It is almost thirty years since I tried to get someone – anyone – interested in publishing Heidi, and about ten since I discovered she was dead. By then she was living not far from me, in sheltered housing. I have never taken the step of searching out her death certificate to see if, as I feel sure must be the case, she decided she had had enough.
There was so much we didn’t know about Heidi when she came to work as a secretary in the editorial department at André Deutsch, only to leave, two years later, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t live on what we were paying her. We didn’t know, for instance, that she had spent most of the previous year in a psychiatric ward. Nor that the father she had never known had been a GI. Nor that he was black.
This, of course, accounted for her dusky skin and perhaps also for a kind of quiet elegance and the self-containment which she certainly didn’t inherit from her mother, the bitter subject of almost every one of the prose poems, haikus, call them what you will, that she left me with.
She never cared for us. She should never have had children, but she gave birth so easily. She just opened her legs and the babies came out.
As for her father: the only thing her mother told her about him was that he was a sweet brown man. She did not add that he was one of many.
The village where Heidi was born was on the Norfolk coast and close to an American base. As far as I know, none of her siblings had African American fathers, but they were all neglected. Their mother paid no attention to their clothes or their food or how they did at school. What Heidi remembered was that she liked sweet things (a child would notice this) and any kind of finery. She would decorate her hats with lots of tulle and roses, and – a happy memory – the Christmas tree.
As an adult, Heidi came to equate all her mother’s sources of pleasure with her appetite for sex.
The only things she could cook well were fruit cakes. She knew the secret of making them dark and fruity. She liked her men that way.
Bananas too: She loved bananas more than any other fruit . . . They must have come from the PX. There were no bananas then. Not even in London.
Too painful to write the story of her life in a connected form, we have only these glimpses of a child unwanted by her mother, unknown to her father and looked on askance by the villagers who knew all about the comings and goings in that house by the sea.
No wonder Heidi adopted so many different names. Leafing through the manuscripts I see she was sometimes Georgia Ray, sometimes Kate France, sometimes herself. I don’t know under which name she sent stuff to Virago, but I do know their response made her happy for, like all the other readers (apart from one professional poet*) they recognised the emotional power and transforming wit of these fragments: songs, dirges, cries for help . . .
I am glad, all these years later, to have found a way to send them out into the world and, for once, wish more people were reading this.
* ‘26 little whimsical perceptions about family relationships . . . Not for me.’