In the summer of 1971, I answered an ad in Time Out: a Hampstead couple required an evening cook. I am no cook, but I was living on very little and accordingly presented myself for interview at a house in Downshire Hill, considerably more elegant than the rambling old place where I was renting an attic.
The door was answered by a well-dressed, crisply spoken woman in her early forties, who introduced herself and showed me to a room I have never forgotten. Light and airy, with French windows, pictures and a vast mahogany dining-table, its entire floor was ankle-deep in screwed-up pieces of white paper. No mention was made of this, and I can remember only one remark. ‘I think holidays are a waste of time, don’t you? They take you away from your work.’
I did not get the job, and I’m glad, for I would have been wasting the time of an extraordinary, brilliant and eventually mysterious writer for whom every hour was precious. It was only decades afterwards that I discovered who she was. Browsing in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, I came upon ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ in which an illicit few hours – gloomy light, shutters with an awkward hook – lead to the danger of profound and unexpected love.
Thinking we were safe – insanity! . . .
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
I don’t know how I made the connection with those snowy heaps of discarded drafts but, captivated by the poem and seeing the author’s name, I suddenly realized: Rosemary Tonks! That was her. But by this time, as I sought to find out more about her, she had long since disappeared. No one knew why, and nobody knew where she was. For a long time, many thought she was dead.
Born in 1928, Rosemary Tonks, whom a few surviving photographs show as a strikingly beautiful young woman, was the author of two volumes of poetry, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Ili
Subscribe or sign in to read the full article
The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.
Subscribe now or Sign inIn the summer of 1971, I answered an ad in Time Out: a Hampstead couple required an evening cook. I am no cook, but I was living on very little and accordingly presented myself for interview at a house in Downshire Hill, considerably more elegant than the rambling old place where I was renting an attic.
The door was answered by a well-dressed, crisply spoken woman in her early forties, who introduced herself and showed me to a room I have never forgotten. Light and airy, with French windows, pictures and a vast mahogany dining-table, its entire floor was ankle-deep in screwed-up pieces of white paper. No mention was made of this, and I can remember only one remark. ‘I think holidays are a waste of time, don’t you? They take you away from your work.’ I did not get the job, and I’m glad, for I would have been wasting the time of an extraordinary, brilliant and eventually mysterious writer for whom every hour was precious. It was only decades afterwards that I discovered who she was. Browsing in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, I came upon ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ in which an illicit few hours – gloomy light, shutters with an awkward hook – lead to the danger of profound and unexpected love.Thinking we were safe – insanity! . . . To make love as well as that is ruinous.I don’t know how I made the connection with those snowy heaps of discarded drafts but, captivated by the poem and seeing the author’s name, I suddenly realized: Rosemary Tonks! That was her. But by this time, as I sought to find out more about her, she had long since disappeared. No one knew why, and nobody knew where she was. For a long time, many thought she was dead. Born in 1928, Rosemary Tonks, whom a few surviving photographs show as a strikingly beautiful young woman, was the author of two volumes of poetry, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). ‘Epoch-making’ is how her most recent publisher has described them. The Bodley Head jacket note to the second collection introduces poems in which: ‘The deserts of the Middle East are again equated with city life . . . its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases . . . its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.’ ‘The main duty of the poet is to excite, to send the senses reeling,’ Tonks once said, and her sensuous, jazzy, declamatory, urgent verses – ‘hyper-urban, angst-ridden’ as one critic described them – spattered with exclamation marks, are filled with startling imagery and startling disclosures.
We move arrogantly into one another’s power, And the last barriers go down between us . . . My refrigerated body feels the coffin’s touch in every word You utter, and backs away for ever from your bed. ‘The Drinkers of Coffee’, 1967‘My ethos is a great European Metropolis,’ she said. ‘I want to show human passions at work and to give eternal forces their contemporary dimension in this landscape.’ In ‘Orpheus in Soho’ these ideas find unforgettable expression, turning nightclubs, bars and alleys into the furnishings of Hades, while ‘the brim of the world is lit, and breath pours softly over the Earth . . .’ Tonks was also the author of six sharp, autobiographical novels, published over seven years, whose titles are as arresting as the poetry collections: Opium Fogs (1963), The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way out of Berkeley Square (1970). You might call one or two mannered and brittle, but the prose in all of them sparkles, skewering pretension, sex and everyday life with a wit and accuracy which have echoes of Oscar Wilde, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh. They were written in a period of extraordinary productivity. Between 1963 and 1974, when she wrote a fine essay on Colette, Rosemary Tonks produced the poetry collections, the novels and some unflinching reviews for leading journals. With the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she also took part in a very Sixties experimental poetry-and-sound event, Sono-Montage, broadcast in 1966. She was a friend of Edith Sitwell, admired by Cyril Connolly and John Wain, gave interviews. But in 1968 a tragedy slowly unleashed a long, unstoppable descent into despair. This was the death of her mother, Thea, in a shocking accident. They had had a particularly difficult start to their relationship: Rosemary’s businessman father died in Africa before she was born, and she spent time in foster homes, before being sent to a boarding-school in Bournemouth from which she was expelled at 16.
