The Migrant Years
Gael started Migrant Press after we moved to Ventura in 1958 from Worcester, England. We were in Ventura for seven years and while there, he published all the issues of his poetry magazine, Migrant.
At the time, Ventura was a small town on the southern California coast just north of Los Angeles – it’s now a city. We moved there when Gael was offered the post of ‘anesthesiologist’ for Ventura County Hospital.
Our house was up on a hillside overlooking the ocean and two off-shore islands which were owned by the government and closed to the public – there was a colony of wild boar on one of the islands. The entire front wall of the living-room was made of glass panels – floor to ceiling – which allowed us a view for miles up and down the coast, as well as Ventura beach in the near distance, and the town below.
The house was a small one with only two bedrooms, and was a little crowded when our third daughter arrived in 1961, but the view and situation was worth it. Our property consisted of two large terraces on the inland edge of town, and there was nothing in back of us but the Pacific coastal mountain range. A deep ravine ran along one side of the house, and there was a steep hillside drop in front. The terrain was covered mostly in brush, such as sage and manzanita, plus erratic stands of eucalyptus and scrub-oak trees, but nearly all the hillside houses had ice-plant as a ground cover: a succulent with brilliantly coloured daisy-like flowers when in bloom.
When Gael decided to start up a little mag, the first hint of what he intended came when he suddenly appeared one afternoon carrying what looked like a large, very cumbersome piece of junk. It was an old mimeograph machine which he had found downtown in a ‘second-hand’ shop. My first reaction was, “You’re not serious”; and I tried not to laugh or be too disparaging when he finally, proudly, had it set up. It was ancient – a far cry from the electric machine I had used at secretarial school “What’re you going to do with it?” I asked. “Start a magazine,” he replied.
As soon as we discovered what an inky mess the thing was, it was immediately relegated to the end of the workbench in the garage. It consumed and exuded heavy black ink to such an extent, the stuff got everywhere – hands, clothes, floor, bench-top, the paper-feed and the exit tray, tea mugs – never mind the drum and stencil to which it was supposed to be confined. The wipe-up cloth was always useless.
Undeterred though, Gael was soon cranking out the sheets of the first issue of Migrant. He happily shared the garage with black-widow spiders, the occasional tarantula, the guinea-pigs in the cage on the workbench, and the cat and cat-basket beneath. Sometimes there was even a roadrunner speeding past the garage-door, up from the ravine, or – when you went outside – a great black condor circling high beyond the upper-terrace. I saw it once – Gael a couple times.
The machine had a hand crank, and you started off the copying process by putting a thick blob of ink in the bottom pan and rocking the drum to ink the pad. Then you attached the stencil and began turning the handle to feed the paper in.
The paper-feed should have been continuous, but you were lucky to get more than three or four consecutive feeds at a time. The next sheet usually went askew and jammed; the paper scrunched up, wrinkled and became smeared with ink. It was maddening. It was impossible to keep your fingers from getting inky; so besides the ink-smears, black finger-prints inevitably appeared on some pages. The ink also came too freely through some of the letters on the stencil because they’d been typed too vigorously. This made the final, printed result often uneven – letters in some words too black and splotchy, too faint in others. Nevertheless, the first issue of Migrant was finally ready to be mailed.
I soon joined in the fun of getting out the first issue - helping to collate the pages on the dining-room table, folding, stapling on the cover (which Gael finally conceded should be printed professionally), stuffing and addressing envelopes. I even took my turn at cranking the ‘monster’.
Beyond the dining-room table, double-glass doors opened onto the patio, and there were often distractions as you worked. One of the funniest sights was to see our Siamese cat being chased by a humming-bird, its rapier-like proboscis just millimetres away from the cat’s behind. The cat also liked to bat around discarded tails from the lizards that lived outside around the house – watching with quizzical fascination as the appendage flopped about, apparently still alive, but not alive.
Gael was a correspondence addict, and his volume of mail soon increased considerably as his contacts widened. He exchanged poems and received ‘little mag’ poetry collections from all over – including Britain, Canada, the US, France, even from Japan where Cid Corman was based. I remember one letter, on purple paper in purple ink, from Elvis Presley’s young wife Priscilla – but I’m afraid her poems didn’t make it into Migrant.
It was as a result of this correspondence, and encouraged by Roy Fisher and Michael Shayer in England, that Gael had decided to start up Migrant. The idea was to cross-fertilize poetry, to encourage English-speaking poets in Britain, Canada and the US, in particular, to read each other’s work. And ‘Migrant’ seemed the right title – especially as it reflected Gael’s own migratory past.
Because there was no other room in the house for him, Gael had his desk and file-drawers in the laundry-room, next to the washer and dryer. However, the desk was below a corner window, and it did have a great view of the ravine and the coast to the south. He stuck to this arrangement for quite a while, but finally couldn’t compete with all the family noise: the washer or dryer whirring away beside his desk, me washing dishes in the next room (the kitchen) while listening to the latest baseball game on the radio, the kids (including neighbour kids) playing about, with the TV blaring forth in the living-room. So he rented himself an ‘office’ downtown. It was a completely bare room except for a second-hand table, chair and desk-lamp which he bought, but it was a place of peace, and Migrant was able to continue.
