Criss-Crossing Life
By: Sylvia Wohlfarth
Tags: Poetry, Chance Encounters, Short Story, Family, Life

Walking home past one of our local bookshops, I decided spontaneously to drop in. I needed, though, to have a better excuse than simply going in to look around and buy some random book. I have a pile at home waiting to be read and though I rarely buy poetry books I have started to do so lately. Over the last few weeks, I have bought poetry books from William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.

I had been thinking of getting something to read for my godmother for Christmas and thought this to be a good opportunity… before I forgot. She lives up the country on her own and has been cocooning since March. Her reasoning is not because she’s afraid of dying, in fact, she‘d welcome it. She’s 88 and fears that there’ll be no-one there to care for her if she gets Covid-19. She wouldn’t want to put any of her family at risk.

And as my godmother often points out, she’s had a very interesting life:

In the early fifties, she left rural Ireland to study at Cork University and then emigrated to Nigeria as a very young lass to teach in a missionary school. There she met my mother, formed a binding friendship and at my birth was appointed my godmother.

Now, although both women were from Cork (city and county) and my godmother went to University at the same time as my father — who she remembered, he being one of only three Black students — all three had to leave Ireland and travel all the way to Nigeria to meet and form a lasting friendship.

My godmother left before the Biafran civil war broke out in Nigeria in the late sixties. Back in Ireland, she went on to become the headmistress of a girl’s school, married late in life, remained childless, and has been a widow now for twenty years.

She was particularly good to me when, between the age of ten and thirteen, I was separated from my family during the civil war. In boarding school in Ireland and my family in the war in Nigeria, I spent many a lovely summer holiday on her family’s farm.

One evening, I remember, she handed me an age-appropriate book on the facts of life, saying once I’d read it, if I had any questions I could ask her. I was eleven. I didn’t. I was too embarrassed.

Back to the bookshop

An old school friend and poetry writing sparring partner had mentioned a book her daughter had given her a few weeks previously. ‘A poem a day’ is all I could recall. I thought this an ideal present for my godmother, someone on their own who, too, loves reading poetry. I went straight to the poetry section but couldn’t find the anthology, or anything similar.

Instead, my eye caught Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I loved the look of it. The perfect poetry book, deservedly hard covered, lovely to hold and feel and with a fifty’s retro look in mint, black and cream. A work of art with details reflecting the vagaries of her mind.

I scanned through one of my favourite poems of hers, Daddy, the name I, too, called my father. But here the similarities end. Plath’s poem never fails to fascinate me. Having lived for over forty years in Germany before moving back to Ireland a few years ago, I know German history and speak the language. I can culturally relate to the German associations in her verse. The powerful lines. This untouchable father, the anti-father, distant in his violence. The Nazi, the devil, the vampire.

“Daddy, I have had to kill you

You died before I had time-”

says it all.

So, clutching Ariel I joined one of the long Christmas queues, masked and physically distancing. At the cashier, I enquired about the poetry book for my godmother. Of course, there were many versions in the computer and as I neither knew the name of the editor not title, the cashier suggested I check with my friend and get back to him. He would order it then for me.

Now, dear reader, this is not where my bookshop story comes to an end

As happenstance would have it, I had another little poetic episode. And it happened to be standing in the queue next to me.

Alert as ever, I heard a cashier greeting a customer with an “Ah if it’s not our Cork laureate, Gerry Murphy. Good Day.”

Now Murphy is a very common name in Ireland. Generic. My mother was a Murphy and so then am I.

In the context of the word, laureate, said in banter I assume, Gerry and Murphy struck a chord.

I was conscious of a stocky bearded middle-aged man. But no voice.

I have a poem stuck onto the wall next to my bed. A poem a colleague printed and gave me when I told her I was a poetry lover and keen to discover local Irish poets. This has to be one of my favourite one-liners. It conjures up a lucid flow of imagery, a confluence of faraway lands and drops them silently at your feet.

Once home, so keen was I to read some of Plath’s poems, I forgot to check the name on my one-liner. It wasn’t until I went to bed that evening when lo and behold whose name did I see on my wall? Yes, Gerry Murphy. The Cork poet I had been hoping to meet one day.

Sorry for the creases. It was folded up in my bag for some time before I hung it up

I‘ve decided to learn the poem off by heart and thus, be prepared for our next encounter. I’ll ask Gerry if he‘s referring to Lagos/Portugal or Lagos/Nigeria (my birthplace) in his poem. Fingers crossed it’s the latter.

And who knows, Gerry and I might even be related.

In Ireland everything is possible.