NIGHTINGALE by Gillian Southgate

 

In Hampstead, Keats lay listening, wondering from where

A song melodious charmed him. He  knew why

His soul cleaved to the singer’s joyous air,

Calling from beeches and a darkling sky.

Mortal, he knew that he was on the brink

Of death, his body thin, his youthful visage white,

That pain might ease with taking of strong drink,

The blushful Hippocrene, more purple than the night.

Out from the dark, scents of the flowers of earth

Set him to ponder on life’s transience, to find the words

To wish for dance and song and sun-burned mirth,

While sobbed the nightingale, most passionate of birds.

 

"Still Further" by Jonty Driver

 Jonty Driver has published this collection of eighty of his poems written over the past twenty years since he retired from teaching. They were selected by our June speaker, Douglas Reid Skinner (see below), who acted as editor and who helped to organise them for publication. A copy of the "flyer" will be attached to the next Winchelsea Literary Society newsletter. If you aren't yet on the mailing list, and would like to see this, which includes a summary of Jonty's life and career and details of how to obtain the book, please e-mail me at lawrenceyoulten@gmail.com 

Here is a review, written by Rosie Irvine, for the Ewhurst Parish Magazine, and reproduced here with her kind permission:

"Jonty Driver is a regular member of the congregation at St James’s. He moved to East Sussex with Ann after he retired from teaching in 2000. He was born in Cape Town in 1939 and was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4, and this led to him being detained in solitary confinement by the security police. He became stateless when the renewal of his passport was refused while he was studying at Oxford.

Eventually he became a British citizen, but he was not allowed back into South Africa until after apartheid had ended, many years later. His last collection of poetry was So Far: Selected Poems 1960-2004, and now we have Still Further: New Poems 2000-2020.

A large part of Jonty’s heart is still in South Africa where he grew up, and like other poets before him, such as Louis MacNeice, he is never wholly at home now in either his country of birth or in his adopted land. As he writes in ‘Sunset & After’,

"I’ve journeyed back from where I don’t belong

to where I also don’t belong."

In this book we travel with him to South Africa and across its vast expanses of veldt, and then suddenly we are back at Orchard Cottage with

"White wisteria

over an old oak door:

snowfall in midsummer."

It seems to me that the poems from South Africa are perhaps more anguished, because of the injustices and brutalities of its history, and because Jonty was forced to leave behind the country and his dear family and friends.

Many of the poems face up to old age and the ever-approaching prospect of death and the questions of faith that this gives rise to, and he says in ‘Rhyming Runes for Magical Dan’,

"About the final letting go

we can’t pretend to know."

They are searingly honest (and not for the faint-hearted!), revealing far more of the inner man than most of us perhaps choose to reveal.

‘Extracts from a Diary’ is a meditation on the poet’s mortality, written in hospital where he knows that

"The obituaries will tell those who read them a few partial truths"

But then we follow him on a slow recovery in ‘Walking Along New Road’, tucked away in this corner of East Sussex where our knowledge of the location is an added bonus for the local reader. And similarly there is a lovely sequence of poems about the Romney Marshes, including ‘Chorus’ which begins,

"Sing we our songs of the Romney marshlands

compost & leaf mould, silt, shingle & sand"

Interspersed through the collection are love poems for Ann, including ‘An Old Man & His Wife’ and ‘Song of the Sparrows’, written during lockdown ‘in the plague year, 2020’ which ends,

"I turn to you, as always, love,

who feeds the birds and knows each name;

we’re both aware what waits for us,

but tend the garden, just the same."

There is a poignant ‘Song for the Grandchildren’ that beautifully captures the fleetingness of childhood with its joyful, spontaneous play. And a poem ‘For My Dead Brother’ after the famous Catullus 101 (‘Atque in perpetuam, frater, ave atque vale’) that ends,

"I face the fact: I too must die

so greet you now: my last goodbye."

And there are many loving tributes in memory of old friends. So this is a collection that is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, but that is ultimately a tribute to the places where Jonty has lived and to all the people with whom he has shared his long and interesting life.

Rosie Irvine

Signed copies of Still Further can be obtained from Jonty. Please send a cheque for £7.50 (p&p inc) plus your postal address to him at Apple Yard Cottage, Mill Lane, Northiam, RYE, TN31 4JU

