And when we lay down by the waterside
My lover whispered in my ear
The first thing that she said was Take Me
The last thing that she said was Cast Me Away
I saw a vision of my mother and father
They were sitting smiling under summer trees
They offered me the gift of life
I took this present very carefully
And one side of my life said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away
Reaching for the Light
Crocus in flames
Never burns up
Dew comes dropping
And it fills the cup
Darkness falls
Petals close up for the night
But when the dawn paints them
They start
Reaching for the light
Baby swimming
Inside your womb
Searching for brightness
In that warm gloom
Well blood is red
And milk is white
Out dives the baby
And she’s
Reaching for the light
Light springs the life in everyone
That’s why the planets dance around the sun
Light makes the heart and the spirit rise
That’s why Caitlin tries to touch your eyes
See the apple tree
Standing there
Stretching blossoms
In the shining air
See Caitlin growing
With all her sweet might
I want the moon
Mum
I’m reaching for the light
Stufferation
Lovers lie around in it
Broken glass is found in it
Grass
I like that stuff
Tuna fish get trapped in it
Legs come wrapped in it
Nylon
I like that stuff
Eskimos and tramps chew it
Madame Tussaud gave status to it
Wax
I like that stuff
Elephants get sprayed with it
Scotch is made with it
Water
I like that stuff
Clergy are dumbfounded by it
Bones are surrounded by it
Flesh
I like that stuff
Harps are strung with it
Mattresses are sprung with it
Wire
I like that stuff
Carpenters make cots of it
Undertakers use lots of it
Wood
I like that stuff
Dirty cigarettes are lit by it
Pensioners get happy when they sit by it
Fire
I like that stuff
Johnny Dankworth’s alto is made of it, most of it *
Scoobdidoo is composed of it †
Plastic
I like that stuff
Elvis kept it in his left-hand pocket
Little Richard made it zoom like a rocket
Rock ’n’ Roll
Ooh my soul
I like that stuff
Apemen take it to make them hairier
I ate a ton of it in Bulgaria
Yoghurt
I like that stuff
Man-made fibres and raw materials
Old rolled gold and breakfast cereals
Platinum linoleum
I like that stuff
Skin on my hands
Hair on my head
Toenails on my feet
And linen on the bed
Well I like that stuff
Yes I like that stuff
The earth
Is made of earth
And I like that stuff
* Jazz musician John Dankworth used to play a plastic saxophone.
† Scoobdidoo was a fistful of kind of multi-coloured pieces of plastic which were a playground craze in the 1950s. It was a sad sort of toy, nothing like the exciting Hula Hoop of the same period.
Silence
I held silence
Like a globe
I held silence
And it glowed
BOTY
Boty Goodwin
(obituary from The Guardian)
The last time we saw Boty Goodwin, our extra daughter, she was happy, blonde, optimistic and planning her thirtieth birthday party. That was about four weeks ago, in Boston, Massachusetts. Boty had flown in from LA for 24 hours to see Adrian’s new show Tyger Two and to spend a little time with us, the parents she’d adopted. Then she flew back to the California Institute of the Arts to give her final show before a board of examiners.
This was a presentation on November 6th of stories she’d written about her life performed against a background of beautiful wallpaper which illustrated key images from her history. At 29, she was already a brilliant artist/writer/performer – and her show delighted her examiners, who congratulated her, offered her a scholarship and encouraged her to take her Master’s Degree in both writing and fine art.
On November 9th she repeated the show for her fellow-students, who were dazzled and exhilarated. All her life Boty celebrated whatever was worth celebrating. That night she partied with her friends. At some point she was given a drug which killed her. She died in her studio in the early hours of November l0th of an accidental overdose of heroin.
Boty wasn’t a junkie or a suicide. Nor was she a martyr or a role model. She was a lovely, funny, very talented young woman who made one stupid, fatal mistake.
Boty Goodwin was an orphan. Her mother was Pauline Boty – one of England’s finest pop painters, an actress whose beauty was admired by everyone and whose shining intelligence enlightened her friends. Pauline was the painter of The Only Blonde in the World – perhaps the greatest and most lively painting of Marilyn Monroe.
