Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

   In the fifties, which more or less coincided with my twenties, I
spent a fair amount of time drinking coffee.
 
   I had spent 1951 (Festival of Britain year) in Gibraltar as
a national service sailor, a coder/educational. I learnt a great
deal about cryptography, a little about teaching and became an
expert in creative skiving, subverting the authoritarian system
of the Royal Navy and putting my time to better use than my
‘superior’officers could devise. I was a haunter of bars and beaches,
not to ignore the YMCA (different, I think, from the one in New
York). I did some work at the Dockyard and Technical school and a small amount of coding and decoding in the complex of tunnels that
permeate the Rock. That was an interesting fifteen months.

   I returned in March 1952 to a London radically changed. As a
teenager I’d come to know some parts of the capital very well. I
often walked from Hampstead to the West End to save the bus fare,
and in the months before I was conscripted I learnt by heart the
ground between ‘up west’and Stratford (Chaucer’s Stratford, that
is, not Shakespeare’s), longer, but just as interesting. the walk from
Hampstead took in Camden town with its large Irish community.
Saturday nights I went ceilidh dancing there at the Shamrock Club
and the Erin. We did a lot of our shopping in Camden Town. It was
much cheaper than Hampstead. This was before the days of the
giant flea market which has made it an international centre.

   Whitechapel and Mile End road and Bow were altogether
different. Most of the shops, furriers and rag‑trade emporiums
had exotic foreign names on their fascias: Grodzinski, Emmanuel,
Stenberg & Cohn; and of course there was Bloom’s, famous for its
salt beef sandwiches and black coffee. My first taste of kosher food
and very delicious.

   Camden Town is about as far from Euston, where the boat trains
from the western ports arrive, as you can walk with two heavy
suitcases. Whitechapel, where Jews fleeing from the pogroms had
settled, is about the same distance from Liverpool Street and from
the docks.

   But I returned to a different London. There had been a massive
rebuilding programme for the Festival. In outlying areas,
Hampstead and Stratford among them, there were still bomb
sites, now overgrown with dandelion and ragwort. They made
convenient short‑cuts. (With the pragmatism of the young, as school
kids we’d been quick to take advantage of them, walking, within a
day or two, through what had been someone’s home.) The centre
on the other hand was full of gleaming new buildings. And there was
that new concert hall on the south bank.

   What surprised me most was the sudden proliferation of coffee
bars. When I’d left, in December 1950, there had been none.
Coffee, of course. Lyons Corner houses, those meccas for the
hungry, certainly (eat as much as you can for l/9d). But coffee bars!
I don’t think I’d ever heard of them. Espresso was a new word. So
was cappuccino. Jo, my lovely girl friend, the one I’d marry a month
or two later, did part‑time work in one.

   It was a weird place, half way along Haymarket. It occupied
two floors and had a tall ornamental water feature. They called it a
fountain but it never cascaded upwards. Constantly recycled water
dawdled down a series of variously coloured planes of transparent
plastic. Coffee was dispensed from a noisy machine. I’d never heard
of that. It was quite cheap (sixpence or ninepence). The clientele
was young, so was the staff. This was the place to be. I spent
much of my spare time on that leave in that coffee bar. I’ve tried to
remember its name – something Italian probably, such as Fontana.

   By the time I left the navy, Jo had changed her job and stopped
going to the Fontana. I did too, but by then I was hooked on the
places. The buzz. The conformist non‑conformity. The sharp bitter
coffee. The froth on the top. the sprinkling of chocolate powder on
the froth.

   One of Jo’s colleagues at the Fontana was a round‑faced young
fellow. He worked behind the counter; he also washed up.
So did Jo. The young man was writing a book. It was going to make
him famous. He wasn’t just an author (and coffee jerk); he was a
thinker. When he went home he wrote for an hour or two every
night. His book was going to be about outsiders.

‘Oh, like Camus,’ I said, glad to air my knowledge.

‘No,’ he told me. ‘not like Camus. Mine will be an important
book. Philosophic. Original. Intellectual. Non‑fiction, We are
outsiders, you and I. So’s Jo. We don’t belong to the herd. We are
the future.’ Heady talk.

