Sarah Moss

It's not quite clear what's happening to her, but she's in her 70s and she's beginning to lose her words and her balance and her short-term memory.

Frighteningly easy to write, I found.

But she still has very clearly her childhood memories and also the things that she learned in childhood.

And I noticed that in both my father-in-law, who died recently of dementia,

and my grandmother, who died in her 90s a few years ago, they were both great readers and both from an age when you memorized poetry.

And they both remembered books long after they'd forgotten the names of their grandchildren and started confusing their grandchildren and their children and forgetting where they were and asking the same question about which day it was and what the weather was like every 20 minutes.

But that really deep, rhythmic knowledge of poetry stayed with them both to the end.

And I loved that and I loved the fact that I could talk to them about poetry when they couldn't really talk about much else.

Mary's poem is called Summer Water and it's not actually a particularly good poem.

It's one of those Victorian ballads.

But the story is the stranger comes to town and it's a vaguely medieval township on the banks of a lake.

And the stranger comes hungry and goes around begging.

And the rich people won't give him any food and turn him away.

But the poorest household shares what they have.

And then the waters rise in the night and flood the rich dwellings.

So that gave me the title.

I'd love to have Shirley Jackson.

I really like her.

And she has a fabulous memoir called Life Among the Savages, which people don't read as much as the fiction, but it's absolutely hilarious.

I mean, there's very little of the darkness of her other novels.