They Spoke No English

By: Keeler, Stephen

I arrived in Sweden in the summer of 1973, with a teaching job and a small rented

cottage by the church, in Mariestad. It was my first time out of the UK, and it might

have been anywhere: my only motivation was just to get out; to leave the dark and

drizzly northern town of my birth, the solemn cloisters of my alma mater, and to

avoid at all costs the (perhaps imagined) horrors of an English school staff-room.

I spoke sub-schoolbook French, minimal German and no Swedish, and yet in

Stockholm I found a city which seemed to have been waiting patiently for me to

arrive. In Mariestad I found a pretty town of quiet, jolly people all of whom seemed

pleased that I had come. If only life were like that!

Well, for me, in Sweden, it was and is, and I have spent the rest of my life

reciprocating. As the poet said, you only fall in love for the first time once. It is

neither over-dramatic nor an exaggeration to say that everything I am I owe to

Sweden in general and to a number of individual Swedes in particular.

The poems in They Spoke No English are snapshots or what John Glenday has

generously called 'little films unravelling through love, absence and desire'. They

are assorted paragraphs in a longer love-letter to a country which is far beyond

special to me. They were written over a five-year period of particular reflection, and

are dedicated to the memory of my lovely late wife, Yvonne, and to our delightful

daughter, Lucy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1838432191
• ISBN13: 9781838432195
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Nine Pens
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 0.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.8" x 8.3"