The Gooseberry Set
                             The Bohemian Life and Times of Martha Rowe-Dente
                                                      An Authorised Biography
                                                   By Genevieve Hedgley-Hogg


              At her beginning Martha was born into a scramble of pink and hairless siblings, all eyes-a-bulge beneath blind sealed lids in the squabble to compete for a place at the teat.  Alarmed by the rudiments in the basics of survival, Martha knew that she must search out beauty down the by-ways to dreams and once fixed upon this noble purpose, promptly barged two brothers and yanked at a sister to gain the firmest nipple for the longest suckle of the sweetest milk.
             Once grown away from Mama's warm and patient belly, Martha preened her auburn fur and took a wide eyed look over and about and around.  Twitching her nose to the air, Martha turned tail on Mama's skirting-board home and scampered the pattern across the linoleum floor with a hippety skippity run, run, run right out of the parlour's back street door where the gutter welcomed her with a half hot dog dobbed bright with a yellow mustard that overkeened her big brown eyes until they smarted a mite too much and moved her on to a stale bagel to neatly nibble on in little mousey crescents before proceeding on her way to skipperty whoops through a grating into the Miller's cellar where she flipped top over tail to belly first most flop onto a softfall sack of flour.  A timely repose...... until bumpity wake up and down bounce behind the back of a horse drawing a barrow upon which herself was found to be on a ride atop a pyramid pile of softfall sacks all a-judder to the cobbles dancing down the street until the salt-sea breezed on Martha's whiskers and the horse hoof clipped its clop, rocking the wheels on quarter turns by a Steamer-Ship-Cruiser on the Water-Dock-Front.
             Two stevedore arms threw Martha and sack across the burly-broad of a double-bend back and then down into the hold of a ship's black echo where a fellow mouse introduced himself as the Honourable Ismbard Rowe-Dente, Philosopher and Poet.
             He was a kind mouse and escorted her to the ship's kitchen where they sat by a porthole eating gorgonzola and patais de fois gras as the ship sailed away from the huge green lady giant wearing a star crown and holding a flame. Ismbard explained that she was THE BIG LIBERTY and they were leaving her country now and sailing to London England where he had lodgings behind a mahogany bookcase in Cordwray Square off Gooseberry Street and Martha was most welcome to join their commune and even be his Mousewife.
             Martha accepted and settled down her life in amongst composers of nutshell symphonies and sculptures in turnip and potatoes and Martha too found her own limelight as an artist of some repute in the medium of many coloured lentils and the odd dried pea.  
 

                                                       CHRISTOPHER'S PENNY


Christopher Jessop steals a penny.
His hawk-eye swoop selecting any
But the old and dulled from crust and rind,
Patina'd from their daily grind.
He pockets a belief that luck shines new,
With a flourish of his his wrist to enhance and accrue
An enchantment beyond the Mint's Royal form
But a mock magicians vanity mis-invokes the charm
And a pen'eth bright talisman to ward off strife
Begins the miscalculation of the rest of his life
As Christopher audaciously chooses his worth
From Fortune's coin-fat, sow-ear purse.
Fate does not expect to be picked,
Chosen, stolen, manipulated, tricked.
Destiny plays on empty selves,
Sturdy bookcases of vacant shelves
Where volumes amass and pages unfold,
Connecting the chapters of lifetimes told
With counter plots that combine and cleave
As chance encounters interweave
Each symbioses episodic code,
Bound, titled, embossed and stowed
Upon oaken ledges across spine-lined walls,
While driftwood libraries of penny-dreadful lives
Are the pulp and plunder of pirated archives.


Postulation is his coin-tossed way
Of little to do about much to say.
Arrogance intoning superior stance
Promptly flicks the penny askance
To barely skim Friendship's crown
As self-indulgence spirals down
Its centrifugal, gyroscopic fall
Sucking attention from one and all.
A desperation perfectly able
To systematically make itself stable
By the duplicity that dwells behind the eyes
Where fierce heat actuates cool surmise.
The sycophantic swooping on samaritan prey
With his talons drawn for their deeds of the day,
Ready to translate each charitable act
As a matter of dutiful, subservient fact
While Flattery's fists uncurl their plea
To deliver impassioned falsity
Abundant with gratitudes empowering request
And chaining Goodwill to bogus behest.
A concave belief boasts a mute penny's charm,
Enforced by the hand with the begging-bowl palm
Of Christopher Jessop's obsequious game
Where Grandmaster versus the timid and tame
In his faking of a path to a victory at last


