T.S. Eliot and the Cruellest Month: A Personal Journey

Why I’m looking ahead to a busy summer after an eventful April

REBIRTH: Building firm foundations for growth over the summer months

back garden — REBIRTH: Building firm foundations for growth over the summer months

By HILARY GAVIN

I’M not sure if any of the very few of you who follow my WordPress blog are poetry-lovers like me but I’d like to share the opening lines of TS Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land with you today, courtesy of The Poetry Foundation website.

I. The Burial of the Dead

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.”

As you can see, I haven’t written a blog since my one and only post last month, entitled Finding Self-worth Through Adversity in Journalism, when I shared my trauma twelve years ago in police custody in Chichester.

Now we’re mid-way through the month of May, these lines penned by TS Eliot in the ‘between-the-wars’ years of the 1920s resonate with me today because, to be frank, I was too busy to sit down and write in April.

Years ago, it was the done-thing for old-fashioned 1950s “housewives” to spring-clean the family home as the sunlight outside the net curtains exposed the thick dust that had accumulated indoors over the winter months.

In the Sixties, I remember seeing these net curtains billowing outside newly-built homes on middle-class housing estates in Chichester after the occupants had “let the air in” by flinging their windows open on a sunny spring day.

To be honest, I’m currently in two minds, because I’m not sure whether to view April 2025 as “the cruellest month” for me, like TS Eliot, or as “the sweetest month” of rebirth and re-awakening of nature as Geoffrey Chaucer contended in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in 14th-century England.

If any of you follow my Facebook page, you will see that I’ve been working hard tending my vegetable patch and plant pots in my back garden. I’ve also had to pay for a local builder to put up a new fence after realising our family might have been told we were responsible for the wrong boundary side since the Nineties.

Yes, it was an unexpected, time-consuming and annoying expense when I least needed it during a stressful time in my life when I should be concentrating on earning a living.

Saying that, April has also been fun too.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gleaned a wealth of information from practical folk. who have spent years working in the building trade, and I’ve begun to take an interest in the infrastructure of our main water and sewerage drains.

As a former civil servant, journalist and trust fundraiser, I suppose many people would view me as a pen-pusher without a practical bone in my body. But I would argue that they’re mistaken. My late father was a mechanic and – although I never really tinkered on cars – both myself and my sister took an interest in basic mechanics when he stripped down his car engine in our family garage.

And, although I try to be eco-friendly, I like driving and I used to enjoy go-karting too, competing with “the boys” who were my old gang of friends in Chichester in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes, I won – although I’d doubt they’d admit they got beaten by a girl if you asked them today. Fun times.

Anyhow, I’ve got to rush off now as there are people to meet and things to do – but I thought I’d share a couple of photos of my back garden which is still very much a work in progress.

Who knows what the end result will be? Stay tuned to either this space on WordPress, my Substack site, or simply my Facebook page.

A freelance journalist who wants to see a return to public accountability in the local press

Hilary Gavin

Hilary Gavin, T/A Business ‘n’ Commas, Hunston, Chichester, PO20 1NY

Hilary Gavin

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