Last year Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks as a poet in residence with Age Concern. Each week, she  would take a train to Preston and spend a day with the staff and residents of Lady Elsie Finney House, a secure residential care home, designed for elderly people with dementia.

In a blog she has written for the Poetry School, she said: “I wouldn’t normally burden poetry with a purpose, but in this case I did come to feel a responsibility to the people I was working with. I wanted the relatives and care staff who had so generously shared their time and stories with me to find something in my writing. I wanted to write a kind of poetry that wouldn’t be ‘beyond them’, as one member of staff put it, and so the residency shaped the tone and style of the poems that I produced in a way that I had never experienced before.

“The title of the book that I’ve produced at the end of it all, The Hard Word Box, is as much a description of the difficulties I faced as a poet as it is a reference to the challenges people with dementia face around language.”

Hesketh launched her collection, published by Penned in the Margins, at the Free Word Centre in Clerkenwell, London, on Wednesday night, and read a short selection of poems from it, including ‘Peggy’, which lists facts that establish a resident’s identity: “My greatest achievement in life was meeting my husband Walter. / Also meeting Sir Stafford Cripps when I worked at Dan Kerr’s. / I consider myself a very independent lady.”   

The poet concludes the foreword of her book thus: “If the experience of reading this book is a little disorientating, then that is probably a good thing. If I learnt anything at all, it’s that the experience of dementia is different for absolutely everybody; ‘telling it right’ would have been an impossible, and in some sense, pointless task.”

At the end of her reading Hesketh gave way to campaigner Julia Jones, who made a passionate case for spouses and carers of people with dementia to be given the same legal rights as parents of sick children – to be able to stay with them in hospital “for as many hours of the day and night as is humanly possible”.

John’s Campaign was launched after Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer about the experience of her father Dr John Gerrard, who had Alzheimer’s when he went into hospital in February 2014 to be treated for leg ulcers at the age of 86. He was there for five weeks, and came out “skeletal, incontinent, immobile, incoherent”. He died last month.

Jones said the campaign had in a very short time secured the backing of a number of MPs, and was seeking the help of more to support an Early Day Motion in parliament on the issue. You can find out more about the campaign here

Greg Freeman