   Maybe he was pretentious, but he was interesting – and
flattering. I enjoyed talking to him. I felt sorry that like so many of my
talented friends his ideas would never travel beyond the walls of the
coffee bar. There was lot of talk about but precious little action.
‘We’re existentialists, you and I,’ he said once. I had a vague idea
of what he meant. I’d read Sartre at school. ‘English existentialists.’

   Well perhaps, I thought. But my life was mapped out and I
couldn’t see myself wearing a beret and smoking Gauloises.
I was going, with my English scholarship to university at Exeter
and would probably become an academic. How little we know
ourselves. With my scholarship (small ‘s’ this time) and my gifts I’d
sail through, get a first and probably be invited to stay on and teach.
I’d most likely specialise in the Metaphysicals, or perhaps Hopkins
with whom I shared a first name. I’d turn down professorships,
preferring to be a free spirit. And, yes, at heart I’d be an existentialist
too. Whatever that really meant.
  
   Things didn’t turn out as I’d supposed. I dropped out of university
after a year. Colin Wilson soon gave up the Fontana and I never saw
him again. I’m tempted to add, ‘I sometimes wonder what became
of him’, but I’m trying to cut down on the jokes.

During that leave I was chucked out by my parents. It’s a long
story. The further away I get from it the less I understand it. I
think it was a conflict of egos, complicated by my emergence into
adulthood. I went to stay with Jo for a few days before returning to
Portsmouth. I took what I could carry with me, and although there
was a reconciliation several years afterwards I never again visited the
house l’d lived in all those years. Jo and I were married that summer
during a weekend leave, at West Ham registry office, witnessed by a
brave cousin of mine and his girlfriend. We were just twenty‑one.
  
   I was still in the navy so I had a place to live (Royal Naval
Barracks, Portsmouth) and three meals a day. I don’t want to
descant on life at Portsmouth Barracks. All I’ll mention here is the
screening of Brief Encounter at the barracks cinema. The raucous
commentary from an audience of vocal and sexually‑obsessed
matelots rendered the wistful, tentative and guilt‑ridden love affair
less than affecting. years later, when I saw the film again I could
still hear, ringing in my ears, ‘Fuck her, mate, while you’ve got the
chance.’ At the time I was seriously affronted, but now, having seen
the film for a third time, I’ll concede that they had a point.

   I served my time, left the navy and went to live with Jo in her
mother’s two‑roomed flat in Corporation Street, E15. On the
first evening of my final leave we got on a tube train to go to the
pictures. I had my discharge pay in my pocket, and we both had our
passports with us. Jo’s best friend, Bobbie, was now living in Paris.
I don’t know who had the idea first. ‘Why not?’ we said. We went
past Charing Cross and stayed on the tube till we got to Victoria.
Buzzing with excitement and marvelling at our own outrageousness
we bought tickets for the boat train. A few hours later we were in
france. the impulse to go to Paris was rather more interesting than
anything that actually happened there. We contacted Bobbie who
was living in a tiny room at the top of a tall house in Montmartre.
We crashed out on her floor. Bobbie was running short of money.
she’d hit on the bright idea of translating books into English as a
way of picking up a few francs. She’d started with a French version
of A Farewell to Arms. I managed to convince her of the folly of
continuing. I wonder if she ever wrote for Olympia Press (another
of her schemes). The three of us arm‑in‑arm, I remember, a little
drunk, swaying along the pavement singing ‘Where e’er you Walk’,
asserting our Englishness. And round about midnight not far from
the Sacré Coeur I found a dead geranium in the gutter and picked it
up and shook it at the moon, quoting Eliot.

