A childhood in India in the days of the Raj

(A lady called Joyce, a friend of my father, gave me this account)

I was born near Madras, where my father was an official of the Imperial Bank of India. I was an only child, and there was no-one of my age living nearby, so when I once met another child I didn't know how to communicate or talk with her. We didn't mix socially with the Indians or Eurasians (mixed-race). Instead I had a pet goat, called Maggie.
     We lived in a large house belonging to the Bank, which had a garden (called a compound) and servants' quarters. There were five house servants and two gardeners I had an aya (nurse) and a Eurasian nanny, but my best friend was my father's peone (bearer), who was called Robert. He was very old, and was delegated to take me for walks. I remember that in the hot weather we went up to the hills for three weeks, and there for the first time I met children of my own age at the kindergarten.
   Our house was believed to be haunted. Even my father felt uneasy at times. There were poisonous snakes. Once we found a cobra on my mother's bed! She was in it at the time. My father called out "Don't move!", got his gun and shot it!

 I first came to England when I was 5, stayed for six months and then returned to India, where I nearly died of enteric fever. When I was 8 or 9 I was sent to school in England, at Hove in Sussex. I didn't see my parents again for three years; instead I was shuffled round between relatives and friends in the school holidays. That kind of arrangement was quite common. I loved England because I was in good health there, whereas I was always ill in India.
   The first school I went to in England was, I now realize, very strange. Because my parents' main priority was the state of my health, they liked its emphasis on life in the open air rather than on academic studies. After this I went to the Maynard School in Exeter, which was more traditional; and then three years later I was transferred to a day-school in Exmouth. By this time my father had retired from India, and my parents bought a house in Budleigh Salterton in Devon, where many other former Indian officials lived.

I left school at 16 and got married at 19, to an old family friend who was nine years older than me. He was a road engineer, and we spent our honeymoon in Germany, looking at Hitler's autobahns! Despite this, we had a very happy married life. We only visited India once, as tourists!

The Strange Guests, part 2

(The story so far: Betty Worthing, a chambermaid, has got to know a mysterious foreign couple, who call themselves Ilych and Nadezhda, staying at her hotel. Now another foreigner has tried to persuade her to intercept and hand over the couple’s letters. Betty is unsure what to do)

One morning Betty came down to the foyer of the hotel and found the place deserted, apart from one guest sitting in an armchair in a far corner reading a newspaper. Behind the deserted reception desk was the board with the letters waiting to be collected, including one with a foreign stamp. She stepped behind the desk and examined it. Yes: it must be for the couple in room 212! This was her chance!  Quickly she took the letter from the board and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She was still undecided what to do next: whether to deliver the letter to room 212 or to pass it on to the stranger who had offered her money for such letters; but all that could come later!

    There were footsteps behind her. The guest had dropped his newspaper and risen from his chair, and was now looking at her intently. He was a shortish man, bearded, wearing a tweed suit.

   “I see you’ve picked up the letter for our Russian friends”, he said. He had a strong Scottish accent, and his voice was firm but not threatening.

   “Yes, sir”, Betty replied, since it was pointless to deny it. “I was just going to take it up to them, sir”, she added impulsively. She sensed that she was falling into a situation beyond her control. What on earth should she do now? Suddenly coming to a decision, she told the gentleman how she had been asked to intercept and pass on letters. “But I wasn’t going to do it, sir! And I was afraid if I didn’t take the letter, he might come and take it himself, now there’s no-one about”.

   “Are you with us, then?” he asked.

   “Oh yes, sir!” replied Betty emphatically. Now she was really committing herself; getting in deeper and deeper!

    “Good. I’ll go up there with you then. It’ll save me the trouble of waiting for one of them to come down”. He returned to his chair to pick up his coat and a large bag.

   

He let her lead the way up the stairs. At the end of the corridor he stopped. “Now, lassie, you go and knock on their door and tell them the Scotsman’s come with the pamphlets. I’ll bide here to make sure the coast’s clear”.

    Despite her fears, Betty could not help feeling a tremor of excitement as she knocked on the door. She really was in an adventure now! As usual, the door opened just a crack at first, but then Nadezhda recognised her.

    “If you please, miss: I’ve a letter for you”, Betty said, “and the Scotsman says he’s brought the pamphlets”.

    Nadezhda opened the door, and Betty signalled to her waiting companion to come in. He glanced down the stairs to check they were not being followed before walking to the room. He greeted Nadezhda and Ilych, and then produced a large pile of pamphlets from his bag. Betty noticed that they were printed in strange foreign letters. Ilych thumbed through one of them eagerly, purring to himself with pleasure as he did so.

    “Very good, very good!” he said at last, “I shall arrange for these to be sent into Russia. But tell me: why did you bring the chambermaid up with you? Is she to be trusted?”

   The Scotsman briefly recounted what Betty had told him. The two foreign guests were silent for a while, then Ilych asked her to describe the stranger who had asked her to pass on the letters. “But I wouldn’t do it, sir!” said Betty, “I didn’t like him!”

   Nadeszda still looked distrustful, but Ilych chuckled, pinched Betty on the cheek and called her “a true proletarian heroine”. Betty had no idea what this meant, but gathered that it was intended as a compliment.

    Ilych then sighed. “So they have found us!” he said. “So we must be moving on again; Nadezhda and me. I think we must leave England. Now, child, you may tell your police spy we have gone, and you do not know where. Because, of course, you do not know! Do not tell him this until next week: give us time to get away. We shall take these pamphlets, but I shall give you one. You cannot read Russian, but one day you may learn. I shall write my name on it in your alphabet, so that you will remember me”.

    He picked up his pen and on the first page of the pamphlet wrote very carefully: Vladimir Ilych Lenin. 

My Father Remembers His Childhood

When I was two years old, my family moved to Hartlepool, where my father worked as a marine engineer and shipping inspector. I was the youngest of seven children, so apart from Ruth, who was five years older than me, my brothers and sisters had left home by the time I was growing up, and I only saw them occasionally.

