Southwold

Tomorrow I walk in beautiful Wendover Woods for The Altzheimer's Society. This week we spent a lovely Autumn day in Southwold where John Betjeman wrote a poem to his friend Mary Wilson wife of the former Prime Minister. The linking article enlightened  and the poem she wrote to mark his passing from Altzheimer's moved me.

"My love you have stumbled slowly
On the quiet way to death
And you lie where the wind blows strongly
With a salty spray on its breath
For this men of the island bore you
Down paths where the branches meet
And the only sounds were the crunching grind
Of the gravel beneath their feet
And the sighing slide of the ebbing tide
On the beach where the breakers meet."

Along the length of the pier are dedications of the sort you often see on seaside benches and which I always read feeling something akin to affection. Now in her nineties Mary lives quietly in Westminster where I suspect she still writes poetry...