Andrew Motion, born in 1952, was the UK poet laureate between 1999 and 2009. In the summer / autumn of 1973, as he commenced his post-graduate studies at University College, Oxford, he and his newly-married wife, Joanna, rented a flat in the attic of Court Leys, Toot Baldon.
Although his stay in Toot Baldon was relatively brief, he had time to compose a poem entitled … Toot Baldon1. In it he writes:
“We rented an attic flat
like a boat (hunched ceilings
and lopsided walls)
on course for open country.”
The poem mentions elms and Friesians viewed from their flat - neither of which are now present in the village.
His 2023 memoir2 says they moved to Toot Baldon, whose name was “comical”, as it seemed exactly the right place for two people who wanted to be alone with each other. The attic provided them with secrecy but a lookout post – “we could hardly believe our luck.”
He describes an empty pub smelling of Dettol (presumably The Crown, now The Mole – no longer empty, no longer smelling of Dettol!), a muddy track running between an avenue of mature chestnut trees with cattle grids at either end (mud and grids are no longer there). He also talks about a cluster of elms by the church and Court Leys and recalls watching, from the bedroom window, rooks “rising like ash” from the elm tops.
Whilst living in their “sky boat” at Court Leys, Andrew and Joanna felt that their time there would last forever, but also felt that everything was too good to last. And so it was. The elms started dying of Dutch elm disease, the muddy track was covered with concrete, the house was sold to a new owner and the pub became “the kind of place that people visit on the weekend”. Their stay ended and they moved back to Oxford, buying a house near Folly Bridge.
- Published in his collection Love in a Life, Faber & Faber, 1991
- Sleeping on Islands. A life in Poetry, Faber & Faber, 2023