The verses here derive from nine photos and five remembered images of my always English mother, Patricia Patience, b. 1922, whose last names were those of Dick, her foster father and a hard Sergeant Major of the Inniskilling Dragoons, of Bobs, her feckless natural father and scion of a famous family, of Meredith, my beloved alcoholic dad, and of Doug, her second husband and a good man. Pat was usually taller and prettier than women she befriended. She was admitted to Cambridge at 17, but war saw her on duty at The Admiralty, where she met a handsome Canadian naval officer who took her from all of England which made her less than she could and should have been.
“It was the same wind as the wind of my boyhood, still careless in the prairie grass.” – W.O. Mitchell