As Gael made more and more contacts with poets in the US, he was sometimes able to meet with some of them. The Ventura house was too far out of the way for casual visitors, but there always seemed a steady stream of relatives. Gael’s sister Tess lived in Claremont where her husband was a professor of mathematics, and his other sister Karen lived in San Diego where her husband was a chemistry professor; and he had an aunt living in Los Angeles who was a chiropractor and had been a missionary in the Belgian Congo. My two sisters, teachers, also lived in Southern California, and my mother and father at a resort lake in the mountains.
One of the poet visitors I remember with most fun was Cid Corman. He was quite bulky, and we had to put him in the laundry-room on a cot that had replaced Gael’s desk. Cid nearly fell off the cot the first morning when a sonic boom rattled the windows and shook the house. It came from one of the missiles regularly tested from Point Magu (just south of us) flying past. This was a common occurrence and we were used to it, but I think it shook Cid more than a little. He was lucky, though, that we didn’t also have one of our regularly occurring earthquake tremors while he was there. It’s a wonder the house survived all the shaking it got, as well as the mud-slides from violent rain storms.
I also remember a visit from Charles and Brenda Tomlinson with their youngest daughter. We took them out to see Death Valley, Charles and Brenda a bit wide-eyed over many aspects of American culture - especially the signs, with their curious use of the English language. These fascinated Gael as well as Charles, and Gael finally had quite a photo collection of them. I think our visitors were also impressed by my sister’s driving at nearly 100 mph on the long, almost completely deserted road through the Mojave desert. But I think what probably made them the most wide-eyed was the box of two-dozen, assorted and extravagantly concocted American dougnuts we brought them for breakfast in their motel room on the first morning. They were made up in twists, spirals, bars or rings and were glazed, powdered, iced or covered in hundreds-and-thousands. I’m sure Charles and Brenda had never seen anything like them – certainly not for breakfast!
Charles introduced Gael to Hugh Kenner, professor and literary critic at Santa Barbara (just north up the coast), and Gael and Kenner became good friends. He helped Gael with many new contacts.
There was also a visit from Denise Levertov, whom I remember being particularly serious and solemn. And I remember a pleasant visit to San Francisco to meet Robert Duncan and his companion Jess.
Then there was the trip to New Mexico to see Ed Dorn and Bob Creeley. Creeley was renting the old ranch house where D.H. Lawrence had lived for so long. We picked up Ed Dorn and his family first, then drove to the Lawrence place where Creeley was living with his family, and there were soon a lot of kids running about. It was a very hot July (115 F. at one point), and we went with Ed and his family to see a great display of July 4th fireworks before we left. He also took us to see some of the Pueblo Indian communities close to where he lived.
Looking back, I’m amazed Gael had any time to put out ‘Migrant’. He was soon the ‘anaesthesiologist’ for three hospitals – two in Ventura and one in Ojai (located in a nearby valley). He was always on 24-hour call, and he often worked through the night on a bad accident case and would still be there to start his regular list at 7:00 a.m. Or he would finish a night session at Ojai and have to make the half-hour drive back from Ojai to begin his list.
At the time, there were horrendous head injuries resulting from people being thrown out of cars, when cars seldom had seat-belts, or people wouldn’t wear them. There were also head injuries from motorcyclists who wouldn’t wear helmets. So Gael spent long hours of his life in those days, assisting at heart-rending (and preventable) trephining (‘burr-hole’) operations. His friend, a local principal (headmaster), was killed in such an accident involving a police-car chase, an occurrence all too common.
However, Gael was indefatigable, and had learned to ‘power-nap’ as an intern. Besides weekly sessions teaching anesthetics to the junior doctors, he was soon also involved with the local theatre group – his most memorable performance being as the Dauphin in ‘Joan of Arc’. He was a bit of a ham, but this could affectionately be excused because of his infectious enthusiasm. His love of play-acting was part of his great desire to tell stories, and in the days of his Viking ancestors, he would no doubt have been a skald. He was apparently a popular teller of stories during his boarding-school days, captivating the boys in his dorm after lights-out – often being begged for ‘just one more’.
Gael was the proud owner of a vintage, English Singer – a white open-top, little ‘roadster’ type of car. Mechanically, it was simple enough even for Gael to fix (usually), and he loved to tinker with it. He soon bought another old Singer he kept just for spare parts; and before we left, he found another one, half buried in the sand at a beach house, which someone gave to him to take away. The ‘Doc’ soon became a familiar sight around town in his Noddy-like little car.
Throughout his life, Gael loved walking, and he would have loved to go walking up in the hills above us. However, our particular terrain was inhabited by rattle-snakes and mountain cats, the scrub was nearly impenetrable, and there were no trails. It was a draw-back, but he happily made do with long walks on the beach.
