Life Story - Poet Bee Wickens

Betty Wickens, known by those around her as Bee, has been writing poetry for over thirty years, totting up over 200 poems and counting. “It’s a really wonderful way of getting things off your chest.” She says. Brought up by her mother on Charles Dickens, she was always interested in poetry, and collected many books with poems in them as a child. She used to learn and recite them, recalling aged six a mystical poem by Violet Carson called ‘Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore.’ “I quite often choose a theme, something that’s bugging me or something that I’m interested in.” she continues, “I choose a topic that I think more people should be showing an interest in, like dementia. I write about my own feelings.” Bee refers frequently to her grandfather, who she says was her best friend as a child. The first collection of her poetry included ‘Grandad My Best Friend’. Her Grandad was a basket maker and they used to go walking every weekend. He left school when he was seven years old to go and help out at the iron factory. He worked into his eighties. Training as a teacher, Bee brought to life so many stories for her young pupils, and poetry was a core part of their learning. But it wasn’t until she retired that she took up writing properly herself, and she has had a number of her collections published. Her collections travel through the seasons, some of which are autobiographical, and other are about nature. Bee talks about wanting to draw attention to things that people take for granted, such as nature and plants growing. Her pointers for writing include focusing on things you’ve never noticed before. “I aim to entertain’ she says, “But I also like to give instruction and to help people to learn through me. That’s the teacher side in me of course. And I always try to end optimistically.” There’s another collection of work from during the Second World War. Bee’s mother had taken the precaution of burying documents and items of value in the garden, in case Sheffield suffered during the Blitz. Bea’s poem, a ‘Secret Corner’, is a true account of a beloved part of the garden that she customised with fencing and carpet and where she would sit and read for hours. When her mother started digging that plot after the war, Bee was furious, until they found together a chest full of paperwork, deeds to the house and everything that had been locked away and buried to save them for after the war. When asked about our modern, digital society, Bee reflects nostalgically on the lack of rapport between the young and the old. “I used to go and do haymaking you see.” She says, “It was a valuable time in the community between generations. But children don’t know about haymaking now.” “My mother was a lively minded woman. Her life was a tragedy, but she made good use of it, and I like to think that I am keeping alive what she created.  She gave me good morals to live by, that I have instilled in my own child” Bee has lived at Eckington Court for over a year, and is still regularly writing poetry. She is currently looking to publish her new work.