Themes discussed include:
the English childhood | two
experiences of childhood | "replaced"?
| the English childhood II | Emile
Zatopec | featureless | the
bald facts | the two stories | style
| capitalism triumphant | two
experiences of childhood II | the 1950s
| mowing the lawn
Elizabeth: Is that Death of a Salesman [play by Arthur Miller]...
?
Cahal: It sounds like it doesn't it? "terrifying crescendo".
Duncan: What was this? The soliloquy at the end is it?
Cahal: It's hard to decide why one had to listen to it under the blankets.
Chris: Well, Lights Out.
Cahal: We're not at school yet.
Elizabeth: It's a play about capitalism, you know, about the capitalist ideal isn't it and you're in a Communist family ...
Cahal: Yeah. But why do you have to read it under the blankets was my question.
Elizabeth: Yes. Also I'm not sure about just calling it Salesman. I don't think we use that abbreviated term for ...
Chris: ... Well it's not current now, this is the point, I mean, is it?
Elizabeth: No. And was it ever? Did we ever say it?
Cahal: It worked for me but I don't know why.
Duncan: It lost me, I must say.
Duncan: But it is interesting that Isonis, the character is in the garden at night anyway isn't he?
Poet (Hugh): Correct, yes.
Cahal: In fact there's an anagram of Loman and long lawn but I think it's better not to mention that isn't it?
Leona: Is it mixing up all the different bits? I mean, this didn't all happen in '53, it's like all jumbled, a sort of jumble of all the stuff that happened in childhood and the earlier stuff that you can remember right up to when you were doing Latin at grammar school.
Cahal: Well there's a break there. That bit seems to be phase 1. And that bit is different again. Is this how to tell one sort of English childhood? And the suburban country houses, chauffeured cars, school blazers, Latin, the different friends that replaced it, this other sort of childhood. So there's from there to there as part 1. The question is, does this tell a story? And then part 2 is something else and quite different given this obsession with Hungary and Eastern Europe "the glorious red shirts of England's defeat". And then to end up with what sounds like a typically English middle class environment. There's something odd being posited there. I mean the real story of the poem is something else. It's that both of those which can be summed up quite easily, the question's only does it work, but the question of the poem is do these two bits work and the relationship between the two as if one had .. replaced the other.
Elizabeth: Are you saying anything that's true about the narrator, by characterising him in this way?
Cahal: But it proves itself by saying, compared to now there's nothing to tell. These are two effective bits of building a life.
Duncan: But you could put that the other way round and say, you know, in a way it's actually kind a feat to be able to tell this story full of all its features and interests and then say at the end of it now mainly it's all this blankness and there's no story here, when, you know, I mean there is a definitely a story. I mean the whole point, it's somebody trying to make a story in a way isn't it?
Cahal: No I think it means that now there's no story.
Elizabeth: You mean now we are here?
Cahal Now the life I live doesn't have those things there ...
Duncan: Oh I don't think it's quite that. You see the English childhood is obviously a clichˇ in that it has a kind of lodestone, obsessive effect.
Elizabeth: Not this one.
Duncan: Ah yes, but no no no, "is this how to tell one sort of English childhood / so sure then of its place that now seems almost quaint and lived by someone else". In other words really the radical socialist childhood, that's the oddity. But not the working class.
Cahal: No, Communist. Radical socialists were a different group of people.
Elizabeth: Whatever.
Duncan: Well I don't know actually because, you know, Willy Gallagher for example, right, in the shipyards of Greenock is a different kind of communism to this kind of communism. And that's the point, this kind of social class is normally associated with X kind of childhood and the anomaly, the problem, is that the childhood doesn't go with the dream so to speak and that's where I think ...
Cahal: Sorry, the childhood doesn't go with what dream?
Duncan: Well basically, you know, the upper middle class childhood is supposed to be full of school blazers, Latin ...
Cahal: But they replaced the first one.
Chris: They replaced it. There were two experiences going on here.
Duncan: I don't know. You see I'm not so sure about the autobiography of 'replace' there.
Cahal: "The different friends that replaced it like some speculator"!
Chris: He's going off to, you know, an independent school or a prep school.
Duncan: It's possible. I don't know.