"In Time" by Douglas Reid Skinner: Literary Society Zoom Meeting 18 June 2021

 The Lit. Soc were pleased to welcome once again a man dubbed the poets’ poet, the well-travelled South African, Douglas Reid Skinner, whose vigorous audience engagement and sonorous recitations on his previous visit are still warmly remembered.  Would Zoom critically diminish that force field of personal magnetism?  The title In Time was to cover a miscellany of themes from his own oeuvre. He set the stage with musings on his collection The House in Pella District published in 1985.  Pella, a small village in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, sits amid a landscape of desolate beauty and is deeply rooted in the past.  The Bushmen, very much yesterday’s men,  still live there along side modern, commercial mining interests who drill ever deeper into the area’s rich geological past in pursuit of minerals and semi-precious stones.  Ostensibly following in  the tracks of 18^th century explorers, Skinner is aware he is stalking himself.  He visits his birthplace, Upington, the fertility of whose farms’ soil benefits from the rich, alluvial silt of the Orange River.  After going to the hospital in which he was born, he recounts in The Visit his return to his now dilapidated and abandoned childhood home.  Approaching it in remorseless heat which melts the tar on the road, he studies the photo held in the palm of his hand;

it shows two people smiling at a child

at play on blankets spread beneath the trees 

the world seems made of found and fallen things.

    This was the first place where he lived.      

Having started on childhood, families and memory, Skinner  continued unpacking the theme of time in the 1980s by studying the ancient geology of the Cape with stone functioning as a book whose pages were the layers of botanical history i.e. deep time.  A complementary objective in this endeavour was the constant search for self, for a new vision emerging from the weighty complexity of the past.  The speaker admitted to conscious imitation of the Leakeys in Kenya and Richard’s transition from safari ranger to palaeontologist.  The poem On Time records how the hiatus created by an hour’s wait for a train presents the opportunity to study the raw, elemental geology of Glencoe during its first winter snowfall, after a short crow’s flight into a fast fading past  from his softer, coastal lunch stop.  The glacial pace of change in the surrounding rock formations contrasts sharply with a hawk striking ,,,,the hawk that suddenly falls down gravity’s steep wall.   Heaven was inspired by an exploration of Western Cape with a friend where they encountered more extraordinary rock formations on a particularly memorable stretch to Cape Point.  It was encouraging to learn of Hieronymus Bosch’s belief that death was not a prerequisite for admission to Heaven and to hear of the heritage left by the area’s Huguenot pioneers, who must have found the wine industry they established at Franschhoek mitigated the austerity of their Calvinism.   

An inveterate globetrotter, 1979 found Douglas in a tribe for whom stoned had an entirely different meaning as he commuted to work in a New York clearing bank via   the Staten Island ferry, but even adrift on a sea of financialised froth his Muse did not desert him as his moving rendition of December, New York Bay neatly illustrated. Heading West, a visit to Point Reyes National Park north of San Francisco, inspired Blue Dragon Flies  which had the poet ruminating on time frames of a completely different scale, of perennial fertility cycles and the budding of the notion that each thing has its own time.  

Even with the filter of Zoom in place, the music of our speaker’s finely measured lines and the X-ray clarity of his gaze still won over the audience while his thought provoking material provided plenty of philosophical biltong to chew over long afterwards.

 William Doherty

 

Loot by Barnaby Phillips

 Many members will remember the talk by Barnaby Phillips to the Literary Society in 2016. He told us the gripping and moving story of a Nigerian soldier in the British Army, sent to fight the Japanese in Burma. He was wounded and saved from capture by the Japanese by some Burmese villagers. Barnaby had managed to find the now elderly ex-soldier in Nigeria, and took a "Thank-you" message from him to Burma (Myanmar) to see if he could find the family who had saved his life. The account of his success was very moving, and was also used in an excellent documentary made by Barnaby, himself an experienced TV journalist working fo Al-Jazeera.

Now Barnaby Phillips has produced another book, "Loot", on the  topical subject of the Benin bronzes taken by the British from an area now part of Nigeria. Along with the Elgin Marbles, these artifacts have been the subject of much discussion about whether they should be returned to their origins. I'm looking forward to reading it. Here's a link that will help you find more about "Loot" CLICK HERE

The Forgotten Spy: Talk to Winchelsea Literary Soc by Dr. Nick Barrat 19 March 2021

 

Winchelsea’s pride of loyal literary lions gathered round their cyber water hole to watch acclaimed genealogist and TV family history celebrity, Dr. Nick Barratt, take the plunge off the top board into his own ancestral  gene pool and emerge after a lung-bursting immersion waving a copy of his recent book, The Forgotten Spy. This tale removed the grit from one family member’s oyster in solving the mystery of Uncle Michael’s Big Day.  Back in the 1930s the 6 year old Michael was assiduously coached by his parents to negotiate North London’s  busy streets and walk to his local Fever Hospital and find out whether his younger brother had succumbed to scarlet fever and was now posted among the deceased in the daily bulletin. Happily he was able to report his sibling’s continued survival to his uncharacteristically distant and distracted parents.  Nick’s plunge into his family history revealed the reason for this parental detachment – they had learnt at that day’s  inquest into the suicide of Mum’s brother, Ernest Holloway Oldham, that he had been a spy. 

