In my most recent piece I mentioned my discovery, in Lancieux, Brittany, of a memorial to the English poet Robert Service, who died there in 1955.
I am old enough to remember something of this man’s work . He had travelled from his birthplace in Preston, Lancashire, to the Yukon in Canada, arriving there some ten years after the Gold Rush. He became familiar with the folk myths and the characters
of the region. Rough and tough sums it up. He was a working man’s poet and in the days when entertainment usually took the form of someone you knew playing or singing or reciting something his poems were committed to memory by ordinary folk. He was no intellectual and neither was his audience but, within his genre, he was a poet, make no mistake, and the average chap who needed a few party pieces would often turn to Service for material. Poems like The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee made for dramatic performances at family parties or in the Public Bar. Here’s the opening verse of the latter:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
The story becomes very macabre, believe me.
Thinking of Service makes me think of my Father’s generation. Father was born in 1901 and served in the Royal Air Force from 1920 to 1926. He spent the whole time in what was then India and is now Pakistan and to me as a child names of places like Quetta and Lahore were very familiar featuring as they did in his stories. He returned to England to face unemployment. Intelligent but without much of an education beyond that gained at the knee of his Mother and then the RAF he was obviously hungry to pull himself up from the working class masses. He read poetry and novels. He joined the Independent Labour Party – about as far left as you could go without moving to the Soviet Union. He formed the ambition of becoming an author. He did not find work so he had plenty of time to explore his options. Penguin books, launched in 1935, might have been targeted specifically at George Ernest Diggle.
He possessed a mental library of poetry from which he could recite; it was a considerable social asset. Add to this an ability to knock out tunes on the piano, the ukulele banjo and the one-stringed fiddle, and you see a man well equipped to entertain and, later on, to be a pretty good Father.
Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din was a favourite and being set in India, albeit a long time before my Father was there, sums up pretty well the way in which the British viewed their Indian subjects and, somewhat oddly bearing in mind his leftwing inclinations, the way in which he himself viewed the Indians with whom he had come into contact. This poem was one of the first he recited to me. These final lines, the most often quoted, give a taste of it (Google will find you all of it).
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
Another favourite was The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning. Here is the second verse:
Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
Isn’t this amazing stuff? Again, go to Google and relish all of this fabulous piece of work.
I have somehow formed the view that all aspiring young British men in the twenties and thirties read and memorised The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward Fitzgerald. It runs to 75 quatrains and follows a very simple rhyming pattern of a,a,b,a and a,a,a,a which makes it easy to memorise but it’s a long job and that’s why the work was widely available in tiny little volumes that would usually fit into the top pocket of a jacket or a shirt. I have acquired three such little books, one that I bought in a secondhand bookshop and the others I inherited from my Father and my Uncle Harold. My Father held the lot in his head but only quoted from it selectively.
I have the quirky notion that one day – it had better be soon - some imaginative arts organiser would book the Royal Albert Hall and invite everyone who knows this work to attend and there would be a mass recitation. I think the place might easily be filled.
The opening verse you may well have heard many times before:
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a noose of Light.
Here’s the 11th verse and just as well-known:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
How many girls have had that verse recited to them by those fervent young men that I imagine?
And read the 51st. You’ve seen this quoted many times:
The moving finger writes and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Finally, the verse, the 52nd, that my Father used to explain or justify his atheism:
And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
Go on now, finish reading this post and hie thee to Google!
I have saved for the end of my Selections From My Father’s Poetry Recitals the one poem that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. It is The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God by J. Milton Hayes. My Father delivered this in fine, dramatic style, lowering his voice to a whisper as he reached the verse where Mad Carew’s body is discovered and then raising it as the awful truth is revealed. I offer it to you here in case you don’t manage to get to Google.
There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.
He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.
He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.
On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.
He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.
He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"
And she found the little green eye of the god.
She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.
When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.
His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."
There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
Knocks you out, doesn’t it?
Thank you, Dad.
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