“In the middle of the glade stood a wild apple tree, which gave it its name. There was a grassy bank beneath it, and when I grew older I would spend many a happy hour here with a book by R.L. Stevenson or Hardy, or Swinburne’s poems, half-conscious of the furtive movements of moorhen or water-vole in the rushy ponds,the shy summer warblings of countless little birds in the thickets of gorse or hawthorn, the deep midsummer hum of a myriad insects. If one moved suddenly a pair of wild ducks was likely to hurtle startlingly from the rushes. It was a magic place: one half-expected some nymph to emerge shyly from the brake, some not-impossible She grown from the Wirral scene (particularly after reading Swinburne). Unfortunately she never did; one had to be content with Suke Damson or Catriona.”

Suke and Catriona are Hardy’s and Stevenson’s most alluring heroines, respectively. NB57, on the other hand, has to be content with Claire Rayner.

To use she as a noun as in “a she”, or “some she”, is a poetic and unusual turn of phrase these days, but nevertheless a perfectly acceptable way to say “a female person” (you’ll still find it in a decent dictionary). The reason for the capitalisation is not entirely clear to me but it may come from whichever of Swinburne’s poems Eastwood is referring to here, a title for a divine nymph perhaps, a bit like the convention of capitalising He for a divinity, etc. I dunno, the capital “S” doesn’t matter really I suppose.

To shorten the line, and presumably to take us away from any particular locality, NB57, instead of “grown from the Wirral scene”, says “from the brushwood”, which doesn’t apper in the Eastwood text, and it would be uncharacteristic of me if I didn’t wonder aloud where this comes from, putting two and two together and making loads of bollocks…

But I’ll just say it’s interesting that Kipling has a famous story (The Brushwood Boy) in which a dream girl, the Brushwood Girl, repeatedly appears to the hero from out of the brushwood. We certainly have the words at least 3 writers (Eastwood, Swinburne and Hardy) wrapped up in these couple of lines of Blackwell, so why not a 4th – Kipling ?

I didn’t mean it was obvious that it should be capitalised, or obvious what it means, but take it from me “She” is capitalised in the John Eastwood passage in question (from “Wirral Born and Bred”), and I suspect from Eastwood’s next sentence, that the capitalisation has got something to do with a Swinburne poem about nymphs. I’ve got the book at home but I won’t be there for a couple of days so no page reference.

…come on then Exxo, enlighten us with a reference or something. It don’t make no sense to me, guv.

Interestingly, and somewhat obviously once you know, it’s “She” (with a capital “S”) and not “sheep”. At this particular point, NB57 is paraphrasing John Eastwood, a local Wirral writer, taking about an idyllic spot where he used to sit and read books as a lad in pre-war times. Eastwood in turn is alluding to references to nymphs in Swinburne’s poetry. And the “brushwood” may or may not be a reference to a Kipling story.

John Eastwood of course is lauded as one of the “Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral” under the pic’s of Big Jimmy Nail on the inside cover of that album. And his writing seems to have influenced NB57 in other songs too, notably influencing some of the more rural images in “Emerging from Gorse”.

Oh and last night this particular true story was set in the village of Mere (the one in Cheshire, “where Graeme Souness used to live”).