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

My first recollection of Lilac Park is the salt of tears. The sight of tear-stained cheeks made others call me a cry baby, which I couldn’t help being so immediately after the severance of my umbilical cord.

     Nonetheless, in a short space of time I was growing new roots. I roller-skated on the bare boards of the gymnasium. Hundreds of metal wheels had rubbed some of these boards into pale velvet; and where the pressure of these wheels had contradicted the grain, there were splinters which when we fell thrust themselves into our flesh. And I used to tear the wings off flies. The flies do not amuse me now; I can no longer understand how Apollo was able to tear Marsyas out of the scabbard of his limbs.

     When a year of roller-skates and flies had gone, the salt of tears became the salt of the sea that flowed through my veins. A psychological revolution set me apart from my playmates. I stopped wishing to offend authority for the sake of offending it; this was a sure road to popularity, and I only used it where games, food and drill were concerned. Liked by very few, I became the receptacle of nearly universal contempt. I had a ferocious temper, and threatened a matron with my penknife. So when, in the Ladies’ Annexe of the Guards’ Club, Uncle John suggested I should learn ju-jitsu, my mother put up a vehement opposition.

     If the tingling of the sea in my veins contained the germs of sensuality, that did not become apparent till later. My imagination was not then haunted by any extraordinary mélange of poetry and gratification, like angels sucking eggs of their sweetness. I had moments of ecstasy when my eyelids failed to droop, and the blood refused to drain out of my hands. There existed simply the birth of my pride, separating me from my fellow human beings — the ‘her’ and its concomitant instincts — if not from the powers that be on high.

     Every Sunday, after church at Lilac Park, I went by myself for a walk through the grounds. I remember those walks best in a hot July. The large, Victorian school building, from which I started, was red brick, and suffered from its profusion of fussy window ledges, bogus chimneys, and ornamental balustrades. A hundred yards to one side of it was a grotesque clock tower which chimed the hours in tunes from which a note was invariably missing. On the other side stood a cedar of Lebanon whose branches were every year weighed down and sometimes broken by the snow.

     I began in the woods, where some boys were building huts, and playing Red Indians. Then I came into the park. Somebody was chasing a butterfly. If caught, it would suffocate in a jar of ammonia, and its frail velvet wings be pinned on to a board. Next I went down to the river. Other boys, hidden in the bracken round the sewers, were eating sweets. I ignored them, and talked to the urchins on the river beach. One of these urchins was sure he had seen my mother as an assistant at a butcher’s shop in Ipswich.

     But the great bell that could be heard throughout the park rang to summon us to luncheon. I climbed up the hill again, and through the copse where I had made mud castles. In the summer these castles had turned to dust. I was never sorry. My creative instincts unsatiated, I planned to build new castles, more ambitious than the old in so far as they were to be surrounded by a moat.

     I washed my hands, and queued up to have them looked at by the matron I had threatened with the penknife. In connection with food, cleanliness at Lilac Park was much appreciated, although I seem to remember our eating a great deal of pork. We Gentiles were regardless of the fact Jehovah had forbidden pork to the Jews.

     I was quite content to eat pork, particularly when in the Latin grace it had been stated how grateful we were to the Lord for His giving us what we had. But I hated the herrings which the East Anglian fishermen caught in the North Sea. Herrings made me stand on my chair and scream. This Sunday there was meat for luncheon which I couldn’t bear to touch, because we had had herrings on Friday. The plates still smelt of them, and infected what would have been wholesome roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

     The matron said she couldn’t care two ‘hoots’ whether I liked the meat or not: I had to eat it. In matters of school discipline the matron’s ‘hoots’ were of some importance. ‘It’s a waste,’ she said. ‘Think of the starving refugees out in Israel.’

     I ate it reluctantly, not because she sucked her teeth, but because Cohen sat next to me. His father bought and sold furniture, so I asked Cohen how he would bid. ‘How do you start,’ I asked, ‘when each man bids a little higher than his neighbour?’

     ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘While you’re both bidding low, you must suddenly bid high. Your opponent will be so taken aback he’ll fall out. Whereas if you’d gone up and up in small stages, his blood would go up too, and you’d have to pass the figure which your opponent thought too high if whatever you’re bidding for is to be yours.’

     I was determined to apply this method to any sale I went to, so as to become a shrewd man of business. It would satisfy that vein of avarice in my temperament which has made me averse to pouring honey and incense on the waves.

     I was in a form called Shell, which on Monday mornings had French lessons with Mr Mutton. While Mr Mutton, with his tales of shrapnel in the Boer War, and his enthusiasm for golf, was the friend of all the boys, Mr Rainbow (who, physically at least, looked like Marcel Proust) was despised by the whole school. I was his only friend. The difference lay in this: Rainbow was the aesthete, Mutton the Philistine.

