David’s background was English and Irish on one side, Scottish, Welsh, Swedish, and Greek on the other. His mother’s family: London tradesmen who became merchants on Grimsby fish docks. His father’s: wanderers who transited from the Swedish diplomatic service to the British colonial, via a spell working for the Ottoman empire.

David grew up in England in the 1950s, and ended university with an MA in “political science” – which by then even he had realised was nonsense. Turning down a PhD grant, he became a labourer, security guard, and hitch-hiker, before getting drawn, thanks to an old girlfriend, into the world of popularised encyclopaedias. This involved summarising the official Olympic rules of clay-pigeon shooting, and then becoming expert on all the gambling games of the world.

Jumped up to “editor” at £2 an hour because there wasn’t anyone else, he then had to write, for a US publisher, Man’s Body: an owner’s manual – in five months with a couple of researchers waiting to go to university, Ruth Berenbaum and Jefferson Cann. This went into 16 languages, sold over a million copies, was a US Book of the Month prime selection, and in many cultures (Catholic, Asian, Muslim, parts of rural USA) was the first time ordinary people had easy access to health and body information. He’d added a final section, “Woman’s body: a non-owner’s guide”, which he hoped did some good. Then contributed to the Woman’s Body book itself (edited by Ann Kramer), writing the chapters on gynaecology and on ageing.

With the proceeds, he bought a half-terrace of three houses for £2,000, in a village in the Forest of Dean. The empty one should have taken six months to do up. Him it took four years, so he became village postman. Eventually escaping to Ireland, he ran backpackers’ hostels, then got taken on as a sailboat-delivery cook/crewman. They only realised after they’d left Ireland that they might have asked more carefully about both his sailing and his cooking skills.

Earlier, the hitch-hiking had taken him through Iraq just after the Ba’ath party had come to power (including resting up for a few days in the family home of one of their government ministers), and twice to Morocco – where he stayed for a while on a kif farm in the Rif mountains (the first European they’d ever met who had absolutely no interest in drugs), and then, without even a green belt, ended up teaching karate in a village down south. The sailing led to a couple of Atlantic crossings, an enforced dismasted stay in the Azores, travels in the Caribbean and USA, and a spell of owning his own boat in the Canary Islands – a wooden-hulled Hungarian-built bilge keeler with a Welsh name.

Back in the UK he did a bit more editing, then returned to Norwich to keep his father company after his mother died. Couldn’t take him travelling at first, the authorities wouldn’t give his father a new passport, they’d decided he was no longer British. But eventually the two of them got away, to Tunisia, Morocco, India, Egypt, eastern Europe, in the last years of his father’s life.

David later split his time between Great Yarmouth and Vietnam, sitting in cafés scribbling or cheap hotel rooms on his computer, and was one of just four surviving male members of the senior branch of the von Heidenstam family, with his own entry in the Svensk Adelskalender, the Swedish equivalent of Burke’s Peerage. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in the UK, USA, India, and Sweden, and his microfictions in Tales for my dog.

David had been in poor health for some time, eventually having to be moved to a nursing home, before he died in the James Paget Hospital in Gorleston on April 12, 2024. As his above autobiography indicates, David worked in order to travel and travelled in order to write. What he described as his sort-of a blog, Footloose, was well titled. But coming back to the county where he had grown up, completed a circle.

The funeral service took place in Norwich in the chapel at the Earlham Cemetery, where our parents are buried, and it was a tribute to David that the mourners included work colleagues from decades ago and a friend from their infants’ school days in rural Norfolk.

The service, which opened with Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto No. 5 and closed with Mozart’s clarinet concerto in A major, was conducted with great sympathy by the Rev Sam Luscombe, of St Stephen’s Church in Norwich.

It transpired that she had, completely unbidden, bought a copy of Tales for my Dog, and had decided to use Leaving, one of its stories, in her address. But quite coincidentally one of the mourners who spoke ahead of her had been equally taken by the story, with its theme of endings being beginnings, and read it out:

“Leaving’s hard, they say. Or easy, of course. Depending. Anyway, I left. It was snowing. And raining, of course. Possibly at the same time. Certainly alternately. And at the same time, of course, I was arriving. That being a necessary condition of movement. (Please consult a geometry or geography teacher, or a qualified driving instructor, if you have problems with this.) And naturally, since I was arriving, the sun was shining, and bands were playing, and dogs were barking, and everyone was shaking my hand. I kept on moving though. It would have been good to stop, if only as a gesture of meteorological responsibility. But I’d become accustomed to the leaving. Being hard. Or easy. Depending.”

Which led perfectly into Sam’s address on that very theme. And also appropriately emphasised how literature was central to David’s life, which was why he worked very hard to get Passages published just before he died.

As he says in the introduction, some of the poems are reworkings of ones written decades ago, and others are new, although which ones fall into which category is not clear. He knew his style was unfashionable, although that hardly stopped discerning poetry magazines from choosing to publish his offerings. And he understood the criticism that some of it was either bleak or introspective, or both!

Even so, I always felt that view was overplayed, ignoring the understated lyricism and the universality of meaning and relevance that marked much of his output. And while Passages includes introspection there is also that lyricism and universality. In particular, water and the sea serve to produce those effects.

David knew very well he was just a landlubber, but he had indeed twice crewed on sailing yachts across the Atlantic, and readers of his brilliant Tales for my Dog will recall how the sea figures prominently in some of those short stories. Hinting at what the French writer Romain Rolland called the “oceanic feeling”.

There is also in Passages, perhaps accidentally, or perhaps not, a touch of the elegiac, as in The Long Road, which mentions the extinction of humanity, but concludes:

“But life is prodigal,

and the universe a dance

of which our minds are part.

And each death not the end of this;

nor all our deaths the secret

at creation’s heart.”

Words I used to finish my eulogy and which in part are quoted on his headstone at the Earlham Cemetery in Norwich.

Mark Heidenstam