Introduction
I first met Rick Vick around the millennium in the local college of further education, at my first ever attendance at a poetry evening class. He sat top table, gaunt faced, nicotine toothed, spike-stubbled, undulating grey hair down to his bony shoulders, spectacles on the end of his hairy nose, crooked as his infectious smile.
By his side lay a leather satchel, which I later learnt contained a copy of the Greek myths, Shakespeare’s sonnets and a selection of the cheapest books of poetry he could find that particular week from the high street charity shop. And notebooks, lots of notebooks. He welcomed the shy table of the middle-class, middle aged, with his cut-glass accent - enunciated vowels, clipped consonants and the seldom heard use of the personal pronoun ‘One’ rather than I or You. Once a week, from our clunky, wooden beginnings, Rick coaxed out lines from our generally dysfunctional existences that had us weeping in front of strangers and hugging them at home time.
His mantra was, ‘Let the pen do the writing.’
Rick was from select British bloodstock - private boarding school from a young age, his father a high-court judge and his grandfather, a Lord Mayor of London. He started his writing career as a journalist on London’s Fleet Street but quickly discovered the hack’s life wasn’t for him and, with a dinner jacket in a suitcase, travelled to New York, where he met a girl and her cat and drove to the hippy communes of California.
From that moment on, Rick never had a penny to spare, but he travelled the world and wrote and lived with authors, poets and artists. He spent fourteen years on the Greek island of Hydra during the 1960s where he led the Bohemian lifestyle with the likes of Leonard Cohen, Cohen’s lover Marianne Jensen, and where Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly and Patrick Leigh Fermor were literary visitors.
A decade after the evening classes, I met Rick leading The Ale House Poets group in Stroud, Gloucestershire where he’d settled with his family. He charged £5 a person for three hours of creative writing exercises, readings and conversation. The group members were seldom able to lay their hands on a £5 note, so he’d settle for a half pint of beer or a cigarette. Without any doubt, Rick kindled in me, and many others, a passion for words and writing that has continued to this day. But more than writing, Rick had a deep love of all art forms, of being true to one’s inner calling, and of humanity in all its guises.
In Stroud, Rick was a busy and interested activist rather than a local politician. He had a genuine love for the town and its cultural life. For many years he helped organise the Stroud Arts Festival including poetry, dance, theatre, music and painting. He had a love of people that manifested itself on every level, from the encouragement of a shy, new poet at one of his workshops to his record-breaking seven appearances as a writer at the prestigious Stroud Short Stories.
Rick saw no difference between, and spoke no differently to, the homeless person sleeping rough in the doorway or the well-to-do visitor to the art gallery or poetry reading holding a complimentary glass of wine. During his life in Stroud, he was involved in social work, leading creative writing classes for ex-offenders and those with addiction issues.
The last time I saw Rick he was terminally ill in bed. He told me of the books he was reading and of how much he’d enjoyed reading a modest piece of my work he’d seen recently in an online journal. I told him that my writing life was entirely thanks to his teaching.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I was simply the facilitator. Let the pen do the writing.’
Steven John
The Phare Magazine - Joint Founder and Managing Editor
Seeing
He watches her, at first vaguely – an old woman paddling. So he sees her through his seven year old eyes – although she is no more than forty, a few years older than his mother. She is standing in the tattered lace of the wave’s furthest reach up the beach. She is alone. Not just by herself, he thinks, having some notion of what alone means, being an only child. Something about her stillness keeps his eyes fixed on her. She is not like the mothers and a few fathers further up the beach, beyond the breakwater, ankle deep in the cold North sea, keeping eyes on their children, further out, splashing and screaming with abandon.
As he watches he senses a tremor in her body as she lifts her head and stares out to sea. He follows her gaze to the distant smudge of the horizon. There is not much to see; no boats just the undulations of the waves. She is wearing a dark red dress which, unlike the other women in the shallows, she has not gathered in her hand to lift.
She steps forward and keeps on moving, slowly, into the incoming waves. He glances towards his mother, who is unpacking triangles of sandwiches and three bananas from two plastic boxes, laying them on a small square of white cloth. He is about to call her attention to the woman but seeing the tight line of her mouth decides against disturbing her. His father had said he would not come on the picnic outing as he had a fiver on the 4.15 at Doncaster. She had not been pleased.
She is up to her thighs when he looks back. Something in him knows what she is doing but he has not the language to put his intuition into words. Deeper and deeper she goes, the sea up almost to her waist. The dress has risen up around her. Like a dingy come to rescue her, he thinks.
She lifts her hand to her head and frees a clasp or pin that holds the long dark hair that falls to her shoulders.
On and on she pushes. He feels her effort. She stops. The ocean heaves all around her body up to her chest. He looks up the beach. No one has seen her. He wants to shout out, to point but does not.
Quite suddenly she raises her arms fingers outstretched and dips under the water and is gone. Just like that. He hugs his knees hard in his arms, staring. Staring so hard – willing her to reappear. She does not.
No one else has noticed. He looks around. All is just as it was the last time he had looked and he wonders if he had seen, truly seen, what he had seen.
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