I was standing there at the end of a reading or a workshop or whatever, watching people heading out into the weather, only half-wondering what becomes of words, the brisk herbs of language, the fragrances we think we sing, if anything. We were left behind in a firelit room in which the colour scheme crouched well down – golds, a sort of dun a distressed ochre – and the sole richness was in the suggestion of a texture like the low flax gleam that comes off polished leather. Two women were standing in shadow, one with her back turned. Their talk was a gesture, an outstreched hand. They talked to each other and words like 'summer' 'birth' 'great-grandmother' kept pleading with me, urging me to follow. 'She could feel it coming' – one of them was saying – 'all the way there, across the fields at evening and no one there, God help her 'and she had on a skirt of cross-woven linen and the little one kept pulling at it. It was nearly night ...' (Wood hissed and split in the open grate, broke apart in sparks, a windfall of light in the room's darkness) '... when she lay down and gave birth to him in an open meadow. What a child that was to be born without a blemish!' It had started raining, the windows dripping, misted. One moment I was standing not seeing out only half-listening staring at the night; the next without warning I was caught by it: the bruised summer light, the musical sub-text of mauve caves on lilac and the laburnum past and shadow where the lime tree dropped its bracts in frills of contrast where she lay down in vetch and linen and lifted up her son to the archive they would shelter in: the oral song avid as superstition, layered like an amber in the wreck of language and the remnants of a nation. I was getting out my coat, buttoning it, shrugging up the collar. It was bitter outside, a real winter's night and I had distances ahead of me: iron miles in trains, iron rails repeating instances and reasons; the wheels singing innuendos, hints, outlines underneath the surface, a sense suddenly of truth, its resonance.