Hartlepool is still well-known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey” (see note at end). We rented a big semi-detached house on the main Stockton road, with the trams running outside the front door. I remember it as always being very dirty. We could sit in the garden and watch the smuts from the Seaton steelworks falling around us. Sometimes the night sky would glow as the slag was tipped. Ruth and I discovered that if we rubbed our hands on the trees and then wiped them on our faces, we became completely black; which did not please Mother. One night an enormous dump of tens of thousands of wooden pit-props near the railway caught fire. The flames were so bright that you could read a book by their light, and the intense heat buckled the rail track.
We didn’t often go to the seaside, although there was a good beach quite close. The sea was always cold, and I don’t remember ever bathing in it with any degree of pleasure. Further up the coast, at Black Hall Rocks, you could find coal dust washed up on the beach from an undersea seam, and the unemployed men would come to rake it up and take it home in sacks. We preferred to have picnics up on the moors at Hobhole, where I could go fishing from the footbridge. Once, when I was about 8 or 9, I proudly told Mother that I had caught two cod and five kippers
.
Father was only able to take us on longer outings on Bank Holidays. For three or four summers we stayed in a farmhouse in Kildale, up in the Cleveland hills. This was a very traditional little settlement, with a pub, a church, a local squire, and even a village idiot. The farm was run by a family called Tait: a husband and wife with a son and daughter in their 20s. This was a period of severe depression in farming, and the Taits must have been very poor. They had no motor-vehicle, and just one horse to provide all the pulling-power. It was a dairy farm, and they had their own creamery, which I remember as being the only clean part of the farm. We once bought local cheese (though I think it was from another farmer) which weighed 14 pounds! The farm had no gas or electricity, water came from a spring into a trough, and the only lavatory was a hole in the ground in an outbuilding. We enjoyed our time at the farm, though I suspect Mother would have preferred something more sophisticated.

When I was about ten, Father bought me a second-hand bicycle for £3.10/-. He took me on cycling tours, stopping for bed and breakfast overnight; up Teesdale or Weardale; to Richmond or Barnard Castle. Later I went for rides with a school friend: once we did a day’s run to Whitby and back, which must have been about 80 miles.

When I was 13 I went away to boarding school, where I became a close friend of Francis Crick, who later won the Nobel prize for his work in the discovery of DNA. Then, three years later, Father retired and moved to Bexhill in Sussex, and we never returned to the north-east.

Footnote:
Hartlepool is known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey”. The story goes that during the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the coast, and the only survivor to be washed ashore alive was the captain’s pet monkey, which had been dressed in a little military uniform. The people of Hartlepool had never set eyes on a Frenchman, and they assumed the monkey must be a French soldier, so they hanged it! Hartlepool still takes a perverse pleasure in the story of their stupidity: to this day, the mascot of the town’s football team is called “H’Angus the Monkey”

(My father died recently, at the age of 93)

Michael Davenport

-  Hello. I’m very pleased to meet you. As I explained on the phone, I’m collecting material for a biography of Michael Davenport, and I was told you used to work for him.

- Yes, I was his valet.

-  Well, I’d be most grateful if you could fill me in with some personal details of what he was like. I might say, your identity will be treated with the strictest confidence if that’s what you’d prefer. Let me get you a drink anyway ……………… Now, what was he like to work for?

-  He was a complete bastard

-  Really? That’s most interesting. That’s not the way most people would have perceived him at all. They do say, no man was ever a hero to his valet. Tell me more! In what ways didn’t you get on with him?

-  He had no consideration for us at all. He treated us like dirt: never once thanked us for what we did. And we had to do absolutely everything for him, you know. He was like a little kid. It wasn’t just fetching and carrying. When he went to a formal dinner, I had to tie his bow tie for him, cos he couldn’t do it himself, and he refused to wear a made-up one cos it looked cheap. I didn’t mind that too much, but I did mind having to put his shoes on for him.

-  Are you saying he couldn’t do up his own shoelaces?

-  Well, he probably could, though I never saw him do it. I think he just liked to have someone grovelling in front of him, doing them up. Gave him a sense of power: made him feel like an emperor or something. That’s the trouble with these new-money types, you see: no old-style traditional gent would ever act like that. And I really used to hate him for it; because I’ve got a bad back, and it really gave me gyp, kneeling down to tie up his shoes. And he didn’t care. I used to hate him for it.

-  (Then why didn’t you leave him and get another job? No, I won’t ask that now: don’t stop the flow; let him carry on talking)

-  But I got my own back in the end, you see. He was off for this big event, flying out, and

he says, George, get me my special black shoes, and make sure they’re properly polished.

Now: his special shoes. Did you know some of his shoes were specially built up, with quite high heels, to make him look taller? Not many people knew that. Shows how vain he was. So I went to the cupboard and got the special shoes with the big heels, but when I was giving them a shine, I noticed that one of the heels had worked loose and might come off at any moment. Now if I’d told him, he’d have gone mad, and raved at me for not mending it sooner, so instead I just covered up the break with some shoe-polish so you wouldn’t spot it. And then I had to kneel down in front of him to put them on, and my back was hurting really bad, so I couldn’t straighten up afterwards, but he didn’t care. And I thought, if that heel comes off , serve you right! I was really hoping it would, just when everyone was watching him. Because no-one could ever look dignified in public with the heel off one shoe and having to hobble around like they’d got a bad leg. He’d just look silly, and everyone would laugh at him.

-  And it turned out to be more than that, didn’t it? Because he appeared at the door of the plane, and waved, and all the camera flashbulbs popped, and then he started to walk down the steps, and suddenly, over he went, tumbled right down to the bottom, head first, landed on the tarmac and broke his neck. Nobody at the time had any idea how it happened: now we know. A man cut off in his prime. Perhaps even a turning-point in history. Who knows; maybe in 50 or 100 years, people could be asking, would everything have been different if Michael Davenport hadn’t died? How did you feel, knowing that?

 - Well, it was tough on all of us. My back was worse than ever. In the morning, I couldn’t move!

Old Age or Early Death?

My father lived to be 93. In past centuries it was extremely rare for anyone to reach such an age. George II, who died in 1760, was the first British monarch ever to pass the age of 70 (and only three have managed it since), which suggests that most ordinary people led even shorter lives.

Many famous people are seen so much as products of their time that it is difficult to imagine them living into a later era. For instance, if Mozart had lived as long as my father, he could have read the Communist Manifesto, and so could William Pitt the younger. And can we imagine William Shakespeare coming out of retirement at the age of 85 to comment on the execution of Charles I?

In some cases, it is an early death which paradoxically serves to immortalise someone's reputation. Nelson's legend climaxes with his death in the moment of victory at Trafalgar: his reputation would surely be different if he had survived the battle and lived as long as the Duke of Wellington. Max Beerbohm imagined Lord Byron living till the 1850s, and writing long letters to the "Times" about the repeal of the Corn Laws; Byron's image, like those of Keats and Shelley, is linked with early death, without which they might have ended up like Wordsworth or Coleridge. We could hardly envisage Oscar Wilde, aged 85, being evacuated back to England from Paris in 1940 ahead of the German invasion; and I fear Marcel Proust, aged 68, would have refused to leave, and would have perished in Teresinstadt concentration camp around 1943. The thought of Aubrey Beardsley (1873-98) as a war artist in either World War makes one shudder: equally, the mental stability of Van Gogh (1853-90) would not have been helped by witnessing the First World War, and Raphael (1483-1520) was spared the sack of Rome by the Imperial armies in 1527. One wonders what D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) would have made of Nazism, and Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) would surely have considered Mrs Thatcher and her supporters appallingly vulgar.

