biography

"Facts, facts! Teach these children nothing but facts." Thus MacChockcholmchild in Dickens' HARD TIMES. Likewise, I am not reading anything but biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. diaries, journals, letters, and nothing else but biographical writings replete with visceral intimate private and personal spitit and abundant in memorabilia and paraphernalia. My current reading--indeed re-reading--is Thomas de Quincey's CONFESSIONS which is a book that makes you love reading and encourages you to pick up pen and pad and do writing youself. The book is conversational not in the sense that it is humdrum but in the sense that it is intimate and establishes with you a relationship as if with a friend who keeps a good company and entertains with glib conversation

At the opening of CONFESSIONS de Quincey gives an account of his encounter with Coleridge in London when he, ie de Quincey has just arrived from Manchester, after a long tedious, strenuous but enjoyable journey all the same. De Quincey met Coleridge before he met Ann the street walker whom he immortalises in the CONFESSIONS. Both being penniless, Thomas and Ann lived in old shabby deserted houses in London where while one is asleep, a drunkard, a thief , a muderer, an escaped prisoner and what-not could enter. On 19th December 1979, while on the Exeter-London train, I got to know an Ann-like woman who was going back to London after coming to Exeter only to post Christmas cards to her parents in London to cheat them by the post-mark on the envelope that she was living away from London. Patricia was a sweet nice soul, always smiling, always merry, despite the tragedy of her life which she related to me. The episode was like one of the characters in Henry Fielding JOSEPH ANDREW travelling in a coach telling fellow-passengers the story of that jilted woman, Lenora whose house the coach was passing by on the way to London. I here summerise to you, dear Ib, Patricia's tragedy: Patricia was married and had a baby, and one night in the local pub, her husband went too far in abusing and humiliating her in front of everyone and they went home and he was still bothering her until he finally resorted to batter her. At this moment Patricia rushed to the kitchen and brandished a knife with which she stabbed her man who fell dead on the spot. "I took the baby in my arms," Patricia said to me making a gesture of a mother very much loving her babe, "and rushed back to the pub informing people about the incident, and the police arrived." She was placed in Royal Holloway Prison, South of London where she spent four and a half years as the incident was judged as misadventure. Pat, always looking at the bright side of things, felt nostalgic to her prison years and how cigarettes were smuggled to her and her prison-mates. When I asked her about her current residence, she told me--and here is the similarity between her and de Quincey's Ann--that she was living in a deserted home in the London's Angels area