Thoughts, news, events, happenings, writings – past, present and future
Do You Want To Know A Secret?
After many many months of research, writing, drafting and re-drafting, I have just given birth to my first novel. It has been a long gestation but now – finally – it is done. Know You Her Secret has been published. Inspired by the true story of my great-great-aunt, it relates how Lucy King left her safe, secure middle-class home in Lancashire to become governess to a little Russia princess in the St Petersburg of Imperial Russia and was caught up in the Russian Revolution … So What’s the Secret? Well –it could be one of many. Was my great-great-aunt a … Read more …
Megan Young Poetry Prize 2024
A poem about the sun by the winner of the Megan Young Poetry Prize 2024
Read more ...Megan Young Poetry Prize 2020
Poetry Becomes a Covid Casualty It seems that poetry has become a casualty of Covid 19. Schools are being advised they can drop poetry from the GCSE syllabus, at least for the next 12 months. What a shame! Children are natural poets. They are uninhibited. They express their thoughts and feelings as they find them. They love rhythm and are fascinated by word play. They don’t just read poetry – they write it. I know this as the mother of a child who wrote poetry from the moment she could write. I know it also because in recent years I … Read more …
Remembering Dresden reconciliation
Dresden Anniversary Fifty-five years ago, when the world was divided into East and West, communism and capitalism, I went to the city of Dresden with a group of other young people from Britain. We were full of idealism about a peaceful world, a world where people of all countries could live in harmony with one another. We were doing our bit against chauvinism and hate – even if those thoughts were poorly formulated in our young minds at that time. We went there to help rebuild a church hospital which had been partially destroyed during the bombing raid of February … Read more …
Read more ...Legacies of Nazi Persecution book wins Wolfson prize
Professor Mary Fulbrook’s latest book argues that thousands who were complicit in the Holocaust evaded justice following the end of the Second World War.
Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice has just been awarded the Wolfson History Prize for 2019.
In Poetry Every Word Counts
Misprints in poetry I was reading an article in the magazine of the Society of Authors the other day about the extra care that is needed to avoid misprints in poetry. ‘In poetry, every word counts,’ wrote the poet John Greening. Misprints can be brought about by the need to transcribe a poet’s hand writing or, these days, by an over enthusiastic spellchecker. John Greening’s article struck a chord with me. When my daughter died at the age of 32 I took on the task of transcribing her poetry, mostly handwritten, contained in a scruffy old folder. Subsequently I published … Read more …
Cancer of Unknown Primary Awareness Week 2018
Many people do not know that you can be diagnosed with cancer and yet doctors cannot tell you what type of cancer you have. This is known as Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP). A charity is working to raise awareness of this form of cancer and promote research in order to improve diagnosis and treatment.
Read more ...Megan Young Poetry Prize
A poem about a blue tit by Daisy Godbold, a Year 7 pupil at the Stephen Perse Foundation school in Cambridge, has won the 2018 Megan Young Poetry Prize
Read more ...Peace and Reconciliation – How Far Have We Come?
Young people’s desire for peace and reconciliation remains as strong as it did sixty years ago when the German organisation Aktion Sühnezeichen was founded. At that time the aim was to send young volunteers to work in countries that had suffered during the Second World War. Today the organisation sends volunteers around the world and has broadened its mission to include fighting racism, discrimination and social exclusion.
Read more ...Should we stop talking about the battle with cancer?
When my daughter Megan was dying of terminal cancer, she was adamant that at her funeral no-one should talk about her brave fight or use phrases such as ‘she died after a long battle with cancer’. This is not a battle, she told me. I am dying. A cancer charity says that the perceived idea that people need to fight cancer can have a negative effect.
Read more ...Martin Luther King
Invisible borders are everywhere. They divide not only different ethnic communities but those of differing social class as well. The anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King reminds me of the time I unwittingly crossed one such invisible border in Atlanta, Georgia.
Read more ...Dresden Bombing Anniversary
This week marks the 73rd anniversary of the British and US Second World War bombing raid on the German city of Dresden. The attack was controversial at the time and has remained so throughout the decades. Thousands of civilians died in a firestorm. There are questions about the morality of targeting civilians and about the need for the attack in February 1945 when the war was almost at an end. Soviet troops were only a few miles from the city which was crowded with refugees.
Read more ...Poetry and Science
At first glance it seems to me that poetry and science make strange bedfellows. The latter demands accuracy and clarity, the former is open to the interpretation of the reader, revealing more than the mere words suggest.
Read more ...Anniversaries 2018
2018 – a year of anniversaries. Prague, Paris, Chicago, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Names and places that resonate today. All of these will be talked about and read about this year, fifty years on from assassination and riots. For me, a year of personal memories.
