In Memory of Geoffrey Holloway (1918 -1997) - Poet and Friend

         He wrote me poems when I was born, phrases of which I remember sporadically: ‘Tiny hijacker, ’ ‘Learn me, my gentle name,’ with a tender rush of gratitude that someone wrote those beautiful words for me.

  He and his silver-haired girlfriend were friends of my parents from way back, too far back for them to remember how they met and became friends, as though the two couples had always known one another and always would. They would always, it seemed, sit around and chat and sip red wine, she curled up like a silver cat on our sofa, his hand touching the cashmere shoulder of her jumper every now and then as if to say: ‘I’m still here, just checking you’re still real’.

They would talk about poetry and life and people they all knew, and they would laugh and their faces would pinken from the food and wine and flicker in the shadows cast by the tea lights my mother always lit, and when I floated downstairs in my nighty he would shout - ‘a little ghost!’ - as I ran across the carpet to his embrace.

As I remember he was a very tall man with silver and black stubble on his face and when he lifted me up I was high enough  to look straight into the face of my great great grandmother’s wall clock which was pinned high up on the wall above the fire place. My Father recently told me that his friend was of average height, however from my small child’s three foot something recollections, he will always be tall.

They came to look after me several times, once when I was being kept off school with a cold. I would have been about six-years-old, and with his help I wrote my first poem, it was about winter being all pretty and frosty but making you sneeze and cough a lot. I knew he was a professional poet, but I did not at that time find it at all remarkable that he took my poem seriously, writing it out for me with all the words spelled correctly so I could copy it and present it to my Mother when she burst through the door with snow on her nose.

I soon got to an age where it was okay for me to stay up for dinner parties and be given a small glass of wine often mixed with water to make it look like a full glass. I used to love it when they came over, she with her beautiful hair, soft clothes and the way she smelt when she bent to kiss me, he with his warmth and the books he presented me with. They would always talk to me as though I was another adult even at seven and eight. If they were talking about a book he would turn to me and ask what I was reading and whether or not I was liking it, and it was often the case that the entire table would enter into a discussion of children’s literature, which eventually turned into a debate which went beyond my understanding, although I still  enjoyed just sitting back and listening to the rising and falling of their voices, as it fell into a steady lilting rhythm, almost like a poem, I thought.

Then there were the self-involved years of early adolescence when my parents friends didn’t seem to matter. I have no recollections of seeing either of them between the ages of eleven and thirteen, although I suppose I must have done at some point.

My last memory of him is of visiting a too brightly lit hospital ward where he lay in bed, thin and frail, the veins on his arms sticking up like jutting blue pathways. My father did most of the talking and my mother some, but I didn’t know what to say, rendered awkard by the strangely clinical atmosphere and the proximity to death. I regret that now, I would have liked to have spoken to him more. As we left my Father said to one of the nurses: ‘You know, that man you are looking after is a brilliant poet.’ She was totally disinterested and my Father left hurt by her attitude. 

I didn’t come to his poetry until several years later, and then it was with a sense of revelation and loss. I did not know before how brilliant he was, and I, like the ward nurse, was too busy with my own concerns, too disinterested to find out. Yet I feel he would have understood, he would have known that I would come to his words later.

‘Words were foreign, message clear,’ he wrote in his first poem to me, perhaps knowing how long it would take before I could truly grasp his poetry.

You can read  Geoffrey's obituary in the Independent here. You can also find the full text of his heartbreakingly beautiful poem The Lovers here.