I first met Jacky Fleming in 1979, when she lived in my road in Headingley. She was looking for her cat, and being a cat-owner myself, I joined in the search. After that we forged a kind of tentative friendship. She moved away to a neighbouring part of Leeds but I was aware of her sterling work for Leeds Postcards and the early publications of her cartoons by Penguin, in the Guardian and The Independent.
When we met again, with me newly single, our friendship became deeper with regular cups of coffee where we chatted through the challenges of our personal lives. Jacky was wonderfully supportive about my first forays into establishing myself as a newly-out gay man. She was also very complimentary about my attempts at writing poetry in the early nineties.
I don’t think she realized that I was harbouring a secret ambition for her to design the cover of one of my books. Slightly disingenuous for a seventy year old, it was a ‘when I grow up, Jacky will do a front cover for me’ aspiration. So for my second set of sonnets, ‘A Bench for Billie Holiday’, Jacky did the perfect illustration for a perfect place, South Landing in Flamborough, just down the road from us in Bridlington. With a nod to iconic illustrator Edward Ardizzone [ whom we both admired] it was the perfect cover. Jacky has gone on to do the brilliant cover for ‘Heart Stones’ and just to add to the beauty, her astonishing artwork for the new collection, ‘Notes of Your Music’.
I feel that I have arrived.
