U. A. Fanthorpe

Rather unusually, U.

A. Fanthorpe only published her first collection of poems, Side Effects (1978), when she was nearly fifty. Explaining this, she confessed to being ‘a middle-aged drop-out’, having left teaching – she had been Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies College – in order to write. Many of these poems were written during her lunch hour, working as a receptionist at a neurological hospital, and thus, she observed, ‘inevitably … spring from the ordinary experiences of work. But others owe their origin to the most ordinary experiences of everyday life’. From this radical career change came, over the next three decades, a substantial body of work and her status as one of Britain’s most popular poets (‘a national treasure’ in the words of Liz Lochhead). Her wry manner is often touching, humanity’s foibles and her own with a warm vein of satirical humour. She was sometimes characterized (notably by critic David Wheatley) as writing ‘highly enjoyable light verse’, though he added that she ‘does a lot more besides’ [The Guardian, 28 June 2003].

In interviews, she mentioned the influences on her work of P.G. Wodehouse’s humour, Hardy’s West Country and, formally, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. One might also mention John Betjeman, perhaps even the comic actress Joyce Grenfell.  Fanthorpe’s own dramatic monologues, often presenting female viewpoints on male pretensions, may arguably have influenced one of her known admirers, Carol Ann Duffy. As Fiona Sampson pointed out when reviewing the Collected Poems (2004) on the Tower Poetry website, ‘in a Fanthorpe poem, characterization and narrative are inextricable’. Thus in her work we encounter a wide variety of character voices. Such as: the daughters of King Lear on the perils of having such a father; a cat’s eye-view of the Nativity (‘Cat in the Manger’) and a gardening Maud telling Tennyson: ‘I’m up to here with botany, / I want someone streetwise and spry. / There are plenty of suitable fish in the sea. / Poets need not apply’ (‘Maud Speaking’). Fanthorpe lived in Gloucestershire for many years. In ‘Dear Mr Lee’, she pays a touching tribute to another author associated with the county, Laurie Lee. Taking the voice of a schoolchild, it addresses the author of Cider with Rosie, to say how they loved the book but disliked studying it: ‘PS Dear Laurie, please don’t feel guilty for / me failing the exam, it wasn’t your fault’.

As we have seen, hospital subjects inspired Side Effects. She hit her characteristic satirical note early, as in ‘For Saint Peter’, whose receptionist narrator observes patients who ‘know about God (in my case Mr Snow) and all His little fads’. The poignant observation of the ill, and the loneliness of hospitals ‘After Visiting Hours’ is also well captured: ‘Doctors appear, wreathed in stethoscopes / Like South Sea dancers’. By contrast, the volume contains what is one of her best-known poems, ‘Not my Best Side’, a wonderfully funny drama taken from Uccello’s painting ‘George and the Dragon’. In it, we are given all three characters’ viewpoints: the rather apologetic dragon, the girl hesitating between her monster and rescuer, and finally a no-nonsense St George himself: ‘I have diplomas in Dragon / Management and Virgin Reclamation’ he says, ‘Don’t you want to be killed and / or rescued / In the most contemporary way?’

Fanthorpe’s knowledge and love of Shakespeare is evident throughout her work. She uses this to give us a variety of female perspectives on the Bard. ‘Mother-in-law’, from Standing To (1982), gives us Gertrude’s confidingly snobbish view of the suitability of Ophelia as a bride for Hamlet. Regan tells of the travails of being King Lear’s daughter (‘It is a pity / That one’s father is so eccentric’) and in ‘What, in our house?’, from Safe as Houses (1995) – a comical tour de force - we hear an extra speech by Lady Macbeth lamenting ‘the implicit slur / Upon my hospitality’. She continues: ‘Poison? Blame the cuisine. I wish to heaven, / Banquo, he’d died in your house. Your wife / would tell you how I feel’.

Fanthorpe’s religious faith, and attachment to the Anglican Church, was also important to her and is reflected in her writing. ‘Tyndale in Darkness’ is a sequence about the martyred translator of the Bible into English: ‘Princes have persecuted me. Perhaps they have a cause’. Again by contrast, in Queuing for the Sun (2003), she herself humorously ‘translates’ ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ into Geordie language: ‘Let’s hev sum / light sez God / Ootbye and inbye / so the light happened’. In this, her eighth collection, David Wheatley commended her portrayals of what he calls ‘quiet sitcoms of desperation’, citing ‘Marriage Lines’ in which a wife takes refuge in gardening while her husband ‘strays over borders’. Fanthorpe’s humanity is also well shown by her poem ‘Libraries at War’, which is also an implicit nudge to the present day, memorializing the wartime importance to people of books; they are ‘such brightness in the dark’. She concludes: ‘Fire, fear, dictators all have it in for books. / The more you destroy them, the louder we call. // When the last book’s returned, there is nothing but the dark’.   

Love, in all its varieties, is one of her perennial themes. Or, rather, what Fanthorpe in ‘Atlas’ calls ‘the sensible side of love’ and ‘the kind of love called maintenance’. With a number of her other best-known poems on the subject, it reappears in From Me to You: Love Poems (2007), a collection co-authored with her partner Dr Rosie Bailey. Its preface observes that ‘In Christmas Poems, U.A. [Fanthorpe] felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky’s the limit’. At their best, these poems are rather unsentimental; typical of them is the sardonic humour of ‘The Poet’s Companion’, which specifies that he or she: ‘Must be in mint condition, not disposed / To hayfever, headaches, hangovers, hysteria, these being / The Poet’s prerogative’. And, in regarding St Valentine’s Day with due cynicism, Fanthorpe matches Wendy Cope: ‘I deplore the national neurosis / which believes the best way to celebrate two hearts that beat as one is / A dozen long-stemmed martyred crimson roses’. In Fiona Sampson’s perceptive view, reading U.A. Fanthorpe ‘is always to enter into … [her] project of recording human meaning, and, above all, of the importance of affection’. In doing so, Fanthorpe herself became bone of Britain’s best-loved poets.

Jules Smith, 2009 

'I began writing because I felt obliged to describe the strange specialness of the patients in the hospital where I worked. Neuropsychiatric disorders were new to me, and I felt the urge to tell the world. Also I wanted to resurrect the language of poetry, which moulders prosaically in hospital folders, and I wanted to ask, not what is diagnosis? but why? or even, who is the patient?. After this breakthrough I found other things to write about, mostly of a riddling sort. But the hospital was where I began.'
6 March 2002