Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights …
Outside my window, the trees are bare. It is early dark but a silver paring of moon is bright in the sky, with a thousand frosty stars. The air smells of cold. A fox barks from the field.
Dickens for winter.
Throw another log on the fire.
This is the Weather the Cuckoo Likes
LOOKING FOR a Latin dictionary, I came upon a faded and battered small anthology called A Child’s Garland, which was collected together for a small girl called Polly Carton who was sent to Canada at the age of eight to escape the horrors of wartime London. It contains a selection of adult verse and prose but, as the editor says, ‘nothing in which a child may not delight’. Well, a child of those times at least. I was given my copy when I too was eight. I do not now remember how I reacted to the bits from Spenser or Sir Henry Newbolt but I do have a lot of the poetry in it by heart, as I have a good many chunks from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. And lest it should be thought what a good little girl I was, I hasten to explain that, on the contrary, so much of the poetry I still remember was learned by heart because I was extremely naughty. If you were as badly behaved as I was at my convent school, you were given a detention. There was a period when I can barely ever have arrived home at the right time: I was in almost permanent detention. Two punishments were meted out during these solitary periods in the classroom when the rest of the school had fallen quiet. One was to hem sheets by hand, as a result of which I acquired such a loathing of needle and thread that I have refused to ply them at any time in the course of my adult life. But the other, and more frequently meted out, punishment was to learn a poem and recite it word perfect at the end of the detention period. The nun on detention duty chose the poems and many of them are right here, in A Child’s Garland and Palgrave. I learned poetry by the yard. Tennyson, Keats, Browning, Kipling, Shelley, de la Mare, Wordsworth … ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness … The splendour falls on castle walls … Tiger, Tiger burning bright… From the troubles of the world, I turn to ducks … Do you remember an Inn, Miranda, do you remember an Inn … John Gilpin was a citizen/Of credit and renown …’
In times of stress, waiting in a long traffic jam or to go under the dental drill, I lower my blood pressure by reciting the whole of ‘The Lady of Shalott’.
‘On either side the river lie,
Long fields of barley and of rye.’
Oh, don’t start me.
I get great pleasure from knowing so much poetry – though much of it should rather be called, simply, verse, because the rhymes and rhythms are so soothing and satisfying. And it is a terrific help when doing crosswords and answering quizzes at Christmas. The ability to learn by heart, like the solving of really complex maths, is a young gift and it burns out pretty early, though I got a great deal of John Donne and W.H. Auden by heart when I was studying them for A level – no textbooks in the exam room in those days, so if you wanted to quote you had to learn it.
It was my ability to recite quite a lot of poetry that helped me both into and smartly out of a conversation with Edith Sitwell – possibly the most awkward conversation I have ever had in my life.
The Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell, children of Sir George and all of them writers, once lived in Scarborough, too, in a house called Wood End, where there used to be a room kept as they had known it, containing copies of their books and manuscripts and the great portrait by Sargent of the three of them as children. We went to the Sitwell House, and to the Art Gallery next door, on many a Sunday afternoon, with tea afterwards in the Gallery, and after wandering round the strange museum part of Wood End, looking at old bits of flint and Roman coins, I was always waiting to dodge away into the Sitwell room to look at their picture. They fascinated me even then, with their extraordinary, arrestingly beautiful-ugly, bony aquiline faces and Edwardian clothes. My favourite was Sacheverell – or Sachie – because of his name. I got to know him well thirty years later, when I went to interview him for a BBC programme about Scarborough and we sat swapping stories of the place – remembering the wind roaring round the chimney pots, having croup and bronchitis, smelling camphorated oil, walking along the beach with eyes down in case there was a golden coin among the pebbles. We had the same memories, so many years apart. The house in which I was born was a pebble’s throw from the one in which they had lived. Sachie could never get over it. ‘We looked at the same roof slates and walked on the same paving slabs,’ he once said. Sachie loved Scarborough and would have talked about it and his childhood there for ever, as I would have listened. The others did not love it, as I was to find out when I walked into the drawing room of Charles and Pamela Snow’s flat one evening and saw Edith Sitwell sitting bolt upright in a chair at the far end. Imagine it. Queen Elizabeth the First or the Queen of Sheba, definitely someone very royal, silk turban, amazingly coloured garments draped about her person. Rings, huge rings, vast gold chains and bracelets everywhere. And that face. The same face I knew so well from the Sargent portrait but grown up and grown old. Her eyes were the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen, huge, heavily lidded, mesmerising, half-closed like the eyes of an apparently sleeping but terribly watchful crocodile.
And there was I, eighteen, a university student. But I had just published my first novel, which might have made me of very slightly more interest to Edith. Only it did not.
The eyelids half closed. The long bony fingers tapped on the arm of the chair. The rings flashed in the light of the lamp. My throat went very dry.
I blurted out that I was born and grew up in Scarborough, that I knew their house so well, so well. I wished I could have explained to her the fascination it had had for me, the way I had been haunted by them, by their portrait. Their names.