Cahal: Are you reading a part of the poem somewhere else then?
Duncan: Yes, but there's two things there. If you say ...... replaced, OK, so this was a very very important man, born into the ...
Cahal: But–
Duncan Hang on. Let me finish, right ... Then all of a sudden he becomes rich and it's all replaced by ...
Cahal: Surely–
Duncan: Hang on! Suburban country. I know, that's what I'm saying right. Now what's being replaced here could be being replaced by him moving to somewhere else, perhaps a boarding school, but it's not clear, that particular aspect of it.
Cahal: I think the people who said Kruschev was right and sold the Daily Worker were not necessarily poor.
Duncan: No, I quite agree with that. That's not in dispute.
Cahal: So where does the poor person come in?
Duncan: Because I'm saying the contrast, the anomaly, is that you wouldn't normally – I mean you could write a totally cliched account of working class life in Greenock in which you bet the Daily Worker or the equivalent of the Scottish Daily Worker is being sold and you bet Kruschev was right and everything else, right, but it would be consistent with the childhood. Here what I'm interested in is, it's a poem about literary anomalies too. I mean it is in a sense a literary poem, it's what suits, the very phrase "Socialist Sunday School" is a phrase at war with itself isn't it?
Elizabeth: Well that is true, yeah.
Duncan: And therefore "how we belonged in history" as distinct from say how the rest of the middle class, and it's somebody trying basically to make sense of something that is slightly incongruous, you know, and it's interesting.
Cahal: But I think the interesting bit about it is that if you'd stopped there it would be poem which says, "How do you resolve these two things?", one which assumed that it was a normal English childhood until he discovered it wasn't, and the second one is probably what's more normal and what has swallowed it up what would have been different; but at least they're two clear stories. Their signposts, their icons, their symbols, their associations, their literary associations, whatever, are as plain as day and in fact the first lot are a lot more unusual, but the real story here is that there is no story now because ...
Chris: There's no story here.
Cahal: Here. But the here is preceded by now. Now mainly it's this blankness but there is no story here. There were two stories, two versions, and there's no story here now except what's featureless, unrecorded and unending. Now we have to take that at face value, but the assumption of the poem is that all those things had features, could be written end to end.
Elizabeth: I don't think that's right. I think that what the last bit does is actually kind of querying in fact the whole of the previous stuff. I don't think it's about 'my life now is blank and featureless and just goes on', I think it's kind of, when I now look back these kinds of tags that I have for what my life was, actually the truth was that in a sense it was more like now because it was more like the life you're actually living. It only becomes characteristic in retrospect. So I mean I feel that those four lines are casting light back on the past rather than comparing the present and past.
Chris: I'd tend to agree.
Cahal: Featureless ... ?
Elizabeth: I'm partly prejudiced by something that I've read very recently written by somebody completely different which is about wonderful sections of one's childhood.
Cahal: These clearly haven't been featureless have they?
Elizabeth: Well I don't know. These things are, I mean ...
Cahal: To say those features go away is quite hard.
Elizabeth: Yeah, but as a child you didn't see them.
Cahal: Oh that's different. That's to say that this "now", which appears to be featureless, might turn out in retrospect to be as full of flag posts as that was. Which is commenting on the now, but I don't think that you can use the word 'featureless' to comment on either plan A or plan B for raising the child.
Elizabeth: No. So this phrase "there is no story here", is it too ambiguous?
Duncan: There's no history ...
Elizabeth: Is it not telling us sufficiently what the perspective is?
Cahal: I think "here" means "now". Now mainly it's this blankness. "There is no story here."
Elizabeth: Does everybody think that?
Duncan: I think the key word is 'replaced', still. I mean it could just be I'm airing my problems ...
Elizabeth: I'm merely asking this question before we go back to that.
Duncan: Is the question clear? What's the question?
Elizabeth: "There is no story here." What does that mean?
Duncan: There is no story in the poet's childhood.
Elizabeth: Well that's what I think too, yes, so it's not just me! All right, OK, that's all I want to know.
Duncan: But can we just talk about ...
Chris: You know, I think it's ambiguous isn't it? Well it's soliciting two interpretations ... ?
