford to a grammar school, but my mother was prevailed upon by her sister that it wasn't quite proper to be in a grammar school but ought to be in an independent school, but she had no money; so we went baas day-boys to Worksop College, and lived with my Aunt Dona, John Machin's mother; then we got scholarships and became boarders there for the rest of our secondary education; that was fine but we had much preferred the grammar school in Oxford which I think gave a better education than the middle-of-the-road Public school which Worksop College was; there were two boys' grammar schools in Oxford in those days, and ours was Southfield; (I had no desire to go to university, so I started wandering round Europe at the age of eighteen and ended up in Barcelona and then Mallorca, and didn't come back to England for quite a number of years; I stayed in Spain working with an American archaeologist and artist called Bill Waldren (and his astonishing family).

11:12:04 At school I would have liked to have done music but my mother didn't have enough money as music was extra; we were very conscious that we were quite shabby boys, and when we came to live in Oxford we were very conscious of all the little boys at the Dragon School; we lived in a middle-class suburb in Headington, surrounded by Dragons who were our main contact, but then we were at the Grammar school; when we went to Worksop College, by this time we had lost our Canadian accents and developed rather dreadful home-county posh accents; Worksop, being a local Public school, had a lot of boys with northern middle-class accents; but we were made fun of and it took some years to persuade our fellow pupils that we were not posh boys slumming it; by this time I was teaching myself the piano and doing some composing; between fifteen & sixteen I wanted to be the next Olivier Messiaen, but the school didn't approve of that so wouldn't let me do it; I had started between thirteen and fourteen, under the influence of my sister's husband who was a student at Oxford when I was at grammar school; I had inherited a piano and converted my mother's garage into a study-bedroom where I had my piano; at this time I was not listening to the Beatles or Rolling Stones, but listening to Pierre Boulez, Messiaen, and so on, and wanted to be a modern composer; I had shown what I had written but was told it didn't make any sense and that I was not a musician, and unfortunately wouldn't let me use the music school, so I did that at home; of teachers that inspired, I think in particular of my teacher of French and German who had been at Keble College and had a shared link with Oxford; he moved me towards literature, and reading in French and German; but I also did English and history, which is what I did for 'A' level

13:58:11 I was in Spain, off and on; I first went to France and worked as a grape picker, then I spent the winter doing agricultural work in (around Languedoc); in 1969 I moved down to Barcelona, so I was there from then until 1975; I went back again in the 1980s; I had always wanted to get back to Vancouver Island, the smells of the Pacific, the sensations of the ocean; as much as I loved the Mediterranean it wasn't the Pacific; I decided I would go back to Canada (and did, dividing my time between Victoria and my native Vancouver Island), then I went north to live in Northern British Columbia; I was wandering, but I had also met E-P [Evans-Pritchard] by this time so was also seeing myself as a free-lance, self-taught, ethnographer, very pretentiously of course, but I was writing to E-P; I had met him in 1961-62 when we were neighbours in Oxford; E-P lived in Jack Straw's Lane, Headington, and we lived just round the corner; then by coincidence, E-P's twin sons, Johnny and Nicky, were at the same boarding school in Worksop, so we were neighbours plus contemporaries at school; from 1962 onwards I was spending a lot of my time going back and forth to E-P's house to read poetry with him in the study; when I converted my mother's garage to a study he would just come and knock on the door and talk to me; when people came to visit, like Julian Pitt-Rivers, he would send Deirdre his daughter over to bring me over to meet him, or they would come over to me; it was rather an extraordinary experience that in my teens I was already spending a lot of time with E-P, but also being introduced through him to all sorts of extraordinary people; this gave me the yearning perhaps to see myself as an amateur anthropologist