   When the time came for me to go to Exeter Jo decided she’d
stay in London. University life didn’t suit me, or vice versa
perhaps. I was restless. Exiled by my family and temporarily without
my wife I felt lonely and abandoned. I didn’t feel intellectually
stimulated. Chaucer was taught by a man interested only in the
eighteenth century satirists. As far as I could make out the head of
the faculty wasn’t interested in anything at all. There were lots of
pretty girls but they were so young, and I was so married. There
was a Latin lecturer, the wildly eccentric Jackson Knight; I rather got
on with him. he had a style all his own. Once in a lecture he fixed
a very prissy and strait‑laced girl with a look, saying, ‘Margaret, it’s
very rude to wink.’ Haughty and embarrassed she replied; ‘I didn’t
wink Mr Jackson Knight!’ ‘No, but I did, and think how embarrassed I must feel.’ He was a clown. But clever.

   I threw myself into the social life at the university, with all the energy I should have given to my studies. Everybody seemed extremely young. Most students had come straight from school, while I’d knocked about for a couple of years, which made me a hundred years or so older. I was a star at the dramatics and I quickly became a staff‑writer for the student newspaper. I grew a beard. I sang with a dance band. ‘Frankie and Johnnie’ was one of my standards. Alcohol and tobacco don’t go well with athletics and I stayed away from football, hockey and distance running, all of which I’d been quite good at as a schoolboy. I did attend a few lectures but my heart wasn’t in it.
  
   Jo came to join me. We lived in a furnished room somewhere
not far from Gandy street (the hub of all life at the time). She
couldn’t find work. She became bored with small city life, and
resentful of my adrenalin‑driven exuberance. After a few weeks she
returned to London. I stayed on to ‘pursue my studies’.
  
   I was writing and reading poetry. Some of my poems were
published in The South‑Westerner. There are advantages in editing a
page of a university newspaper. Francis Berry and Cecil Day Lewis
came to Exeter to read. I spoke to Berry for a long time afterwards.
Wilson Knight (Jackson’s brother) came and lectured about the
crown in Shakespeare. I took him on and lost.

   At Exeter I received my first commission: £5 for an eight‑line
verse about a new‑born infant. I’d met this farmer in a pub. He
was a euphoric new father. ‘You’re a poet, he said. ‘Write a poem
for my little girl.’
  
   ‘That’s not really my kind of thing,’ I tried to explain.
  
   ‘I’ll pay you,’ he said. Well, that did it he took me out to the farm
and I met his wife. I looked at the sleeping child. I managed to write
something, but it was very difficult. It was also very birthday card‑ish.  The couple were delighted. I wrote the two little stanzas out in my best writing and received my fiver. Of the poem I remember only the shape, and the expression ‘pink fists.’ I got the bus back to the city with five pound notes in my wallet. I was a professional poet.
  
   I wrote songs, too. Words and music. Nothing became of any
of them (although years later a song which I co‑wrote got into the
Australian top ten).

   At about the time when the end‑of‑year exams were due I got
wind that a film unit was coming to Cornwall. I decided to
hitch‑hike the sixty‑odd miles to Tintagel and try my luck. It was a
strange journey. I was used to hitching, never having funds for rail or
bus fares. I’d stood with my thumb out in pouring rain, I’d hitched
in rollses and on the backs of lorries, I’d once almost been killed by
a speeding motor cyclist – how we squeezed between the car we
were passing and the oncoming truck I never understood. But this
one occasion had an altogether different feeling. I won’t say it was
an Odyssey and it certainly wasn’t a Pilgrim’s Progress but in some
peculiar way it was emblematic. Though, as to its meaning, I never
worked that out, preferring not to. I’m the same with poems.
  
   I set out at midnight, on the theory that at night there are loads
of lorry drivers generous with lifts because they want company to
keep them awake. I was wearing a pair of baggy green cords and
carrying a light canvas bag with a few essentials: change of clothing,
toothbrush, book of poems, notebook. My first encounter was with
a policeman.
  
   ‘Where are you going at this time of night?’
  
   ‘Tintagel.’
  
   ‘Oh a humorist, eh?’
  
   ‘No. That’s where I’m off to.’
  
   ‘How you going to get there?’ He had a fine west country burr.
  
   ‘Hitch hike.’
  
    ‘Wouldn’t it be better to wait till morning?’ (lovely ‘r’ in
morning.)
  
   I tried to explain and asked him the best road.
  