     Mutton had retired from business, and settled down in his villa at Felixstowe. He had an air of distinction, and of being the connoisseur of worldly affairs. His check tweeds were not too loud, but nearly so. His head was sweet with grease, and not a hair dared to venture out of place. Eau-de-Cologne scented the silk handkerchiefs on which he pretended to blow his nose.

     We were meant to be reading a book called Jours de Gloire, about the bravery of the French Resistance movement in the last war. Men crawled through drain pipes and swam in cesspools. Women hid in cupboards. All manner of things took place, which we could never discover for ourselves because the French of Jours de Gloire was too difficult.

     Mutton translated a little. Term after term he had to teach with the same book to the same form, and the amusement of it began to pall. Nor was this a shrapnel morning. A question about the state of the greens on the golf course provided an admirable red herring. This prompted him to explain his impunctuality; his wife insisted on putting all the clocks in the villa at Felixstowe ten minutes late. So the golfing programme on the television (when few people had one) also started late. And every morning he set off late in his Armstrong Siddeley.

     Here Mutton lit one of his many cigarettes, puffed at it, and told us as a matter of confidence how his spotless Armstrong Siddeleys (they were in the plural) would never start, so that he arrived at school later than even he had intended, and therefore had no time to roll the greens.

     It seemed we should never learn any French from Jours de Gloire. Golf condemned the activities of the Maquis to an oblivion I am sure they didn’t really deserve.

     My mother was anxious I should become a patriot not only in sentiment, but in reality. She wanted me to be an officer in the Brigade of Guards, and so strong was her determination that it fermented in her sub-conscious. The result: our gardener, who loves flowers, had to plant row upon row of scarlet geraniums. Their dressing was so impeccable our lawn resembled the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

     As I never mastered the most elementary foot drill, and was never promoted to rifle exercises (done with a plain slab of wood), my mother became worried. She gave her child the choice: ‘Either your learn to box, or you learn to dance.’

     The only time I boxed had been over a question of honour. Although my opponent was smaller, he was master of the art, so the episode had ended in blood and tears. It had stung my pride to appear yet again in public with stain-smeared cheeks, and I chose dancing.

     The ballroom walls at Lilac Park were Adam green. The curtains were walnut picked out in silver; the furniture, the convoluted pillars of the fireplace, and the dusk blue looking glasses a combination of Spanish Baroque and German Rococo. In such surroundings duly coated in gilt, I pushed the dancing mistress round the floor against the music of the waltz (although in self-defence I should say I soon learnt the steps, as opposed to the rhythm, of the dance which Byron thought so risqué). The fox-trot, however, not being so simple and triangular, was completely beyond me. So were the Scotch reels, in one of which like a mad sailor I clutched at air in an attempt to persuade the audience I was an agile rope climber.

     When, recently, I tried to become a deb’s delight, I was sorry for a certain piece of rudeness of which I had been guilty towards my dancing mistress. My partner had been snatched from me by another young man. I watched them doing the cha-cha-cha (five paces forwards, five paces backwards, and one to the side), and the same foursomes and eightsomes I had tried to learn at Lilac Park. With a skill I envied they glided over the parquetry floor. I hated their happiness.

     And this unhappiness of mine was due to one incident. Infuriated by the dancing mistress at Lilac Park, who had been henpecking me on account of my failure to keep time with her in the waltz, I pressed my nose close to hers, as though to kiss, and said: ‘Your breath smells disgusting.’

     My dancing lessons were stopped; and at her next race meeting my mother backed a horse called ‘Problem Child’. It won.

     My ineptitude for any kind of physical exercise had widened my separation from the common herd. But as a sort of compensation I was allowed to look through the telescope whose copper dome, contrasting nicely with the round red brick tower upon which it seemed to sit like a green breast, was visible from practically every point during my walk round the park. It was the Sister who arranged this, and it was also she who used to comfort me when, during my religious crisis, visions of hell fire prevented me from going to sleep.

     One night in the dormitory I explained to her my difficulty. In 1172 my ancestor, de Traci, had been one of the knights who slew Thomas à Becket on the altar steps. Because he had helped in this dastardly crime, the Pope cursed my family with the curse that the wind should always blow in their faces. This meant that in the days of square rigging the Tracys could never go on a Crusade. Although both square rigging and Crusades had long since been out of fashion, I imagined His Holiness still used to curse me once a year.

     The illusion became a torment. Should I never be able to redeem myself in the eyes of God? The Sister said I could. She taught me a poem in which God, Truth and Beauty were the same thing. The stars we stared at pantheistically confirmed the beauty aspect. She was nagged at (without the penknife) until I was allowed to look through the telescope.