16:24:22 We knew E-P first by local, middle-class, social reputation; there were some people in the neighbourhood who didn't really approve of him; his wife had died in September 1959; he was a single parent with five children; she had committed suicide after suffering acute post-natal depression; he was a Catholic and some people were alarmed by him in various ways, I think quite unfairly, but he could on occasion be a bit brusque or teasing; when I first saw him in April 1961, I was told by a neighbour to be careful as that was Evans-Pritchard; I didn't know who he was so I went down to Blackwells and got a copy of The Nuer and the Zande witchcraft book and started reading them with mixed comprehension; we got to know his twin sons as my twin brother and I were at school with them; as one does with neighbours who are very close friends, we were in and out of each other's houses; my mother was teaching at this time at the Dragon School and taught Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and she taught Deirdre as well, so there were links within links and liking; I started spending time by myself with E-P, sometimes to my mother's consternation; she could sometimes tell that I had had the odd bit of whisky while reading poetry with him; my first impression was that he was very easy to meet and flattered you by his willingness to talk about things; at my 13-14 he was talking about things I could not have any knowledge of, but that didn't worry him; when he talked about Malinowski or Radcliffe-Brown he would just assume that I knew who these people were; when I didn't know I soon found out, so I was able to begin to talk to him, not intellectually as such but social friendly chit-chat, and gossip of course which he enjoyed; so to begin with my assessment of him was that he was a very approachable, friendly person; despite my being only 13 and he in his early sixties, the age difference didn't matter whatsoever; when I was in the study in Jack Straw's Lane reading poetry to each other, there was no question of age-difference whatsoever; some people didn't understand which led to less than generous gossip in the neighbourhood, which I just totally ignored; my first impressions were of a person who was very generous and kind, and willing to listen; one of my first encounters with E-P was making conversation in the street, and noticing that he was looking at me very intently; I remember Michael Gilsenan saying that when he listened to you, he really is listening; I began to realize that was certainly true, he expected there to be a dialogue, and for me this was an alternative education to ordinary school; he would pass on books to me, including copies of his own when they were republished; he was quite remarkable; his writings are still read not only for his intellectual insights, but also for his literary gifts; there are passages of great beauty in The Nuer and complex literary intelligence in the great witchcraft book; you see that towards the end of his life his writing became a little slacker, but at its best there was that quality of prose and thought; Jonathan Benthall said recently about E-P that he didn't leave anything of any theoretical importance; I read the Cairo lectures which he gave me in the sixties which were extraordinary lectures to this day; so maybe he didn't write a big work of theory, he didn't want to, but the monographs - he was of the view, as was Godfrey Lienhardt, that it's in the ethnography and the interpretation that the quality lies; you don't have to tie yourself to functionalism or structuralism, and he repudiated both; but he was very pleased when Lévi-Strauss contributed to Beidelman's festschrift, he didn't think Lévi-Strauss had the least bit of interest; he didn't want theory to get in the way of clarity, so didn't want it to be the starting point; the starting point was like meeting someone in the street, it was chat; I am sure that in his fieldwork once he was able to communicate effectively there was a lot of chat; that is what he did with me and with many other people, whatever their social background; I don't think E-P was in the least bit snobbish although he was accused of that from time to time; his background was upper middle-class but his father, Thomas John Evans-Pritchard, came from a relatively humble background; Thomas managed to get himself to Hertford College, Oxford, but he had difficulty when he was there; he had no money to speak of although he got a scholarship from villagers in North Wales who collected money for him to go to Oxford; he couldn't afford to buy his M.A., for example; at that time he was just Pritchard, the Evans came later; he found it very difficult to find a living and for sixteen years was just a licenced practising preacher in the diocese of Chichester where he finally became curate; he later became a vicar in Oxfordshire; that meant we had family links too, because my grandfather John Roland Pryce was at Oxford at exactly the same time; there is no evidence that they knew each other, but as far as E-P was concerned they were virtual ancestors, they had to be because they came from the same part of North Wales, both Welsh speakers, my grandfather just across the road from Hertford at Jesus; so we used to entertain the idea that we were really cousins; E-P was very conscious that his father had had to work very hard to establish himself; his wife had a rather grander social background and also had private means, which is why the name Evans got put before Pritchard; she inherited money on the condition of this name change, and that money allowed E-P to have private means in the 1930s to do research