In the green rags of the Bible I tore up The straight silk of childhood on my head I left the house, I fled My mother’s brow where I had no ambition But to stroke the writing I raked in.This passionate, prophetic poem, ‘Running Away’ (1963), delineates a real tension between mother and daughter, yet they were very close. Like fragile Thea, who married again but whose second husband also died in Africa, Rosemary came to believe in mediums and a spirit world – something which she later felt had done her great harm. And in Thea’s second widowhood, on their return from Lagos to London, they lived together in poverty. It was then, aged 18, that Rosemary began to read deeply and seriously, discovering Baudelaire – like Rimbaud, a lasting influence – while hanging out in Soho. Within two years she was married: to Mickey Lightband, six years older, and another businessman whose work took him much abroad. In Karachi she contracted polio, and for the rest of her life wore a stylish black glove to conceal her withered right hand – she taught herself to write with her left. And in 1954, when they settled down in Hampstead, a life began which combined intense work with memorable dinner parties. At these she shone. Family members recall how funny she was, how generous, and how much the centre of attention. At some point during these years, an aunt gave her a collection of Oriental treasures – god-figures from China and the Far East – to be held in trust. This creative, vivid, fêted life began to break apart with her mother’s death. She continued to write, but over the course of eight years she embarked on a spiritual quest, turning her back on the Christianity of her childhood, attending spiritualist meetings, consulting mediums and healers. Was she seeking to reconnect with the mother by whom, as a fostered only child, she had felt abandoned? Her marriage ended. Living alone – not far from Mickey, who had a new wife and whom she never forgave – she was plagued by neuritis in her writing arm and serious eye-problems. To deal with these she began a punishing routine of Daoist eye exercises and meditation which ended in an emergency operation and left her almost blind. Further disasters included a burglary and a hopeless lawsuit. By 1977, describing herself as ‘psychologically smashed’, she rarely left the house. By the following year she had left London, telling no one outside the family where she had gone. ‘My life, my work, my hopes!’ she had written in ‘Rome’ (1963), another prophetic line. All, it seemed, had gone from her now, her life itself a broken sentence. In 1980 she sold the house in Downshire Hill and locked the Oriental collection in the bank: she had begun to fear those graven images, and with a sense of revelation she returned to the Bible. This became the one true book, and she never opened another. And in 1981 she withdrew the ‘heathen’ gods and smashed them to smithereens. She had been working on a novel about a man’s search for God. She burned it all to ash. ‘I can tell you I meant business,’ she later told her great-niece in a letter. The fury and passion with which she did all this is there in many of her poems: ‘Badly Chosen Lover’, ‘Done For’, ‘Fog Peacocks’, ‘I May Destroy You’, ‘Running Away’. Now she had run away with a vengeance, the door on the world slammed shut. I would say that her spirit was broken, save that a new spiritual life was about to begin. That year she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised in the River Jordan. This, she wrote, was her ‘second birth’. And although she never wrote another line of poetry, she continued to write: letters to her family, though she never saw them, and in countless notebooks. In 2009 Brian Patten presented a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled ‘The Vanished Poet’. Was Rosemary Tonks hiding in some smoky European city, so vividly realized in much of her work? Had she taken up residence in a souk, or a tent in the desert, again a repeated theme? Had she died? It was Neil Astley, publisher of Bloodaxe Books, who told Patten that she was alive but, sworn to secrecy by her family, he did not reveal her whereabouts. She was living in Bournemouth, taken in by her kindly maternal aunt in 1978 and comforted back to health. From her house Rosemary had moved to a secluded one not far away, where she drew the curtains, refused to answer the phone, regarded postcards from Astley as communications from Satan, and lived as Mrs Rosemary Lightband until her death, in 2014, at the age of 85. She became one of those people who creep into church and out again, speaking to no one; who give out bibles at Speakers’ Corner, and have just a single friend, who knows nothing about them. She is buried in the Church of St Thomas à Becket, in Hampshire, in her mother’s grave. She has gone, but she haunts the modern mind. It is Neil Astley who has brought her back into print, introducing her to a new generation with Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems in 2014. Within the last couple of years at least three references have appeared in novels and radio programmes and at least one young poet, Lizzie Palmer, has embraced her idiom. You can hear her on a podcast from the British Library, where you can also hear Rosemary herself, reading in her cut-glass voice poems from her old, unbroken life: poems which with every line say, ‘Hear me!’
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Sue Gee 2023
About the contributor
Sue Gee’s novel Earth and Heaven (2000), set at the Slade School of Art between the wars, features Henry Tonks, surgeon and Professor of Painting, and Rosemary’s great-uncle. You can also hear her in Episode 3 of our podcast, discussing the art of editing.