Chimes at Midnight Peter Scupham For Ann and Anthony Thwaite

Mr Gudgeon, the elderly bookshop assistant in Brian Aldiss’s first novel, The Brightfount Diaries, is given to sardonic aphorisms: ‘A miscellaneous collection of objects is man’s only defence against time,’ is one I particularly like. Navigating the steps and curlicues of The Mill House at Low Tharston, the Thwaites’ home for some fifty years, moving into the long low living room lit with a chequered light from the riverside windows, is to move into a room which is a metaphor for lives lived as travellers in space and time. A Roman bust shares its gaze with the staring eyes and flowing beards of Bellarmines, those stoneware drinking jugs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (We only wish we could have introduced him to his admired Robin Hildyard, of the Victoria and Albert, whose Exhibition Catalogue of stoneware was delightfully called Browne Muggs. Robin had also mentioned Anthony in an academic article, which delighted him.) Books, of course, are everywhere, shelved and nid-nodding to each other, heaped in piles; drawers open to reveal fragments of pottery: ‘Sherds, Peter, sherds, not shards.’ This a world of suggestions, shadows of lost knowledge; it exemplifies Anthony’s favourite book of Geoffrey Grigson’s, Looking and Finding, ostensibly for young collectors. We came from a collecting generation of schoolboys: mine were seashells, military badges, wildflowers... Ever since, as a boy, Anthony was given a silver denarius, he had been a looker and finder, alert for the secret signs which lie buried all around us. Both of us shared the National Service experience, jesting that Anthony’s acting rank as an Educational Corps ... read more

Sinéad Morrissey Inside St Mary’s Church in Gdańsk stands a Clock of Everything. At fourteen metres, it was the tallest clock ever built when Hans Düringer completed it in 1470, and it remains the largest wooden astronomical clock in the world. So beautiful its creator was allegedly blinded upon finishing it, the clock is the first thing that greets you as you enter the basilica by the north transept, its dark medieval wood highlighted by the white walls. Composed of three discreet but interlocking sections, like the Trinity, it functions as an at-a-glance answer machine, the Google of the fifteenth century. Of course it tells you the minute and the hour. But if you want to know the phase of the moon, or the relation of the moon to Taurus, or the relation of the sun to Capricorn, or the relation of the sun ... read more

Rebecca Watts

WATTS: I’d like to start with first encounters, because one of the things that perplexes me about Mew is how limited her reception has been over the past century. It was only a few years ago that I found her poem ‘The Trees Are Down’, somewhere near the beginning of an anthology of ‘modern verse’ I’d borrowed from the library, and was blown away by its freshness – that unique quality Mew has of channelling emotion and complex moral convictions into rhythms that are both speech-like and intensely musical. And I remember thinking: why haven’t I heard of this poet before? But then ... read more