Some pomes wot i rote

I think I’ve probably written creatively from the time I learned to form my letters.
As a young child I spent a lot of time in a world I had created in my head in order to escape the parts of the world I did not like. I guess it was a natural progression to get some of that world down on paper once I was able to and writing stories or “composition” was my favourite (that’s an understatement, it was probably the only thing I enjoyed) at both Infant and Junior School.

The first poem I can remember writing was for a school competition when I was 10. We had to write about Christmas and the winning poems were shown in schools all over the County (Oxfordshire). Anyway, mine was a winner, the only lines I can remember now are:
“The tree we decorate in our house
Came to us from Queen Victoria’s spouse”
(Not literally of course. Lol.)

The next one I remember was written about two years later for and about the girl next door who I adored with the childhood “love” and innocence that was lost soon afterwards (I suspect even earlier for kids today: sad.). Anyway, my Sisters came across this poem in the place where I had hidden it while I plucked up the courage to hand it on, the teasing was more than I could bear so I denied my love (coward) and destroyed the poem.

For various reasons school became a very difficult place for me to be for a couple of years and I truanted more often than I attended. Things might have been different, I passed my eleven-plus but my family could not afford the extra expense that attending the nearest Grammar School would incur. Some, including my Mum, have supposed that more stimulation at the Grammar School might have held my interest but I doubt that, I think my fear of school was part of a more generalised fear of the whole world and a symptom of the childhood depression that the medical profession refused to acknowledge until recently.

So, it was the original Secondary Modern school for me. A place where the girls were taught to be seamstresses, cooks, secretaries or hairdressers while boys learned how to make things from bricks, wood or metal. (I have never forgotten our end of school career interviews. We had to tell the whole class of our ambitions and were laughed at by the teachers if our dreams did not meet one of these “chosen” occupations).

At fourteen I decided I ought to do something about my attendance or I might not get a job when I left at fifteen. My saviours as I battled through the longest year of my life were “Maggsy” and “Stoner”, two companions with a sense of humour as daft as my own, and Mrs Margot Theophilus, my English teacher, an Australian and one of the few graduates among the teaching staff. As I write this, I remember that in each of my two most complete Secondary School years, the first (with Anthony Barham) and the last, I had English teachers who appreciated my work.

In Mrs Theophilus’ case, she admired the content rather than the appearance. Each of the poems I am about to copy here was awarded a “merit” by her and transferred to her special “honour” book but all of them also have a comment, in red ink, lamenting my poor handwriting skills. A typical example on the one in front of me which comes complete with inkblots, smudges and crossings out reads:

“Merit: Could be neater: You were to “rough” copy it at home not in class”. Oh well, I tried.
Anyway, the poems you are about to read are my longest survivors. I must have written them between September 1964 and February 1965, so I was aged 14 years and nine months and 15 years three months. I left school in April 1965 aged 15 years and 5 months. This (unabridged and unedited) is the sort of work Mrs Margot Theophilus was encouraging me to produce at that time.

“Tall Men.”
Tall men in the field
Arms outstretched
Reaching, for nothing

Tied to each other
By thin, thin cable.
Bringing electric
To home, shop and stable.

“Fog”
Down it comes.
Dark and Grey.
But it goes just as quickly
It wafts far away.

“A Name”
What’s a name for?
Why can it be?
Not just to save being called
A, b, or c
Surely.

“A Friend”
A friend is something everyone needs
But not all have.
When we are sad
Our feelings they save.

Are you still with me, good! I think there are signs in the last two of the isolation that was beginning to overwhelm me but perhaps I am being too analytical. If I remember rightly that lot was set as a homework task, we had to choose one but I enjoyed them so much I did that lot myself and then, for a small fee, wrote some more for some of my friends who also got merits lol. I had to be careful though, the school culture was not supportive of male poets and one or two of the more macho male members of staff made it very clear that they had learned of my “talent” and left me in no doubt of what they felt that said about me as a person.

While I have my doubts that the Grammar School (for different reasons) would have felt a more supportive environment, I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been if, during my last year, I had felt able to tell the teaching staff that I would have liked a job in journalism, one of my fantasies back then. I think Mrs Theophilus might have been very pleased. Here is another that made her “honour book”.

“Autumn”
The leaves are scattered on the ground
Red and Golden all around:
As Golden leaves before us lie
Still more are falling (falling) from the sky
A carpet made of Gold-Red leaves
Which flutter to earth on a gentle breeze.

We wander through the leaves and peep
At the squirrels preparing for their long sleep.
They scurry around, to and fro,
Gathering nuts to make their stores grow.
The birds are migrating, going south
With exceptions like Robins, Blackbirds, and Grouse.

The babbling brooks are meandering slow,
Waiting ‘till ice diminishes flow.
The gentle light peeps through the branches
And on to streams where it gently dances.
The days are shorter
The nights more long
The trees now bare
For summer has gone.

I notice in the middle of the squirrel verse she has written, in red ink of course, “their X 20” because I had written “thier”, a mistake I would still make if my computer did not correct me because I internalised the “I before E except after C” rule too well.

This last one is dated Feb. 9th. That’s two weeks after Winston Churchill’s death on Jan 27th 1965. and just over a week since his funeral on Jan 30th.
I remember the latter well because it was a Saturday and I was doing my Saturday job as van boy for a travelling greengrocer. Although I was aware of Churchill’s greatness through my Gran (her bio to follow soon) I was amazed that every adult who answered the door that day was in tears. My interest was maintained because his final resting place at Bladon was in a village only about 30 miles from my own.
I recall at some point writing a much longer poem chronicling his entire life but this one I wrote with my memories from that Saturday still in my mind.

“Sir Winston Churchill - Departed in Spirit Only”
“Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes”
Slowly the coffin sinks from sight
But the memory of this great man,
Of the way he transformed wrong to right
Will never sink, and where ere It’s told
His story will bring thrills for young and memories for old.

A man with a flair for adventure
With nerve of solid steel
Has slipped from this world to the next:
A soul that surly must be blessed.
A man who did his very best has gone
But his memory will linger on.

So there you have it, the last poem I wrote for Margot Theophilus. It’s the one she commented might have been neater and when I see the beginning of a third verse crossed out on the page I have to agree with her, lol.
It must have been soon after writing this poem that I had a bad accident on my bike and, as a result, missed my fourth year exams. There seemed no point continuing at school, and Mum needed the money, so during the Easter holiday I got a job and never returned.
“Teen age” was just beginning in the mid sixties. I, and others like me, were expected to be school kids one day and adults the next. Without health and safety regulations in the workplace, and with the threat of Nuclear War an everyday concern, the world was quite a scary place. My poetry was never so innocent again and when I resumed writing at eighteen it was mostly about the darkness in my mind and a seemingly dark world outside it.
Luv Brian July 2 2007.