Hawleyville Childhood Recalled In Memoir

By Nancy K. Crevier

Cowshit And Strawberries, published in June by The Learmonth Press in Edinburgh, Scotland, is the first in a series of memoirs that Vera Rockwell Coghill plans to write. The youngest of 13 children, Ms Coghill was born October 24, 1933, to Stephen and Elizabeth Rockwell of Hawleyville. This book, her first ever published, will be the topic of discussion when Ms Coghill visits C.H. Booth Library on her birthday, Wednesday, October 24, at 7 pm.

Ms Coghill lived in Hawleyville the first 11 years of her life, and attended the one-room Land’s End School there. Unfortunate family circumstances found Ms Coghill farmed out to an aunt in Bethel in 1945, and she never again lived in Hawleyville. In her book, Ms Coghill reminisces about her young life in Hawleyville, stories that she later told her doll while a child growing up alone in her aunt’s home, separated from her brothers and sisters.

“It was these stories of my childhood that saw me through some very difficult adolescent years,” Ms Coghill said via e-mail from Edinburgh, Scotland, where she now lives. “I went from being part of a very big family in a community I had hardly ever left and where I knew everybody to one where I was an ‘incomer only child’ in a childless household.” But the tales of Hawleyville, she said, are happy ones.

Her journey to that of published author was winding. Following her 1951 graduation from Bethel High School, Ms Coghill was trained as a nurse at Middlesex Memorial Hospital in Middletown. She worked at Middlesex Hospital, a hospital in Rochester, N.Y., and Stamford Hospital after receiving her state registration in 1953.

In November 1956, she and two fellow nurses set sail aboard the Queen Mary to work abroad, landing in Glasgow, Scotland. She worked in Scotland for one year, where she met her husband to be, William Coghill, before returning to the states to save her money and return to Glasgow for her wedding.

In 1960, Ms Coghill and her husband moved to London, where she happily raised her two children. But feeling a need to do something more, she obtained her teaching certificate from North East London Polytechnic in 1972 and a master of arts in graphic design from the Central School of Art in London in 1980.

In between, she and her family were finally able to visit the country of her birth, 15 years after she had left.

“I left Hawleyville in 1945 and only occasionally came back to visit,” said Ms Coghill. Of the original “baker’s dozen” Rockwell children, said Ms Coghill, only five of them are left. “My sister, Mary, lives in Florida; sister Vivien in upper New York; my brother, Hal, in Cape Cod, and brother, Jimmy, in Pennsylvania.”

Back in London, Ms Coghill continued to work with young children and use her love of art to develop research on how children use marks and manipulation to enhance their learning.

Her husband’s transfer to Edinburgh in 1991, where Ms Coghill now resides, opened up the opportunity for her to further pursue her painting and find time to write, two forms of artistic expression in which she had become increasingly interested as the years went by.

She attended creative writing classes at the Centre for Life Long Learning at Edinburgh University, where she penned a piece called The Talisman, which her instructor liked “and told me to write all the rest,” Ms Coghill said. So began her memoirs.

The title of her book, Cowshit and Strawberries, is taken from a poem she wrote about an incident that took place in Hawleyville when she was just four or five years old. (See sidebar.) It is a poem that speaks of a simple, happy experience of a simple, happy childhood.

Despite the volumes of writing, she considers herself a painter now, primarily, Ms Coghill said, and because of that she is most fond of the chapter in her book entitled “Paint,” which recalls the time she and her brother painted the family’s pot-bellied stove a rainbow of colors.

She has finished the second memoir focused on the years of her life between 1945 and 1956, On Becoming A Virgin, and hopes to one day see it published, as well.

“I also would wish to finish the trilogy with a book in which I tie in my painting and writing with the ‘life experiences’ I have had,” Ms Coghill said.

Her four siblings will join her at the book reading to celebrate her 74th birthday, and along with those too young to remember the Newtown area of yesteryear, Ms Coghill said, “I do hope people from Hawleyville who knew me will somehow hear about it and come; I would love to see any who remember me.”