   ‘What have you got in that bag?’
  
   I told him.
  
   ‘Mind if I have a look?’ Not at all.’ I began to unzip it. ‘We have to check up. There’s been a couple of burglaries round here.’
  
   ‘Not by me,’ I said.
  
   ‘You can do it at the station if you like. You have that right.’
  
   ‘No, no. Here will do.’ I offered my bag for inspection. He had a
cursory rummage. He’d been polite all along, and now he became
conciliatory, seeming to want my good opinion.
  
   ‘Here. I’ll see you down to the Oakhampton road. Put you on
your way.’  He fell into step beside me and together we walked to
the westward road. I couldn’t figure out whether he was being
friendly and helpful or running me out of town. Either way it was all
right with me. We parted at the edge of town.
  
    My first lift was in a lorry. He set me down in a country road
and wished me luck. I walked a good long way, keeping the north
star to my right. No traffic came. The sun rose. I was filled with an
extraordinary sense of freedom. I saw myself as if from far off, a free
being. I walked on. Then stopped: what was the point of walking?
I’d miles and miles to go. Something would come along. I began
to study the hedge and became involved in watching a snail slowly
mounting a long blade of grass sun lit the dew. Many have said that
dew sparkles like diamonds and it’s true: the refraction of horizontal
sunlight on the beads of water makes it flash in reds, greens and
yellows, just like a diamond when you turn it in the light. But a good
deal cheaper. I watched the snail for well over half an hour. I felt I
was using my time really well. It was as if I and the world and the
snail were the whole thing.

   The sun rose in the sky. I heard a vehicle coming. I turned and
raised my thumb. A baker’s van. He stopped and took me on
twenty miles or so. I fell asleep with my cheek against the window
and woke up a few miles down the road. I tried a little conversation
but the driver was a quiet man. The fields went by. I fell into a
reverie: it was then that I heard the voice – a woman, weeping and
complaining. it seemed quite real. Who was she? I came to myself
and the voice stopped. I realised it had been a hallucination, but
felt somehow that there was some reality behind it. Who was the
weeping woman? Was she alive or dead? Why did I hear her? Was I specially gifted? Was I going mad? I can’t remember her words, but the incident itself I’ve not forgotten.

   I walked again a mile or so. A young man on a motor bike picked
me up, a farm worker. He’d been out milking and was on his way
home to breakfast. He took me off my main route and down a little
lane into a village, rather against my will. We dismounted. ‘Have you
had any breakfast?’ he said. It was about seven in the morning.
  
   ‘No,’ I said. I’ll get something later. I’ll find a caff when I get to
Tintagel.’
  
   ‘That won’t do,’ he said. ‘You come in with me.’
  
   He took me into the kitchen of a large cottage on the main
street. It was warm and busy. ‘This man needs a bit of breakfast,’ he
said to his wife. She was plump and bosomy, pretty and young.
  
   ‘Come in and sit down,’ she said without question. It was already
a strange day and the absolute normality of this little household
made it stranger. A little boy in a high chair was banging with his
spoon on the tray. A chubby girl of about five was sitting up at the
table eating.
  
   ‘Sit down,’ the man said. I sat down.
  
   ‘You’re very welcome,’ said his wife.
  
    ‘I’m hungry,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.
  
    The woman broke eggs into a pan and not long after we were
eating sausages and bacon, fried eggs, toast and marmalade, and
drinking hot tea with plenty of sugar. I offered money. They wouldn’t
take it. The unaccountable kindness of strangers. I told them where I
was going and why.
  
   ‘We’d better get you on your way then,’ he said. I got onto his
pillion seat again and he took me back to the main road west.

   Two more lifts and I was in Tintagel. I don’t remember the first
but the second was from a glamorous blonde in a two‑seater.
She was smart, racy and poshly spoken. She wore tight leather
gloves with no fingers. She was quite old, about thirty I guessed,
and I was convinced that she’d picked me up because she fancied
the look of me. I imagined as I watched her gloved bands expertly
handling the gear lever that my luck was in and that I was about to
have that legendary adventure with an older, experienced woman.
The sun was still shining. We roared along the lands. It was late
morning by now and a beautiful day. Just the day for a daring
escapade. She set me down in Tintagel, wished me luck and drove
on. I watched her car out of sight.
  