It is best for a romantic hero to die young, because:-

"Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man"
(A. E. Housman: "To an athlete dying young")

At the opposite extreme are those who achieved their finest successes late in life, or kept working well into old age: Gladstone and Churchill, Milton and Goethe and Tolkien, Titian and Michelangelo. The greatest of such people appear not as anachronisms left over from an earlier age, but as products less of a single period, but of all time.

The Strange Guests; part one

Betty knocked tentatively on the door of room number 212. Voices from within told her that the occupants were still there, but it was now late in the morning and unless she was able to make their bed very soon she wouldn’t have time to get ready for her lunchtime duties. She hadn’t yet met the couple in 212, but Elsie, who normally did this room, said they were foreigners and “a bit funny”.

       The door opened a fraction, and a pair of eyes peered out through the crack. When they recognized Betty’s chambermaid uniform and cleaning gear, the door was opened more fully and a youngish woman, plainly dressed and with her hair tied severely back, poked her head out and quickly glanced each way down the corridor to ascertain there was no-one else there, and then pulled Betty quickly inside and locked the door behind her.

       The air inside was thick with smoke. A great mass of papers littered the table by the window, with more on the floor. Seated at the table was a man in shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, with a pen in his hand. The woman spoke to him in a foreign language, and he then turned to face Betty.

   “If you please, sir; I’ve come to make the bed and tidy the room”, said Betty.

   “And what is your name, child?” His accent was so strong that Betty had difficulty understanding him.

   “Betty Worthing, if you please, sir”. She dropped him a little curtsey, because she sensed that, despite the fact that his clothes were rather shabby and that he and his wife were occupying one of the cheapest rooms in the hotel, he was nevertheless a gentleman.

   “Ah, Betty Worthing, yes”. (He pronounced it as “Vording”) “You may clean the room, child. But you must never touch my papers. Never, you understand?”

    “Yes, sir”. Betty proceeded with her work, conscious that the couple were closely watching her every movement. She was careful not to touch a single paper, however much she longed to stack them in a neat pile and dust all the cigarette ash from the table. She allowed herself no more than a single fleeting glance at one paper, which was not only in a foreign language, but written in strange letters which she could not read. At last she finished her work, curtsied to the couple and let herself out. They were indeed “a bit funny”!

Betty was assigned to room 212 for the next few weeks. She never found the room empty, at any time of the day. The strange couple always had their breakfast in the room, and never went down to the dining room together for other meals. Sometimes the man went out for a walk on his own, or the woman went shopping, and to post letters. They wrote a lot of letters, often to foreign countries. Sometimes they had visitors, mostly other foreigners, and then animated conversations continued throughout the night.

     As the man became more accustomed to Betty’s presence, he began to ask her questions; about how much she was paid and the hours she had to work; about her family and life in the town. Often he made notes about her answers. In time she found it easier to understand him, though he never learnt to pronounce her name properly. In an odd way, she liked him. His wife said little. Betty worked out from their conversations (which were never in English) that she was called “Nadezhda” and that she called her husband “Illyich”. That’s a very strange name, Betty thought.

Then one day the clerk at the hotel reception desk called Betty over. “There’s a man wants to speak to you”, he told her, indicating a respectably-dressed stranger seated near the entrance. “He says it’s important”.

    Betty didn’t usually like to be seen walking out with strange men, but she allowed him to take her to a café (where fortunately there wasn’t anyone who would recognize her) and they sat in a quiet corner. She remained on her guard, and hoped he wouldn’t suggest anything improper.

   “You are Betty Worthing, chambermaid at the hotel?” He asked, and she nodded. “And you clean room number 212, where live a man and a woman, yes? Tell me now, how does he look?”

   Betty considered. This man was clearly another foreigner; perhaps from the same country as the couple in 212, since he pronounced her name in the same way. What was going on, she wondered. But she saw no harm in answering his question.

   “He’s not very tall, and his forehead’s bald. He’s got a little beard. He’s got high cheekbones and his eyes are a bit slanted. I think his wife calls him Illych”.

   “Ah yes! It is him!” the man hissed, “And his woman, Nadezhda, she is very plain, yes? She is not his wife, you know. Immoral behaviour! Yes, a very bad couple! Most wicked!”

   Betty stiffened. Her brother was living with a girl who wasn’t his wife, and although she didn’t approve of such behaviour, she didn’t see why strangers had any right to make remarks about it.

    “Are they criminals?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

   “Ach, your police; they are so stupid! Just because this man commits no crime under your law, they ignore him! But this man, he is more dangerous than any robber; far more dangerous! But you can help us. He has many papers in his room, yes? Then perhaps you can bring some to us: you will be rewarded. Or does he let you post letters for him? No? Then you can persuade him to, and bring them to us. And also the letters he receives, yes?”

   Betty found herself disliking the man more and more. She might only be a chambermaid, but she still had some professional pride; and the suggestion that she, an honest girl working in a respectable hotel, might steal a guest’s papers and letters ….. the very idea! And why should a foreigner say the British police were stupid: what an insult! On the other hand, she was tempted. It wasn’t so much the promise of a reward, though heaven knows she could do with more money. But she’d always had the dream that she might one day be the heroine of a great adventure mystery, and now it looked as if the dream might be coming true.

     “I’ll see what I can do, sir”, she said, cautiously.

(Continued in a later entry)  

Kingfisher

Suddenly my wife said, "Look!"
and I turned just in time to see
a flash of brilliant emerald
fly under the bridge
but not out the other side.

Many times we returned to that bridge.
We longed to see him again
maybe perched motionless on a twig
scanning the river below for his prey,
unsuspecting minnows and sticklebacks,
or diving, an iridescent meteor,
into the brown waters

But he never came back.
This king of fishers,
lethal killer in miniature regal pomp,
wasn't there for our benefit,
he existed only for himself:
was interested in us only insofar as
we interfered with his hunting.

The Labours of Hercules in Shropshire

Many thousands of years ago, around the time half of Britain was covered in ice, the River Severn flowed north, into the Dee estuary. But then, when the ice retreated, the god Zeus spoke to Hercules and said, “It is my desire that the Severn should now flow southwards. Take your club and beat out a new channel for the river”.

Hercules took his club and began his labour at the northern end of the new river-bed. But the god of the northern marshes, fearing that his wetlands would be drained, sent out his reed-girls to distract Hercules. And the reed-girls said, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” and he continued with his work. But he was thinking so much about the beauty of the reed-girls that he beat out his channel shallower than he intended, so some of the wetlands survive to this day.

