Publisher's Synopsis
I arrived in Sweden in the summer of 1973, with a teaching job and a small rented
cottage by the church, in Mariestad. It was my first time out of the UK, and it might
have been anywhere: my only motivation was just to get out; to leave the dark and
drizzly northern town of my birth, the solemn cloisters of my alma mater, and to
avoid at all costs the (perhaps imagined) horrors of an English school staff-room.
I spoke sub-schoolbook French, minimal German and no Swedish, and yet in
Stockholm I found a city which seemed to have been waiting patiently for me to
arrive. In Mariestad I found a pretty town of quiet, jolly people all of whom seemed
pleased that I had come. If only life were like that!
Well, for me, in Sweden, it was and is, and I have spent the rest of my life
reciprocating. As the poet said, you only fall in love for the first time once. It is
neither over-dramatic nor an exaggeration to say that everything I am I owe to
Sweden in general and to a number of individual Swedes in particular.
The poems in They Spoke No English are snapshots or what John Glenday has
generously called 'little films unravelling through love, absence and desire'. They
are assorted paragraphs in a longer love-letter to a country which is far beyond
special to me. They were written over a five-year period of particular reflection, and
are dedicated to the memory of my lovely late wife, Yvonne, and to our delightful
daughter, Lucy.
