Sensibly, she doesn’t think her fans should have any access to or interest in that. But when she has time and space to visit her Narnia then she sends us postcards that can still reignite our imagination-connection and make us smile, laugh, cry and gasp. Maybe it’s not Bush being elusive, but our own childhood energy. We yearn for the intensity she gave us and her return promises a rekindling of that.
I watched her Little Shrew video in my pyjamas first thing this morning while my own children were still asleep. I’d read it was inspired by children affected by the war in Ukraine and when that war broke out I’d helped a British friend travel to Poland to rescue children whose parents (as police officers) had to stay and fight.
Bush told Barnett she felt that audiences might, alas, have more empathy for an animal than a child and so picked a Caucasian pygmy shrew (native to Ukraine) as her heroine. I watched the little rodent make its way through the rubble of a housing estate, crawling out of a soldier’s pocket and over his lifeless hand. His corpse nods back to her 1980 single ‘Army Dreamers’ which lamented the “waste” of military-mad young boys to the percussive click of a gun loading.