Channelled

“A two-kingfisher day, with sparrowhawks thrown in
and we were bickering at Kingswood Junction.
Water won’t be told, she said, you never learn.
We settled to the first of nineteen locks.”

These are the opening lines of Jo Bell’s vivid poem to begin her collection Navigation, and one of the reasons The Canal Trust and The Poetry Society invited Jo to become Canal Laureate of the UK, a post she so merits, and uses to great effect to celebrate the romance and not-infrequent stubbornness of the motorways of their day, the tremendous canal network of our country.

Canals came into being in the mid-18th. century because the Industrial Revolution (which began in Britain during the mid-18th century) demanded an economic and reliable way to transport goods and commodities in large quantities. In 2015 we tend to regard the purpose of canals as being for leisure, and I have fished on the Lancaster Canal close to Garstang as well as been boating on a canal holiday. As Jo Bell’s companion comments in the poem, “water won’t be told” is the first lesson learned, but the manufacturers of industrial revolution goods were bright enough quickly enough to recognise that water would float barges full of their produce not fast in today’s terms, but certainly far faster than the horse-and-cart snail’s pace on muddy and frequently impassable “roads” which were little more than farm tracks.

From records surviving from the time, there took place 29 river navigation improvements during the 16th and 17th centuries, beginning inevitably with the Thames locks and the River Wey Navigation.

The biggest growth was in the so-called "narrow" canals which extended water transport to the emerging industrial areas of the Staffordshire potteries and Birmingham as well as a network of canals joining Yorkshire and Lancashire and extending to London. We rarely hear the word “navvy” today, but our canal system, just as our 20th. century motorway system, owes so much to the armies of Irish navvies who sent home their earnings to the families they had left behind. The Birmingham where I worked in computing in the late 1960s owes its criss-cross of fast urban motorways to the navvies I used to serve pint after pint to at the Crown and Cushion near Aston Villa’s ground. It was their watering hole after another day’s slog creating the roads, and the wages I was able to earn helped pay for my first car.

Given the variety of wildlife which has made our canal network their home, it is little wonder so many enthusiasts are drawn to the water, and fishing in a canal or slow-sailing along one is as much to do with observing Nature in what was a man-made environment. For us today, canals are a great stress relievers. Do try them.

(c) C J Heyworth (Christo James)
November 2015

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Stripes

This day's topic, STRIPES, takes me to my earliest scanning and reading of comics, and the military characters featured there.

STRIPES always signified AUTHORITY, and even the lowliest member of a Force who carried stripes on his sleeve (always men "back then") was mocked and rather mistrusted and disliked by "ordinary" soldiers, sailors and airmen.

As my father had risen to the rank of Warrant Officer First Class in the RAF, and would have worn insignia, though I never saw him in uniform, I did not go along with the common certainty that anyone with stripes must be a bastard - I preferred to believe that "earning your stripes" is necessary to gain respect in any walk of life.

So, I should like to consider what it means to "earn one's stripes" in poetry.

I guess that for most of us, being encouraged to "read aloud" in infant and junior school may well be our first encounter with poems, and rhyming and regular rhythm are probably typical characteristics.  A large number of pupils hate this as they fear being mocked for mispronunciations or stumbles, and never progress to featuring at Spoken Word activities where memorising by heart is often required.
To me this progression enabled me to gain great enjoyment from acting in plays and performing in Public Speaking Contests.

It is not usually until we join a workforce that ease in self-presentation becomes valued and used daily.  And this is especially so if one writes poetry and is expected to "perform" it at, for instance, Open Mic. events.

The best form of practice is "doing it", and finding a sympathetic audience in your locality has always been the best form of learning - initially it is more about learning to overcome your own trepidation, and that can be overcome through practice to your long-suffering partner or even the cat, than about earning prolonged applause.  

Practise the rhythm of your delivery.  

Where should an emphasis be made?  

When does the flow require a pause?  

Make your audience respond to you by making eye-contact.

All of this normally follows having probably several of your poems published preferably in different poetry magazines to prove to yourself that your work can appeal to quite different editorial tastes.

Publication helps you to "earn your stripes", but an audience "in the flesh" applauding your work seems to be regarded as much more of an accolade in 2015.

Numerous online outlets are also available to you - Seek; Find; Contribute.

Best of Good Fortune in all your poetic endeavours.

Christo 

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Calling A Halt

I've loved travelling by train since I was a baby, and had family living either side of the River Ribble. Our family - Mum. Dad and me in Layton from 1948. Mum's younger sister, Connie, her husband, Frank, and Nan, my maternal grandmother, near North Station. The other three Panther sisters, Marion, Madge and Phyllis and their families, lived in Southport. So until Dr. Beeching wielded his axe in the early 1960s, there was frequent to-ing and fro-ing, and I learned to love trains.
 

 

Also school soon provided "train poems" for me to enjoy, not least Auden's Night Mail with its wonderful imitation of in metre of the train chugging along the tracks -

"This is the Night Mail

crossing the border,

bringing the letter

and the postal order..." 

