The main task for this week apart from an Award Board at work yesterday is to get back to grips with the manuscript. Ideally I’d take myself off to a quiet corner of Wales to do this free from distractions but instead I’ve taken leave from work. This part of the process is where external…
Author: Caroline Davies
Who was Percy?
As well as finding out about Percy Honeybill’s war the other thing I wanted to know about was his family. How were we related? A chance on-line conversation with writer Donna Gagnon led to my reading a sea faring entry on her family history blog and discovering I was in the hands of another expert.…
Percy Honeybill’s War
Once I was back home I applied myself to finding out more about Percy Honeybill and what might have happened to him. As always Jeremy Banning was an invaluable source of information. He confirmed that Percy would definitely have been in the first battalion of the Kings Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) and would have been…
Private Percy Honeybill 1887 – 2nd September 1918
My mother always used to say that if you came across a Honeybill anywhere in the world the chances were that we were related – Honeybill was her maiden name. It turns out she was more correct than she realised as the surname was ‘created’ by a clerk’s error in the mid eighteenth century which…
Somme and Arras – Maps, the Missing and souvenirs
I’ve already mentioned our guide, Jeremy Banning’s expert knowledge – he didn’t simply know where the English, French and German trenches had stood but also produced maps and panoramas to get us to understand. So we’d be standing in the middle of a field and like a magician he’d unfurl a long photographic image showing…
Somme and Arras day 2 – the world turned inside out
I woke early on the second day to the sound of a cockerel crowing somewhere nearby in the village. This was to be a day of the woods – Mametz, Mansel copse, Delville (known as Devil’s wood to the soldiers), and High Wood. I have an affection for woodland which goes back to a childhood…
Somme and Arras – the dead
Sometimes when another writer dangles an opportunity in front of your nose you have to say yes even if it doesn’t necessarily square with your other plans nor with the time you have available. So on the first Friday of October, thanks to Vanessa Gebbie, I found myself on Eurostar early in the morning heading…
Home Straight
I’ve spent the morning pacing around the house, manuscript in hand, growling (I have a sore throat) the poems aloud. I’ve finished the final poem about the Gloucester Sea Gladiators and polished some of the others. Even my hairdresser, Juliet got in on the act earlier. The manuscript went with me to the hairdressers first…
One of my Poems has been travelling…
Well there I was posting about not being able to let go of my poems when a message appears in my in-box reminding me that I did let one of them, Sirens, out earlier in the summer. Oh my, what an adventure this poem has had. I was responding to an invitation from Nicelle Davis…
Are we there yet?
October is the month in which I hand over my collection to my publisher, Jan Fortune of Cinnamon Press. It is going to be so hard to let go if these poems. I worry about them needing more work. I worry that they don’t do justice to the merchant seaman and others whose stories they…