‘I hated Scarborough,’ she said.
‘Wood End …’
‘I loathed that house.’
There was absolutely nothing whatsoever that I could say.
‘Do you read poetry?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Do you get it by heart?’
I did not explain how I had done so, but I said that yes, I knew a lot of poetry by heart. Was she expecting me to say that I knew poetry of hers? I did, actually, I knew ‘Still Falls the Rain’, but I was too nervous to say so. Probably I should have done but she might have told me she hated it now, loathed the poem.
I do not know if Edith Sitwell ever laughed – possibly not. Somehow, that face was always haughty, disdainful, solemn, watchful of expression, though the eyes might have flickered and glinted with amusement. So I was spared the humiliation of any sort of laughter when I replied to her next question.
‘What do you know by heart?’
I was not prepared. I was terrified. Thrown. Totally unsure of what or how to answer, though a second’s pause for calm thought would have allowed me to collect myself and say ‘Spenser. Chaucer. Shakespeare.’ But the effect of Edith Sitwell a foot away from me, Queen Elizabeth the First re-incarnated, did not allow me to pause calmly for thought. I did not plan what I would say in reply. One never does at such moments. I opened my mouth and out came
‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I.
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes
And nestlings fly.
And the little brown nightingale builds his nest
And …’
The expression on her face is one I shall remember until my dying day. I fled.
Years later, I told Sachie the story, sitting in the eminently comfortable drawing room in Northamptonshire. He had the same face as Edith, same nose, same eyes, though his were not so hooded and they laughed. He laughed now, hooting down his nose and inhaling his cigarette at the same time, tossing his head back. The laugh said everyth
ing but it was not unkind, not scornful, not dismissive. It was a laugh which told me that he summed up the whole scene in one, his sister’s expression, my horror and embarrassment, the awful Hardy verses somehow coming out of their own accord and too late to get them back. He did not need to say a single word. The laugh was enough.
I do not read much poetry now, and rarely anything new. I know I should. Should. Ought. But I don’t and that’s that. Perhaps I don’t need to. I can recite the whole of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ after all, and W.H. Auden’s:
‘As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.’
And
‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.’
And
‘Slowly, silently now, the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon.’
Or perhaps
‘Whenever the moon and stars are set
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet
A man goes riding by …’
And then again, there is
‘If you wake at midnight,
And hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind
Or looking in the street.’
It’s a comfort to know that when I am old and grey and full of tears, I will still be able to say:
‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes.’
By heart.
But not all the poetry I know was learned when I was a child. I did not encounter Charles Causley’s work until I was fully adult but he is a poet whose verses stick like burrs to the inside of the mind. I don’t remember making any attempt to learn them, I just absorbed them by osmosis.
‘I had a silver penny and an apricot tree
And I said to the sailor on the white quay …’
It sounds like a poem for children. So do others.
Ah, people said, Charles Causley, ‘the children’s poet’. The tone was always patronising. And indeed, he wrote poetry for children, some of the best in English. So, of course, did Ted Hughes, about whom no one ever dared speak patronisingly. But there is nothing sweet or charming or, well, patronising, about the poems either of them wrote for the young. You will have to think for only a few seconds, surely, before remembering the opening lines of Causley’s best-known, most anthologised poem about, and for, someone young:
Timothy Winters comes to school,
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters,
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
Causley could no more write down to children than he could sentimentalise them. He wasn’t a primary schoolteacher for thirty-odd years for nothing. ‘Children,’ he said, clear-eyed as ever, ‘you walk among them at your peril.’
But he wished he had had his own. He wrote a letter to me a few years ago, one of many wonderful, rich, funny and revealing letters, in which he talked about Hughes, his greatest friend, about how he had loved him, how he missed him.
‘I used to see them often, when he was with Sylvia. Lovely girl. And Frieda and Nicholas. I used to look at them in their cots and think, “and all I’ve got to show for it are a few old poems”.’
Occasionally, because he was a lifelong bachelor, people thought he was homosexual. It troubled him. When A.L. Rowse told Causley, ‘You’re one of us,’ he said to me, ‘I hope he only meant a Cornishman.’ He would have married, he said, if …
The pause was a silent reference to his mother; he was pretty well chained by her during her lifetime, though he made dashes for the open world, to Canada and Australia and Asia, a term here, a term there, as visiting writer and poet in residence.
I first saw him in 1971 at the famous Book Bang in Bedford Square when he was receiving a poetry prize, and I said to a mutual friend, the poet William Plomer, that he looked melancholy.
‘He has reason,’ Plomer said, ‘he has a Mother.’
He was not melancholy, really, or rather, not in company, not in letters, not in our phone calls, which grew longer and more frequent as he became housebound after a series of strokes, and then went into a home in his native Launceston. He loved talking about books, poetry, children, life, the literary world he was, and yet was not, a part of. He always made me laugh. His turn of phrase was unique, and throwaway lines, spoken in his slight Cornish burr, were either achingly funny or achingly memorable. He once spoke of a line of poetry that Hughes had written as so good ‘it makes your hair catch fire’.