I guess it was this desire to go ‘walking’ that decided him to go up Mt. Whitney one weekend with an exchange-teacher friend from England. Mt. Whitney – in the Sierra Nevada range to the northeast of Ventura – is over 14,000 ft. and one of the tallest mountains in the US. Gael and Stan made it to just over 10,000 ft. but Gael finally succumbed to an overwhelming attack of altitude sickness and they had to come down. Later in life, with very deep enjoyment, he confined himself to the gentler slopes of England, Wales and Scotland.
Gael loved to make things, loved the challenge of solving the problems involved. He was gifted with his fingers and could turn out little animals or cartoon figures in clay or plasticine, or do paper cut-outs in just a few minutes – much to the delight of the children. He also loved to sketch while out walking, and he tried his hand at pastels, and later, watercolours. But his real talent was in cartooning – he could catch the essence of a character in just a few strokes. Fortunately, as it turned out, most of his creative energy was finally confined to poetry.
His efforts at ‘making things’, though, weren’t always restricted to little things. I came home once to find a huge stack of concrete blocks and a pile of sand in the patio. There had been a serious mud-slide down the upper-terrace into the patio a few days before, and Gael – stripped to shorts in the heat – was mixing concrete. I should have known.
I had been intending to call in a builder, but Gael couldn’t resist the challenge – he’d never built a wall before. There was soon a retaining-wall in place, about eight-feet high, and as far as I know it’s still sturdily holding the upper-terrace in place. Gael, though, was never fussy about ‘finishing touches’. He loved simple, functional creations, with the ‘beauty’ in the function. So either end of the wall just sort of drifted away as he ran out of concrete blocks. A year or so later, he decided to have a go at replacing the steep, concrete driveway up to the house, and it was also a success – but this time he did have the help of my experienced father.
I don’t remember any particularly dramatic or calamitous events which touched us personally during these Ventura years. There was a tsunami from Japan which hit the beach and washed away a considerable section of the coast road, but it didn’t seriously affect the community. And there was the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination, but on the whole, I just remember an enjoyable seven years.
We finally left Ventura when Gael was due to be called up to fight in Vietnam. Some of the doctors he worked with had already been called up. Gael had always been a pacifist and didn’t want to fight in any war. Then he was told that he wouldn’t be allowed to serve in the American Army as a doctor, unless he agreed to become an American citizen and serve for a minimum of five years – otherwise he would be taken in as a medical orderly.
Gael – his heart always in Britain – had no desire to become an American citizen, and by now he was becoming fed-up with the way privatised medicine was going in the States. More and more unscrupulous doctors were taking advantage of patient insurance-cover to over-charge. And ‘Good Samaritan’ doctors no longer dared stop even for a sidewalk accident because so many were being sued by greedy lawyers if anything went wrong. Now Gael just wanted to get back to Britain and the National Health Service, which he firmly supported. So we were soon aboard the S.S. Oriana on our way back to England.
The Oriana was a cruise ship, coming from Australia (filled with returning military personnel and their families) and going via Los Angeles, Acapulco, the Panama Canal, Bermuda and Jamaica to Le Havre and Southampton. It was a lovely, two-week voyage; and the ship brought all our household goods – including the washer and dryer, the mimeo monster and a VW van – free. An epidemic of measles and mumps spread through the throngs of kids en route, and Julie got the measles and Shari the mumps, and even Gael had the mumps when we arrived. But he wouldn’t stay put, and he horrified our nurse-landlady by walking happily around Malvern the first day.
We went back to Worcestershire because we had spent three previous years there, loved the area, and we still had friends there. Also Michael Shayer was living in Worester with his family, teaching chemistry at King’s School, and he and Roy Fisher were full of new ideas for Migrant.
When we first arrived, Gael was determined he wasn’t going to do anything but write and be a poet for at least a year – we would live on our savings. It wasn’t long before we found an old ‘rabbit-warren’ of a house at Stiffords Bridge, Cradley (of mixed lineage – part Elizabethan, part Victorian and everything in between). We had an acre of land with farm fields stretching away on two sides, and the back garden bordering Cradley Brook. There was also a country pub on either side of the bridge. There was plenty of room on the back lawn to play cricket, and the first evening we moved in, I caught a brown trout for tea. We were just ten minutes away by car from Malvern and the Malvern Hills.
Gael quickly resumed his Migrant activities. He wanted to continue by publishing the work of unknown, or little-known, American, Canadian and British poets in pamphlets or small books. However, a group of doctors (former friends and colleagues) in Worcester wanted him to join the practice they had just started, and they kept pestering until he finally gave in – he insisted, though, that he would be only a part-time partner and he wouldn’t do weekends. Needless to say, he was soon working just as hard as he had been in Ventura – even doing anesthetics again as well as being a GP. But he still managed to be a poet.
Sept. 2006
Page(s) 2-10
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