Duncan: It's linked though isn't it? It's linked to this idea of, you know ... I still think the key word is 'replaced' there because there's three senses in which you could believe it, right, to make sense. OK, we're reading a poem in which somebody's wealthy father, right ...
Elizabeth: Duncan, move on!
Leona: I've got a different ...
Duncan: OK, first of all then, has it been replaced because the poet no longer believes in the ideology in the opening lines. Or has it been replaced because his parents no longer believe in the ideology of the opening lines. Or has it been replaced because the culture itself no longer can accept this. I mean imagine a kind of alternative thing where the Berlin Wall didn't fall and then all if a sudden, you know, everything went black. Was that what replaced it "like some speculator moving in on waste ground"?
Elizabeth: I think it's number two.
Leona: Can I just say that I don't think 'replaced' is talking about the first stanza at all. I think it's talking about Latin. OK, you know, go on, tell me is it mad?
Duncan: Go on, go on. We're not dumbfounded. We're waiting. Yes, it's all right.
Leona: Country houses and the chauffeured cars and trips to shows, the school blazers, the Latin, the different friends that replaced it. It, i.e., Latin, "like some speculator moving on waste ground". So Latin was the, kind of, like, first intellectual bosom friend and maybe some of these other things, you know, but it's it. It could be Latin or it could be, you know, I haven't quite worked out whether it was Latin or if it's that cluster of things that includes Latin.
Duncan: OK. To be brutal, the life led by his friends at the boarding school ...
Leona: No, the life led in the previous ...
Elizabeth: I can't go with that.
Cahal: Well I'll tell you why I can't go with it. Because the 'it' of the sentence before, of which this sentence is a continuation, because it begins with a capital. And, "but is this how to tell one sort of English childhood so sure then of its place" ...
Leona: Yeah.
Cahal: ... so although Latin is close to your other 'it', the last 'it' we had was that one sort of English childhood, and we hadn't finished that sentence because although we stopped with a question mark we said "And the suburban country houses, the different friends that replace it", i.e. the same childhood, "like some speculator moving in on waste ground".
Elizabeth: I agree.
Cahal: That's my kind of little grammatical sort of argument.
Elizabeth: I do agree with that.
Leona: OK.
Elizabeth: But I mean, you know, this is something that the poet will tell us, whether or not that's what he intended.
Leona: Well, he might. He might.
Cahal: But also we'll have to think out whether "different friends" replaced things serially, i.e. different as in diverse, friends, or they were a different set of friends which is how I'm reading it.
Elizabeth: How I'm reading it too, yes.
Cahal: A whole different set of friends from the people who would have understood this empathy with Hungary and Kruschev and so on.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And there's no explanation given, if it is as I think I read it the same as you, that, you know, first of all there was this and then there was this, why this should have happened, and I can see why you're trying to, you know ...
Leona: Yeah. I'm not happy with the reading that everybody else has of it; bits of it, yes but not the overall reading.
Duncan: Could I ask a question? Why can't the English childhood, why can't suburban country houses, chauffeured cars, trips to shows, school blazers, Latin and anything else be consistent with the Daily Worker and Kruschev being right?
Cahal: You seriously want an answer to that question?
Duncan: Yes.
Cahal: Because people by and large who employ chauffeurs and go to musicals and learn Latin and wear school blazers are politically opposed, at least 95.7 percent of them ...
Elizabeth: Well they bloody well ought to be.
Cahal: To the people who are ...
Duncan: Then why do you think they're guilty of some kind of dishonesty ... ?
Leona: Do champagne socialists sell the Daily Worker on the Saturday? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know anything about this.
Duncan: I think it's the only place you can sell it isn't it, Hampstead?
Chris: ...
Elizabeth: Chris, Chris is allowed to say, ask a question. Get on with it otherwise you'll be ...
Chris: You'll be axed by ...
Chris: I meant "this blankness", delete this.
Elizabeth: Ah, good point.
Chris: "Now mainly it's blankness."
Elizabeth: Would you also delete 'here' in the next line?
Chris: Well I'm not suggesting this. I'm saying, so what is the meaning of 'this'?
Elizabeth: It would destroy the ambiguity that I have with that quatrain at the end.