25:13:24 E-P went to very expensive Prep school, The Grange, in Crowborough, then he went to Winchester; he wasn't a brilliant classical scholar like his brother, Thomas, who unfortunately had a psychotic breakdown in his early twenties, but E-P was lucky enough to have a teacher called A.P. Williams, "History Bill", who went on to be the Bishop of Durham and a Fellow of All Souls; he realized that E-P was not a great classical scholar but he had a flair for English; he took E-P under his wing and really worked providing him with things to read and also to write spontaneously; E-P worked at his writing; he told me that when he was in Cairo as a professor, working on the big witchcraft book, it was then he started drafting and redrafting, but he already had a gift well-honed on how to create good paragraphs and well-balanced sentences; that is there throughout his life; he was known as the poet when he did fieldwork in Sudan, and he was; although he never became a modernist, never got quite beyond Tennyson, his knowledge of poetry which he had read at school - he had a book at Winchester called Poems for Repetition and he knew them all; he gave me this book to read out the poems that he had learnt; I would start to read and then he would take over; he knew 'The Hound of Heaven' by Francis Thompson, and almost the whole of 'In Memoriam'; I think you can hear the poetry in his writing; the way he manages to be very sparing in the use of epithets, adjectives and so on; he doesn't over-burden his prose, and the length of his sentences, particularly in the Nuer and Azande books, the way the sentences are formed is almost poetic in the way that there is a balance on a page; of course, it is more than just that but I really do think that the poetry repetition that was common in the major Public schools in those days, and the learning by rote was not a grind for him; he also loved going to Chapel at Winchester and also the Cathedral because of (the choral music); although he could not sing he could recite poetry with the cadences which you could also find in his prose, the rhythm that takes you to the end of that chapter or paragraph, and you don't have to think about it; there is a depth to the sentences which gives a meaning well beyond the intellectual; that is what I find in The Nuer in particular; some chapters are distinctly poetic which in no way make it less of a masterpiece of the conventional functionalism of the time, but there is in his writing something that you don't find in his contemporaries - Meyer Fortes, Edmund Leach - you really don't find that quality of prose which comes I think from Winchester and also from his mother

29:53:01 When he was at Winchester he was confirmed in the conventional Anglo-Catholic tradition of a public school boy; in terms of organized religion, by his own admission, he lapsed after school; also when he became a Catholic his was not a Mass-going Catholic particularly; he told me that when he was with the Azande in the twenties on what would become his Ph.D., for whatever reason he started thinking about the religion he had left behind, not for theoretical but for purely emotional reasons; he said that God had become present to him again when he started doing fieldwork; he never wrote about this in his memoir of fieldwork, but he always took a bible with him, and when he went to the Azande he took Lowie's Primitive Knowledge; in his memoir he mentions the Lowie but not the Bible; of course he knew the Bible back to front and could quote great chunks of it as he could poetry; the rhythm of the King James' version was in his blood as it were, and when in came to Nuer Religion he used a lot of Christian cosmology; when his mother was living as a widow after his father had died he told her in the mid nineteen-thirties that he was thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic although he did not finally convert until 1944 when he was in Benghazi; he did try twice but he couldn't meet the conditions; he said that they finally let him in because of the War; this did not marry overtly with his anthropological work, but I think covertly in the way he saw the world and thought, and it did make him deeply suspicious of theory; when he repudiated functionalism and would not take up Needham and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, I think he thought that there was something that was imposing a world idea of thinking on a world that is not (yielded) in that way; his final comment to Meyer Fortes on a lecture he gave at Durham in 1971, 'Some Aspects of Mysticism', was that this was his inner world; when he was living in Magdeburg Square in London during his LSE days)he said he always read the Bible at night; he was not going to church, and even when he became a Catholic he rarely went to the church and never went to the new Catholic church at Headington that was built just round the corner in 1959 though invited to do so; he had a deep mistrust of clerics; his anarchy would not allow him to become a church-going Catholic, but his bedtime reading in later years were things like the Desert Fathers; I think that time in Cyrenaica, which I call his pilgrimages, is critical; during that time he found something happening to him which had nothing to do with anthropology or ethnography, but a great deal to do with companionship; he found God companionable

