Book of poems is my first...and last (From Worcester News)

Book of poems is my first...and last

11:19am Monday 24th October 2011 in Mike Pryce

I’VE been called a few names in my time, but so far Cilla has never been one of them. That was until the other day when I picked up the phone and a voice in a broad Liverpool accent said: “Is that Cilla Pryce?”

It took me right back through the years to when Merseybeat ruled the airwaves and a young lady called Miss White changed her name to Miss Black, recorded a Bacharach and David song called Anyone Who Had A Heart and the rest is history.

“No, it’s Mike Pryce,” I replied.

“Oh, it looks like Cilla to me,” the voice went on. “Must be your writing.” (No wonder the bank manager is always sending me letters.) “Anyway, it’s Cynthia Osborne here.”

Now, Cynthia Osbourne is some kind of nugget.

She said: “Think of modern technology, well I’m the opposite.”

She hasn’t got a car or a television set and refuses to have a phone anywhere near her. Not just a mobile but even a phone in her home. That’s why I had to write to her.

She said: “If I want to phone I go outside and use a public kiosk.”

Despite being a teenager in 60s Liverpool she didn’t much like the Beatles, went to the Cavern Club once, but wasn’t very impressed and actually preferred Herman’s Hermits, who, whisper it quietly, came from Manchester.

So here is a lady who could claim enormous street credibility from her younger days but can’t be bothered. She’d rather write poetry.

Her first – and probably only – book My Life In Poetry has just been published, but if you are looking for anything about the author in it then you will be sadly disappointed. There’s not even a photograph on the dust cover.

Today Cynthia Osborne lives in Worcester. In fact she has done for eight years, currently in Chedworth Drive, Warndon, and has wandered along in glorious anonymity until her book came out. Things might change now.

She was born in the West Derby area of Liverpool but doesn’t have good memories of growing up in the city.

“In fact I don’t really like Liverpool much,” she said in her dead giveaway accent. “I haven’t got very fond memories of it.”

She certainly wasn’t your typical teenage girl of the time.

She said: “I never bought records. I objected to paying for music. If I wanted to hear it I listened to the radio. I preferred folk and jazz to the Beatles. I went to the Cavern one night and it was OK, but I wasn’t overwhelmed and I never went again. Oh yeah, Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, I suppose he was all right.”

Poetry was not on her radar nor anywhere near it in those days.

Cynthia worked at Plessey, the electronics giant, as a messenger initially and then as a private secretary to one of the bosses.

However, after one overture too many, she quit the post and moved to the typing pool. Then she left to join a temping agency and had 77 different jobs in three years. As she puit it: “One week here, one week there.”

It was a pattern followed in her domestic life as she began to move home around the country with her sister Heidi. First to the Wirral, across the Mersey from Liverpool, then to a couple of places in Wales, followed by Coventry, Shrewsbury, Craven Arms in Shropshire and Kidderminster.

She said: “I just like moving.

Although I didn’t like Kidderminster. It was too hilly.”

Her first stop in Worcester was Dines Green and now she lives on her own in Warndon while sister Heidi is still in Kidderminster.

Cynthia’s poems were all written during a rather bleak time in her life between 1986 and 1995.

She said: “I used to cry so much and when I cried the poems just came to me.

“They never came at any other time. I would write them down as they happened.”

In all she wrote more than 90 poems but almost half of them have gone missing during her many house moves.

She said: “All I have left are in the book. So there won’t be another one. I haven’t written a poem for more than 15 years.”

Her initial attempts to have them published several years ago were unsuccessful but in Worcester Library one day she saw the name of Arthur Stockwell of Ilfracombe, Devon, an old established book publisher specialising in encouraging and guiding new writers. Cynthia sent her poems off and the response came back that Stockwell found them “very interesting and compelling”.

The book, containing 52 of them, is the result.

Cynthia Osbourne I wish you all the luck in the world. You’re more than a paperback writer, because this is in hardback – but just don’t call me Cilla.

􀁥 My Life In Poetry by Cynthia Osborne (ISBN 978-0-7223-4110-0) is published by Arthur H Stockwell and costs £7.99.

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