Born in 1894 and educated at private schools, courtesy of a legacy from an uncle in Southern Rhodesia,  Oldham finished in mid-table in the Civil Service exams he took on leaving school.  This secured a post at the Board of Trade and after a stint in Education the outbreak of the Great War saw him in the Cipher Department of the Foreign Office.  He enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and was placed on the Reserve List before seeing action in the Staffordshire Regiment after completing officer training.  He was  then seconded to Military Intelligence but was blown up, concussed and nearly buried alive at Saint Quentin during the German Spring Offensive in 1918: all enough to be repatriated to Blighty.  The war’s end had him back at the F.O. and in their delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. Limited foreign language skills scotched a potential diplomatic posting in Rio and after a spell overseeing Whitehall’s King’s Messengers he was back in the shadowy world of security,, intelligence and ciphers.  He was involved in co-ordinating the Government’s activities in the General Strike of 1926 and the following year married an apparently rich widow, 10 years his senior, with 2 sons and a house in Kensington. 

Far from fading into the rosy glow of domestic bliss, Barratt’s tale burst into flame as one Charlie Scott walked into the Soviet Embassy in Paris offering them grazing rights on British Intelligence’s cables by selling them the cipher code book for £50,000.  This triggered a cascade of investigations as the Soviets sought authentication of Scott and the British charged Ernest Oldham with elucidating the matter.  The Russian agent, posing as a Hungarian count Joseph Pereli,. tracked Scott and learnt this was Oldham’s alias.  He even went  to Oldham’s house, met his wife, arranged a lunch assignation at the Ritz and began  an affair with her which culminated in him living with the Oldhams in a ménage à trois.  Life in espionage’s fast lane proved stressful and his increasing reliance on alcohol as a prop necessitated Oldham’s admission to a Suffolk Rehab. Clinic. 

Although later said to have  been behaving increasingly erratically, Barratt opined that Oldham’s presence at the summit meeting where Germany was admitted  to the League of Nations in 1932 and the intelligence that he gave the Soviets helped forge the partnership with Germany that resulted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the 1939 dismemberment of Poland.  In a bizarre final act Oldham was sacked and denied pension rights in November 1932, possibly indicative of realisation dawning in British Intelligence.  His wife, Lucy, left him in early 1933 and the Russians requested a swan song – stealing the cipher code book.  The slapstick abortive attempted theft added Oldham’s colleague Kemp to his pursuers in the role of amateur sleuth and MI5 started to tap his phone.  He still had the use of his red diplomatic passport and managed to elude his British hunters for several months on the Continent before being spotted by chance in Jermyn Street when he returned penniless to London.  Nick Barratt felt that the evidence against Oldham was only circumstantial but the pressure drove him to suicide by placing his head in the gas oven of his kitchen   Lucy also committed suicide some years later and Tereli was recalled to face Stalin’s purges in the 1930s but seems to have survived his years in the Gulag..

Access to both British and Soviet archives allowed Nick to appraise his great-uncle’s espionage career.  The Soviets rated Arno (Oldham’s code name) one of their top assets and his demise a great loss.  The British view is  ambivalent with much being made of his alcoholism and erratic behaviour but little of his ability to consistently give British Intelligence the slip or to explain why he continued to be given tasks and access to the Foreign Office despite his wayward lifestyle.  Maybe he was quite a good spy. The egregious maverick British Intelligence officer, Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame, was also exercised about the Oldham case as he crashed around Whitehall in the 70s and 80s on his own campaigns of destabilisation. 

Our speaker hypothesised that the Soviets suffered buyer’s regret after Oldham and their next batch of recruits, the Cambridge 5, were more ideological fellow travellers.  The 4^th and 5^th men, Blunt and Cairncross, managed to see out their careers as pillars of the British Establishment although we are assured the security services had everything under control by the 1960s.  Hmmmm.

Family history and genealogy are increasingly popular pursuits and the evening concluded with an animated audience engaging Nick in a lively Q and A session. 

William Doherty

 

 

PILGRIMAGE, by Gillian Southgate

 

 

On their Easter pilgrimage through the Balkans

The Muslim Amar declared with shining eyes

That he could see God everywhere. Edwina Currie

Stared wordless at the concentration camp

Where German bullets had strafed the walls

And killed her own good people in the war.

The convert Adrian Chiles found his better angel

Sitting In a roadside apple tree. And Fatima Whitbread,

Shy with humility, told the camera she had never

Known her parents, but lifted her eyes to the hills,

Till the group beheld the spires of Istanbul

Shining through mist in the valley below them.

