On other topics: I suppose you have noticed that this two-sheet missive is accompanied by a slim journal with the name Strident in yellow and red across the top? Have you also noticed, beneath the masthead, somewhat smaller, but near the top (purely on account of alphabetical order) the name ‘Veda Gray’? You have? Well, yes, I have included a copy of my real-life publishing debut. Put it away safely! One day it may be worth a shilling or two. I have maintained my maiden name for publication purposes because, for goodness’ sake, I don’t want to be mobbed in the streets!

Read the poems. Say nothing if you don’t like them, and shower me with praise if you do. There will be more I hope, so long as Knox keeps his business sense about him and doesn’t go bust (I have never seen a man give away his wares so generously. Someone merely has to mention a vague interest in modern poetry, and Knox is piling them up with ‘super’ examples.)

The launch was great fun in the end. A small group of devotees and contributors, tea and cake and wine, a speech by Knox, lots of sales and autographs splashed across title pages. (I must come up with a better flourish. Something utterly unreadable. My signature looks like it did in the fifth form.)

Love Veda x

† † †

25 NOVEMBER 1966

Dear Tilde,

It is like some kind of blessed nor’westerly, getting a letter from you!

When you write of your daily activities, I find myself wanting to stomp around among your hens, collecting eggs and sprinkling chook feed, and picking your bee-infested lavender.

For my part, I’m feeling dead on my feet at the end of the day, though I don’t seem to actually do much. I remember working at Goodwin’s and having enough energy at the end of the working day to write, read, go out, socialise, stay up late. Then I’d be up in the morning, and off I’d go again … Perhaps it is that I have a lack of structure. There is something to be said for structure. It puts you on automatic like a washing machine. (Which I now have, in a purpose-built laundry. A Hoover Keymatic—It tends to jump across the floor occasionally, in thrall to its lumpy, unbalanced contents, but it does not destroy them, and they seem to come out cleaner than they went in.)

Truthfully, my nerves are so a-jangle by the basic things of life sometimes. It rises up in me, in my chest and stomach, a kind of rage without an object—I don’t know where it comes from, Tilde. I have nothing to be angry about. I wonder if this is all part of the character flaw our mother used to speak about. ‘You will never be happy with anything,’ she said, ‘It is not in your nature to be satisfied.’ I am beginning to think perhaps she was right. You know I can’t even bear to get out of bed sometimes because I know there is only cleaning up to do. And an empty house, with dust collecting … I had not properly realised that you do not need to create mess for there to be cleaning to do.