Cahal: Because 'now' predominates.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And it would anchor that last four lines, commenting on the past rather than being the present compared to the past ...
Chris: Yeah, OK, right ...
Elizabeth: Now mainly it's blankness, there is no story except ...
Cahal: There is no story now, you mean.
Elizabeth: There is no story now about the past except ...
Cahal: The only story I've got now would be featureless ...
Duncan: You see I think the argument behind it is ...
Cahal: It's not recorded anyway as far as I've recorded those two.
Elizabeth: I've recorded those two but they're not real ...
Cahal: But they're featured and they're recorded and they're ending because they did end. Those two things both passed away.
Duncan: I know what it is. It's about somebody living two different histories and there's just simply no connection between the two.
Elizabeth: Yeah, but the question is, are they also living a present in the last four lines?
Cahal: Where's the present? Where are we now? I understand. I think everybody agrees there's conflict here.
Duncan: The bomb site and the Socialist Sunday school belong together because it's a vision of history ... parents have experienced a war, you were brought up on a bomb site, Socialism ...
Chris: Well come on, right, we've all agreed that's not ...
Duncan: There's a break ... well that is one history. And irrespective of whether it's the poet's or whether it's the parents' or whether it's anybody else's, there's another history now and that's it. Incidentally who defeated England in '53?
Cahal: Hungary.
Duncan: Hungary, right, of course.
Elizabeth: Oh how extraordinary!
Duncan: I should know that ... this is stupidity, yes, I know.
Cahal: But this is what we were talking about before ...
Elizabeth: Is Zatopec, is that ... not a political ... ?
Poet (Hugh): Zatopec is the greatest long distance runner this planet has ever known. He ran three gold medals in the 1948 Helsinki Olympics. Sorry, '52.
Duncan: Hungary defeated England in '52/53, right. Zatopec was a Hungarian ...
Hugh: No, a Czech.
Duncan: A Czech, right.
Elizabeth: I wasn't actually born, by a long chalk I'm happy to say now.
Cahal: A short, sharp chalk, actually.
Chris: I was born in that year. I was one.
Cahal: But the name was still around.
Elizabeth: Were you really born in 1951?
Chris: '52. It's my 45th birthday.
Duncan: You're a youngster.
Elizabeth: Really?
Chris: November 4th. I'm interested in the last two lines. What's "featureless, unrecorded and unending"?
Elizabeth: It's pretty Larkenian, those two lines if you ask me, and not necessarily the better for it.
Chris: Which two are these now?
Elizabeth: That one and that one
Chris: So the drift is the signposts of our past, they ain't important, it doesn't matter what ...
Elizabeth: Well we haven't decided whether we're talking about the present or these pasts now seen as being.
Chris: OK. Well if that's the case, if we assume just for the moment that this is what's being said, that actually the signposts of our past, our history, are not important, the important things are what is actually featureless. Featureless? can't be described? unrecorded.? There's something to do with feeling here. Unending. What is unending?
Elizabeth: Certainly what if the poem is not like the influence ... ?
Chris: Yeah. And if it is a feeling thing then it contradicts the concept of blankness. Featureless, unrecorded, unending.
Cahal: Just try that again. If in something we've got blankness, we've got absence of story. You're suggesting that it's about feelings ...
Chris: Yeah. I'm suggesting that there is no story here except the story's actually what is featureless. Now what is featureless, it's what we are feeling. He's given us the sign posts, he's given us the information, factual information, as the way that you would describe history from the outside. But the real history is what is your feelings experience. That is what is featureless ...
Duncan: That's the problem though isn't it? Chris That is what is unrecorded, and it is unending because it continues now.
Duncan: But ...
Chris: Just hold it ... The point is that the blankness, you see that, there is a contradiction if my reading's of any sense, between that and blankness. This is not blankness at all. This is actually real.
Elizabeth: Right, it's ... maybe or Yeah. It's unclear. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. It's not blankness.
Leona: It's untoldness which isn't the same thing as blankness.
Chris: Yeah, Because blankness is not ...
Elizabeth: Yes. People look blank and it doesn't mean there's nothing there I suppose ...
Chris I mean it's a feeling tone itself isn't it, blankness? I mean it's a type of ...