As Hercules worked further southwards, the river god, annoyed that he had not been consulted, sent river-nymphs to distract Hercules. The river-nymphs danced round Hercules and sang, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” But he was so confused by the nymphs dancing in circles around him that he lost all sense of direction, and the course of the river-bed he was beating out, through where Shrewsbury now stands, instead of being a straight line, ran in great loops and meanders.

Hercules now reached a line of hills and began to beat a passage through them. But the god of the hills, foreseeing that men would come and cut down his trees to fire their furnaces, and blacken his rocks with their smoke, sent woodland dryads to distract Hercules. The dryads sang, “Leave your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Comeback when I’ve finished!” But he was so eager to sample the pleasures that the dryads had promised that he stopped he work early, so that the Ironbridge Gorge was narrower than intended, and it remains a place of fierce and dangerous waters to this day.

At last Hercules finished his labours, and the Severn now flowed southwards in a new path. And Hercules went and sat down to rest in the Quarry gardens, and he called out, “Ho! Reed-girls and water-nymphs and tree-dryads! I’m finished at last! Where are the pleasures beyond imagining that you promised me?” But there was no answer, for they had all gone away. And Hercules in frustration smashed his club on the ground, causing a great pit which is now the Dingle gardens. But eventually he fell asleep, tired out by his labours.

The god of the River Severn saw him asleep and thought, “Now I’ll have my revenge! Reject the pleasures offered by my water-nymphs, did he? Not to mention the reed-girls and dryads too! I’ll place a curse on him so that he’ll never be able to enjoy such pleasures again!” And he cursed Hercules, but Hercules did not realize it till he awoke.

Men came and erected a statue of Hercules, which you can still see in the Quarry gardens. This angered the river-god, and he was angrier still when he realized that, thanks to the labours of Hercules, he now faced a very long and weary route to the sea. His anger continues to this day; and every few years he sends down a flood, which often fills the Quarry gardens and surrounds the statue of Hercules, but he has never managed to topple it. And if you go to the Quarry, you can still see Hercules, with his lion-skin and his mighty muscles and gigantic club – but if you look closely you will notice that, thanks to the river-god’s curse, he wears only an infeasibly tiny fig-leaf.

Tangier: a true story

My first-ever visit to Africa was extremely short, but with such a surrealist element to it that it has remained in my memory ever since. I had signed up for a tour of southern Spain, to Granada, Cordova and Seville (all richly deserving of a visit, but that’s another story), but included in the tour was a boat journey across to Tangier for an overnight stay.
We were under the guidance of Pedro, a middle-aged dyspeptic Spaniard with a very cynical and sarcastic attitude to Moroccans. He told us how essential it was to follow his instructions precisely. The first surprise came when he told us to collect our bags and prepare to disembark: the unexpected aspect of this being that the boat was clearly still some distance out from the harbour. But we obediently followed him to the exit doors, which were down in the belly of the ship, where all the luggage was stored.
But he was quite right, because a seething mass soon built up behind us, pushing and shoving to get to the front. In these situations, the British tradition is to form an orderly queue and wait patiently, which mean we lose out to nations who don’t observe these niceties, but fortunately our party contained a number of strong-minded American matrons who fought off any interlopers. Then finally we docked and the doors opened. The crowd surged forwards and found – nothing but a yawning gulf! There was no gangplank! After we had teetered on the brink for what seemed like ages, a gangplank was finally put in place, only for a mob of hairy stevedores to charge up it and fight their way in amongst the passengers in order to get at the luggage. Eventually just ONE passport official appeared, and insisted on looking at every page of each person’s passport before he would let them off, presumably to check that no-one had been visiting Israel. Thanks to Pedro’s experience, we weren’t held up too long, but other less fortunate people were still disembarking four hours later. There was more trouble a little while later, when a policeman asked to inspect the passports of one couple and promptly disappeared with them. Pedro was furious. “The next time a Moroccan policeman asks to see your passport”, he raged, “Tell him to push off! Tell him it is none of his business!” (Personally I wouldn’t like to try this tactic)
It was Ramadan, which meant no Moroccans were allowed to eat or drink during the hours of daylight, though this did not apply to tourists. Drinking no water during August must be a serious trial. Shortly before the official nightfall, when it was actually still daylight, the streets emptied and all the shops closed in preparation for the evening meal. We were warned not to go outside, since only criminals would be out on the streets at this time. So I went back to my hotel room, which overlooked a number of flat-roofed homes. I watched them all lay out the food on tables on the roof, and then I suppose there was a broadcast over the radio to say that it was now officially night-time, because all the families suddenly started to eat at precisely the same moment.
We were taken to Tetuan, a squalid little town where we saw people living in what appeared to be windowless cupboards opening onto the street. In the evening we were treated to a display of belly-dancing by a fat and unattractive woman, We had a local guide who took us round a tourist shop that dealt in sterling, and helped us bargain for goods. I found the bargaining custom very irritating. I watched one man in the party buy a leather purse, for which the asking price was £5, but was eventually beaten down to £2. Another tourist who was watching this transaction said, “I’d like one of those too”. The salesman promptly started at £5 again. I showed a passing interest in a rug, and was told the price was £80. I explained that since I only had £10 left, and he wasn’t going to let me have it for that, we should abandon the negotiations. He clearly thought I was a tough bargainer, and even when I left the shop he ran after me shouting, “Okay, £55!” I longed for British supermarkets and set prices.
There was a bar on the boat which took us back to Spain. As soon as we pulled out of port, many of the Moroccans at once went to the bar and started boozing, thus not only breaking the Ramadan fast but also the laws against drinking alcohol. Pedro snorted with contempt. “They think they’re safe on a Spanish ship! It’ll be full of secret police! They’ll all be locked up when they go home!”
All this was thirty years ago. No doubt things are different nowadays.

A Haunted Room

In the examination hall, the students

sit huddled over the desks, oblivious

of their surroundings. Only the bored invigilator

reads the columns of names

inscribed on the walls.

The school's war dead.

Endless lists of names. Besides each name

a date. As he walks around, he calculates

that at least a hundred did not live

to see their twenty-first birthday,

never knew adulthood; were no older

than the students below them. And he wonders:

had they foreseen this, would they still have gone?

And the students who now ignore them,

would they have gone too?

