Stories in stones

Since childhood I have been fascinated by museums, large ones, small ones, famous ones, struggling local ones. They have always seemed to me to be repositories of stories - the stories of people's lives from centuries or millenia ago, which we can somehow still access through the artefacts they left behind. Much of it must be conjecture of course, but that's what I enjoy, the chance to let my imagination run riot to recreate a life lived long ago, perhaps in a far flung part of the world. And that then leads on to the opportunity to put that life on paper, as a story or a poem.

I'm delighted to have been asked to read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival this year, at an event in the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum with the American poet Carrie Etter and my friend and Picaresque colleague Penny Howarth. It will be on Saturday May 14th at 8.00pm and we'll be reading poems inspired by the Wilson's permanent collection. Some of the ones I shall read were written last year and a couple appeared in "Poetry Amongst The Paintings", our Picaresque pamphlet launched in December, but I'm still working on several more.

Two other pieces of work still underway - a poem and a short story - had their origins in a visit last summer to the museum in Stroud. Two lives I'm reconstructing are of young girls from the area who lived hundreds of years apart. The first was a girl named Julia Ingenelli; all we know of her is what is recorded on her tombstone -

To the spirits of the departed
Julia Ingenilla
who lived 20 years, 5 months
and 29 days

The tombstone was found in Horsley, a village not far from Stroud, presumably where this well connected young Italian woman lived some time between 100 and 200AD. Who had those words inscribed? Someone who knew the intimate details of her life, a grieving father perhaps? Fertile ground there for pursuing.

The second girl's name was Elsie Burford, a scholar in Stroud almost a hundred years ago. Her nature studies drawing book is on display in a cabinet in the reconstructed school room at the museum, opened at a page headed "April 19th 1922". Where was she when she captured these impressions of dragonflies? What was the weather like, how was she dressed, who was she with? What became of her subsequently? The pen picture I can draw from the fragments of information I have may bear little relation to the reality of her life but hopefully will contain just a sliver of the essence of it.