That love affair with rail in verse continued through childhood and teens as rail travel and stations began to acquire a romantic significance via films such as Brief Encounter, and the mystery of why some trains were beset by unscheduled halts as in Adlestrop, which seemed nothing much of a poem when I first encountered it at, say, fourteen or fifteen, but has stuck with me for more than fifty years:

 

Adlestrop

by Edward Thomas

 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas 1878–1917
Source: Poems (1917)

Through researching Thomas and the poem I have come to have a much enhanced understanding of the Victorian and Edwardian eras of my grandparents, and WWI and the 1920s during which my parents were growing to adulthood.

The unscheduled halt has provided poetic inspiration for other poets whose work I admire too such as Dannie Abse:

Not Adlestrop

by Dannie Abse

 

Not Adlestrop, no - besides, the name
hardly matters. Nor did I languish in June heat.
Simply, I stood, too early, on the empty platform,
and the wrong train came in slowly, surprised, stopped.
Directly facing me, from a window,
a very, very pretty girl leaned out.

When I, all instinct,
stared at her, she, all instinct, inclined her head away
as if she'd divined the much married life in me,
or as if she might spot, up platform,
some unlikely familiar.

For my part, under the clock, I continued
my scrutiny with unmitigated pleasure.
And she knew it, she certainly knew it, and would
not glance at me in the silence of not Adlestrop.

Only when the train heaved noisily, only
when it jolted, when it slid away, only then,
daring and secure, she smiled back at my smile,
and I, daring and secure, waved back at her waving.
And so it was, all the way down the hurrying platform
as the train gathered atrocious speed
towards Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire.

Dannie Abse
from Collected Poems, 1948-1976, Hutchinson, London 1977

Even later comes this collection by a current favourite poet, Carole Bromley, a fellow-member with me and over 500 of us on Jo Bell's terrific 2014 Project 52 which recently received a Sabtage Award - the title poem is called Unscheduled Halt and recall vividly a train journey through France which unaccountably stops at Lille.

The chapbook costs very little, perhaps £5.00, from Inpress and is a Smith Doorstep publication which I'd urge you to buy.

But the Calling A Halt which has been most imprtant to my life recently has nothing to do with trains - the HALT was my deciding to quit smoking eight years ago in April 2007.  I have smoked cigarettes from the age of fourteen, and wasted a small fortune on my nicotine addiction, but the Calling A Halt, aided by patches prescribed by one of our GPs until the constant yearning has subsided, is one of the best decisions I have ever taken.  I still quite often dream that I am smoking, but that does my constitution no harm.

Hope you have enjoyed this meander.  It is fun being Guest Blogger from time to time.

 

Christo Heyworth

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Unfinished Business

In conversation at Manchester's Cornerhouse on Monday the 16th March with Julie Gardner, another member of 52, the best poetry-writing group I have every belonged to, we were discussing earlier life choices, and wondering about our own "path(s) not taken" in the dilemma so memorably captured by Robert Frost. 

I suspect that in our young lives what occupies so much of our time is consideration of the present and the future, whilst having lived full and very active lives, it is little wonder that we reminisce and wonder. 

In my case, the Cornerhouse itself brought back struggling through the grief of the late 1980s following our daughter, Rebecca's untimely death in October 1985.  I'd used Cornerhouse as a haven and base following my resignation from teaching in FE, and a pretty fruitless search for an alternative career in Charity Management or "in the media" with London and Manchester as the most likely locations for future work. 

But we were discussing much earlier choices.  Why did I choose Reading Uni when I was fortunate to be offered places at Reading, Nottingham and Leicester?  Why did school not persuade me to try for Oxbridge, as nowadays I love the cities of Oxford and Cambridge so much?  Why do my PGCE in Liverpool after not liking systems analysis in industry for the three years after graduating? 

A sense of what might have been, and Unfinished Business permeates all of these, and I believe can be traced back to my birth in the circus that is the working-class holiday resort of Blackpool - I really had no need to run away to join the circus as I was born into its DNA: entertainment, and was encouraged by an uncle who was a Tower Company musician. 

From being a tot, I became familiar with the baroque elegance of the Tower Ballroom, and the rather more subdued Edwardian glamour of the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens.  Did I waltz into Strictly-style ballroom dancing? NO, but the theatres and entertainment palaces of post-WWII and 1950s' Blackpool seeped into my veins to embroider an extended family tradition - my Southport cousin and his wife became stalwarts of The Little Theatre in their home resort. 

Meanwhile I acted in and later directed stage productions from boyhood in junior school through secondary and higher education, but the key "path not taken" was on graduation when instead of the post of ASM (general dogsbody trainee Assistant Stage Manager to "learn the ropes" quite literally) at The Theatre Royal, York, I opted to become a systems analyst with Pressed Steel Fisher, a subsidiary of car-makers British Leyland at their works at Castle Bromwich in the late 1960s.  What might have been, had I worked at a provincial repertory theatre and moved on to other playhouses in other cities and towns? 

