The artist, poet and novelist Ida Affleck Graves (1902–1999) was born in India. When she was six she was sent to a religiously minded boarding school in Eastbourne where she was deeply unhappy. She was eventually rescued by an aunt and moved to a Quaker school in Penge where her artistic talents were recognized and encouraged. Her first collection of poems, The China Cupboard (1929), was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and in 1934 Graves and her second husband, the wood-engraver Blair Hughes-Stanton, founded the Gemini Press which published her second book, Epithalamion. Her third outing, Mother and Child, was published on VE Day in 1945 when, as she said many years later, it was “rather overshadowed by other events”. Two novels and three books for children followed in the 1950s. Although she continued to write poetry, she “stuffed most of it into a drawer”. In the early 1990s, however, a teacher came across her work and encouraged her to prepare a collection: A Kind Husband, in which “The White Goat” eventually appeared, was published in 1994, when Graves was ninety-two, and was followed in 1999 by The Calfbearers, published just six months before she died. Writing about her in 1994, Blake Morrison was charmed by her outspokenness. Was she surprised by her success? “When I look at my book I think it’s bloody good.” Did she read the poetry of any of her contemporaries? “I don’t want to be buggered up by the Moderns.”
“The White Goat” is full of the close observation of the born artist: “Effort’s rapture tilts her face for the swallow and the horns / Sweep back with the timelessness of scribbled fossils”. But we can also feel her impatience with the religious dogma of her first school (“take this apple. It fell and nobody has fouled it / Or sinned and it shares this old hand’s innocence”), which is perhaps what prompts this touching embrace of the pagan. Most moving of all, though, is Graves’s recollection of the deep loneliness of boarding school life: “Write to me in parcels, post me snapshots liquorice and soft cheeses / From home signed with udder warm hugs and kisses / … till I come to believe / Weeping, this love is my very own”.
The White Goat
Oh goat, take this apple. It fell and nobody has fouled it
Or sinned and it shares this old hand’s innocence.
Collar and chain tighten, the neck tassels and the rolled ears dance,
Juice creaks on her tongue squeezing the oval eyes to a slit
And the arcs of her horns plunge down.
Effort’s rapture tilts her face for the swallow and the horns
Sweep back with the timelessness of scribbled fossils.
Up goes her lip, she bares her teeth in a laugh up-wind and rustles
The grass with pellets, the plume wags and her camera lens
Closes its pink shutters and has done.
I beg you be my mother, for mine was nothing to speak of.
Write to me in parcels, post me snapshots liquorice and soft cheeses
From home signed with udder warm hugs and kisses,
Welcome me with milk in a tall glass till I come to believe,
Weeping, this love is my very own.
IDA AFFLECK GRAVES (1963)
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