He made use of the legends and folklore of Cornwall all his writing life, in his children’s poems and stories, and, most of all, in the ballads, which were for every age.
Very occasionally, the ballad form leads him into a kind of archness at odds with the rest of his work:
Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in through the window
‘We’ve a job for you,’ he said.
Rarely does the Christianity that is the warp and woof of his verse fail to bring out the dark side in his poetry. The Christ-story was a bitter one for him, the person of Christ a suffering, betrayed human being, assayed by all the forces of evil. Even when the rhyme dances, the words are steeped in gall.
Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
Herod is his name.
War infuses his poetry. It was war that first took him far abroad from Cornwall as a young man and his finest verse was forged in the experience of the navy in wartime.
As he grew increasingly frail and nervous of leaving home, Causley began to receive some of the serious public recognition that should have been his years before – though his fellow poets always knew his worth. In 2000, three years before he died, he won the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a Lifetime’s Contribution to Literature, worth £15,000, and asked me if I would receive it on his behalf, and make the speech he had written.
I also read one of his great poems, ‘Convoy’, about a dead sailor:
Draw the blanket of ocean,
Over his frozen face.
He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish,
Staring through the green freezing sea-glass
At the Northern Lights.
He is now a child in the land of Christmas:
Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears
And the diving seal.
The iron wind clangs round the ice-caps,
The five-point Dog-star
Burns over the silent sea,
And the three ships
Come sailing in.
When I told him about it he said, ‘Oh that was terrible, Susan, I knew him all my life and then I came home and he didn’t and I had to pass his mother every day in Launceston High Street. I always wished I’d turn to stone.’
He was never poor, never rich, but winning the Heywood Hill Prize meant more than honour to him. I asked if he would sign a book for a friend and mentioned that I was enclosing stamps for its return. ‘No, no, please do not,’ he said, ‘money means nothing to me, now that I’ve won this prize. I can scatter it like bird seed.’
Remembering him, I remember the jokes. One always does. I also have one hilarious visual memory of him. We had taken part in a radio programme together one January, at the University of Exeter, to which he had been driven from Cornwall by a young German friend. We were all going out to supper afterwards and euphoric at having finished the work part of the evening, we came out of the main entrance into a world of snow. It was beautiful, but as he was marvelling at it, Causley leaped forward and descended to his waist into a drift. As we looked on in amazement, and horror, he said ruefully, his Cornish accent somehow strengthened by the drama of the moment, ‘I don’t know that we shall make dinner in public … I really am awfully wet.’
He was a man who made the most
of things. Was he happy in old age? Probably not. He would have loved a wife, children, grandchildren, and after his strokes, he relied on the help of his kind Launceston neighbours. He gave up walking to the corner shop on his Zimmer frame to buy Captain Birds Eye’s frozen ‘Ocean Pie’ after he fell heavily. Soon, he knew he had to go into the home. His only worry was his cat. In the home, they were kind to him, honoured him even, and he told hilarious stories about the events of the day there. On one occasion, a man had visited from a local zoo, bringing pets with him. ‘I never thought I’d end up with a blessed monkey in my arms,’ he said ruefully.
I think he knew the value of his own work. But he was never vain, never anything but young in heart and spirit.
Shortly after receiving the Heywood Hill Prize, he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, a rare honour, and asked me, again, to accept on his behalf. ‘What would you like me to say?’ I asked.
The reply might well have been: ‘What an honour.’ Or perhaps, ‘What a surprise …’ But one of our greatest living poets, aged eighty-three, asked me to say, ‘My goodness, what an encouragement.’
The Well-Travelled Bookcase
MY FEW BOOKS of travel writing have gravitated towards one another over the years and stuck together out of solidarity, for there are not very many – I am not a traveller, nor even much of an armchair one, and it is some time since I read any of them, so now that it is deep midwinter, I am taking them down and dusting them off to see if I can be transported to warmer places, brighter days.
If I have to pick out just one travel writer, I guess I will not be alone in picking out the doyen of them all, Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The book of his I have re-read most often is hardly a travel book at all – or if it is, the travel is inwards, a spiritual journey. Some books are balm to the soul and solace to the weary mind, a cooling stream at the end of long, tiring days and A Time to Keep Silence is assuredly one of them. In the 1950s, PLF went from Paris to stay in two monasteries, St Wandrille and La Grande Trappe, in order to rest, recuperate from some crisis – he does not elaborate – and write a book. He was not a believer but he gained immeasurably in spirit, as well as in mind and body, from the accepting atmosphere, the silence, the calm routine and quiet presence of wholly – and holy – dedicated men. He saw the point of their way of life, though he could never share it, and so his book can give sustenance to any readers, believers or not, who can immerse themselves in its beautiful and reflective prose and allow themselves to rest there. It is a book that has never failed me, a companion over many years, in troubled times as well as good ones.