Jack Digby

Jack Digby's mother never gave him anything; not even a memory. All he knew about her was what he'd been told by Miss Harriet Livingston, the maiden aunt who had brought him up; and that was little enough. About his father he knew even less, for his aunt always avoided talking about him at all.
    He had been born in France, shortly before the outbreak of the war. He and the two sisters had been evacuated in great haste just ahead of the German invasion in 1940, but his father had never been seen again, and was entered as "lost; presumed killed". In the confusion Jack's birth certificate had been lost, which had caused him endless bureaucratic delays throughout his life. Then, before he was too young to understand it, his mother and Miss Livingston had had some kind of quarrel, as a result of which his mother had decamped forthwith to Canada and had never again made contact. Miss Livingston was most reluctant to speak about her at all.
   Although his aunt had always performed her duty towards him, Jack soon sensed that she didn't really like him at all: indeed, she rather resented him. It was a relief to both of them when he was packed off to boarding school, from which he duly progressed to university. Even in the holidays he came home no more than was necessary, preferring to stay with friends, or later to go travelling. It was on one of his foreign expeditions that he learnt that his aunt had died in an accident. The bulk of her estate went to charity. She left him some money, but no final message.
   While he was helping to clear out her house, he found an old photograph, tucked away and doubtless forgotten, beneath some yellowing newspaper in a cupboard. It showed two young ladies and a man, and was labelled on the back, in faded pencil, "Mary, Harri and Don". This set him thinking. "Harri" was clearly his aunt Harriet, probably in her twenties at the time; so was the other woman, Mary, who resembled her closely, his mother? In which case, was Don his father? He pondered the matter for a while; but then other concerns took over and filled his time: his work, and a family of his own. It was only many years later, when he had more leisure, that he rediscovered the photograph and sought to investigate his past.
   He researched in archives and genealogical websites. For his mother, he learned little that he did not know already, so he turned to his putative father, assuming that the man in the photograph was indeed Don Digby. Eventually he was able to meet a very aged lady who was Don's sister.
   She instantly identified the photo as being her brother. "So you're Don's son,are you?" she said. "He sent me a letter, you know, and told me he'd had a son; but then he was lost in the war. Oh well. You do look a bit like him. Yes, they often went on holiday together: him and Harriet and poor Mary".
   "Why do you say, 'Poor Mary'?"
   "Well,he wasn't at all kind to her. I shouldn't really say this, him being my brother; but it was all a very long time ago. Mary couldn't have any children, you know. He told me he'd realized he'd married the wrong sister. Me, I didn't like Harriet much"
    "But ...... Mary's my mother!"
    "Oh, no! Harriet was your mother. And of course, Mary was furious about it, poor girl. Didn't Harriet ever tell you? Now isn't just typical of her!"

Why teenagers shouldn't necessarily be encouraged to write!

When I was about 17, a school friend and I spent some time trying to write a play. This was in the mid-1960s, the heyday of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”, led by the great Samuel Beckett and the now-sadly-forgotten N. F. Simpson, and our production was intended to be very much in that vein. The curtain would rise to reveal a nondescript middle-aged couple watching television. On one side of the stage there would be a staircase ascending into the darkness. It would become apparent that the couple had never ventured up these stairs, nor did they display any curiosity as to what might lie at the top. The audience would be able to hear, though not to see, what was being broadcast on the TV, which would be of a distinctly surrealist character, during which the couple would exchange desultory and inane dialogue.

Every so often, other people would enter the stage. They would be generic types; a policeman, a poet and so forth, and each of them would have a different motive for wanting to climb the stairs. The couple would, of course, ignore them.
So far, so good, you might think. They trouble was, we had no idea of what should happen next, let alone what denoument (if any) there should be. Now it’s all very well for the audience not to be sure what might be found at the top of the stairs (in fact, usually in this sort of play, they’d be no wiser at the finish than they were at the start), but surely the authors ought to have at least some notion of what it all meant? Was the staircase perhaps a religious allegory, or what? And we simply hadn’t a clue.

So in the end we gave up, and our play duly took its place in that great gallery of abandoned projects, known to some as “the round filing-cabinet”. It was to be joined there some months later by a very different, though equally derivative, aborted production; a play for Easter, to be entitled “The arrest of Jesus, as performed by the cast of Z Cars”. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that this latter effort was rather better, but before people start to have thoughts about mercy-killing, I’ll end by saying that that is (or to be more exact, might have been) another story.

P.S. Thought for the day:- “Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch” (C. S. Lewis; “The Allegory of Love”).

Mow Cop: The False Tower

I could see from my bedroom window
a stone tower, stark,
on a rocky outcrop.
It was all of two hundred years old
built to give
the family in the big house
a romantic vista.

(Their money came from coal mines
but they liked to pretend
they were mediaeval)

Today the best view is from
the council estate
as is only right and proper:

"These are the children of the men
that hewed the coal
that raised the cash
that built the tower on Mow Cop".

The family is long gone
of the big house, nothing is left.
Only the folly remains.

The Shadow

Where am I? More to the point, who am I? I must approach this problem logically, scientifically.

I have just come to full consciousness, and I find I am standing in a wood. The sky above is black, and there is a moon, so it must be night-time. How did I get here? I have no idea.
   The moon is full, and I must have good night-vision, because I can see my way through the trees. There is a path, and I walk along it, since it must presumably lead somewhere. All around me I an hear the faint night-noises of the wood. I make as little noise as possible. I am interested to observe that, despite the darkness and my loneliness, I am not afraid. I suppose I can speak, but there is no point in doing so, since there is no-one to talk to. I wonder what language I would be speaking? I have no way of telling.

After I have walked for some time, the wood gives out, and I find myself on open grassland. There are signs of cultivation, so I must be near a human settlement. Some sheep are dozing on the grass: they see me and run away, bleating. I wait for a while, in case dogs or a shepherd may be roused and come to investigate. Nothing happens, and I resume my walk.
    Finally I can see a village. There is no-one in sight. What shall I do when I eventually meet someone? Should I knock on a door? Do I ask them where I am? Will they understand what I am saying? What if they attack a stranger who suddenly appears? I must go cautiously.
 
Ahead of me is a tall, blank wall. The moon is shining so brightly that it casts my shadow on it. Is that really me? those ears, that jaw?
     Now at last I understand. I am not a man. I am a werewolf.
   
           AAAAAAARRRRR!