Elizabeth: Yeah. But I kind of go with that because it suggests that what we are talking about is the past, not the present ... It's my view of the poem.
Cahal: That there's things that happen that aren't the true story of those times, is something impossible to tell because it's shapeless, and it doesn't have events but has an undercurrent.
Duncan: Sure, OK, if I could just cloud the progress of this clear exposition and say that isn't there a contradiction, a stylistic contradiction, that, you know, basically what the poem is presenting is an anomaly.
Elizabeth: Well there's a whole set of anomalies.
Duncan: Well I don't know, I think there are only two, you know, where you have childhood A and childhood B, I would call it, right, and it looks as if childhood A doesn't belong any more, and childhood B doesn't belong because it wasn't the poet's childhood, and therefore you've got this complete suspension, all right. That's what the poem's about. All this stuff about blankness and no story here, what's featureless, unrecorded etc., I think is totally, that's baggage to me just ballast.
Elizabeth: I absolutely disagree ... That's the thing that determines itcompletely.
Duncan: OK, and also I'd even say the simile of, you know, "that replaced it like some speculator moving in on waste ground", you know, OK, there was, what was it, Cotton and Claw or whoever it was, I mean in a way it's too ...
Elizabeth: Wimpey ...
Duncan: No Wimpey wasn't a crook was he?
Leona: Wimpey Homes
Chris: Charlie Clore.
Duncan: Charlie Clore, that's right. But the point is what this poem shouldn't have is commentary. It should put the bald facts down straight ...
Elizabeth: But the point is it's saying there aren't bald facts.
Chris: The bald facts are actually not interesting.
Elizabeth: The bald facts are beside the point, they're weird, themselves and they're beside the point.
Chris: But there is no story ...
Duncan: But if they are then let them speak for themselves.
Elizabeth: Well they are speaking for themselves. That's what they're doing in the first part.
Duncan: If they're speaking for themselves, let them speak for themselves.
Elizabeth: And then?
Duncan: And then the anomaly becomes obvious. I mean I don't want to be told that it is blankness, I don't want to be told that it is featureless. I want to know that it is by experiencing it. I don't want to be edited ...
Elizabeth: It couldn't get to that point.
Cahal: If somebody had written this bit at the end ...
Elizabeth? You wouldn't be satisfied with this ...
Duncan: I could write a poem and I could, I could even ...
Elizabeth: Yeah, you could, you could, but what's interesting is the thing that says there was this, it was weird, there was this, it was weird, the two things together are completely weird and I am nowhere in that, I'm somewhere else again.
Cahal: Either now or on looking back.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Cahal: Did plan B replace plan A historically, chronologically, or did plan B replace plan A in the telling?
Chris: I think it's chronological.
Cahal: I think it is, but I'm just ...
Duncan: OK, well can I just ...
Cahal: But I think even there I'm not disagreeing with what we've got there. You know, that's my kind of poem, right, that says hey it was like this, or actually or to tell you the truth I could tell you that it was like this, and they'd both be true maybe, and then I stop. But this says something else again and I think we have to pay attention to that rather than simply saying it's a wobbly sort of a coda to the business of story-telling.
Elizabeth: Yeah. It may be that this is not quite strong enough to even take us onto that point, maybe.
Cahal: I think it is ...
Leona: If it's thesis, you know, and antitheses and synthesis it leaves you to think a bit.
Elizabeth: It does leave you to think a bit which is ...
Leona: Which would be the classic thing to do coming out of that background.
Duncan: It's the synthesis I don't want.
Elizabeth: Yes, indeed, it's Hegelian isn't it.
Leona: Yeah, yeah!
Duncan: It could be.
Cahal: Is it saying that because the two stories are actually so different and so arguably authentic and both ways of telling, just that, is it that therefore, having tried both stories, I can't even tell stories any more. I can't even tell stories because the only truth that I know actually does rely on features like this or the recording of a series of icons or flag posts or events or whatever and doesn't have a start and finish anyway like that one maybe does and that one maybe does, that, you know, if it was a real story it's deeper than those kinds of piling up that most of the rest of us pass off as poems up to here, you know?
Elizabeth: Or as our past.
