A new baby …

So your book’s finished, it’s published, it’s in the shops and sitting bubbling away quietly on Amazon. Surely now, after three or four years’ work, you can leave it alone?

Well, no you can’t. That precious baby you gave birth to with such care and loving tenderness now has a life of its own, like an unruly teenager.

The real nightmare, of course – and I mean nightmare literally, the bad dream that wakes you in a cold sweat – is that some person, some letter, some photograph, will emerge with a killer fact that reduces the basic argument of the book to rubble. That, thank God, has never happened to me, though the thought of it has broken my nights once or twice.

But there is the occasional silly typo that you should have spotted – p.394, l.1 if you want to know. (Please don’t write and tell me about it. I know.) That tiny defect somehow spoils the innocent new-born perfection of the thing, like a pimple on the baby’s face.

Then there are the people you meet at readings or presentations, like the one I gave at Queen’s Park Arts Centre, Aylesbury last Friday, who have photographs or little anecdotes that would have fitted in so perfectly. Too late now – so, for instance, nobody will ever read the reminiscences of the old lady who remembered playing with Vernon Scannell’s younger sister more than 75 years ago. They wouldn’t have changed the conclusions of the book, but they might have given another insight into Scannell’s family life.

Hey-ho. Here and there, as you flick through the pages, you find phrases that you could write a bit more elegantly now, or ideas that you might have developed more neatly. And yet, whatever little niggles plague you in the small hours, you’re happy with the book and proud of it. It tells a difficult story honestly, and it brings to life a man who wasn’t always easy to like, but who ultimately earned respect. Other biographers would have written Scannell’s story differently, but this book digs out where the poetry came from in a ramshackle, edgy, complicated life.

So Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell is thoughtful, and truthful, and it’s the best you could have done. It may be a scruffy teenager rather than a pretty little baby, but it’s ready for the world.

And – you know what? – you love it. Like a child.