Christopher's penny bribes a belief
In self-exemption from misfortune's grief
To focus the fanaticism in dementia's eyes
Through desperation to delusion's disguise
Of foppery chancing a brocaded arm,
Languidly cradling the gilded charm,
Loquacious in pretenses of grandiose ability,
Elaborating his non-existant nobility
With a wile both witty and debonair
Able to outstare what is not there.
Where an unremarkable coin was found,
Plumes and kerchieves trail the ground,
Bowing and scraping to an imperious role
In deference to Christopher's splendid soul,
Baroque etiquette beckons admiration
With curlicue gestures of self -adulation.
Until the penny's charisma tires
And egotism's patina conspires
To rewrite itself in parody
With melodrama's tragedy
Of error eluding shame,
Prompting bigotry to recast blame
In zig-zag acts of counter-claim
As scripted accusation through turns of rage
Where justification exits the stage.



A shiny penny, a deliberate fake,
An amulet inducing the ultimate mistake,
A deviation across Christopher's palm
Heralding elitism's dysfunctional charm
Whereby he over-supposes himself
A crust above the upper-shelf,
An attitude throwing choice
Out of the mouth and through the voice
To assume assertion's delirious pride
Covering in one misguided stride
The dead-step distance of a cul-de-sac
Where cement never sets beneath soft tarmac
So he browbeats certainty into Fate's round hole
In angular accordance with his self-styled role
Of bonhomie brimming fear,
City sorcerer and urban seer
Tipping elation to spill distress
Laced with a tantrum's verbal prowess
Of inaccuracies summoning an image-mirage
To spellbind his faery entourage
With wizardry's wind-bag affectations
Expounding long-bearded incantations
To compound fracture a frail wish-bone
As magus minus alchemist's stone
Melds head-call ego to tail side coin.

                                                                         Mary's Bridge


Mary Forest walks a bridge
Across a gully steeped in mist
As on a stair not actually there
She treads her way upon the air
Each stepful, a half-pace to a truth never found
Before the consecutive heel meets the ground
In just such a nick of delirious time
Her stumbles are kept from falling
Callous inglorious depths
Blind through fog, the whitest of fears
Sensing her ridicule by silenced jeers,
Pierced by the angry jutting of chins
Of rugged scorn on opposed rockfaces
Massively dropping to their temporary bases
Where the merest trickle of the sharpest doubt
Is the blade that gouged the entire gorge out.
Crossing these breaches of self-infliction
Are the bridges that span self-belief's suspension
Where the stalwart traverse the humped back stone
Anchored from whence and toward,
While Mary is offered only upturned bellies
Of rotting timbers, unsecured,
Over which she now scrambles
To the loud snap and crack
Of a long strained hope too ferociously yearned.

Mary washes her sorrows with sins.                



                                                                               2



Midway across is an icy draught
That creeps through flesh and catches hearts
On a note of pain in the key of flight
Its perfect pitch kills the beat of life
To leave its victims turned to stone
Standing upon the bridge alone
As if before an invisible door
Forbidding an entry that cannot be seen
By its own non-existence its closure remains
In equidistance from losses to gains
Where souls sway as the raging trees,
Rooted, yet flailing in the mounting breeze,
The Herald of Almighty Storm.
In the wake of The Storm not arriving
Comes weariness in place of calm
That might have rewarded her patience,
Her waiting, her withstanding harm.
But incentive is a vague nostalgia,
A perspective of sepia'd passio
n and pain,
A leeching of colour from a prime desire
Necessary to Mary's creative fire
Long since extinguished by a rain-sad cloud
Dissolving belief to build self-doubt
As a phantom bridge of crumbling pride,
A disintegration to no other side.



                                                                                3

Mary Forest does not fall,
There is no vertiginous gorge at all.
The drop is Delusion harnessed to Desire
Where Sorrow and Disappointment conscientiously conspire
To lead her across Humiliation's rift
On the pride broken back of an illusory bridge
And suspended so high in her dizzy minds eye
A life-locked, death-white, bone chilled fright
Has muted true talent, once forthright,
Now left at half-mast to Vocation's call,
A ragged flag in a bitter squall,
Tattered by the hoists of expectation.
Disastrous insignia flown to distraction
That were better folded deep in the hold
Of some secret vessel that might chart a life
Without emblem or figurehead inviting dissipation
Of the one sure course and true.
For while Tall Ships are dispatched to port after port
Of Umbridge, Pique and the Cape of Forlorn,
Their rudders shifted by others' scorn,
The sea-mist boats and low grey barges
Steer their own invisible voyages
By the hand of self-recognition,
Through storm after storm, past fear and submission,
To the places that shout "AHOY".      