 

Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul Talk by Bijan Omrani 15 December 2021

 Those Lit. Soc. members who had daringly crossed their personal Zoom Rubicon gathered in virtual conclave to hear Bijan Omrani discuss his recent book on Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. The swots who had done their pre-talk prep and read the book would indubitably have had their appetites for things Classical whetted by the fulsome front cover  testimonial from the nation’s best known scholar in the field, Boris Johnson.  Eton  also lit the spark for our speaker’s opus as, like an embattled gladiator in the arena, he fought to avoid ensnarement in a net of languid ennui from his Lower Sixth Latin class who were signally failing to see the foundation stones of Western European culture in Book V of Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries, finding only “irrelevant linguistic roughage”.   

With barely a pause for an Ecce Homo, Bijan plunged into his hero’s biography. Auspiciously born on the threshold of a new century in 100 BC into an impoverished blue-blooded clan and having had to assume the role of head of household at age 15, Julius Caesar focussed on his ascent of the political pyramid of the Roman Republic.  Within a year he was nominated for the post of Flamen Dialis in the priesthood of Jupiter, drawing the unwelcome attention of Rome’s dominant military figure, Sulla, who pressed him to demit  office and to divorce his wife.  Caesar wisely granted himself a temporary exeat before returning to his cursus honorum and scrambling up the ladder of sequential state offices;   the Roman Bar, quaestor in Spain, Curule Aedile, Pontifex Maximus, Praetor and eventually Governor of Spain.  The acquisition of these offices entailed disbursing large sums in bribes and public entertainments, panem et circenses, which in turn necessitated lavish borrowing of money. Becoming a provincial governor created a situation which could be exploited for personal profit. 

With the groundwork now laid for political power, it was time for the next step – general of an army.  The Roman Republic’s army had given up its citizen-soldier format in favour of a professional outfit  whose troops’ primary loyalty was to the general, like the condottiere bands which ranged across medieval  Italy.  Caesar had a role model in his uncle by marriage, Marius, who had risen from the ranks to lead an army which had defeated the Gauls before he became the leader of the patrician Populares faction in the Senate – antagonists of Sulla’s equally patrician Optimes faction.  In emulation Caesar led his army into Gaul and fell on the Helvetii tribe as they moved in transit across southeast Gaul, killing thousands of them.  These Gallic Wars continued for years  culminating in the successful besieging of Alésia where the leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, surrendered -  to be paraded in Caesar’s army’s triumphal procession into Rome.  After 6 years incarceration he was garotted and his corpse flung in the Tiber in a fitting coda to a particularly bloody campaign. 

In the course of the next century Gaul was incorporated into the empire and the natives were assimilated into a Gallo-Roman culture.  Our speaker demonstrated the residual, archaeological legacy of this with examples like The Arch of Glanum, just south of St. Rémy-de-Provence, site of van Gogh’s creatively productive, voluntary confinement in the local asylum.  The Arch, dating from the reign of Augustus Caesar, has side panels showing Gauls as Roman prisoners but also functions as part of a dam-aqueduct complex representing Roman dominance going hand in hand with life-enriching engineering skills.  The impressive amphitheatres at Arles and Nîmes still offer eloquent testimony to the benefits of urbanisation under the Roman aegis and less than 10 miles from Arles the aqueduct of Barbegal with its 16 integrated water wheels which powered multiple flour mills is a reminder of the sophistication of Rome’s hydraulic engineering.  At Autun the skeletal remains of the Temple of Janus constitute an imposing local landmark.  Individuals could assimilate and flourish in the Gallo-Roman culture.  Ausonius’ mastery of Rhetoric saw him made tutor to the Emperor’s son in the 4^th century AD and build on these contacts to be made a consul. 

Quod erat demonstrandum?  Would Bijan’s Etonian Classics  recidivists now see the light – the Roman Empire as the keystone of France’s cultural flowering?  Was the spirit of the Gauls, like the good of Shakespeare’s Caesar, “oft interred with their bones”?   Marcel Proust, on an unaccustomed foray from his habitually  introspective narrative  pathway, comments approvingly in “Swann’s Way”  on the belief  that the souls of France’s Celtic forebears can return to share his  life, springing forth from centuries long imprisonment in objects and animals.  These recalcitrant ghosts of a stubborn, unyielding France were to emerge in the flamboyant journalism of de Maupassant and Zola in the leading, late 19^th century Parisian daily Le Gaulois, in the guise of the Gauloise cigarettes clamped between the lips of the resolute poilus defending Verdun – extrapolated in the inter-war years as a symbol of an unflinching France profonde  -- and an aromatically smouldering baton passed to the hands of today’s gilets jaunes.  Even hard done by Vercingetorix might draw a quantum of solace in the survival of his emblematic suffix in René Goscinny’s  irrepressible cartoon Gaul, Asterix, who was sometimes interpreted as symbolising the less vertically-challenged Charles de Gaulle, resisting American domination rather than that of Caesar’s Rome. 

And the Lit. Soc. audience was left to conclude that they had enjoyed a talk which like Caesar’s Gaul fell nicely into 3 parts; history, Classical culture and travelogue.   

 William Doherty