Award-winning Shropshire poet's life told in verse
Award-winning Shropshire poet Mollie Bolt is on song as she tells her life's story through a compilation of her poetry called Sing Me A Lifetime.
"I really meant to be a singer. All my mum's family had good contralto or baritone voices. But I'd have hated the discipline," said Mollie, from Wellington, who is in her late 80s, and has won a host of prizes for her poetry over the past 40 years.
Her book is dedicated to her father, Horace Edward Wright, who died in 1984 and whom she still misses.
Mollie grew up in Harpenden and due to a serious illness did not start school until she was seven, but her father, who was a bus driver, made sure she could read, write, and do sums, and she says she never felt at a disadvantage.
There has been bad luck and sadness. She married Staff Sergeant James O'Brien in 1954 but their third child died soon after birth, and her husband was killed in a car crash in 1964.
"Having returned to Colchester, I was given a job at the military hospital, the boys being left with relatives. I decided to look for a house in Colchester.
"My life changed again when Staff-Sergeant Jim Bolt, a previous colleague of my husband, offered to take me househunting in his car. I found one, and married that summer, and bought it together."
Various moves followed through Jim's Army postings, the last bringing them to Shropshire, at Donnington. Jim retired as Major J.E. Bolt, MBE, in 1991.
Mollie said: "Although I had written a few poems now and then throughout my life, it was not until the late 1970s that I found myself with spare time to fill, and began to enter the poems for occasional competitions.
"To my surprise, I now seem to be quite well known."
Her book comprises dozens of her poems, roughly arranged in chronological order. Here's one of them, titled Last Visit.
One of Mollie's poems:
My father lay against his pillows;
a smaller man than I remembered, with eyes less blue,
but still intelligent – and comprehending...
Yes, he knew.
"That doctor is a fool," he said.
"I've asked him more than once, to give me something for this cough.
"And when he does, I shall be up and off,
"down to the pub to have a pint."
With that he closed his eyes,
trembled and fought for breath.
My father was a stubborn man
who loved his life, and family,
and would not say goodbye.
Why should he welcome death?
For after all, at eighty-five, he knew
that he was much too young
to die.
