Six months after my daughter was born, my father died alone on the floor of a B&B in Ilfracombe having lost his wife, his business, home, and been deported back from San Francisco where he had been living for the past 20 years. He was an alcoholic, but had only been drinking for ten years or so. After he died and I had my second child I fell into a wild kind of depression and had repeated fantasies of escape, running from my life which suddenly felt like a trap. I was isolated, yes, at home with my children, but I was also grieving. Each night after the children’s bath, I would sing them to sleep and I always sang the same song:

“I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for something what can it be?”

When they were a little older, I snuck away from them and my husband for a week’s writing residential in a stately home in Ireland. On the last night a friend threw a dinner party in her apartment and another writer got out his guitar and I sang this song to a room full of strangers. When I stood to top up my glass, my new friend said to me, “Maybe you need to find a different song to sing to your children from now on.”

From the album Blue, Reprise Records, 1971