Julia Casterton
Julia Casterton has died. I only just found out. It's a shock, and not sunk in yet. Of course I'm writing first - I won't sleep otherwise.
Apparently there was an obituary in yesterday's Guardian and I'm glad I didn't just happen to be reading the paper at work - it seems like only a minute ago I was having to read terrible obituaries at work and I'm not ready for any more of that just yet. And yet here we are.
Julia made me laugh more than possibly anyone else I've ever met. She was fearsomely intelligent and knowledgeable, and irrepressible in the sense that is used of people like Pollyanna. (David Belbin,* on his blog, has written that Julia "had more than a touch of the rock star about her": this is true, and a fact I feel bounden to mention as I've just compared her to Pollyanna. It would be a strange, sweet, wild-card Pollyanna.) And marvellously inappropriate, and big inside, and her love of life just spilled out in all directions.
She was also - partly through this very maverick, life-guzzling, incredibly warm and expansive quality of hers - extremely instrumental in the overcoming of my famous ten-year writer's block. And years later, when I realised I needed to start writing again - and poetry this time, which I suddenly realised was what I should have been writing all along - it was with the fully-formed thought, the very words, "I want Julia..."
That was the beginning of a string of events that completely transformed my entire life, even leading to me sitting here typing this to you, dear reader. And you are dear. And that phrase itself - "completely transformed my entire life" - is one I can almost make out, in my mind's ear, Julia saying, with a big laugh.
A laugh like the time we bumped into each other - almost literally - in a tunnel in the underground - was it Bank? I think it was; Julia remembered that better than me - and with great embraces and shrieks of laughter she told me "Oh my God darling, I've been SO ILL, they thought I was going to DIE, and I've had my SPLEEN removed!!" That was just the beginning of that story - we were both late in different directions but in four minutes she caught me up with a whole year's-worth of soap-opera plot and left me reeling - but smiling for the rest of the day, because a random encounter with Julia in the tube was such a gift.
Of course, it was all in how she told it - I thought she'd got better - but it wasn't really such a funny story. We've seen now how it ends. But I do know that I will once again laugh whenever I think of her. The stories are just too funny. I'm so sad. She was great. And that's the gift.
* who runs the MS in creative writing programme at Nottingham Trent University, for which Julia was an external examiner
6 comments:
I am shocked by this. Just last year she gave a wonderful talk and reading and Sussex Uni and afterwards a group of us, including Julia and her daughter, went out for supper. She was lovely.
Sorry to hear about your friend's death Katy. She sounds like an amazing person.
I am still thinking about this. I took out my copy of The Doves of Finisterre last night and looked at "Rubaiyat for Miriam." It was one of the very few times I have cried at a poetry reading, when she read it last year.
RTS, hi there. Well, there's our one degree of separation! Yes, well the funeral was hard, very hard, and the sight of Julia's daughters whom she talked about so much and with so much adoration was the hardest thing of all.
Mark, thanks for your thoughts, and yes, Julia was. I hadn't been in touch with her for some years, except to run into - always with great happiness! - but she was just someone you would never stop being intensely fond of. The chapel was bursting, standing-room only. At the launch party last night people who had only ever met her once were stricken when they heard the news.
I am a friend of Julia's from Finisterre, and will also remember her laughter, her voice and that special twinkel in her eyes very fondly... I was very sad to hear that she left us, but am shure she just said: "bye for now..." as she used to... I still talk to her sometimes, and all I feel is love. If she was open minded and incredible while she was alive, she now is shurely close to perfection...
Farewell, my friend, to know you was a highlight of my Finisterre years...
Cassandre Stapfer
When I'm in bed I read her books and feel I'm with a friend. I still stop and think, I'll never see her again. I wrote a poem after a dream I had when I heard that she had died. I read it at Torriano Meeting House because I was in Willesden Library and Julia's name and two of her poems jumped out of a page from the 2003 anthology and gave me a kick up the backside to go Torriano and do it!! Wendy Young/Byhecklectic
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