Read more ...Coventry – a good choice for our troubled times
Some people seem to be scratching their heads, asking themselves why Coventry has been chosen as UK City of Culture 2021. British people that is. What doesn’t seem to be realised is that Coventry is an international city, its name resonating with people around the world. Its message of peace and reconciliation is heard by thousands in other countries and has done so since the building of the inspirational new cathedral consecrated in 1962.
Read more ...Paul Oestreicher – an inspirational peace campaigner
Paul Oestreicher has played a significant role in my life every since I first went to East Germany in the 1960s to take part in the Coventry Cathedral project of reconciliation in Dresden. At that time, I did not know him, or know of the behind the scenes role he had played in enabling this project to take place between Britain and East Germany – two countries on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. Paul was a leading Cold War peace campaigner and has continued to espouse this cause, renewing his call for a peaceful world in a speech … Read more …
Exmoor Ponies
The other weekend I met up with an eclectic group of people who had one thing in common – Exmoor ponies. Given the chance many of them would have spent the whole day sitting there chatting about Exmoor ponies, telling their personal stories about this fascinating breed. We were there because a woman who shares this Exmoor pony passion in spades has spent the past few years collecting some of these stories together and has just published them in a book – The Exmoor Pony Chronicles. Sue Baker has been deeply involved with Exmoor ponies for much of her life. She caught the bug when she researched the ecology of free-living Exmoor ponies for her PhD in the late 1970s.
Read more ...Cancer of Unknown Primary
It is a traumatic moment for most of us when friends or family are diagnosed with cancer. Very often, one of the first things we will ask is this: what type of cancer do you have? By this we mean is it breast cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer and so on. But sometimes the answer to that questions is: I don’t know. For the last ten years a small charity has focussed its efforts on making people aware of a type of a cancer where it proves difficult and sometimes impossible to identify the site of the primary tumour. That’s when the answer to the question is: I don’t know. Why does this matter? It matters because …
Read more ...Megan Young Poetry Prize Winner Announced
A poem about green tomatoes has won the Megan Young Poetry Prize. The winner, Ayshe-Mira Yashin, aged 14, is a pupil at the Stephen Perse Foundation school in Cambridge. The award was launched in 2014, in memory of my daughter, Megan Young, who was a pupil at the school and who died aged 32, four months after being diagnosed with cancer. Megan was an equine veterinary surgeon, but she was also a poet having expressed herself through her poetry throughout her life. Some of her poetry has been published in Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul …
Read more ...Cancer of Unknown Primary – Don’t Die of Ignorance
What does it mean when doctors tell a patient that they have cancer but, unfortunately, they can’t tell you what kind of cancer you a suffering from. How can they not know? Why don’t they know? This is what happened to my daughter Megan Young seven years ago. What it means is that the medical experts are unable to locate the primary tumour. And what this means – in turn – is that treatment will be a very hit and miss affair because most cancer treatment is targeted at specific tumours whether that be breast, colon, lung and so on. …
Read more ...Sharing Grief Through Poetry
I will never forget the lady behind the Post Office counter. Meeting her was such a reminder of how little we know about the people we meet in the course of our day to day lives, of the things we carry with us, the depths of our feelings, our hidden talents, the grief that many of us share but which we rarely talk about. Sharing grief can happen in unlikely places. …
Read more ...A Political Anthem
The 1945 bombing raid on Dresden and the poem that Megan Young wrote about it has attracted more interest than any other post. She wrote the powerful poem, Annihila, on the 50th anniversary of the raid. When you read it, you can feel the intensity of Megan’s ability to relate to the suffering of others and transform that into the written word. This is the voice of a young woman who cared deeply about justice and who felt the pain of the world. …
Read more ...Music and Poetry United in Megan Young’s Compositions
I had never heard the word Sprechensang until I read one of the poems by Megan Young. It means, apparently, something between singing and speaking, spoken singing. It doesn’t feature even in a large dictionary. So how did Megan know this when she was only 15 years old. It is just one of the many questions I ask myself about Megan. My daughter was an equine veterinary surgeon. She died of cancer, aged 32. Her understanding of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world is present in her poetry much of which has been published in the book Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul. …
Read more ...April Bluebell
Megan wrote an evocative poem about the arrival of spring bluebells in Kentish woodlands. It is one of my favourite poems. So simple, so observant, and – as was so often the case with Megan’s poetry – hinting at a spiritual awareness. It was written only a few months before the symptoms of her cancer began to be felt. This and other poems are published in the memoir I created following her death from cancer of unknown primary (CUP). She was 32. Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul is a celebration of Megan’s life.
Read more ...Annihilation: The Dresden Bombing Raid
This year the Archbishop of Canterbury will be one of the many who will gather in Dresden to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombing raid on the night of 13/14 February. He will preach in the city’s cathedral, reduced to a pile of rubble in 1945 but now magnificently restored and dominating the Dresden skyline once again. Its rebuilding was a controversial decision. Some say that the ruin which remained after the raid served as a fitting reminder of the horrors of war – a memorial to all who died. For many years the ruined cathedral provided a meeting place for those who came to remember. I was one of them. The gold and pastel coloured interior of the restored building could not be further away from the gaunt greyness of ruined Dresden.
