November 1973
Dear Isabella,
Thank you for
That card from Israel, where you are;
I am at Preston, in a train,
Travelling south to catch a plane,
And looking out of its window
At broken roofs and glass below,
Parked cars and rubble; clean and bald
New offices of a starker world
Than
-Just as I was writing, “Than”,
The diesel drew in to Wigan,
Whose red Victorian bricks are there,
Spire, factory, and gas-holder;
And, looming in the east, a spine
Of gloomy hills, the long Pennine
Below a dirty pewter sky.
-We’ve pulled in and pulled out of Crewe;
Now squared-off Cheshire fields lie green,
Trees burn from ochre into dun,
Or, stripped, stand like a map of veins
Above flat fields in hedgerow lines;
And a brook, placid as a snake,
Winds flatly by the railway track
With here and there a red-brick farm,
A march of pylons, a Dutch barn;
Already we’re in Staffordshire,
The midlands; London can’t be far.
I love the north, and all England,
But best, perhaps, a vanished land:
The one I had a glimpse of, when
Between the Severn and the Nen
From ’34 to 42
spent those summers long ago
Without a notion that so much—
Things common as a hedge or ditch,
A line of mowers scything hay,
A stook of corn, etcetera,
Or, running late to Cheltenham,
A long white smoke-plume slowly drawn,
The branch-line train from Honeybourne—
Was scarcely to be seen again.
January 1974
This was as far as I had got
One winter day, November 8,
Two months while on the way
From Cumberland to Africa.
For when the London suburbs ran
To meet me, I laid down my pen
(That is, I closed the typewriter),
To watch grimy, and grimier,
Victorian backyard plots flit by,
Then cuttings, until, quietly,
The engine halted at Euston.
Twenty-four hours of London,
The peculiar bit I love and know
(That dingy littoral of Soho
-Now pasture where dinosaur heads
Of power-shovels dip and feed-)
Then, full of grief and Guinness, I
Boarded a plane to Italy:
From whence, from Rome, a jumbo-jet
Carried me southwards through the night
And further from the ego who
Began, but could not continue,
As he approached his other home
And other self, his letter-poem.
What had brought me flying over
To Africa was my mother,
Living in, and older than,
Johannesburg, where I was born;
Eternal, maternal love
Returning me to Orange Grove.
How recreate the glassed-in stoep
Where bed my was, four floors up,
That overlooked a bioscope,
A golf-course, and Voortrekkershoogte
(One of the hills whose thin blue line
Edges the horizon like a stain),
And the green tree-tops which hid
Corrugated iron red
Roofs of Norwood bungalows?
Or, when the sun dropped below,
Slid like a penny in its slot
Under the highveld’s rim, and brought
The white stars out, and the white moon,
And the Lido Cafe’s neon,
Revive those moments of being
In a familiar, alien
Environment, which absence from
Underscores, at each return,
After half a life elsewhere,
That will or nill my roots are there?
Still living there, my mother, born
In Dumfriesshire in ’81
When klipspringers used to haunt
The kopjes of Witwatersrand;
Born when that glass and concrete flower
Of Langlaagte and cheap labour,
Those withered hills of yellow spoil,
The Jameson Raid, and Treason Trial,
The fractured lives, and fractured hearts,
Lay implicit in the quartz.
It’s strange that everything around,
Crumbling suburban mansions, drowned
In their own gardens, under tall
Oaks already memorial
To a way of life half gone,
That all things there I look upon,
Growth or artefact, should be
Younger than her living eye.
A spacious view, and full of clouds,
At evening, from her high windows:
Below, above the summer green,
There’s a blue smoke of blossoming
Jacaranda through the tree tops threading;
Vague curtains of unfallen rain.
I watch her blue and fading eyes
Look inward, reminisce;
Histories not of this land.
She talks to me of Henry Lamb,
A wicked wit, a wicked eye,
A Strachey portrait still half-dry;
Of a tide flooding Solway sand,
Two children running hand in hand—
Their deliverer, unknown.
“My father gave him half-a-crown.”
Like that sea long ago, the dark
Wells up below Magaliesberg,
And washes over veld and trees.
