When I was a child I knew a woman called Frieda. Frieda lived alone about seven doors down from us in Wavertree Vale, a tiny street by the gasworks. She was a tall thin woman with a hooked nose, sunken brown eyes and long silk skirts. Her hair was a reddish grey and her clothes smelt of mothballs. She often wore her coat indoors. It was dark green and bell shaped, and fastened by a large star shaped buckle She was quite unlike anyone else in the neighbourhood. Some people whispered about her being a German spy, others mocked her behind her back. But they were stupid whispers, unsubstantiated, and spiteful.

The tragedy was that Frieda was a Latvian Jew, an exile whose family had been victims of the holocaust. The things she loved were things no one in our neighbourhood knew much about or cared for: classical music, opera, books. Frieda was living among the wrong people. She had washed up in the wrong place.

I remember her records. They were scratchy old things. Operas and waltzes in paper covers. She kept them in an old piano stool, though she had no piano. Frieda sometimes pretended she was going out to the opera while really she was going off to sit alone on a bench in the park. I didn’t understand then how people could be sick in the mind one day, then appear normal the next

From the outside Frieda’s house looked no different to the others in the street, and yet once inside I entered a different world, one made cavernous and exciting by the vast number of books her little parlour contained. The books were not arranged neatly on shelves as if in a library or for show, but scattered all over.

They were much older than the few books I’d held so far, and they smelt strange. Not of mothballs, like her clothes, but of a bitter coffee like smell, chicory maybe. When I first visited Frieda’s, it was to get her to help me read my comics, which she always readily agreed to. We would sit on her back door-step and she would help me with the latest exploits of Tin Lizzy, a mischievous robotic housemaid, or Keyhole Kate, so called because she was a nosey-parker who had a long thin nose and wore her hair in plaits. There were other, more wordy comic strips that I found hard to read even with help – a favourite being about a submarine that looked like a fish and that was controlled by a child.

One day Frieda from a pile of books heaped up on the table she unearthed the wonderfully strange legend of Rip van Winkle. Frieda’s choice of that particular book was perhaps one of the key events of my childhood. If she had found a different book, a story that had not appealed in the slightest to a comic greedy child, what then? An undernourished imagination, or one nourished on different foodstuffs, would have led to a different life.

I still do not know what fascinated me so much about the Washington Irving story but I was absolutely mesmerised by the idea of someone being put under a spell by a group of malignant dwarves, falling asleep for 30 years, then waking to find himself alone in the world. It could have been Frieda’s accent, making the story sound exotic, or maybe it was the way the story was written, the way it purported to be a true account of an historic event.

Also Rip Van Winkle’s growing sense of apprehension as he nears his home to find his world changed and his life’s certainties shaken, was something I understood. I’d felt that apprehension many times. The uncertainty as to what awaited me in a house where moods could change so drastically in the few hours between leaving for school and returning for lunch were echoed in that story. Later there would be other life-directing books, but that was the first.

Don’t forget – if you want to anonymously send someone one of Brian Pattens love poems on Valentine’s Day, 5th Estate will help you do it. Read more here.

…though not always, as you’ll hear if you listen to my poem ‘A Blade of Grass’ on this podcast.

Anyway, I was in the office at PressBooks, and before I knew it, I’d been bundled into the filing cupboard. Here’s the result. Download it on to your MP3 player and take a walk on a crisp autumnal day to listen…or perhaps email the podcast to a lover for his/her journey to work.

The Filing Cupboard presents: Brian Patten reads from his Collected Love Poems (6.2MB)