I want to write about Dr. Pat D'Arcy, a friend of mine who died last weekend.

Pat did a lot of work in education in the Bath area, was Area Advisor for English in Wiltshire, fought for the rights of teachers' knowledge to be taken seriously and cared about how children were treated and what they were treated to. She edited the influential book, Making Sense, Shaping Meaning, in 1990, and worked with Nancy Martin and James Britton, whom she developed close friendships with over the years. They were both linguistic and pedagogical agitators, both passionate about their work too and influential in philosophical areas surrounding language and meaning.

I met Pat in the early nineties as a part of a Masters course I was helping Jack Whitehead to run at BathUniversity. Our first meeting was prophetic in the sense that we disagreed! She was under the impression because Jack couldn't be there on the first day, she was in charge, and I thought I was. Boy, was that a case of having to meet the ground running! Pat was a force of nature, no kidding! Get in the way of her passion with incompetence or a lack of clarity and she was, like a rottweiler, poised to strike. But that was superficial, because underneath this feisty spirit and gusto was someone moved by the human condition and who fought to improve it. When I've said things like the above to people who didn't know her, they're a little shocked at me using such a tone on such an occasion, but those who knew her smile affectionately, because she was a force of nature and there's a Pat-shaped hole missing in reality now.

All that passion for education, all that desire for children to have a right to a good education, all that temper and spirit and verve, I loved them all, but I was also privileged to take part in a correspondence that began in 2001 when I went to China. When I came home twice a year it became my habit to call in at Pat’s for a few days either before or after coming to see my mum. And then we would put the world to rights over wine and cigarettes and poetry and politics. Every waking moment was exciting and unpredictable with Pat. We’d rush off to the Arboretum in Wiltshire or a picnic by the river, or a tour of a monastery or simply sitting in the back garden next to an elegant and old gazebo, and talk the days away. I hated leaving her always. John, her husband, was always so understanding of the time she gave me whenever I turned up. Together, we two changed the world!

Most of my other dearest personal recollections of Pat arise out of the years and years she put up with me disgorging "literature" into her inbox at a rate of knots: several novels in China and since, short stories galore and the rest. And she not only read them all, she commented on everything. My creative life was very much bound up with hers, and for a long time, nothing I wrote was out of her sphere of interest and influence. I trusted her ideas, even when I didn't agree with them, and her integrity as a critic, her passion for understanding the written words and their inner meanings was second to none.

She was, before she got ill, writing a novel about Lady Macbeth before the play and during it, her life as a girl and then young woman. She had researched the time and the place, the historical vantage points, and was creating what I found to be a fascinating insight not only into the character of this woman's motives and presumptions, but what she had to say about human psychology in general. I kept telling her in my efforts to give her an engaged and appreciative response to her fiction, that she should get it published. It would be interesting for people who like historical novels, but specifically as well to students of Macbeth. In her creation of the woman, Pat didn't exonerate her from responsibility but rendered a monster very much a human being, someone I could even identify with and recognise our consonant humanity.

I have a folder in my hotmail account of all our corrspondence over the years. It numbers thousands. I took some of them out last night and looked at what she had written. Following are a couple of extracts from our letters. The first is from her to the end of a novel I wrote, which Pat went through, chapter by chapter, commenting, allowing her imagination to run freely as well, trying to undestand the why as well as the how. Her Ph.D. (see http://www.actionresearch.net/living/pat.shtml entitled, The Whole Story had as its tenet that an engaged and appreciative response to a text can illuminte in ways that criticism cannot, and that this approach can improve the quality of learning. And she always put this process of being fully engaged in the life and meaning of someone else's words into practice in terms of her responses to my texts. Always. She never failed me and that's such an amazing thing, when I know that others were similar recipients of her insights and time. I could have chosen any one of a thousand extracts, but I choose these ones, because they reveal Pat being Pat, down-to-earth, intenesely felt and understood, practical, caring, sensitive and full of respect for what word and people can do.

May 15th 2008.

Dear Moira, I'm really sorry there's been this hiatus - but I guess part of me may have been putting off coming to the end of your novel which I have so enjoyed. Anyway, the last lot of visitors' sheets etc have been washed and ironed, so before I start thinking about what clothes to pack for our holiday in the Scillies (!) I'm determined to walk myself through your final chapter - in a way it's two chapters isn't it but I can quite see why you have compiled them into one, bringing Andrew and Nancy together in Gillian's mind - her two most important people - just as they are together, literally, in Ruanda. And as I think I said in my earlier brief response, it is lovely to finish on such a happy and confident note, where for the first time, G sounds like a normal teenager, speaking in a voice that I recognise and can relate to.

And in another letter dated 23rd December 2008 about my comments on her writing:

Thank you so much for your comments on both my short poems and the saga chapters. I just love the way you perceive aspects of my poetry that never occurred to me while I was writing - like the soft sound of the words in the third stanza of my first poem and the way you find your gaze being first directed downwards to the crannies and crevices and then soaring skywards with the bird's eye speedwell. I suppose i was seeing it like that in my mind but without conscious thought.  I'm glad my mention of mesambreanthemums brought equally vivid memories to your mind although I've never heard them called Livingston daisies. Did you bring them into one of your 'memory lane trips' with your Mum? I can remember the flowers in our own garden quite clearly, although it was just a tiny patch. Somehow that made the flowers seem even more precious - often there was only room for just a single plant. I remember our one daphne bush with a hauntingly delicate springtime scent - and one tiger lily - and one Christmas Rose. If we were lucky, it produced two or three flowers in time for us to grace our Christmas table with them.
The aeoliums which form succulent rosettes, a bit like a flattened out globe artichoke, thrive all over the place on Scilly. They can be either light green of this very dark red colour which did indeed remind be of clotted blood, although no threat was intended!

Pat fully understood that when you take someone's words seriously you take them seriously as human beings in all their needs and wants and dispositions. I was so lucky to have her friendship. I will really miss her. I loved her.

Moira 20.01.10.