35:04:03 In the last decade of his life after his wife's death, and certainly after he retired from Oxford in 1970, he made a conscious decision to make a bonfire of his personal documents; he did leave some things at the Institute and these were passed on to Godfrey Lienhardt; when it came to things like field notes and personal papers he decided to get rid of them; he would go to the study, light a fire outside and start chucking things onto it; at one time he was going to burn all his photographs which I managed to rescue; when it came to his notebooks and private letters, we have all the correspondence from him to Meyer Fortes, his "younger brother", but none from Fortes to him; this is very sad; I know there are all sorts of stories about E-P in his youth, which was not exactly dissolute, although he knew people who did have that reputation; Francis Turville-Petre who read archaeology at Exeter, and they were contemporaries there, is the model for Auden's character in the Accent of F6 and Billy Onslow, later the Earl of Wicklow, were both Roman Catholics, so he was mixing with people for whom Catholicism was part of their upbringing in their daily life, but I don't think there was evidence that he was wildly dissolute; he didn't start the burning process until 1970; before then he gave me his Ph.D. thesis to read, he also gave me some of his notebooks to read which he had in a number of drawers in his study; at that time I was not in a position to make a judgement on them, but it was interesting to look at his Azande notes and then look at the thesis which was quite short; they were very detailed both in the quality of his observation and participation, he was very meticulous in recording things; he was also very good at drawing maps; he kept field work diaries, again very detailed; we are talking of hundreds of pages burnt, unfortunately; I did ask him why not just leave them at the Oxford Institute as they would be of interest; he said they had got his books, a huge bibliography, and he didn't see why he should leave anything else behind; I suggested there would be people who would want to write about him but he didn't see why they would want to; it was an odd thing to do as I couldn't see any gain by him doing this other than he was closing chapters off; he was actually working on a paper on levirate marriage when he died; he was writing to the Hebrew scholar Aubrey Johnson and I had to write to tell (Johnson) E-P had died; so he was still collecting information and still publishing bits and pieces based on his ethnography; I assume when he was writing those he was using the notes he still had; when he finished doing that then he started burning them

41:14:09 When I first met him he had a real gift for talking to anyone, and a real gift for friendship; with Meyer Fortes we know that they were diametrically opposite in all sorts of ways, but there was a very strong friendship there; with the Institute, E-P really did encourage a family atmosphere there; people were chums, they were friends, they went out together; some people who weren't heavy drinkers didn't find the pub going as attractive as others, that was a problem for Needham, for example, but he did form very loyal friendships that were both intellectual and emotional, and that is certainly true with Godfrey; when the Institute was very close to the 'King's Arms' that was the place for post Friday seminars; E-P as an undergraduate enjoyed the company of people in a social rather than an intimate setting; a point that Godfrey made in his memoir with which I agree; E-P liked social activity in social places but also needed the retreat, whether it would be back to All Souls, or to his house; he kept his friends in different places; I think he thought that without that social contact you wouldn't be able to talk to people about things that were important; I think those pub meetings were very informal in contrast to his predecessor, Radcliffe-Brown; Richard Farndon says of E-P that he was yaw-yawing about things in pubs that were a little fantastic; there was some truth in that, but a lot of his stories weren't fantastic; they were based on very extraordinary things which had happened to him; but he was a great believer also in virtual truth, so he would embellish a story, and that has always struck me as quite a good thing to do; he had an anthropological family who he had brought with him from Cambridge, but his own family also; when we were at home, on Sundays, the E-P twins, the children and me, would go down to the 'White Hart' at Old Marston and play bar-billiards and so on; he would do many things with his children; I know that there were sometimes tensions between the twins and E-P after they graduated, but there was a huge loyalty within that family which I think came from him; he could be difficult at times, and he wasn't always well in his last years, and did certainly drink more than was good for him but he had an extraordinary constitution; I would put him to bed some nights when I thought he would never walk again, and at four o'clock in the morning, when I was living in the house, he (would be) tapping on his typewriter; he was always typing out something or other; so friendship and being with people, time alone, and in the final years time for being with God; that is what the poetry reading was a lot to do with, being with God and waiting for the time when he would go to heaven; he would often say he was waiting, waiting; his choice of poets were Henry Vaughan, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Francis Thompson, and some minor poets that he had read in his early years; of course he enjoyed Shakespeare, but also G.K. Chesterton; he had a copy-book in which he used to write down his favourite bits of poetry, and the only thing that I would call even remotely modern was a poem by James Joyce; I gave him a collection of Yeats as a Christmas present one year which he did read, but Eliot he was very ambivalent about; his musical interests were quite slight and were mainly church music from his time at Winchester and Oxford; he didn't play an instrument himself, nor to my knowledge, listen to music