Hands

If you’re a real Sherlock Holmes, you can learn a lot about people by looking closely at them. In the old days, of course, you could always tell miners by the coal-dust ingrained in their skin, and weavers had bad front teeth because of what they called “kissing the shuttle”. It even applies to some trades today: an antique dealer once joked that he could always spot his fellow-tradesmen by their baggy trousers, caused by kneeling down to take a closer look at the furniture. But hands are the main thing for clues.
Manual workers’ hands look quite different. There’s a story from the Russian revolution that the Red Guard used to patrol around Petrograd stopping strangers and examining their hands. If a man had hard hands, he was a worker and they’d buy him a drink; but if he had soft hands it meant he was a bourgeois and they beat him up. But Lenin had to put a stop to this, because so many of the Bolshevik leaders had soft hands!
My wife once managed something on these lines. She was brought up on a farm, and when she told this to a chap we’d just met, he said he was a farmer too, on the Surrey-Sussex border; but after he’d gone she said to me, “Did you see his hands? He’s never milked a cow in his life!” He wasn’t THAT kind of farmer, you see; the sort who has to milk his own cattle. I thought Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of her.Now where was I? Oh yes. I think you could apply this to a whole lot of different professions if you knew what you were doing. You could probably spot musicians, for instance, and even guess the instrument. The fingertips and nails for playing stringed instruments would be a dead give-away And teachers would always have chalk underneath the fingernails of the hand they used to write on the blackboard, though I don’t expect this applies any more.

People who’ve played a lot of sport can also be distinctive. Yes, I’m trying to come to the point. Everyone knows that rugby forwards tend to have horrible cauliflower ears from all that time in the scrum. Olympic throwers will have overdeveloped muscles on one side of the body, and so will tennis players and fencers. And footballers have often had knee operations, though of course this isn’t easy to spot when they’re just walking around.
As regards hands: I remember a reporter once telling the American gymnast Kurt Thomas that people could probably stub out cigarettes on his palms and he wouldn’t feel a thing. Cricketers also have hands like old boots. Do you remember when Darren Gough was on “Strictly Come Dancing”? In one of the early rounds, a judge complained that he had big thick hands that looked inelegant. He must have felt like saying, well of course I’ve got big thick hands; I’m a fast bowler, what do you expect? It didn’t stop him winning in the end, though. And cricketers often have broken fingers: I’ve known one or two with fingers sticking out at ridiculous angles. And if you do a lot of bowling you develop calluses on the spinning fingers, and these can get ripped and be very painful.
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get to the point, officer. I know I’ve been waffling away,but that’s because I’m just as upset as you are: I’m sure you’ll understand. As regards this particular person, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before; in fact, I couldn’t tell him from Adam; though of course when the body’s got no head, you can’t be certain. But I’m prepared to bet that he was a slow-left-arm bowler.

Winterwood

Jinna scrambled over the stones of what had once been a wall and looked down the slope to the snow-covered wood below. Not a single print of any kind disturbed the whiteness, and only a gap in the trees like a low arch showed her where the path ran. The light was lowering and gloomy beneath the leaden sky, and the prospect filled her with deep uneasiness. But she patted her coat and felt the slight bulge from the inner pocket. There it lay, the great jewel. She must carry it safely through the wood to the other side, and whatever her fears, she could not turn back now. Setting her face in determination, she half walked, half slithered downwards, and, ducking under the laden branches, entered the winterwood.

Inside it was very quiet. The trees were packed so densely that there was little snow underfoot, but the darkness was greater. She could trace where the path wound itself, and there were dimples in it, as if feet had already passed that way: feet too small for a human, but making patterns unlike any animal that Jinna had ever seen. The path continued to run downhill, until she reached the bottom of a valley. Jinna found she had reached a frozen river which she must cross. She listened carefully for the sound of trickling water, which would mean thin ice that might break under her weight: even if the water was shallow, if she got her feet wet, they would freeze. But there was no sound. Jinna realised that since she had entered the winterwood, the utter silence had been broken only the crunching of her boots in the snow, and her own breathing. Somehow this was even more oppressive than the noise of things moving around her. She sensed that here in the wood it was always winter, and nothing lived. Fighting back her mounting fear, she crept carefully across the ice and up the bank on the far side.

The path rose now, until she came to the summit of a low ridge where the trees opened out. There was nothing in the clearing except an immense log, the remains of a fallen tree, half-covered in snow like the body of a frozen dinosaur. The light was slightly better here, and Jinna paused for a rest. For reassurance, she again patted the lump on her coat, and then, acting on sudden impulse, reached into the pocket and pulled out the jewel. She held it up, and even in this dimness it glowed and sparkled with its internal radiance. Never had she seen anything so immeasurably beautiful. She must save it, at all costs! But its glory only made her surroundings seem more threatening. The trees appeared to close in on her. She sensed that the winterwood hated and feared the jewel; would smother its radiance if it could. Over to her left came a sound, and then another: the first she had heard in the winterwood. Maybe it was only the soft thump of snow falling from overburdened branches, but Jinna feared it might be something
far more threatening, though she knew not what. She realized she had made a serious blunder.

Quickly she returned the jewel to her pocket, and pressed on. Now the path twisted round to the right, and then to the left. Fear stalked behind her, and she walked faster and faster, her breath panting with weariness and mounting anxiety, never daring to glance back. Then, up ahead, amidst a thicket of smaller trees, she saw another low archway, and knew this was the end of the wood at last. With her escape now in sight, panic at last overcame her. She ran. Through the archway she ran: branches clawed at her face and snow cascaded over her head and back, but she had escaped now, out onto the open plain, freed from the winterwood for ever.
For a while she simply stood there, panting with relief. Then once again she felt her pocket. There was nothing. She tore open her coat and plunger her hand into the pocket. It was empty. In mounting desperation and terror she searched each pocket; every inch of her clothing; once, twice, many times. Nothing. There was no doubting it: the jewel was gone.
Gradually she managed to subdue her terror and steeled herself. She knew what she must do. Somewhere, somehow, she had dropped the jewel, and now she must find it again. Slowly, reluctantly, she forced herself back to the archway through the trees and re-entered the winterwood, retracing her steps, examining the snow on each side, stumbling with weariness, tears frozen on her cheeks, until at last her strength gave out, and she fell forward on the snow, and she died.
　
　
But then the clouds rolled away and the snow melted. Flowers blossomed in the grass. Jinna felt the warm sun and looked up in wonder to see birds playing on the budding trees. Then a Voice, so enormous that it filled the horizons but was at the same time gentle, spoke to her.
"You have done well", said the Voice.
"But I failed", said Jinna, "I lost the jewel in the winterwood".
"No. You were victorious. There never was a jewel. There never was a winterwood. But you fought to the very end. You have triumphed. We can now proceed to the next test".

Romanticism Fails Again!

When I was a boy I found a book in a cave.
It was up above Ullswater.
I clambered down over huge boulders
And groped my way along a dim passage
Then in complete darkness
By touch alone I found it
My hand met something clammy and damp
But I knew it was a book
I could feel the pages.

I took it up.
It dripped as I bore it to the light
- not without trepidation
since had this been an H. P. Lovecraft story
I would have found
A tractatus of occult knowledge
Of nameless secrets from beyond the grave
Ancient, arcane and damned
Or, if written by M. R. James,
I would look back to see
A figure, dark, but oddly indistinct,
Following me from the cave.
This was how horror stories began!
I steeled myself for the supernatural
As I opened the book.

