Rebellion sometimes means saying ‘yes’
Mark Ramey, winner of the 2023 Shelley Memorial Project poetry prize, explains more about the real-life figure who provided the inspiration for his winning poem, Lilla.
Lilla is about an inspirational woman, Lilla Fox, who I first met in the 1970s in Reigate. She was, as the poem suggests, a communist activist and famed for her energetic distribution of The Morning Star newspaper at rallies, party conferences and protest marches. An art and music teacher before she retired, Lilla also wrote and illustrated books on folk costumes and musical instruments.
When I came to know Lilla, her children and husband had all left her, and Lilla, then in her late 50s, and ever public spirited, was letting rooms, very cheaply, to waifs and strays. I was one such charity case and my Mum another.
Lilla’s family brought her up as a Quaker and certainly something of the Quaker’s quiet intensity rubbed off on her. She saw Zeppelins from her London nursery during WW1 and sometime in the 1930s found her Marxist calling. In the early 2000s she moved to Crawley where she eventually died in a nursing home, almost making it to a 100.
I only stayed at Lilla’s for a few months, but over the subsequent years I continued to see her at demonstrations, still selling The Morning Star. Eventually though we lost touch. That was until she reappeared suddenly at my Mum’s funeral in 2005. Mum died tragically and suddenly at the age of 59. She was an NHS nurse for much of her life in Redhill and kept in touch with Lilla. Somehow Lilla, then in her 90s, found out about Mum’s passing and so, when the family’s tributes were over, and the celebrant asked if anyone else had anything to say, the packed church fell silent - but not Lilla! Leaping to her feet she made a short, passionate speech about Mum and nursing. I have never forgotten Lilla’s intensity and compassion: her raw grief and her powerful championing of the nursing profession felt so honest. We applauded her then, and in some ways, Lilla is an echo of that same applause.
The reference to Hesperus is Phosphorus in the final stanza of the poem comes from a famous linguistic puzzle in Language Philosophy. The basic idea is that Hesperus (the Morning Star) and Phosphorus (the Evening Star) are the same object, the planet Venus, the symbolic planet of love, whose twice-daily visitation is a quirk of celestial mechanics.
Lilla suggests, like this puzzle, that two things can seem very different but be aspects of the same thing. Thus, the political radicalism of the newspaper, The Morning Star, is just one part of something else – the love of humanity. Lilla loved people and wanted to make life better for them all. She understood, I think, that the spirit of rebellion is not just about saying ‘no’, it is also about saying ‘yes’. For me Lilla’s humanity trumped her ideology. I struggled to hear her revolutionary message: it was drowned out by what I saw as doctrine. It was only at my Mum’s funeral that I finally heard Lilla’s voice, not just her words, and understood that the real revolution came from Venus.
The socialist message The Morning Star presents is an important one but also, I think, The Beatles were onto something back in the radical 60s when they sang “All you need is love. Love is all you need.” Shelley himself noted in Love’s Philosophy that, “Nothing in the world is single.” Lilla would have agreed…and then tried to sell me a copy of her paper.
You can read Mark’s poem here.