49:21:23 E-P knew Arnold Lawrence, T.E.'s younger brother, very well; we know there is a photograph of Arnold, Lawrence and E-P together dressed in Bedouin garb; there is no doubt that E-P met T.E. in the 1920s; T.E. was writing the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in Oxford when E-P was there, just preparing to come up to the L.S.E., but I am not sure how much time they spent together; E-P was always very unwilling to say much about Lawrence, but it did come up in the 1940s when he was (was leading a band of Galla irregulars)- which did have a profound impact on him because he did (in close combat) kill people during that campaign; a reporter with the Daily Express reported on E-P, calling him a social biologist and the new Lawrence of Arabia; E-P used to have a cutting in his study but I expect he destroyed it; when asked about T.E. he would not say much but tended to make fun of him, so I don't know whether there was anything else

51:16:18 After my years in Spain. I was in Canada for most of the seventies; by this time I was writing full-time but not making much of a living; I wrote novels, plays and poems, publishing poetry in West Coast journals; the novels I didn't publish; I used to come back to England to teach on summer schools at (Cambridge) in the summer of 1978 my mother became really rather ill so I decided to go back to Canada for a short time and planned to come back to see her; in Canada I became engaged to a Canadian artist called Heather Cragg; I came back to England and my mother really wasn't well by this time; Heather came to join us in March 1980, and on the way to my mother's house one night she was killed in a road accident, six days after her twenty-seventh birthday; that was a great shock and I really didn't want to go back to Canada at that stage; Heather had been educated in Canada and also at Ruskin College, Oxford; she had a great deal of work here in England which she had done both as a student and for years after when she still lived here; I dedicated myself to putting all her English work together in an exhibition at Ruskin, and to then make sure that all her work was returned to her parents in Victoria; that took about two years, indexing and cataloguing, then finally I was brave enough to return to Canada to see her parents; there is a Heather Cragg Memorial Fund which pays for young artists to come and work abroad; I also wrote a book about her though it is as yet unpublished; she was only twenty-seven but had already produced nearly 450 works; I stayed in Oxford after Heather died, then I was offered a job in Israel; I had some friends called Bloch, and Rudy Bloch was a retired chemist living in Israel who had written a huge work on salt, but it wasn't finished; the Blochs suggested I go and help Rudy finish his book, but my mother's health deteriorated so I didn't do so; by this time I was doing some free-lance teaching in Oxford, and then I met my wife a few years after that; meanwhile I went to live in Greece and Sicily - my two-year habit of moving on had been with me all my life until I got married to Sally; we met in the mid 1980s and married in 1987; she was my boss at one time, is a German scholar by background; we have four children, the eldest is twenty-five, a computer scientist; second son, Tom, was here at King's from 2011 to 2014, and got a double first in theology and religious studies; my daughter, Elinor, is eighteen and has just gone to do philosophy at Sheffield, and then there is Gabriel who is thirteen and still at home; so for these twenty-eight years I have been settled; now that I'm semi-retired I have all those boxes of manuscripts to put into shape; for instance I have nearly 300 poems about E-P and his family which I'd quite like to put into a collection; I used to write lots of poems for E-P and for his children, for Deirdre, Ambrose, poems for twenty-first birthday parties and so on; I'd like to bring out a collection called 'The Ark', the name of their house in Jack Straw's Lane; I do have a publisher who is interested and I would like that to be my first collection with a long introduction in which I can talk about E-P as well, and about the poetry of his prose; that would be for me a very satisfying thing to do