Duncan: Could I just mention some things that are to do with the style, OK, because we've still got a divergence really over the way in which we can handle this type of history. "Was all this odd or normal?" An unusual way to speak. If you said, Was all this odd?, or if you say, Was all this normal?, you're saying exactly same thing as Was all this odd or normal. In other words if you query the normality of something you're bound to be raising the question of its oddity and therefore I think it's just a little bit too rhetorical.
Leona: I would think that what it does is it balances the two, because if you asked Is all this normal? then you're inviting someone to say No it wasn't, it was damn odd. And if you ask if it was odd then you're inviting everyone to say No, it's perfectly normal. But if you put it in this way then you're leaving it in the balance. You're dealing with a genuine question there.
Cahal: You're asking a question about judgements. You're asking a question about why we bother making judgements about what's odd or normal.
Elizabeth: Yeah. I tend to feel it's better like that.
Duncan: Second stylistic point: Can you really have a suburban country house? Now I know about country houses.
Cahal: It costs money, but you can do it.
Elizabeth: Point 3...
Duncan: Doesn't the phrase 'waste ground' presuppose, right, that judgement upon the first, moving in on waste ground, well that simile is again, it's that kind of commentary that I don't want because I don't think the poet really wants to make any judgement about either history. He's more interested in the sheer contradiction of what's going on ...
Poet (Hugh) It's not the poet ... It's the speculators.
[ALL SHUSH POET]
Cahal: No. Let's take another reading of that now. The bomb site and the Socialist Sunday school were associated historically with the mood in the '50's. And this other mood, "like some speculator moving in on waste ground", the bomb site has been replaced by some new kind of life just as the bomb site of Europe has been replaced by something new that we thought we wouldn't see again. We're using very broad metaphors here. The idea of capitalism triumphant in such a short space of time. Of course it was always there, I mean that's sort of a naive, a wilfully naive reading that says this kind of pre-war settled conservative lifestyle – I don't mean for the people concerned although that might be where some of it's starting out, but actually world-wide – this kind of thing rose again. Speculators, Rolls-Royces suddenly were in again when in 1948 everybody – and I always use that 'everybody' carefully because people keep telling me that most people didn't believe that – but people believed there was a new world that was worth fighting for, that there was going to be a better Britain and a welfare state ...
Duncan: And they believed in two different worlds. They believed there was a new Capitalist world or they believed that there was a new Socialist world.
Cahal: Well I'm putting my money on the idea that the majority of people believed that there was a new and better welfarist world, not necessarily communist.
Elizabeth: And there bloody was, when you look back. There was and it went.
Cahal: People weren't surprised, even in the '60s, never mind the '80s and so on, but even in the '60s when people who one would have thought wouldn't have shown their face again after 1948 were suddenly spending money endlessly and driving huge Rolls-Royces and buying yachts and so on and we thought, not that we'd not got away from all that but hopefully those people would have kept a lower profile. So in listing those things in that way it may not just be a description of the world that one can remember or that one found themself in, but a much bigger comment about the shift between 1953 and, say, 1963. I don't know, I mean I'm not going to be too specific, but that world of swindlers and millionaires and ...
Duncan: I agree, I don't entirely buy it, I mean you could say that a socialist, right, or a communist would look at a British bomb site and think that happened because of the war against, you know, the communist war against capitalism, whereas a capitalist could look at the bomb site exactly the same time and that was, you know, Britain and the Empire fighting Germany. And there would be no relationship between both those visions. They're mixed and completely contradictory and no gloss can really explain that contradiction.
Cahal: For me they're end to end, just, I mean maybe it will be nothing to do with the poem, but for me there is a sense historically that a lot of the excesses of the '60s people never thought would happen here ever again and certainly the excesses of the '80's and where we've got back to now which is a condition somewhere about 1920, both in class terms and in social policy terms ...
Duncan: The music isn't so good though is it?
Elizabeth: We're not going to progress this time.
Cahal: No. But, you know, I mean you can believe all sorts of things about cycles and so on, but we've been run by right wing government for years, longer than I can remember, and it looks like going on for another five. The whole process that I was brought up with which was simple things like inoculations and orange juice and ...