                                                                             4

Mary Forest has known such a place,
"Ahoy" and welcome to this sacred space
Of knowing who you are and what you must do
Without recourse to the counter view
With which others will try to wear you down
By the glower of a strange and eerie frown
That understands nothing of a Path or Way
But fearing your success, insists you stay.
So Mary has embarked on her peculiar Life,
Undaunted but aware of its inevitable strife,
And so she strode far and wide,
Bonny and bold with nothing to hide.
'Til an evil twang from an enemy bow
Shot an accurate arrow from her crown to her toe.
Poison tipped and poison barbed,
It fastened its septicaemic fear,
Year, after year, after year, after year,
Bringing Mary to the fever of her hallucinatory bridge
Where from such parallel, pre-constructed crossing,
Her foe, already maimed, had maliciously aimed.
And Mary will duplicate the venomous quiver
Should the malignance grow and her soul not deliver
A formula once lost as a remedy regained,
And by this rediscovery reinstating the pure,
Walk from her bridge by miraculous cure.    

Isabel was either writing or thinking about writing and she wrote many different kinds of things. Among these were her stories for children and I've reproduced one here in the hope that you might read it to a child in memory of Isabel or any other lost loved one.
              The story is taken from a collection of ten entitled "A Woodland Journal", which opens a window into the life of the hedgehog Genevieve Hedgley Hogg and Ottersby a befriended otter.


                                                           OTTERSBY'S DRAGONFLY

               A little bit quite before the mid-of-the-day, Ottersby sploshed into the cloudy-green for his swim-time up the upway of the stream for the surprise-catching-out of a fat-lazy-trout.
               With his paws a-paddle beneath the cool and the summer warm upon his back, he kept a tidy pace on the exact mid-line with his special V-shape ripple a-rolling out from each of his either sides to the backwards and outwards, to the east bank and the west bank, making all the river his own.
                 In the flash-of-a-blink out of the corner of one eye, Ottersby glimpsed the hitheree-ditheree hover-dance of the delicately beauteous-ful dragonfly and changed his direction with a roll and a dive to resurface wet-nose-first beneath the jewel of all the flies for a closer close-up spy.  She hitheree'd and ditheree'd all garmented in shiny rainbow and kingfisher blue and Ottersby was entranced in a dreamy trance until such time as off and away she flew.
                 Ottersby scampery-skipped up the bank and through the long-sweet grass that edges the river's edge and trot-trotted into the woods to a place where the wood-chop-men had not very long ago been.  He picked up a tiny-pointy piece of charred-cold wood from the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and sketched himself his very own dragonfly onto a roundy slither of the pale inside of tree. Then he mosaic'd his very own dragonfly with the pretty petal pieces of bitter-sweet-forget-me-not-Rosebay-willow-herb-robert and varnished them down with the sticky clear resin from the fir cone tree and for his finally finishing touch he dippy-dipped the endmost tips of his whiskers into the ashes of the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and finely traced the faint fairy filigree of his dragonfly's wispy wings.
                All gleamy-eyed with pleasure and pride he raced home to Genevieve his most favourite Hedgley-Hogg and showed her his very own dragonfly to be forever kept and forever seen where he bang banged it with a nail to the wall and when his tummy rumble-tumbled with the forgetting of the catching of the trout, Genevieve served him with an especially fat slice of devilled worm pie with mint and rocket salad and they toasted Ottersby's dragonfly with an especially old and favoured vintage of rosehip and crab-apple wine.

19th Century Creen Indian

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
we will realise that we cannot
eat money

(Taken from a postcard)

the smile

it is autumn
a woman steps through soft bars of moonlight
on the edge of a tall forest
a white owl hoots from the tree tops,
leaves drift down all around her
in the dark wind
like huge flakes of golden snow;
as she comes nearer
she can hear the rustle and sigh of the ocean
see the distant gleam of the surf on the beach,
she smiles
as though she has found a way
to climb through the air to the stars.....

The Lions Carcass

By
Isabel Wallace

This novel will capture and challenge your every thought and emotion - are you who you really want to be or has someone taken the self from you?

The Lions Carcass based on the story of Samson and Delilah a must read and only £4.99. Follow the link to make your purchase.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/isabel-wallace/the-lions-carcass/ebook/product-21130454.html