But it proved to be an electricians' manual
Scarcely occult even to the least technically-minded
and I thought, well,
how it came to be in the cave
so far from any power-source
might make a story in itself
but it wouldn't be the same!
Why bother?

As for the book
I can't remember what I did with it.

Picture

Jill dropped her suitcase on the bed. The room was sparsely furnished, but looked comfortable, and in any case she couldn't afford a better hotel. She felt she could do well enough there; but then she saw the picture above the bed: an old photograph of the seafront at Rhyl.
      Rhyl! What on earth was it doing here?

Her first thought was that it had been hung there deliberately: someone was getting at her. Then she realized this was ridiculous: she'd only made the booking yesterday: no-one could possibly have known she would be staying at this hotel. She then tried to laugh it off as an absurd coincidence, without any deeper meaning. An old picture of a seaside resort; a place which had seen better days and was now looking a bit battered. "Just like me!" she thought ruefully.
     But even so .........

Why did it have to be Rhyl, of all places? She'd gone there with her parents as a little girl, all those years ago, and they'd met the man who ......
     For most of her life she'd been trying to suppress the memory, but now, thanks to that picture, it was surfacing once again ......

 

Spring Chorus: April 2013

American frogs say, Ribbet, ribbet,
Greek frogs said, Coax, coax,
But my frogs just say, Gaa, gaa, gaa,
Each spring I await them
When the daffodils open.

















This year they were three weeks late,
But at last one morning I heard them,
Singing, Gaa, gaa, gaa,
Meaning, We’re here again,
The ice has gone,
The sunlight’s warm
And it’s time for sex!
And soon the pond’s boiling
With mass copulations
In threes, and fours, and fives,
And tomorrow the water will be
A jelly soup of frogspawn
And so life is renewed.
So, Gaa, gaa, gaa,
The happy chorus of spring!

Memories of my grandmother

I never knew my father’s parents, who died before I was born, and my mother’s father is only a very shadowy figure, since he died when I was five; so the only grandparent I remember is my mother’s mother.
Her name was Mary Anne Midgley, but all her friend called her Polly, and to us she was simply “Nana”: she never even signed letters any other way. Her home was at Keighley in Yorkshire, and I don’t think she ever left there except to see us. She and her husband, Thomas, had a house which they had bought freehold just after the first world war: something which must have been most unusual then. It was a small terraced house, two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, with an attic and cellar, very small yards-cum-gardens at front and rear, and an outside lavatory: being built of stone it was likely to last forever, but is the sort of house nobody wants nowadays. My father explained to her how it would be easy to get a grant for an indoor lavatory, but she always ignored him: I suppose she considered it an unnecessary frivolity. Similarly we had a gas fire installed for her in the front room (the Parlour, to which only the most important of visitors were admitted), but she hardly ever used it, preferring to live in the kitchen and fetch coal for the kitchen fire up from the coal-hole in the cellar. Beyond the coal-hole and the outdoor lavatory ran a little cobbled street, with washing lines strung out across it. I always thought this a self-defeating exercise by the housewives, because on the other side was the railway, and when we visited her, back in the days of steam trains, we contrived to get dirty without even venturing out of the house, so it couldn’t have done the washing much good either.
Apart from us, Nana only had one blood relative: her sister, Aunty Maria, who lived with her husband, Uncle Percy, nearby in Haworth. They were childless, and we were always given to understand that we would eventually be their heirs. But when Aunty Maria died, uncle Percy, who was well over seventy and extremely deaf, promptly remarried. Nana never forgave him for this, and they never spoke again. Thomas Midgley, by contrast, had numerous relatives around Keighley (plus at least one who had mysteriously “gone to the bad” and was never mentioned). They all seemed to be much better off than him. (My father said that Thomas was considered, unjustly, he thought, the stupid one of the family). Most of these Midgleys were in the Yorkshire wool business; a sure sign of which was a tendency to feel people’s lapels and say “You didn’t get that at Burton’s, did you?”. I have a photograph of Thomas and Nana early in their married life, both looking highly respectable. They bought good quality furniture for their house, some of which I still have, along with the piccolo that Thomas played in the town orchestra, and part of his collection of books: the Sherlock Holmes stories, Alexander Dumas, Walter Scott and Thackeray; all with his names stamped inside. It goes almost without saying that they were pillars of the local Labour Party in its early days. Nana said that she had known Philip Snowden, a local man, one of the earliest Labour M.P.s and the first-ever Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that Ramsay MacDonald himself had stayed at their house; but unfortunately by the time I was old enough to be interested in such things, Nana’s memories were getting confused, and my mother believed the MacDonald story was imaginary. Nana was also a lifelong vegetarian, with an interest in fringe medicine, which must have been very unusual for those days. Clearly she and Thomas could be classified as serious-minded working-class intellectuals: a category probably hardly existing amongst young people today.
I remember Nana as seeming very old and deaf, and frail-looking, but fiercely independent and hating being patronised. We used to drive out to see her, arriving around mid-day. “What have you come for?” was often her opening question. “We’ve come to make you lunch!” my mother would announce brightly. “I’ve had mine!” Nana would reply; quite often adding, “Your hair’s a mess!”, or even, “Tha’s getting to be a gurt fat podge!” Because of the wool connexion, I always had to be well-dressed for these visits; otherwise I would be told I looked like a “top o’ the town kid”. This meant nothing to me until my mother explained that in Keighley the top of the town was where the Irish lived, and they were certainly NOT respectable! She could remember a time when the Irish children came barefoot to school, and the babies slept in orange-crates. The need for working-class respectability also led, I was told, to the only doubts Nana had about my father as a prospective son-in-law; namely, “He drinks!” This referred to the fact that he occasionally had a glass of beer at a local pub on Saturday lunchtime, when he finished work. The problem here wasn‘t teetotalism (Nana cooked up some lethal homebrew in her cellar) but the pub: pubs were also most definitely not respectable places.
She had a very strong Yorkshire accent, and naturally identified strongly with her county. Just about the last thing I remember upsetting her was when Brian Close was sacked from the England cricket captaincy. “They’ve only done it ’cos he’s working class and Yorkshire!” she exclaimed. She didn’t actually say “southern MCC pouffs”, but I’m sure that was the gist of what she thought.
She had plenty of friends in and around her street, few of whom I remember meeting. This once created a problem: when we visited her for her 80th birthday, and her neighbours were invited round, my mother was put in charge of handing out the drinks. Nana gave her a bottle of standard sherry, saying “This is for my friends”, and another of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, “And this is for my SPECIAL friends!”, and left my mother to decide for herself which category any visitors might fit into. She compromised by giving everyone Harvey’s until it ran out.
My parents had hoped that when my sister and I left home, Nana would come and live with them. But she always refused to do so, and eventually she died in her own home, which was what she wanted.

