Elspeth Barker could write about anything and have you longing for more, which makes it sad that she wrote so little: we need to cherish every word that has survived of her. She was the wife of the poet George Barker and, in the ways that count, a poet herself – although in prose. When she died, in 2022, she had published one wonderful novel, O Caledonia, about a wayward 16-year-old girl growing up in a Scottish castle. Described by Ali Smith as “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century”, it became, once republished, a classic more than a collector’s item. She also produced clever, witty, unpredictable journalism and we now have this selection of essays, chosen by her daughter, Rafaella Barker. Notes from the Henhouse is a book for which one feels incredulous gratitude. How come, you think, she is not better known? The book deserves to be permanently on the bedside table – to cheer, reassure and inspire.
Rafaella Barker describes her mother, in the introduction, as a “classicist, mother, wife, pig fancier, dog lover, countrywoman, terrible driver and bona fide spellmaker”. She begins with a marvellous essay on birds that introduces the baby jackdaw she rescued as a child and fed from a silver mustard spoon. Such fledglings seldom survive. Hers did. He developed an appetite, landing on their dining table and “helping himself with undiscriminating relish from grey mounds of well-cooked cabbage and tremulous orange jelly”.
She is at her eccentric best whenever describing animals – her amused love communicating itself. She loves them without sentimentality. Her father kept a parrot who spoke in an ancient “fruity tongue”; her pet pig, Portia, is a delinquent: “medium Vietnamese with a snippet of Berkshire” and with an expression of “intense cunning”; and there is a glorious essay devoted to dogs: “There can be no heaven without dogs”. She unrepentantly admits to seeing animals (including the hens of the title) in human terms, is triumphantly anthropomorphic and one would not wish it otherwise.
Her essays are sympathetic little masterpieces to which she brings storytelling capacity and an intensity that absorbs as the best fiction does – her life waylaying the reader like an outlandish novel. I adore her blase approach: her style of polished recklessness. No matter what she describes, she seems to accept her lot as being caught up in a – usually chaotic or bohemian – flow. In the priceless essay Dogs of Athens, she slogs along to a Greek hospital to visit a dying Texan acquaintance whom she admires but is not 100% sure she likes. She is less ambivalent describing, in the same essay, the stray dogs at Athens airport.
In Moment of Truth, she writes about getting together with George Barker, whom she had met through his ex-lover the novelist Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept). In the essay, drink and poetry conspire like matchmakers. Throughout, she has an attractive willingness to be exposed as imperfect along with a tolerance of others, including her husband, who is described in Memories of George Barker as having retired drunk after a dinner party, later to be found asleep with his arms tenderly embracing the six-week-old baby a guest had left upstairs on the bed: “saintly as an effigy, the baby moth-like clasped on his chest”.
Elspeth Barker retains her gorgeous prodigality as a writer even when focusing on minor subjects, such as an Aga in Friendly Fire, and is observantly amusing: “Guests jostled companionable hips in the traditional position of leaning on the Aga rail. If you do this too vigorously, you slide with surprising momentum sideways to the floor.”
Barker’s imagination amplified her life but did not make her retreat from it. On the contrary, these essays are filled with wisdom: Of children as they grow older: “they require danger”. Of gardens: “In a garden it is never too late.” Of death: “I find death absolutely unacceptable and I cannot come to terms with it.” And she rejoices in getting older: “At this interesting point in life, one may be whoever and whatever age one chooses.” She is right but one would still be in her thrall even were she not.
Notes from the Henhouse by Elspeth Barker is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
