Blown through with memories

I'll Raise The Wind Tomorrow

by Diana Calvert

Review by Frank Ruhrmund

ONE of the highlights of this year's St Ives Festival for poetry lovers in general and for admirers of Arthur Caddick in particular, is sure to be the launch in St Ives Library, held in conjunction with St Ives Bookshop, at 3pm on Tuesday, September 9, of I'll Raise the Wind Tomorrow. Published by Finishing Publications, Stevenage, an account of her childhood by the poet's daughter Diana Calvert, and an expanded version of that previously published under the same title in 1994, it comes complete with a CD of the author's father reading his poetry in his inimitable voice – a treat in itself.

But this is a book filled with treats, from its author's candour in recalling the birth of her sister Caroline, to her moving account of a Christmas rescued from oblivion by the arrival of a compensation cheque from the electricity board for an injury her father suffered when operating the switches for it – one of the duties which went with the family occupancy of Windswept Cottage at Nancledra, and which led to a Christmas Eve shopping spree in St Ives. An outing which culminated in one of the family's "most treasured moments: moments that knitted us all together in a warm blanket of love and joy."

While this may seem overly sentimental, it is far from being so. Diana Calvert does not look back at her childhood and her family through rose-tinted spectacles but with honesty and, on the very next page she describes how "Father Christmas ended abruptly for us all when I was about 11. At about midnight we were awoken by sounds that evoked thoughts of an earth tremor. All our precious presents came tumbling downstairs, followed closely by dad, while mum stood in the hallway speechless with exasperation. Dad blamed the stair carpet, mum blamed the rum punch but for all of us, Father Christmas was no more."

Mention of her Mum, reminds one of the saying that behind every great man there is a great woman, and there is no doubt that her mother Peggy was, if anything, greater than great.

From their days at Windswept Cottage in Cornwall and their Devon days to their very last days in Gloucestershire, Diana Calvert gives a frank and faithful account of what life was like for a child with a poet father. She links many of the poems he wrote with family events.

Perhaps the most moving, heartfelt and revelatory passage in her memoir is that in which she recalls her move to the big-ones' classroom at school. "This was my first taste of being an outsider, and to this day I can still be haunted by that intangible feeling of aloneness, like an echo from long ago.

"The trouble was that my father was a poet and to the other children in the class this meant our family was "queer" in the old-fashioned sense.

" If only I could have told them about his poetry. It clung to me like Cornish mist and saturated my senses with its beauty and poignancy. They saw a man with a booming voice, partial to drink and eccentric behaviour. I saw one of many colours, variable as the west wind, often infuriating, usually impossible, but so full of poetry and romance it was impossible not to love him. My mother found him the same and spent endless hours trying to convince herself otherwise.."

One of Cornwall's finest, one whose poems still have the power to move one to laughter as well as "cling like Cornish mist" to the soul – if only Arthur Caddick and his wife Peggy could be here now. While they would probably be surprised at much of what their daughter Diana has to say, at the same time I'm sure they would also be immensely pleased and proud of her for putting life with the poet Arthur Caddick and his family in context and, as it were, setting the record straight.