Mary Michaels explores the life and work of Joan Barton on the 100th anniversary of the local poet’s birth

Joan Barton’s Miss Prideaux of Clifton (the beginning of which isreproduced in the panel to theright) is a poem which peoples theterraces and squares familiar to anypresent-day Bristolian with their shabbygenteel inhabitants of the early part ofthe last century. In a hundred or so lines, we are given the measure of one elderlylady’s meagre daily life and its contrastwith her previous existence as thedaughter of a respected military officer. Of the three carefree young women inthe family, Charlotte is now immured inan Anglican convent (for some breach ofconvention we can only guess at), Arabella prematurely dead and buried inSt Andrew’s churchyard and Eleanor, thespeaker, surviving on her memories witha few remaining family possessions; oddbits of Spode china, Waterford glass, aquilt made from silk from hergrandmother’s trousseau. Without a traceof self-pity she faces the stairs to hersmall top-floor room, taking comfortfrom the morning’s Cathedral sermonand looking forward to hearing throughher window the nightingales singing inthe woods above the Gorge. It is asperfectly realised as a Chekhov shortstory and has a not dissimilar poignancy.

The writer, Joan Barton, is however, little known in Bristol and little noticedin the surveys of the poetry of her era (she was contemporary with W.H.Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice); an omission which is now beginning tobe made good. She was born in Redlandon 6 February 1908 to parents who ranan art dealers’ and frame-makingbusiness at 84 Whiteladies Road (thepremises which in 1966 were to becomeBristolreviewOFbookshome to the Clifton Bookshop). Theeldest of three children, she won ascholarship to Colston Girls School. Always good at organising, as well aspassionately involved in reading andwriting (in her early teens she filled anexercise book with capably finishedpoems, a number of which were printedin the school magazine), she becamehead girl. Accepted to read English at StHugh’s College, Oxford, she was forced toforgo her place when she failed to getfinancial support; the family could notmanage to meet the cost. Instead, shebegan a degree at Bristol University butafter falling ill with a thyroid disorderwhich put her in hospital for much of hersecond year, abandoned the course towork as an assistant in the big localbookshop, ‘George’s’ on Park Street. Bookselling was in fact to become herprofession when, in 1947, after workingfor the BBC in Bristol, the Land Army inHampshire and then the British Council, she opened the White Horse Bookshopin Marlborough with her businesspartner Barbara Watson. After moving toSalisbury twenty years later theycontinued to trade in second-handbooks; specialising in modern Britishfirst editions, detective fiction andchildren’s fiction until Barton’s deathin 1986.

Thursday’s Child
Remembering for me
the day that I was born
the February day
you said it was the gentlest spring
that you had ever known
the sky clear as a bell;
drowsily you lay
and watched it
and the thin blue shell
of morning growing light;
it smelt of joy;
and I the first-born in your arms asleep,
together, gathered close,
and all was peace for pain.
Alas, but I was Thursday’s child
and we had far to go
to find such peace again

Few people who knew Joan Barton as abookseller were aware of her other life asa writer. Probably none knew that thefirst poems she had published (at the ageof twenty-two) had attracted theenthusiastic attention of Walter de laMare; that Philip Larkin included her inhis definitive Oxford Book of TwentiethCentury Verse; that she was the subject ofa Radio 3 programme in the series TheLiving Poet in 1975; or that the presentPoet Laureate, Andrew Motion, selectedsome of her work for a programme of hisown, describing himself as ‘a great fan’. Equal admiration was expressed by JohnBetjeman (who urged her to publishwork she showed him when they workedtogether in the 1940s), by Cecil DayLewis and later, Anne Stevenson. Suchwas her modesty and sense of privacythat even some members of her ownfamily were unaware of her writing untilher first book The Mistress (Sonus Press, Hull) came out in 1972. Her very highstandards kept her output small; when anexpanded collection, A House Under OldSarum, appeared – to favourable reviews– in 1981 from Peterloo Press, Barton was already in her early seventies. At her death, she had published abouteighty poems.

It is fortunate that the centenary of herbirth comes at a time when literarystudies are moving beyond slottingBritish poetry into catch-all categories; ‘the Auden influence’ (1930s), ‘Neo-Romanticism’ (1940s), ‘The Movement’ (1950s) and so on. There is an increasingacknowledgment of the range and varietyof work that was being producedthroughout the twentieth century.

Barton’s work particularly resistssimplistic classification. An outsider interms of the literary world – on accountof her gender, class, Redbrick University, provincial location – she wasnevertheless very aware of changingliterary modes and fashions. In the mid-1930s, for instance, she moved from theuse of strict metre and rhyme to a moreflexible, colloquial mode of expression, feeling that the former had become ‘oldfashioned’. But her poetry was groundedin her own world; a prosperousprovincial city that lived by trade, a placeof sounds, smells and physical objects, every one of which, like the silk-linedsunshade carried by Miss Prideaux, had atale to tell. So precise and concrete is a Barton poem that the series to which ‘Miss Prideaux of Clifton’ belongs (Aphrodite, Snow in the Streets, TheTimber Wharf, The Wet Summer, WhoseComrade?, all written between 1935 and1939) stand as a document of the Bristolof their era; its cargo ships, dock basins, timber wharves, malodorous passages, cooped-up clerks, grim prison-likehospital as well the crumblingeighteenth-century architecture andnatural beauty of Clifton and the Downs.

This Bristol was effectively destroyedby the Second World War, which alsoushered in a fallow period for her poetry; busy with her job, she wrote none at allfor almost sixteen years. In the mid-1950s in Marlborough, the impulsereturned. Her work from this middlephase draws on her experiences in thebook trade, on friendships (usuallyrecalled in absence) and on holidayjourneys. Frequently, the focus of thepoem is a single character whose wholelife story she manages to imagine fromthe slightest of traces; a photo tucked intoa book bought at auction (Lot 304: Various Books), a few scribbled words inan old desk diary (The Major: AnEpitaph) or a retired working man’slibrary that she has been called in to clear (A Passion for Knowledge in NorthWiltshire). The life she summons up isoften marked by failure – aspirationsunfulfilled, opportunities unrealised, human connections glimpsed but missed– and the loneliness which is a morecommon fate than any of us generallylike to admit. Or it may have beenblighted by social disadvantage; an issueof which Barton was always aware.

Only in the last decade of her life didthis most private of poets write aboutherself. My Grandfather in the Parkrevolves around a childhood memory ofplaying, rather anxiously, in CothamGardens, watching her retiredrailwayman grandfather timing the trainsas they pulled into Redland Stationbelow. Thursday’s Child, a poem ofextraordinary tenderness, evokes herown birth in the house (still standing) inMelville Road.

It is good that a hundred year’s onfrom that day, Joan Barton’s work isstarting to receive the attention itdeserves. With thanks to Harry Chambers ofPeterloo Poets for permission to republishpart of ‘Miss Prideaux of Clifton’and ‘Thursday’s Child’ from Joan Barton, A House Under Old Sarum, Peterloo Poets, 1981, ISBN 0905 291328. Available from Peterloo Poets, The OldChapel, Sand Lane, Calstock, Cornwall, PL18 9QX at £7.95