   In Tintagel I signed on as an extra and spent a thrilling couple of
weeks tramping about in armour and hobnobbing in the evenings
with film people. On my very first day I was accosted in the pub
by the handsome but aging film‑star, Robert Taylor. He quizzed me
deeply about the weather.
  
   ‘How will it be for filming tomorrow?’
  
   ‘Oh, it looks as though it’ll turn out fine.’
  
   ‘Oh great! and do you think it’ll last?’
  
   ‘Certainly, judging by the look of the sky.’ I was not shy of giving
my expert opinion, realising only afterwards that he thought I was
either a member of the cine‑crew, or a weather‑wise local. As it
turned out I was right. the sun shone. Ava Gardner never showed
up, much to my disappointment. If you ever catch up on that minor
classic The Knights of the Round Table and don’t blink, you’ll catch my film debut. I recognised myself the third time I sat through it. Apart from my brilliant cameo as a soldier waving a sword, the film is not worth the price of a ticket.

   Whereas the stars stayed at Tintagel’s finest hotel, I lodged at
a caff with the Dangar sisters, two large elderly ladies who,
for a tiny fee, gave me a big brass bed and a splendid fried breakfast. The elder Miss Dangar (I never discovered their Christian names) was a great conversationalist. She kept me going with remarkable stories ‑‑ most of them, like all good stories, about sex and violence. She also displayed a baffling inability to distinguish between myth and reality. A story about a local rape or burglary would segue seamlessly into tales of King Arthur, who she conceived as a living presence, or at least a person only recently departed. I loved talking to her.
  
   ‘I don’t know who they’ve got to play King Arthur,’ she said once.
  
   ‘Is it that Robert Taylor?’
  
   ‘No, he’s Lancelot,’ I told her.
  
   "Well,’ she said, ‘whoever they get he’ll have to be a very strong
man.’
  
   ‘Why’s that?’
  
   ‘You see that rock?’ she pointed at a huge boulder in the sea, a
couple of hundred yards from the shore. ‘D’you know how it got
there? When King Arthur found out what his wife had been getting
up to with that Lancelot, he got in a terrible temper. Of course
he did. Well, in his temper he tore that rock out of the hillside
and chucked it out as far as he could. and there it still lies. See for
yourself. I don’t know if those Americans’ (she pronounced the
word with some scorn) ‘have got anybody as could do that.’
  
   ‘They might use an English actor,’ I said, playing along.
  
   She took me seriously. ‘Or an English actor, come to that, judging
by what I’ve seen. They don’t make men like that no more.’
  
   I explained to her that actors used pretence, that the boulders
the Picts in the film were hurling were made of papier maché.
  
   ‘What did I tell you?’she said. ‘and what’s more, if I was that Robert Taylor I’d look after myself a bit when Arthur comes down here.’
  
    I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Arthur didn’t figure in any of
the scenes they were filming.

   I really enjoyed those days. Fully caparisoned knights on large
horses galloped in the lush green fields. Picts, clad in skin
smeared with war paint and topped with unruly black wigs, fired
rubber‑tipped arrows at the invaders. Some bold spirits among
them thought it a good idea to remove the rubber tips and sharpen
the ends. One of these hit Lancelot’s steed in the backside. The
horse reared and Lancelot fell off in front of the film crew amid two
hundred cheering extras, and we did no more filming for a couple
of days because Robert was sulking. We were costumed up and
paid, though, in case he could be persuaded to turn up.
  
   I watched stuntmen fall off on purpose – most impressive, and
cunning. First a couple of techs dug out a large area of turf. Then,
having removed some of the soil, they lined it with layers of cork,
relaid the top grass and made it look as good as new. When all was
prepared, the stuntman/double set his horse off at a gallop bearing
his lance beside him, his pennant streaming in the wind. The effect
of this sight in the twentieth century fields is impossible to convey:
bizarre perhaps, ludicrous, but poignantly romantic. The knight who
was to lose the joust had a precisely measured length of piano wire
(invisible to the camera) attached to his back. On cue he and his
opponent thundered towards one another. When they met over
the prepared turf the wire reached full stretch. The horse galloped
on. the knight did not. Prepared turf or not, sooner him than me.