Writing Poetry

A friend quoted to me a remark of Emerson's on the difficulties of writing rhymed poetry. Emerson spoke of a poet who had thought up a "beautiful line" about stars, only to find he couldn't think of any good rhyme for "stars", with the result that his poem had to be abandoned.
I do not accept Emerson's difficulty in finding a rhyme for "stars" (see end), though his point is a fair one.Of course, the problem can always be avoided by writing "vers libre", with neither rhymes nor scansion (what one literary critic described to me as "prose that doesn't reach the right-hand margin"), but it is obvious that any clumsy, contrived or unsuitable rhyme kills a serious poem stone-dead: bathos is fatal. Even great poets are guilty of dreadful lapses at times. Consider the following from the first verse of Wordsworth's "Simon Lee", about an aged man:-

"Of years he has upon his back
No doubt a burden weighty
He says he is three score and ten
But others say he's eighty"

This can hardly fail to raise a smile, and as a result the serious message of the poem, which is intended to evoke sympathy for the old man's difficulties, is irretrievably lost.

In writing comic verse, by contrast, the more improbable or contrived the rhymes, the better, since ridiculous rhymes can add greatly to the humorous effect. For Exhibit 2, here is the opening of "Lord Roehampton", by Hilaire Belloc:-

"During the late election, Lord
Roehampton strained a vocal chord
By shouting very loud and high
To lots and lots of people, why
The Budget, in his own opin-
-ion should not be allowed to win"

You can't get much more contrived than this, but as comic writing it is highly effective. Furthermore, the scansion is perfect and the poet is clearly in total command of his material: he has composed it all quite deliberately.

One doesn't need to be a great poet to know the answer to Emerson's problem, which is simply this: if a line is going to end in a weak or contrived rhyme, then the weak line must be placed first, not second. We don't have to investigate major literary works to find that natural poets know this by instinct. Take the example of this anonymous Border Ballad from the 15th century, which tells of how Henry Percy of Northumberland (Shakespeare's Harry Hotspur) rides forth from his stronghold at Newcastle to challenge the Scots raiders under Earl Douglas:-

"But oh, how pale his lady looked
Frae off the castle wall
When down before the Scottish spears
She saw proud Percy fall"

The second line is actually rather weak, but you don't notice, because the verse builds up to a climax with the word "fall". If you recite it out, as would originally have been the case, then you can anticipate the final word coming, with sinister effect.

Take an example from pop music. There are few really striking rhymes for "bridge", but Chuck Berry had no problem coping with this in "Memphis Tennessee":-

"Her home is on the south side, high up on a ridge,
Round a half a mile from the Mississippi bridge"

Nobody would pretend that this is great poetry, but think how feeble and contrived it would be if "ridge" had been used in the second line of the couplet rather than the first!

The use of proper nouns can be effective if they fit naturally and provide a suitable climax at the end of a line. As an example, here is the chorus of an old Scottish song about the whaling ships of the 19th century, operating out of ports like Peterhead and Dundee:-

"The wind is in the quarter, the engine's burning free,
There's not another whaler that sails out from Dundee
Can beat the old "Balaena"; she needs no trial runs,
And will challenge all, both great and small,
From Dundee to St. John's."

Here we have two rather weak rhymes, concealed by each being placed first, with two place-names used to provide a climax. ("St. John's" comes as a surprise: it was the port in Newfoundland where the whalers called in on their way up to the icy waters west of Greenland)


To finally illustrate the point, and refute Emerson's case of the lack of any really good rhyme for "stars", I offer the following two and a half line of impromptu, meaning nothing in particular:-

"..... and still she hears
In distant echo through her prison bars
Ancient eternal music of the stars"

"Bars" remains a weak rhyme for "stars", but its weakness has been concealed.

Another Clerihew

This was inspired by the recent scare about large numbers of immigrants from Romania coming to Britain:-

"Count Dracula (whose real name was Vlad)
Was justly considered quite mad
For taking the decision to remain here
When he might have gone home to Transylvania"

(Index under:   Immigrants; unwelcome)

An ongoing collection of my clerihews can be found on an earlier entry

A Letter

The letter had fallen on the mat address side down. He didn’t bother to turn it over before ripping it open with his finger. Inside was a single sheet of paper. There was no sender‘s address at the top, and the writing was in careful block capitals. “Mister Williams”, he read. But this wasn’t him: Mr Williams was the previous occupant of the house. Really the man should have informed the Post Office of his change of address, not to mention telling his correspondents!

“Mister Williams: you still haven’t paid us the ten thousand. We will be sending people round to collect it”

He read the message three times, by which time he was shaking. What had this man Williams been involved in? He knew nothing about him at all. He hadn’t even met him. The property had been vacant when he moved in; the agent had shown him round an empty house. Now Williams’s misdeeds, whatever they might have been, were catching up. That must have been why he’d left, without a forwarding address. And here HE was, trapped and helpless, having to answer for someone else! Cold crawled up his spine. He could envisage what would happen. A couple of thugs would come knocking on the door: he’d try to explain to them that he wasn’t Williams, but they wouldn’t believe him, and ……….. No; he couldn’t bear even to imagine it.

For the first time, he turned over the envelope. On the front was just the single word “Williams”, again in capitals. There was no address, and no stamp. Suddenly, the implications of this dawned upon him. It had been delivered by hand! One of THEM had pushed it through his letterbox! This meant that, almost certainly, they were watching his house even now! There wasn’t a moment to be lost! He must escape! Without even bothering to pick up his coat, he ran to the kitchen door and outside to the rear garden, with some thought of getting away through the back hedge. But already he was too late! There was a figure, dark under the shadow of the trees, coming round the corner of the house and advancing towards him.

He stood there, trembling and quite incapable of movement, as time froze, and then the figure spoke.
“Morning, Nigel! How are you?”
“Michael! Oh, thank goodness! You can’t imagine how relieved I am that it’s you! Come on in! But it was a rotten trick to play on me, with that letter! You know how nervous I am!”
“What trick? What letter?”
The cold panicky feeling started to crawl up him again, but at least he wasn’t isolated and on his own any more. “I got a letter just now, threatening me. Or, not exactly me, but …… Wait; I’ll get it and show you”.

But the letter wasn’t there. He scrabbled around ineffectually, with increasing confusion, then finally said, lamely, “I don’t seem to be able to find it. But it was here”.
“That’s all right, Nigel”, said Michael. “I am your doctor, and I quite understand”. Yes indeed: it was becoming more complex and fascinating by the day, the case of Nigel Williams.