Kate Hendry

what scaredy kate does

is desert the dangerous thing — her body.
Dumps it on the top deck of the 29
but her husband cycles to the depot,
claims it back from lost property.

At the pool, she shoves it
under the bench in the changing room
but a naked, dripping woman calls out
Is this yours? Good job I spotted it!
Scaredy Kate picks it up by the ear, drags it home.

Throws on wellies and mac.
Stomps up to the allotment.
Lifts the lid on the compost bin and tips body inside.
Worms wriggle out of its way.
Oi! shouts a man with a spade. You can’t put meat
in there! It’ll bring out the rats!

Reluctantly, she lugs body back home.
Chest freezer in the back room?
If she defrosts the hedgerow berries,
eats all the sausages and peas.

For now, body must lie next to her in bed.
Scaredy Kate puts earplugs in so she can’t hear
it blubbing into its pillow like a baby.

what scaredy kate knows

That she’s been dunted, twisted, bruised,
that her ribs are sore, sore, sore.

This fear. The swell of it. She knows
the bank-bursting rush of river

bearing limbless tree trunks downstream.
River’s washed away path, grass

and all the tiny sprouting bulbs
that should have been snowdrops.

She can’t cross the torrent,
can’t retrace her steps.

River’s overwhelmed the overflow,
swamped the meadow, unmapped her.

Muddy, lapping waves launch her
on a side route through birch woods.

Up steep steps — she doesn’t know
where they lead, if her ribs

are fractured or cracked, or
harbouring bone-crumbling disease.

But this is where she stops —
at the top of don’t know

by the salt box on Colebrook Place,
out of breath above the drowning river.

scaredy kate resized

In the changing room, Scaredy Kate
climbs back into the borrowed wetsuit

of her skin. Or tries. Dried out
and cracked, it won’t fasten up.

Imagine your fingers are fish!
coaxes the nurse on the other side

of the concertinaed curtain.
Wiggle your hips, twist your wrists!

She does what she’s told — tugs
neoprene over heels, ankles, knees —

but the upper half of her’s bowed
and warped. The nurse frowns

You have to say it like you mean it,
‘this is my body, I will fit.’

Kate Hendry has published two pamphlets: ‘The Lost Original’ (Happenstance Press) and ‘MX SIMP’ (Mariscat Press). The latter was shortlisted for the 2023 Michael Marks Awards.

Kate wrote the following about her poems:

These poems are from a sequence called ‘The Scaredy Kate Poems’. Scaredy Kate is a persona; my frightened child self. She speaks in the third person — her voice is not quite hers, and not quite mine. She is anxious, but longs to discover how to live freely and fiercely in the world.

I had written my way through my treatment for breast cancer in 2020 — the Covid year. My notebook was my only companion in waiting rooms and wards. The result was ‘MX SIMP’, a pamphlet published by Mariscat Press in 2023. When treatment ended, when there were no more waiting rooms or wards, I felt adrift. Recovery was a gnawing fear of recurrence. I needed a new figurative language to articulate that terror. Thus Scaredy Kate was born.

Scaredy Kate sounds like that childhood taunt ‘scaredy cat’. Do I sound unforgiving of my cowardly self? I was! But I also wanted to claim her — fear was such an unrelenting, consuming experience that I knew I had to speak from it, rather than silence it. The poems are me being brave about being cowardly.

The title of ‘What Scaredy Kate Does’ echoes Susan Coolidge’s novel ‘What Katy Did’. I hated that book as a child. I was not that Katy — unfailingly good and patient. Of course, the novel is also about recovery: Katy falls from a swing and injures her spine so badly she can’t walk. Eventually, after years of goodness, she is rewarded and walks again. In my poem, Scaredy Kate is angry and impatient: she refuses to accept her broken body. Other people foil her plans and she is forced towards some kind of truce.

I was a good student of hypochondria before cancer; an excellent one after. Every ache, every pain was a sign. When I fell and bruised my ribs, I was convinced that the cancer was back. I was as loyal to this story as a dog to its cruel master. ‘What Scaredy Kate Knows’ is about the relief of not knowing — of letting go of the seeming certainties one hangs onto. I wrote it after a winter storm when my local river burst its banks and flooded my usual way home. I was forced to find a new path — to walk a route I didn’t know, to embrace uncertainty.

‘Scaredy Kate Resized’ describes the particular, peculiar experience of a mastectomy. The tight skin across my chest which reminded me of putting on a wetsuit. It’s also about accepting the new body and choosing to live in it.