     Through this telescope I saw the pale, paste-coloured craters of the moon, and its icy brittled mountains casting shadows the lens brought into a sharp focus. I looked at the gold ball of Venus, and read how this planet was enveloped in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide which blanketed what lay beneath in the humid heat of a greenhouse. The telescope also revealed the red spot on Jupiter, whose atmosphere, my book said, consisted of methane and ammonia. Methane poisoned Welshmen at the bottom of coal mines, and ammonia was the liquid gas, used on hot July afternoons at Lilac Park, to kill the butterflies incarcerated in their jars.

     This, and more, I learnt from Sir James Jeans. His paradoxes puzzled yet fascinated me. How could the Universe be finite but boundless? Furthermore, Jeans said the Universe was expanding, but I could not understand how it could expand if it had no walls beyond which to do so. He compared the expanding of the Universe to the blowing up of a soap bubble. But the bubble had walls made of soap.

     Again, this Universe might be of finite age, in which case it was created, I imagined by God. But Jeans stated there was no proof that the Universe was not of infinite age, in which case it was never created. That was the beginning of the end of my religious crisis.

     The stumbling of my imagination over these and other questions reached a climax in a letter to Einstein, composed by Uncle John. We felt we had to say we were sorry for using up the time of such a great man. Could we say ‘encroach’, or ‘impinge’? No, these words were too difficult to come from the pen of somebody of my age.

     But I did encroach upon his time. He answered every letter — even the most unimportant — that he received, and I have kept his answer to mine.

     The Sister comforted me in my solitude, and bandaged my pride; Rainbow was my stimulus. His likeness to Marcel was in his big, lustrous black eyes, his pallid skin, and the mere wisp of his moustache. He was thin, complaining that the wind often cut into his fleshless flesh, and extremely poor. Rainbow was so poor he hardly ever smoked a pipe; he sucked it. It was his boast that one ounce of tobacco lasted him for several months. He lit his pipe in the morning, let it go out, and breathed the smell of dead tobacco for the rest of the day.

     When I first wore long trousers, Rainbow congratulated me, saying how proud he himself had been when promoted to the honour. Like any other master he called me by my surname, so I took this opportunity to tell him he didn’t know my Christian name. He said that he did know what it was.

     ‘What is it, then?’ I asked.

     A pause ensued, at the end of which he said: ‘Merlin.’ I was ashamed, as when in the cool of the evening God walked through the Garden of Eden, and called: ‘Eve.’

     Atkins, with his sharp tongue, warned me: ‘I hope you’re on your guard against that man. But I’m sure that a judge of character like yourself will be all right.’

     One Wednesday afternoon, when my dancing lessons had been stopped, I went for a walk with him in a neighbouring park. Rainbow was interested in medicine and psychology. Once he had fallen off a cliff into the Mediterranean, and said how odd it was he should be able to remember so exactly every event which had taken place just before and just after the accident (and yet the accident had been so many years ago). Rainbow could describe the events with an accuracy of detail equal to In Remembrance of Things Past. I was rather impressed, and wondered if he could put his knowledge of psychology to any practical use.

     Suddenly we escried the owner of the park. He was flourishing a stick, and thought we were poachers.

     ‘Mark my words,’ Rainbow said. ‘If we come up to him, and say we’ve lost the way, it’ll be all right. But if we try to run away, he’ll catch us up, and we’ll be in court. An elementary piece of psychology.

     The tactics succeeded admirably. We returned to Rainbow’s room for tea. It was littered with eighty-nine books on psychology, and, as a reminder of his medical days, a giant treatise on the pumping of the human heart. He told me how he wanted to get married, but couldn’t afford to till he had passed his exams and become a doctor. If he failed three times, he was disqualified. Twice, after he failed, he had fallen into rages. His nose had become the vulgar pink of Japanese cherry blossom, his face white like a shroud. His fiancée had understood these rages . . . , then, after his third failure, she had faded out of perspective.

     Rainbow made some tea to which he added condensed milk. The milk was so revolting I wondered if he used it as manure for the cacti on his window sill.

     We were silent for a minute or two, and when I had finished the first cup this silence was unexpectedly broken.

     ‘Hush,’ he said, ‘I believe the Headmaster’s outside. I’m so unpopular with him he’d better not find you in here with me.’

     I was hustled out quickly.

     At the end of the term Rainbow had to leave. His eighty-nine books on psychology were piled in the luggage van, and we travelled to Liverpool Street in the same compartment.

     I said: ‘We shall probably never meet again.’

     He replied that I had stuck an arrow in his heart.

     On reflection, I fancy Rainbow to have been a mere mortal like Cocteau; I was Pallas. It makes little difference if a man be transfixed with an arrow or a spear, he dies just the same.

     The Athenians had chosen a proud goddess to rule over them. In this respect she was like all the other gods, who were so proud they refused to tolerate the same quality in ordinary men.

     Pride, they seemed to say, must needs be stillborn.