Patrick Swift (1927-1983)
Lycoperdon Pyriforme, watercolour on card, 25.5 x 32cm; inscribed "October '57 Hollybrook under oak and hazel on the ground"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...a stanza in a poem in the present collection called 'The Muse: His & Hers':
Stevie, the Emilys,
Mrs Wolf
By-passed the womb
And kept the Self.
I have quoted from it because it takes me back, through association, to the summer of 1957, when Elizabeth allowed me to stay several weeks in her flat in Westbourne Terrace in Paddington.
We spent a memorable day in the company of Stevie Smith, at the invitation of the painter Patrick Swift and his wife Oonagh, who occupied a studio-flat somewhere in the country not far to the north of London. After the meal, we all went out into the fields to hunt for mushrooms: a fairy ring, boleti, button mushrooms, and even the rare and startling Phallus impudicus hiding under a bush. Later, after a visit to Michael Andrews painting in a nearby studio, we ate the mushrooms for supper. Some tasted revolting, but none made us ill. Elizabeth and I accompanied Stevie Smith in the train back to Palmers Green, where we walked up the hill to the house she had lived in for sixty years. She had been amusing, sometimes caustic, but always agreeable.
- David Gascoyne, introduction to The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Smart (Paladin, London, 1992)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