“He never showed affection to us,
And so I never got enough,”
She says, who gave me too much love.
Then back to Henry Lamb again.
And were there not the mornings when
Like a Jo’bourgeois, bright and early,
I’d catch a doubledecker trolley
(City-Stadt), pull up the hill,
Pass the cracked cement of Yeoville,
Look for St John’s low red-brown tower
Remembering those lost and other
Selves that time and change have killed,
The man, the schoolboy, and the child,
Who saw the same yet not the same
Prospects; for and because of whom
These constructs, mediocre, tatty,
Possess, as now I concede, beauty.
Though outside the O.K. Bazaar
The mutilated, as before,
Are squatting, patient, black, and humble,
I miss the Pioneer Hotel,
Ornate and pinchbeck and decayed;
The glassed, voluminous Arcade’s
Overblown and plaintive
Grandiosity of 1890.
Most of the old stuff’s coming down;
You’d not think, in so new a town,
The current fashion to erase
Could so affect the sense of place,
And as in London or Paris,
Effacing more than history,
Erect the outworks of Nowhere
Here, there, and everywhere.
But I best of all remember
A green summery December
Afternoon, when from the shade
Of the old Pretoria Road
We turned off, where a painted sign
As in my boyhood, read: IRENE.
I’d often passed it as a boy,
But that was in the general’s day.
The once I saw the general,
He was driving down the Mall,
Apple cheeks, white dagger beard,
At the Victory Parade.
No great tactician, so they say,
No De Wet, no De La Rey;
Yet his commando took the war
From Stormberg to Concordia;
Smuts for my generation was
Take or leave it, the Ou’Baas.
Along side-roads, no longer tar,
But blood-rust dirt of Africa,
We sought the old dead general’s farm
Hedged and edged with heavy green
Huge eucalypti towering
Over fields where browsed oxen,
Patriarchic, biblical
As Exodus or Samuel;
And found, down in a wooded hollow,
His tin-walled, tin-roofed bungalow
Grateful for bougainvillea and
Grassblades that pricked through the red sand,
Tall trees above, a vlei below.
The whole anachronism so
Irrelevant as to be a dream,
To be the Africa we mean.
Under boulders, on a hill
Above Irene, his bones lie still;
To the north, syncretic, bland
As polythene, highrisers stand
Witness to Pretoria.
And if you look the other way
Over the water-broken highveld
Dome, you see against its rifled
And enormous monotones
The lumpy spoil, and brittle bones
Of a meretricious city.
But to say that is too easy.
Their own history has made
Dumb ox politicians afraid,
Subverters of truth and sense,
Polyhistors of the shade of skins;
And Oppenheimer rings a bell
As Eugene Marais never will.
A consolation is, that here
Culture does not spell Career:
Between indifference and police
The real, the gay and serious
Makers would appear to thrive
Unflattered, unacademised,
Pro tem at least. There was the night
Two days before my homeward flight,
When Barney Simon took me round
To Lionel Abrahams’s, and I found
With him and Nadine Gordimer
A rapport that seems seldomer
To happen, but the kind I’d know
In Fitzrovia, long ago.
And these were friends of two good men,
Of Nat Nakasa, and Bosman,
Dead men I had wished to meet,
Masters of the ironic
Throwaway, the smile that stings
Where indignation wastes in weeping.
Ill-bodied Lionel, if I
Who also am a cripple, may
So apostrophize, I see
In you a human victory:
Not a heroic, but human,
That says, “If he can, then I can.”
I mean not only what you are
But what did with Renoster.
I am not to forget your room
That held so much, shadowed and warm;
Its glass wall, where a dark garden
Looked with the moon and sadness in;
What we said, and did not say.
I sign off: desunt cetera:
And leave Johannesburg behind
And that ill country where no wind
Blows good, though it be blowing change;
Dear Isabella, I must end
This desultory and octo
Syllabic letter to a friend.
What has been said in it is true
But of no moment; in the end
A way to record truth is to
Preserve the unimportant and
Personal, so be it moves:
The what, to find the why one loves.
Leave a Reply