Sialkot, the town where Tessa lived except for the three months she spent with her baby in a tin-roofed bothy in the foothills of the Himalayas
Scottish poet Tessa Ransford first went to live in what was West Pakistan in January 1960 as a missionary’s wife to work in women and children’s welfare. Her new book ‘don’t mention this to anyone’ (Luath Press) consists of poems and prose fragments of life in the Punjab
The only contact I had with my parents and other family and friends was by airmail letter, usually a blue airmail letter-form, already stamped. As we had no telephones we needed to write letters locally, too, every day. I wrote every week to my parents, as they did to me. They kept all my letters. Theirs to me were lost when our luggage was burnt on a ship in Liverpool docks in 1968.
The dying were all around us, particularly children, but also young adults, dying of TB, malaria and other fevers. Girls died in childbirth. Fellow missionaries also died, and my husband and other friends were frequently ill with hepatitis, paratyphoid, mysterious fevers, malaria and dysentery. We were vaccinated frequently, especially for cholera. And there was cancer awaiting the old. But apart from disease, a wonderful missionary doctor was killed in a car crash when the dust at the margins of the single track road blinded the windscreen. Death was ever-present.
Did he reassure them they had not lived in vain?
What is a life that is not lived in vain?
‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher’.
Death though, death is not in vain.
It gives abandonment, forgetting
forgiving, forgoing
going before,
that is comfort.
Tessa Ransford is a poet and founder of the Scottish
Poetry Library
Click here for the fragment from this collection which appeared in Tuesday’s Scottish Review
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web