I wrote this poem when I was at school. The inspiration was William Wordsworth’s poem about being lonely and having the company of a host of golden daffodils.

I typed it out one lunchtime on the back of a sheet of paper taken from a pile of school letters using a typewriter we found in the room we used to hang out in. There was only ever this one draft.

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
In my rubber dinghy,
And as I wandered, I came across
A huge and lonely whale.
The whale, it made a sound, quite loud,
But I couldn’t give a toss.
Then suddenly, from the depths of it,
There came a mighty gale!

The whale it was a-blowing,
A-blowing very hard.
My little dinghy was a-blown
To strange and far off lands;
To where the weather was snowing,
And where it couldn’t moan.
Instead, the silly dinghy shouted,
“On deck, I need all hands!”

O, what a silly thing to Write,
‘Cos dinghies do not talk.
O, what a silly verse that was,
To make my dinghy speak!
And then along came a tall knight,
Who resembled the Wizard of Oz!
Up he strode, and said, “Hello,”
And made my knees quite weak!

Caity Taylor 1991 Untitled

I still have the original somewhere; I also scanned it and saved it electronically.