Pauline met and fell in love with Clive Goodwin. He was a working-class actor, handsome, witty and hip, who became editor of the influential magazine Encore and later worked on the TV arts programme Tempo as right-hand man to Kenneth Tynan.
Pauline and Clive married. But shortly after she became pregnant, Pauline was diagnosed as suffering from a rare form of leukaemia. She gave birth to a daughter and died shortly afterwards. Clive decided that the baby should be named Boty. Boty spent her first years living with her loving grandparents in Surrey. Clive was nervous about looking after a little girl by himself, but we encouraged him to bring Boty to live with him in his large South Kensington flat.
The first time he looked after her on his own, Clive was terrified, so they both came to stay with us in the beautiful Yorkshire farmhouse where we lived at the time. Boty and our two daughters, Sasha and Beattie, who were around her age, became very attached to each other. It was during one of these visits that Clive told us: ‘If anything should ever happen to me, you will have Boty to live with you, won’t you?’ We laughed, of course, our friends didn’t die in those days. We laughed, but we agreed.
In 1968 Clive founded the Black Dwarf, that fine raging left-wing magazine in which, for a short time, socialists, artists, pacifists, anarchists, poets and communists formed a volatile alliance. By now Clive was also literary agent for most of the best left-wing playwrights in Britain.
One day, when Boty was nearly 12, Clive flew to Los Angeles to negotiate with Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths about the movie Reds. They met in the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel. During the meeting Clive drank one glass of wine. But he was suddenly attacked by a headache and had to leave. In the lobby of the hotel he staggered and vomited.
The hotel staff, thinking he was drunk, called the Los Angeles police. Clive was handcuffed and thrown into a police cell, where he died, alone, of a cerebral haemorrhage.
There was a big memorial meeting in a London theatre – with songs and speeches and poems. Boty, nearly 12 years old, not only came to the meeting, but insisting on appearing in a sketch of her own devising, in which she and Cli
ve’s secretary were trying to contact Clive by phone. Everyone knew right away that Boty, somehow, would survive.
Until she was 16, Boty lived with her grandparents and came to us in London for weekends and holidays. But she had lived with Clive in the centre of radical, bohemian, rocking London and she longed to return.
When she was 16 she chose to live with us and go to the local comprehensive. By now she was one of the family, a maker of laughter, a setter of style and a wonderful peacemaker in a sometimes stormy family. Our proudest moment came when Boty signed a card to us – lots of love from your extra daughter.
Four years after her father’s death the Los Angeles Police and the Beverly Wilshire finally settled out of court and Boty had financial independence. Her beauty and intelligence and wit attracted hundreds of friends and admirers. But she worried that some people were after her money – and a few of them were.
Boty believed fiercely in education. She knew that education for women is the only real way to freedom, but she also knew and understood politically the huge advantage she had over most other women because of her money. She was able to choose for herself to study at the California Institute of the Arts and pay her own way. But money didn’t corrupt her. She remained true to her Clive and Pauline’s principles while developing her own political philosophy.
Her family and friends and teachers and fellow-students are devastated. Maybe this will silence a few of those voices which whisper that ‘smack is cool if you know how to handle it’ and play on the glamour of dead and alive junkie rock stars to make heroin a fashionable poison. We feel both empty and angry about Boty’s death. But we and her extra sisters who loved her so utterly are immensely proud of her talented, shining life.
ADRIAN & CELIA MITCHELL
Boty Goodwin was born on 12th February 1966. She died on 10th November 1995.
The Forest and the Lake
(for Clive Goodwin, Pauline Boty and their daughter
Boty Goodwin, written soon after Clive’s death).