The theatre-bug was partly assuaged when I quit industry and retrained for teaching English and Drama, and produced enjoyable performances at the Palatine Road Main Hall of Blackpool and the Fylde College of F&HE (now an exhibitions' space) of Billy Liar, and again of the same play, but with a fresh cast, at the "new" Tech site at Bispham.  The Unfinished Business nowadays is to complete and stage a play of my own, probably at The Edinburgh Festival. 

There is inevitably a lot more but, for a contribution to the LDGPS continuing blog, that will suffice for the moment - all I'd suggest is that if you have a burning ambition to pursue any activity, do turn it into a way to earn your living.  There can be no other way to spend our time than by getting paid for doing something "in your blood". 

By being a successful actor, Angelina is now able to do what she REALLY wants to do!

 

 

C J Heyworth 17/03/2015

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Treasure

In childhood the first seeds of taste are planted, and it seemed to me as a boy that Treasure meant possessions, material wealth, mainly as a result of Treasure Island being read to me by my father. The idea of treasure being holdable in a buried chest found only with the right map stuck with me until my father died in July 1953 during the night of an unexpected fatal heart attack. Then I began to realise that TREASURE we value most is not a jewelled fate, but much more about the people we love. It was not until I went on in my late teens to study David Hume and other philosophers as part of my university undergraduate course that I found this realization described so well by David Hume facing the inevitability of death considered in similar circumstances. This week I discovered that Oliver Sachs (in his recent article for The New York Times) finds Hume equally helpful:

He writes about decisions he has made since a diagnosis of untreatable liver cancer - "I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favourite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ILL at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.” 'I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,' he wrote. 'I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.' "

I do not believe I have ever properly "got over" the shock of the death of my treasured father all those years ago, and I hope all of the "best bits" of him live on in me - our children are our major gift (or curse) to posterity, and bringing up our son (my stepson) is certainly what I count my own major achievement. I wish that our daughter, Rebecca, had lived more than her mere four years, as Rebecca was certainly our second treasure after Damian.

To complete my homily, real treasure in life I feel is NEVER to suffer "a moment's abatement of (one's) spirits", though the four or five years after Rebecca's death in 1985 were very hard to bear, and not everyone is fortunate to accept from childhood that life always appears too brief when we lose those we love.

My father rose to be a Warrant Officer First Class in the RAF of the 1930s and 1940s and I try to live by his motto - Onward and Upward. What I treasure most is the life that he and my mother gave me.

CJH February 2015

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Material

Material is so useful a word as it can cover so many different manifestations.

When I began to notice in infancy the many activities of my mother especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I often heard Mum and her four sisters mention "material" in conversation.

I suspect it is far from usual now in 2014, but in the immediate post-WWII period virtually everything was "on ration" and each member of each household was issued with the ever-so-valuable Ration Book, and making clothes for the family was part and parcel of not only a housewife's skill, but extended to Dad too as he had learnt to sew and mend from his first joining the RAF in the early 1930s.  But material was hard to come by in the exact colours and quantities required.

Material was in short supply as the excuse "gone for the war effort" became an expression in everyday speech in the years before I was born in 1946.  In a time of shortages, neighbourhoods did seem to be much more "neighbourly" in the sense of helping each other out particularly for special occasions such as children's birthdays, making school clothing, Christening outfits, new clothes for Whit Walks, wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses, Rose Queen and Gala Queen "uniforms", and sewing badges on to uniforms for voluntary organisations (Cubs, Brownies, Scouts, Guides, GFS).

It was slightly puzzling too arriving at age five in school when Miss Fleetwood would urge us to "collect up all the materials" which had to be put away in boxes and cupboards for the following day, and I made friends with Peter whose Dad was a builder and I heard Mr Jones say he would have to go to the suppliers for some more "building materials".

Sunday School was no help either as we were told not to yearn for "material things", but to seek "spiritual wealth" when what I longed for was the model aircraft carrier in the toy shop wingow, an electric train set, balsa wood aircraft kits and The Eagle Comic delivered to our door each week.

But I grew up never short of the more important things of home - loving parents and extended family, carpets, furniture and beds for our use, clothes on our backs and shoes on our feet and plenty to eat and drink though I never had a great appetite until much later, and "doing without" was good training for living a modest life in terms of possessions.

By the early 1950s, the general public in Britain seemed fed up of austerity, rationing and "making do" and lots of people fled to Australia, New Zealand and Canada mainly, I suspect, because they would still be able to speak English there (quite why Brits are so hopeless at learning new languages I have never really grasped), but most of all because they believed that a higher standard of living, a certainty that life would be materially better, would be available far more quickly away from broke, grey Britain.

It was quite a while later that Madonna could warble "Material Girl" and have people smile because they understand what has developed into an I WANT... society.

Our son and daughter-in-law will move to a fresh house this coming Friday and are astonished and rather flummoxed at the simple amount of "stuff" that they have accumulated in their four and a bit years of marriage.  Perhaps the same strikes you when you embark upon a "de-clutter".

Having the wherewithal to buy what you believe you need is a pleasure, but your material possessions are of little importance compared with good health, genuine companionship and friendship, an active mind, and, as Larkin almost said "What will remain of us is love".

Christo

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