Greek Vase and Sussex Lady
(in memory of Claire Crowe) by Anna Crowe
Punk with Dulcimer, Peterloo Poets

The sideboard was stiff with scones and tea-bread,
at least three kinds of cake;
your table was a dazzling beach
where silver gleamed like fish.
You sat and poured Darjeeling from a blue
and gold pot; white-haired, still beautiful;
black velvet ribbon and cameo at your throat.

This is how I remember you, and yet
– roller-skating in nineteen hundred and seven,
the first girl in your road to ride a bike
– you were the one who plunged
into the Black Sea out of Sussex,
out of your family of Brethren, teetotal
to the bone; to surface with this drinking-
cup: two-handled kantharos; elegant
terracotta bossy with barnacles,
with wormy scribblings white as Downland chalk.

Some five years after your death,
we’re celebrating the move to the new house,
broaching your last bottle of blackberry wine.
Twice the strength of conventional stuff,
more potent than any Hippocrene
that might have brimmed your Attic cup,
it’s fairly laid us out among the tea-chests.
Sprawled in an orgy of bubble-wrap
with piled-up crockery and dusty books,
it is as much as we can do
to raise our helpless glasses and salute you
– Lady of Eastbourne galloping off
on a horse of Sussex chalk;
sea-nymph roller-skating out of sight.

A bottle of homemade blackberry wine is uncorked, and the life of the old woman who made it is fondly remembered by our increasingly intoxicated poet. The description of the woman’s white hair and the cameo on a black velvet ribbon at her throat gives an impression of elegance, and real hospitality is embodied in the image of her sideboard “stiff with scones and tea-bread”. A sense of decorum pervades as the woman pours “Darjeeling from a blue and gold pot”. There would be no mugs here, not even bone china ones.

The poem is written in memory of a woman with the same surname as the poet, who was “roller-skating in nineteen hundred and seven”, which gives us a time frame, so perhaps she was the poet’s grandmother. We don’t know specifically what age the woman was when she was roller-skating, but she sounds modern and daring. To be the first girl in her road to ride a bike cements that notion. Add to this the fact that in an era when overseas travel was considered much more adventurous than it is today, she was swimming in the Black Sea “out of Sussex” and out of her “family of Brethren”, as if escaping their shackles. Plymouth was where the first Brethren assembly in England was established in 1831, hence the term Plymouth Brethren. A Christian (Protestant) body, their fundamentalist beliefs isolate them from the secular world in varying degrees, depending on whether they are “Open” or “Exclusive”. Even the Open Brethren would surely have disapproved of our heroine as she emerged from the Black Sea with a Greek drinking goblet – a kantharos – from which to drink wine, in clothes that would cling to her body when wet, no matter how voluminous.

The poet refers to the last bottle of the old woman’s homemade wine as being more potent than any “Hippocrene” that might have filled the “Attic cup” (a region of Ancient Greece from which the goblet may have originated). Hippocrene is a spring on Mount Helicon in Greece. The water is said to imbue the drinker with poetic inspiration, rather as the blackberry wine is now doing in a more potent way.

The wine is being drunk in celebration, our writer having moved to “the new house”. Of course, we are generally surrounded by the effects of dead people in our homes, but the absence of the maker of the wine, or a meat pie being kept in the freezer, or a batch of home-baked biscuits is sharply illuminated because the life of perishables, which is often all too short, has exceeded the sell-by date of the human being.

Our poet and her drinking companion(s) lift drunken glasses to salute the adventurous relative, and imagine her galloping off on a horse carved from a chalk hillside, or skating away in the guise of a sea-nymph. A woman of many parts has died, but leaves memories of herself and her history in the minds of her family and corked with the blackberries. And so it is that we are attached in the minds of others to all the little things that we do.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide