At last! Your Poet is here in the world and in the book (and one day, I hope, in the film) and everything can be all about me, which let’s face it is the point of it all. First, let me tell you about the auspicious omens surrounding my birth. Like everything else to do with me, they are very interesting. Of course, they mostly happened before I arrived, and it is mainly hearsay and legend, but obviously it is all true nonetheless. I was told about them when I was developing into what I have developed into, and I only wish I could remember them all. There was one about chickens, how they rushed out of their cage and greedily gobbled up the grain, which is a sign of divine approval, apparently, in the Methodist church. And it was said that buzzards were seen circling over the estate in the days leading up to my birth, which was regarded by the servants and among the villagers as auspicious, even though to me it sounds a bit weird. The family always said that a single ray of sunshine shone through the window of the room in which I was born as soon as I poked my head out into the world, which I think is quite nice, and that was undoubtedly a good sign, if it actually happened. The one I have, I admit, a little trouble with has to do with the reading of urine, which by all accounts was a favourite back in the history of these parts, before the introduction of hygiene and sanitation regulations. The subject (in this case, your baby poet) urinated into a chamber pot and then the pee-pee would be examined. The ways of interpreting the wee-wee varied considerably, with some old ladies (it was always an old lady) reading omens into the taste (taste?!?!) or smell of the liquid, while others preferred to look at the flow and colour. Another thing they did, apparently, was look at the bubbles. Large bubbles spaced apart signified good luck, in particular future incoming wealth or, in my case, future literary genius. It sounds like hokum, but then look how things have turned out! Of course, I was not around to witness any of this, but I have it on reasonably good authority, and everything you read is true, more or less.
I shall be honest. I do not remember very much about my first years. I was very young, and did not know that one day I would be writing an autobiography about myself, so I did not take notes, or keep a diary, or anything of that sort. Obviously I was a beautiful baby (look at the photograph!) and it was not very long before I turned into a very cute toddler (look at the other photograph!).
I can remember a few things from those early days. One, if I called my mother ‘Mummy’ she would tell me off and tell me I would not get my tea unless I called her ‘Ma’. And my father ignored me completely unless I called him ‘Pa’, which given that I had a very limited vocabulary to begin with – only two or three words when I started out – I am not sure if I understood what the problem was. (Actually, now I come to think of it, there is no way I could possibly remember that. I will say that I was told about it later by a relative, perhaps an aunt. But I digress, and will come back to this later before the book is published and make it more believable. As I have said before, this is all very much a first draft, and I will probably change things later, especially if they are things that make no sense and are obviously not true.) But anyway, it is clear, I think, that my parents always had very high expectations of me, even while I was in the process of learning how to talk and walk. Two, Ma outsourced most of what would normally have been a mother’s work to an old woman from the village who, I learned many years later, was widely believed to be the head of the local coven. Whether or not she was I have no way of knowing, but if you look back into the archives of the local newspaper of the time it does appear that there may have been reasonable grounds for the suspicions. I refer you, too, to the urine tests mentioned earlier. I mean – seriously?
I really do not have much else to say about my baby and early toddler period, except that I know, because my Pa always used to accuse me of it, that I was very precocious, which I think is the right word, and when my governess read to me I would often correct her pronunciation, even while I was still in nappies and struggling to string proper sentences together for myself.
Yes, I had a governess, and this bit could get extremely interesting because my governess was an extremely interesting and – how shall I put this? She was an extremely imaginative person who, in retrospect, and by today’s standards, had a very idiosyncratic take on the best way to rear a young male boy child. But this is probably a good place to take a break and I ought to check with my lawyers about what I can say and what I cannot say, and I should also check with my agent, who is very good about things such as what the reading public will tolerate and what would be literary suicide. I will be back!
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James Henderson
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