meeting Mary Hampden-Jackson

At the back of the closed down building I found a forgotten memorial bench with a plaque: ‘In Memory of Mary Hampden-Jackson / teacher and poet / who lived here / 1971-1980′. It wasn’t easy to find out much about her – her books were out of print (though luckily in the Bodleian Library) and no one in Jericho seemed to remember her. I wrote a letter to the local paper and 2 of Mary’s former pupils got in touch. They remembered a slight, unassuming, very private woman. Thin and frail-looking. Eccentric, ‘a free spirit’. A writer of gentle poetry observing the natural world around her.

‘Have you listened to silence? / All confusion of sound left out, / Voices, distractions, all / Of no more depth than the troubled surface / Of a stirred up stream?’ (from ‘Silence’ by Mary Hampden-Jackson)

Mary (back right, in the shadows) with colleagues, July 1950

Mary’s books – Poems in Many Voices, Short My Release and Other Poems, Lyrical and Meditative Poems - are sometimes available from Amazon and other second-hand booksellers