   I remember Niall McGuiness and Gabriel Wolf (very young and
handsome) among Robert Taylor’s fellow knights. the actor who
later played Rumpole of the Bailey trotted around with baldrick,
helmet and plume. There was also a fight director, a splendid fellow
by the name of Diamond who taught us how to fire our arrows and
gave us a bit of sword drill.

   The actors kept out of the way most of the time, turning up
when called, but otherwise invisible. Not so the stuntmen.
taken individually they weren’t too bad, but as a gang they were
unpleasant. They occupied a position somewhere between us
lowly extras and the exalted actors. Arrogant, convinced of their
importance, they strutted their stuff (as befits men on twenty
pounds a day). They thought themselves really something. They
used a knowledgeable, excluding filmic slang. But the village girls
(who hung around the filming whenever they could) stayed
away from them. ‘Too much swank,’ said young Miss Dangar, my
hostesses’beautiful niece, who had been Miss North Cornwall the
year before and had the photos to prove it.

   One of these posturing apes addressed me as ‘Hey, you, lad,’
which didn’t please me. He offered me a bit of string to tie up
my whistle (I’d been whistling.) I was quite cowed by these men.
Several of them were massive, and all of them were tough. But I
took them on when they started tormenting the gulls. These ever
hungry birds had wonderful reflexes. If you stood on the rocks and
threw food they’d come swooping past and catch it in mid‑flight.
It was the stuntmen’s amusing fancy to tie lots of small morsels
at intervals along a piece of string, so that when a gull caught and
swallowed a little bit of bacon or whatever, it would now fly on,
trailing a long string of bait rather like the tall on a child’s kite. Other
gulls would follow grabbing the food and the lads rolled over on the
grass. helpless with laughter. I challenged them. They ganged up on
me and i got the worst of the argument. All the same they stopped
doing it. I’d spoilt the pleasure, and there were others around who
hadn’t liked to say anything but who now tut‑tutted. Perhaps some
of them were glad to be allowed to stop this obscene diversion.

    I could have stayed in Tintagel for ever. The weather was so lovely.I became something of a favourite with the head make‑up lady. ‘Nothing happened’ as the euphemism has it. But in reality plenty happened. I went boozing with her and partying and she gave
me a glimpse of yet another way of being. She was hedonistic,
rather well off, jolly, bawdy and I suppose irresponsible. Off duty
that was. She did her job very well. She was fun to be with, totally
without abstract ideas but no fool. I’d never met anybody like her.
She had metallic blonde hair, and she covered her fifty year old
complexion with layers of pancake which tended, Cinderella‑like,
to crumble round about midnight. If I could remember the story
of her lost knickers and the hotel mattress I’d tell it. Something
rather Shakespearean happened (think Mistress Quickly rather than
Desdemona) but quite what I really don’t remember. It was very
funny but I guess you had to be there. The knickers were French.
  
   She’d improved the spelling of her name with the addition of
a Y. ‘It’s more classy,’ she said and then unreeled a maudlin regret
that when she’d chosen her professional name she hadn’t gone for
just one. ‘You know. Like the French actresses. Arletty and so on.
Jayne, perhaps. Or Trudi. Or Celeste. Makeup by Celeste. Look
much better on the credits. Much classier. Although the one I chose’
(she had adapted the name of one of England’s queens) ‘goes pretty
well.’
  
   I suppose I was almost a toyboy. Almost but not quite. Anyway
I count her among my mentors, and Miss Dangar (whose
interpretation of life, come to think of it, was no odder than
Hollywood’s), I include her, too.

   I’d almost forgotten I was a university student. When I went back
to Exeter it seemed incredibly dull. My time there seemed a total
waste. Whatever life was about, it wasn’t this. I decamped and
returned to London, as always.