ARMADA

Patten's personal misgivings about the overall quality of Storm Damage made him reluctant to rush into writing a successor. In the years immediately following its publication, he was in any case extremely busy consolidating his growing reputation as a children's writer. His children's poetry collection Gargling with Jelly (published in 1985) had sold 200,000 copies, and he had been invited to edit The Puffin Book of Twentieth-Century Children's Verse – which appeared in 1991 to considerable critical acclaim (see Afterword, page 79). Thawing Frozen Frogs, his sequel to Gargling with Jelly, was also written over this period along with a range of children's story books. At the same time, he was touring widely – more often than not to places dogged by civil wars, as it turned out. In the Sudan, he read at the Islamic Students’ Union in Khartoum. Later, as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, he was in Macedonia. (Both visits resulted in poems later published in Armada.) Back in London, he continued to live in Brook Green – although he also spent several periods of ‘quiet time’ in the small fishing village of Mousehole, in Cornwall.

By the beginning to 1994 he was beginning to assemble a number of new poems. At that point the subjects were quite varied, although some (which were later published in the ‘Between Harbours’ section of Armada) concerned a difficult and obsessional love affair – soon to end – that had much preoccupied him over that winter. Then in March 1994 came a turning-point. His mother, Stella Bevan, suffered a brain haemorrhage – ironically, at the social club that had taken over the premises of the old Magnet cinema where Patten had spent so many hours of happy escapism as a child (see chapter 1, page 2). Patten hurried to her bedside in Liverpool, but she never regained consciousness. She died early in the morning of 13 March.

The death of his mother was very unexpected and painful. However, it was to inspire an extraordinarily rich and intense period of creativity, as Patten grieved for her, recalled his own childhood with her and sought to give meaning and permanence through his writing to both her living and her dying.