Out of a perhaps questionable quest for completeness, I have been working my way Rosemary Tonks’ oeuvre. Tonks was perhaps one of the better-known of “forgotten” writers — “The Poet Who Vanished,” as a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary was titled. As John Hartley Williams wrote in a 1996 piece for The Poetry Review, “She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties — she was a true poet of any era.” According to Williams, Tonks “sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today.”
Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Neil Astley, Tonks’ cousins and Bloodaxe Books, Tonks’ collected poetry — as well as a selection of her prose — was published shortly after her death in 2014 as Bedouin of the London Evening and is easily available. It’s also one of the rare cases where full advantage of e-publishing possibilities was taken, as the e-versions of the book include quite a number of audio recordings, including an interview from 1963. And having read all but Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During the Chase (1972), I would argue her poetry is far better than her prose.
But I’m not one to give up for purely aesthetic reasons. And so I sought out not only Tonks’ rare adult novels but also her ultra-rare children’s books: On Wooden Wings (1948) and Wild Sea Goose (1951). There are, as far as I can determine, about a dozen copies of either book available worldwide. There are three copies of On Wooden Wings currently for sale, one of Wild Sea Goose. So order your copy now.
I took advantage of my British Library card and scanned in reading copies of both books on a recent visit to London (the same trip that netted me my scan of Kathleen Sully’s Not Tonight). Tonks was just 20 when On Wooden Wings was published, but she’d already had one of her stories, “Miss Bushman-Caldicott” — “the story of a very nice cow” — read on BBC’s Children’s Hour. All the same, On Wooden Wings is best classified as juvenilia.
“Are you making shoes? or straightening them?” asked Webster.
Black Smith threw back his head and gave a guffaw of mirthless laughter.
“I’m making them crooked boy, crooked — twisted — and bent about!”
“Whatever for?”
“So that every horse that wears one of my shoes will hobble and fall, and every cart made with one of my wheels will run unevenly, always … ALWAYS!”
Knowing Tonks’ story and her adult work, one cannot read On Wooden Wings without looking for clues. In this case, one needn’t be overly Freudian to find them. Every one of Tonks’ novels features some irregular band of characters that provides, however haphazardly, a substitute for one’s own absent or unreliable family, and so does this one. Webster’s own family takes no notice of his departure. His new friends, on the other hand — every one of them an outcast — travel many miles to find him when the weather vane flies off with him, the tramp, and the dog.
And there are a few moments when we can see the wise-cracking Tonks of the novels — who could, at times, veer too far off course “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness,” as a blogger cleverer than I put it. One of Webster’s outcasts is Sebastian, a diminutive fellow who’s been rejected as a waiter. His worst sin, it turns out, was his failure to maintain the proper façade:
“I would write out the menus in English instead of in French, and of course everybody could read them!”
“But aren’t you supposed to read the menu?” asked Webster very surprised.
“Of course not. People can order anything they like, but when it comes to serving, we give them what we like. That is why all menus are in French, then nobody knows what they are getting.”
Still, I’m not sure these rare bits make the book as a whole worth reading, unless, as I say, you are a Tonks completist. If, however, you are one of that tiny band, please let me know. Cross your heart and swear to die you only talk like a digital pirate and I will be happy to pass along my amateurishly scanned PDF of the book.
Thanks for the comment. I highly recommend Bedouin of the London Evening, the collection of her poetry. A unique voice and one that probably has a more receptive audience, particularly with ornery women not convinced the world is quite what it thinks of itself. As for the novels …. yeah, maybe not worth selling stock for.
Just so you know, I for one have been carefully following your “questionable quest for completeness” and very much enjoying the second-hand information about Tonks’s novels and fiction. Though I’m not yet convinced I want to read them myself…! Still, I’m fascinated by her life and poetry, and I’m so glad she hasn’t been completely forgotten.