Kate Legge

other domestic imperatives got in the way.

And I went through them and that was where I became interested because a lot of the papers recorded the things that had happened in a number of members of our family.

And at that time, I had discovered this beautiful poem called The Circus Animal's Desertion by William Butler Yeats, where he's writing... My favourite poet, by the way.

Is he?

Oh, he's beautiful.

And this is one of the last poems he wrote.

And he was looking back.

He's no longer as prolific as he once was.

So he's lingering, trying to find a sort of lingering truth that lives on beyond the vestiges of youth and fortune and wondering at the muse.

And this is the last verse.

And this is what really grabbed and took a hold of my heart.

He said, those masterful images, because complete, grew in pure mind.

But out of what began...

a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, old bottles, old kettles and a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut who keeps the till.

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

And I felt that really summed up for me where I wanted to go in tracing these seams of darkness, both through my husband's family and then through my own family, because looking for meaning and measurement later in life and wondering about the things that forge destiny, circumstances, temperament, and the plaiting of the kinship strands.

The foul rag and bone shop of the heart is one of his most famous and most powerful lines, isn't it?

It's beautiful.

It's beautiful because if you think about opportunity shops and, you know, they're full of chipped memories and stunted hearts and you never know what you're going to find and it's often things that have been discarded that can be the most illuminating and that's what I found going through my father's papers.

It wasn't so much the, you know, the records of momentous achievement but it was the scraps of paper with letters from various members of the family that revealed to me, you know, their heart.