Character. Or, perhaps, characters.

This is what I am searching for studiously on the train up to London, listening to the drumming of wheel against rail as I thrum my fingers on the table sympathetically, distracted. The passenger beside me shifts uneasily as I endlessly rearrange sheets of paper on the tiny fold-down shelf.

I am squinting at a photocopy, of a microfilm copy, of a scrivener’s copy, of a seventeenth century will, straining to make out some words - or even letters. Is that a ‘c’, or an ‘s’? And what lies under that great splodge? - I can see the outline of the word, but nothing more. Not for the first time, while I’m happy with my older, (arguably) more mature mind, I do wish I still had the younger man’s eyes. Searching, scanning for flashes in the black ink. Some words, phrases, objects, places stand out with a faint glow - gleams of copper, silver, gold. Like the soldier and his magic tinderbox, I greedily scrabble for the golden ones. I have to be ruthless: there is simply so much to read through. Thousands upon thousands of handwritten words.

Later, at the National Archives in Kew, we are led underground and presented with an extraordinary array of historical documents, some of which have been shipped down to us from deep storage in a disused salt mine in Cheshire. Tightly bound scrolls, wrapped up in thick archivist ribbon (a guitarist’s fingernails come in handy here) lie in open boxes, side by side with ancient leather bound tomes - the latter, contemporaneous copies of the original wills, musty and creaking as the pages are turned, the leather binding still lightly charred from their narrow escape in the Great Fire of London.

We pore over the will of Bess of Hardwick, once the second wealthiest woman in the world - over 120 pages of tight Stuart script, masterfully executed, with tell-tale marginalia, a sweeping, experienced hand and a thick, rich parchment, yellowed with age - yet the ink still dark, forbidding, impenetrable. This scrivener certainly earned their fee on this one.

Excitedly, we find the original will of one of our growing party of characters - Alice. To see the very will we have been decoding, to study the hand, closely inspect the impression in wax of the signet ring, to see her own ‘mark’ - suddenly there is a frisson of tangibility, the clicks and whirrs of the past meeting the present. There is a pattern in her will, a rhythm - three children, three bequests of three significant rings - that immediately brings to mind a folk ballad, especially her association of each one (seal, wedding, death’s head) with each child. How did she decide which ring went to whom? And how did they feel about it? (“Why do I get the Death’s Head, mum!?”) And - thinking pictorially - as a broadside ballad, what would the woodcut design be? Before we know it, we have run out of time; the scrolls return to their boxes and the tomes are sent back to the salt mines.

Later, on a chance visit to Clerkenwell, I stumble across Benjamin Franklin’s replica printing press - the same used to print broadside ballads and pamphlets in the 1720s and there, in front of me, lies a selection of traditional woodcuts, hand-carved and mounted on rock-hard blocks of boxwood. There is a plethora of themes to choose from; I watch the resident printer mount it with strips of wood called ‘furniture’ before he starts rolling it with ink.

A few days later, I am sitting in the atmospheric hush of the Devon and Exeter Institute, poring through an eighteenth century will belonging to Emily from Pilton, a small rural village in North Devon. No gold here - but diamonds, diamonds everywhere! This question prompts Laura and myself on a journey that takes us (not literally - just yet!) to a church outside Barnstaple, where Emily’s carved memorial, specifically requested in the will, is still firmly mounted on the church wall; the ancient graveyard, where she rests, is facing the sea. In my imagination I fancy her spirit watching her young daughter Amelia from afar as she combs the beach for seaweed, later becoming a world-renowned expert in the subject. Or maybe she reminisces on her tragic clergyman husband, buried adjacent to her, who drowned far too young, leaving her a widow with five children under seven years old.

Sounds and phrases pop into my head with these remarkable documents. A snatch of melody comes from nowhere. It might be useful, so I jot it down. Such fragments are easily lost. Unusual objects leap out and suggest a title, or a refrain. Patterns and symmetry. The kind of repetitive structures, symbolism and even motes of language that make up, when this dust is gathered and compacted, something more malleable with which I can get to work - and explore the conflict. It’s all bits and pieces, scattergun for now, but that’s the process, one I have learned to trust and give in to over time.

Curiosity gets the better of me, despite already gathering so many loose threads, and I change direction by idly looking up my own town of Topsham in the TNA database. I’m astounded to find over 350 wills there - that’s fewer than 1 in 80 from the whole collection. Why so many? It is a small town, but has a strong seafaring and boatbuilding history; could that be the cause? As I scroll down, a surname leaps out at me - one of the best known of the Tops’am old guard. Someone of that lineage used to be my neighbour, another my electrician, and a third lives in the flat upstairs. I send a message to a fourth, who runs a small kitchen shop. Would she be interested in looking at her ancestor’s will - provided I recorded a few of her questions and musings, to maybe work with later on? She says she’d be delighted. Once again, the past reaches out and meets the present.

On a random search, I come across a sexton’s will in a curious, crooked hand. It’s short, but to the point (much like his spade) and begs the question: what happens when the gravedigger comes to be buried? Who will lay his body down? And what sage guidance might they receive from the sexton himself?

How can I create verses about the material culture of wills, without making them sound like some kind of inventory, or modern shopping list? There is a balance to be struck, for sure. They are there to illuminate the lives of the testators, not smother them. I must remember that a light touch is required.

And secondly, bearing in mind these documents are wholly centred on our mortality, I’m conscious there is a real need to look for the life, light, love and yes, even humour within them. I know it’s there; I just have to look in the right places and meet the right characters.

I’m returned to the present by what sounded like a knock on the door - but it’s just my mind playing tricks, or a bird against the windowpane. Briefly muddled, I make a cup of tea and then a list.

One William. Two Alices. Richard & Emily. Josias, John & Thomas - and Whitelock.

The cast of characters are assembling.