Read more ...Death Sentence: Do We Lose a Battle When We Die?
For many people cancer is a death sentence. Maybe this is why a warlike vocabulary has grown up around the disease. We use phrases such as ‘fighting the battle’. But not everyone feels comfortable with such imagery. My daughter Megan was one who did not. It’s not a war, she wrote shortly before her death from cancer at the age of 32. Similar thoughts were expressed by a man facing death in very different circumstances. Michael Lambrix was a prisoner on Death Row in the USA. He was executed in October 2017. ‘I suppose it’s really not that different from the resolve most cancer patients feel when they too are counting down their last days – especially those who have suffered for so long under that threat of death, and when that final countdown does come, there’s almost a sense of relief that the journey may finally come to an end and the suffering will finally pass, ‘ he wrote.
Read more ...A Poem Becomes a Prayer
Giving Comfort and Inspiration to Others Megan’s poetry has struck a chord with so many people over the past 18 months since I published her poems in Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul. Some people contact me to tell me so and I take great pleasure from knowing that Megan’s poetry is helping and pleasing others. Sometimes it brings comfort. Sometimes it is inspiration. Sometimes it is sheer pleasure in the beauty of her words. But there must be many others out there who I do not know about who have been affected by reading Megan’s poetry. One such that … Read more …
Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP) Awareness Week
Cancer of Unknown Primary – Megan’s Story The Nightmare of the Hidden Cancer My energetic, fit and healthy daughter Megan was diagnosed with abdominal cancer almost exactly five years ago. She died four months later, aged 32. We have never known what type of cancer she suffered from. Was it ovarian, pancreatic, stomach, liver …. no-one could say. Numerous tests were conducted, scans carried out, consultations held. But the site of the primary tumour which had caused my daughter to become ill so quickly and so devastatingly was never found. The cancer cells riddling her abdomen were secondary. During those … Read more …
Lunar Speculation
A poem which speaks of love Today is my daughter Megan‘s tenth wedding anniversary. She and Toby were married for just over four years. Megan died of an unknown form of cancer, known as Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP), in January 2010. In this poem, which she wrote many years ago, she speaks of love. Lunar Speculation Where there is a crowd There are familiar strangers Acquaintances, smothered by their own ambiguity. Anything they say can still wash over me. The abyss, the sea and suddenly A flight to plains of green. For you are the light in the darkness … Read more …
Remembering
The significance of remembering those who have died This has been a summer of remembering. As a nation, we have been remembering the young men who lost their lives in the First World War. We have come together to do this. But it is what we, as individuals, do all the time for those we love who have died. We remember them, create memorials for them, simply talk about them. And in this way, they live on. I have often wondered over the past four and a half years since my daughter Megan died about the extent to which our … Read more …
Hills Road Sixth Form College Student Wins Megan Young Poetry Prize
It is almost a year since the publication of Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul. This precious memoir is a tribute to the amazing talents of my daughter Megan Young. As she herself wrote: ‘I am a scientist, an artist, a Wordsmith’. She grew up to become an equine veterinary surgeon. But she was born a poet and wrote poetry almost from the moment she could form the letters. It is her work that has given birth to this book and also to the poetry competition, The Megan Young Poetry Prize, which was awarded for the first time earlier this … Read more …
The Death of a Child: A Perpetual Grief
Time stands still for a parent when a child dies. However much life moves on, as it inevitably does, there is a part of that parent which stops, and remains stopped, at that time when the child died. The way in which life – time – is measured alters. Without conscious thought, my memories are slotted into two different boxes – when Megan was alive and after she had died. These thoughts were reawakened recently when I read a most heartfelt and moving letter in a national newspaper from a woman whose young daughter had died more than 20 years … Read more …
Megan’s Poetry the Inspiration Behind Wye Ride Jump
Every spring, hundreds of riders, horses and ponies gather on the North Downs in Kent to take part in a ten-mile cross-country ride across this beautiful rural area. It is known to those who take part as the Wye Ride, named after the nearby village of Wye. The Wye Ride was one of the highlights of Megan’s year. She took part every year, loving, as do many others, the chance to leave the confinements of winter behind and glory in the freedom and exhilaration of galloping across the downland hills. The land is kindly opened up for the occasion by … Read more …
A Celebration of Poetry
Just over a month ago, five young poets took part in the final of the Megan Young Poetry Prize. At an evening called A Celebration of Poetry, they read their contributions and the winner was announced by the former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, who also presented the award. The event had been organised by the Stephen Perse Foundation school in Cambridge (formerly known as The Perse School for Girls). This was the school attended by my daughter Megan in the 1990s. Just before Christmas I had sent a copy of Wordsmith: The Gift of a Soul, to the school. … Read more …