the forest laughed
plenty to laugh at –
squirrels at their gymnastics,
motorways full of fanatical ants
carrying out their looney missions,
overdressed pheasants holding fashion parades
watched by the rabbiting rabbits –
the forest laughed a lot
sun-washed clearings,
small thickets dark with grief –
it was a good forest to go to,
swaying and sheltering,
welcoming as a woolly, brown-eyed dog
one day the forest turned its head
and realised it grew beside a lake
the lake was liquid light
there were deeps with wisdom fish
long as your leg,
there were shallows with quick fish
tinier than pins,
swallows skimming and surfing,
a plump of ducks at their pleasure-boating
the lake looked down at the fish and smiled
the lake looked up at the waterbirds and smiled
the lake looked at the forest and smiled
and from that day
it was lake and forest
forest and lake
so lovely so lively
shining and shadow
the laughing forest
and the shining lake
green hand holding blue hand
a landscape of glory
in which so many of us wandered happily…
only the bird of badness sang: not long
and the earth shook twice
and the lake shook dark
and the forest shook still
dawn finds us watching
as a green and blue striped boat
drifts over smoking waters
up to the shaded shore
and, nearly twelve years old,
half forest and half lake,
out of the boat steps Boty
A Flower for Boty
Eloquent art
Speaking straight to the heart
Fills the critic with numbing dismay
For eloquent art
Speaking straight to the heart
Leaves the critic with fuck-all to say
Good Luck Message to Boty with Flowers
Before Her Finals at Cal Arts
With the Style of the Beatles
The Flash of Jean Harlow
And the Funkiness of Frida Kahlo
Plus the Fire of Blake
And the Wings of Shelley
C’mon Boty
Give it plenty of Welly
Telephone
Telephone told me that you were dead
Now I hate every telephone’s stupid head
I’d rather sit here turning to a block of stone
Than pick up any snake of a telephone
Every Day
Every day we’re going to talk to you Boty
Tell you the ridiculous News
The Politics of Bebopalula for All
And the Meaning of Red Suede Shoes
Every day we’ll have Visions of you Boty
Dressed up like a Birthday Cake
Every day we’re going to listen to your Voice
And your Laughter like a Trumpet Break
Every day we’re going to see you clearer
Stomping on a faraway Starry Floor
Every day we’ll edge a little bit nearer
Till we Dance with our Boty once more
(I wrote that last poem with a beautiful new fountain pen. I saw it at London Airport on my way to fly to Los Angeles for Boty’s Memorial Meeting. The pen was flecked in various shades of silvery blue and I couldn’t afford it. But I heard Boty whisper to me – Go on – buy it! Get blue ink and only use it to write poems. And when I paid for it, I heard Boty laughing.)
For Boty
Down on this planet
where we waver and wander
lost among the towering hours
Down on this planet
when an apple tree dies
there is a long leaning
and a slow falling through the years
until the moss-kissed insect-lively trunk
rests in its bed of grass
and becomes part of the grass
And down on this planet
if you drop a ball on the pavement
its bounces become smaller
till it finds a resting curb or gutter
Things fall and take their time in falling
and then they take their rest
But I don’t see you as falling darling
you seem to move
among our lives
like waves of the sea
like a mist of tears sun-touched with laughter
like a slow snowfall
like bonfire smoke
and the swirl of scarlet leaves
Especially When It Snows
(for Boty)
especially when it snows
and every tree
has its dark arms and widespread hands
full of that shining angelfood
especially when it snows
and every footprint
makes a dark lake
among the frozen grass
especially when it snows darling
and tough little robins
beg for crumbs
at golden-spangled windows
ever since we said goodbye to you
in that memorial garden
where nothing grew
except the beautiful blank-eyed snow
and little Caitlin crouched to wave goodbye to you
down in the shadows
especially when it snows
and keeps on snowing
especially when it snows
and down the purple pathways of the sky
the planet staggers like King Lear
with his dead darling in his arms
especially
when it snows
and keeps on snowing
from
ALL SHOOK UP
POEMS 1997-2000
THE YEARS SPEED BY
A Year Passes, as Years Do
January is a penguin on a slide of ice
on an iceberg full of penguins
watching a film called Iceberg
about an iceberg badly damaged by a monster ship
and a love affair between two of the penguins
but only one survived
there is a terrible song in the film
called Our Fish Will Go On.
February is a man called Fred
with cardboard in the soles of his holy shoes
as the Manchester rain pours down
and slaps his face with its chilly hands
and his coat is soaked through
so that putting his scarlet-blue
hands into his pockets only
makes them colder and damper.
March is a kite which breaks free of its string
and surfs across the sky over the South Downs
and sees the far coast of France shining
and starts to slide along the air currents over the Channel
dreaming of a happy landing in Paris.
April is a blue-eyed toddler
who staggers into a field of trampolining lambs
and sits in the meadowgrass
snatching at the raggedy white clouds
and singing a song about chocolate biscuits.
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