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| Remembering Kathleen as she was |
Kathleen Herbert:
Teacher, Writer, Friend
A teaching career of close on 40 years
When I mentioned Kathleen Herbert at my last Old Students' Reunion in June 2012, I was amazed and delighted by the warmth that I received on behalf of my friend- that unique and astonishing person Miss Kathleen May Herbert. She had touched so many lives, and changed them for the better, according to the many people who came to me and wanted to talk about how she had had a profound influence on them. She was a charismatic and caring teacher, a warm and witty friend and a subtle and moving writer. All that has gone, but what remains is a gentle, charming but slightly bewildered lady.
Some
years before I got to know Kathleen really well, she nursed her mother through
terminal cancer. Several years later, she did the same for her father. At this
time I had returned to my school in East London to teach English and she was my Head of Department,
but her father needed her and so she gave up the job in the school she loved,
and went to work in a Catholic High School near her home.
She is fondly remembered by pupils and staff from that institution too.
The writer emerges
Meanwhile,
in 1982, she published her first novel, The
Lady of the Fountain. In 1983, her second novel, Queen of the Lightning won the Historical Novel Prize awarded
annually in memory of Georgette Heyer. Bodley Head also published the
sequel, Ghost in the Sunlight in 1986.
At around the same time, The Lady of the
Fountain was republished as Bride
of the Spear. All three novels are set in Cumbria, Northumbria and the
Borders of Scotland, during the period of upheaval and immigration following
the withdrawal of Roman troops in the fifth century. This period is often
referred to as The Dark Ages. Kathleen prefers the term Heroic Age.
The
three books sold well and were translated into German and French. They were
published in paperback by Corgi in 1989.
Following
the success of the Cumbrian Trilogy, she concentrated on her scholarly research
and produced several volumes on Anglo Saxon history and legend, which are still
read and respected by a small but enthusiastic audience. Melvyn Bragg
acknowledged one of them, Spellcraft,
as a most helpful source in his Afterword to Credo, his historical novel about St Bega, set in Cumbria in the
Heroic Age. (Spellcraft is still in print, now called English Heroic Legends, and available on Amazon and from the publisher Anglo Saxon Books, as are Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens and Looking for the Lost Gods of England)
She
retired in 1984 at age 60 and was in her prime,
while her books were selling well. She devoted herself to studying,
lecturing and writing. She learnt Welsh in order to read The Mabinogion and
other early British epic tales, and she also studied Hungarian. I have the
impression that the main reason she did this was because Hungarian is such a
notoriously difficult language, and she relished the challenge!
She
spent a great deal of time tramping the hills of her beloved North Country,
particularly Cumbria, researching on foot the backgrounds for her novels.
Then in
April 1994 she had a massive stroke. Her tenacity, strength and humour enabled
her to rebuild her life and carry on for a while, but I didn't fully realise
how much damage had been done until some years later.
My
friendship with Kathleen has lasted for well over forty years. Like all
friendships, it has changed, as I married and had children (to whom she became
a much loved and affectionate "Auntie") and she became a well
respected author. There were gaps, high points and low points. During the last
few years there have been low points indeed, as the stroke started to take its
toll, and she became prey to depression and delusion. During those dark years,
we met rarely, and she allowed no-one into her house. She was often despairing
and felt she was being watched. She bemoaned her own incapability- on good days
with a joke, on bad days with tears.
I often
reiterated my offer to work on the book for her, and try to reconstruct it if I
could, but although we tried to arrange meetings, something always happened to
prevent it, and it wasn't until much later that I realized just how poorly she
had become. She became more and more despairing and felt she was being watched.
I reassured her as best I could, but she was reluctant to meet and I felt
powerless. In 2009 she wrote to me, asking me if I could get the book
published, and saying that it had got messed up when she was ill. At that
point, I suggested she put it all into a box and send it to me, registered
post. It took another year to persuade her to meet me and hand it over.
The lost book is found
I hadn't seen her for several years and I hardly recognised her. A striking and lovely woman in her prime, with pale red-gold hair and a sense of the dramatic, Kathleen loved beautiful and exotic fabrics, rich colours and textures, and was always immaculately groomed. Now she was thin and unkempt, with slightly grubby fingernails, and a stain or two down her coat. I said hello and touched her on the shoulder and we embraced briefly, but she didn't want me to see her: "I want you all to remember me as I was," she said.
She had a week or two of
great energy and optimism, when she rode on the wave that had buoyed her up to
gather her book together but it was a very brief upturn in what proved to be a
rapid decline in her health and spirits. She had been neglecting the physical
world of eating, drinking and sleeping until she was found wandering, far from
home with a dislocated shoulder, and taken to the nearest hospital. Although she is now physically comfortable, a
second stroke, and the ravages of self- neglect and age mean that her mental
capacity is declining. Her
once powerful mind is now dark and clouded. It almost seems that every time I see
her, a few more lights have gone out, and yet occasionally someone pulls the
curtains open a crack and a beam of brightness strikes the back wall and I see
her and hear her as she was. Sadly, these intervals are becoming more and more
infrequent.
There
seems to have been serious deterioration since that school reunion in June 2012.
Immediately after the meeting I was able to tell her of how many people had
said she changed their lives and how much she meant to them. That certainly got
through and tears ran down her cheeks. I wept too for the loss of beauty, of
intelligence, the sadness of humanity- sunt
lacrimae rerum.
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As a family, we find Kathleen's present state very hard to cope with, but we know that she is more comfortable now than she has been for several years; she is warm, well fed and free from pain. More than this, she is free from the despair and delusion which she suffered from for so many years. When my daughter Kate visited her last Kathleen said she was happy where she is now. After a life of such great creativity, energy and intensity, perhaps we should wish no more for her, than the peace she now has.
Trifolium Books 2011
Moon in Leo is set in Northern England in
Furness, on the southern edge of the Lake District, but encompasses the whole
of Britain and Europe. The book has received excellent reviews, and is selling steadily. It is available from Amazon and The Book Depository worldwide, as an e-book from Amazon, and from any good bookshop.
I now
have all Kathleen's notes and literary papers and am gradually working through
them. I will be publishing some of her essays and lecture notes, to allow a
wider public to benefit from her scholarship and wisdom. Her retelling of Guinevere's story is already available as an e-book: The Once and Future Queen. 
In 2013, I intend to reissue
the early novels as The Northern Kingdoms
Trilogy, and Mike and I are hoping to publish an entirely new novel, Ghosts of Camelot, which we found, half
written, and completely planned, amongst the many notebooks and boxes of papers which we rescued when Kathleen's house was sold. Although she was delighted at the publication of Moon in Leo, and still has a copy beside her bed, Kathleen is now beyond understanding what needs to be done to bring this fifth novel to publication. I can do nothing for her now but make sure her work reaches the public as I believe she would have wished. 