Duncan: You be careful. Remember Michael Foot was living next door probably.
Cahal: Yeah. I'm really talking about my take on the poem rather than what was actually happening and I think that these two things look kind of end to end and both stories sit uneasily because after this one this shouldn't have happened again and therefore the speculators and the waste ground are not accidental, nor is the waste ground of a blank story to my mind, although you could argue that if you abandon this then I've got to adopt that version of history, but, you know, it's working at several levels, a personal narrative and a historical narrative and the question of whether either the personal narrative or the historical narrative were true. One of the things that I've found when saying to people that the '50s were different and that the world I lived in was welfarist and communal and all sorts of things, is many English people would say, "Oh it was never like that, everybody here…" (well everybody's always somebody else's everybody, you know) people say to you, "Well we didn't do that ourselves, everybody had somebody in to "do" that for them" or "everybody believed that the Russians were about to take over all through the '50s".
Duncan: Well we were frightened.
Cahal: Well you see, you're one of them, exactly, and that's what I didn't understand until people start saying to me there was a different version of that time. People, you know, spent all their time thinking that the Russians were going to take over, the poor would keep coal in the bath ...
Duncan: Oh no, we were poor and we were frightened of what was happening in Hungary. Scared stiff.
Cahal: Well exactly and what I'm saying is that you could have different versions of a time that are both personal and, you know, macro-economic.
Duncan: Can I just do a final stylistic point. The section of the autobiography about the father mowing the lawn, it is the father mowing the lawn, right ...
Cahal: It's about listening to the radio while the father is mowing the lawn. At midnight.
Duncan: Well whatever it is, the way I think it is is that you're under the blankets ...
Elizabeth: ... I mean plenty of people did it.
Duncan: Oh, yeah, I end up doing it ... you can go on all day long, you've got to get it done. Anyway the point is it doesn't belong there. It belongs in another poem about, you see on the one hand there are the attributes of the father which belong to history, and then there is the personality of the father which I think ...
Elizabeth: Except that mowing the lawn is incredibly typical ritual ...
Cahal: It's not personality.
Duncan: Yes it is, but it's unimportant ritual in another poem, and I think that relates to the final bit at the end there. There are two things here, and one is this wonderfully evoked contradiction which I think, you know, has got a lot of mileage in it, and the other is this more personal aspect, the fact that this is your history. There's a poem you can stand back from embedded into a poem you can't stand back from. Maybe you need to separate them, you know, like a kind of foetus in foetu, you know, there's two things growing here and you need to sort of separate them.
Poet (Hugh): OK.
Elizabeth: I think it's very interesting. It's very interesting because at the ending, if I've read it right, I think it's ...
Poet (Hugh): Well the ending is completely ambiguous.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that's right, and if the ending is close to meaning, What can we possibly know about our own beginnings, then I think it's brilliant. I mean, not brilliant in the sense that nobody's ever done it before or anything like that but in the sense of yes, you know, we don't know. It's all a fiction in a way. But it's not fictional.
Cahal: Some kind of truth.
Chris: A feeling of truth, that's what you want, you want meaning ...
Leona: But everything we tell is fictional somewhere.
Duncan: I don't know. It's interesting isn't it. A librarian's paradox. Do you catalogue poetry under fiction?
Elizabeth: Do you want to say anything Hugh?
Poet (Hugh): No, not particularly.
Elizabeth: Nothing to say.
Poet (Hugh): Nothing to say. It's either in the poem or it isn't.
Duncan: Nothing in the poem. Oh I see. Nothing to tell. Right.
Elizabeth: But Zatopec was a long distance runner.
Poet (Hugh): Emile Zatopec.
Duncan: Was he Hungarian?
Poet (Hugh): No! He was a great Czech long distance runner in the Czech Army who won three gold medals in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
Duncan: But he was still the fruit of socialist development ...
Poet (Hugh): Yes he was, that's right, because he was in the army, he trained with army boots on and he won the 5,000, 10,000 and the marathon in about three days flat and I mean it was quite incredible.
Elizabeth: And then died?
Poet (Hugh): No, no, no. He was obviously a hero, with his wife, Dana, who was a javelin thrower, and I have his autograph.
Leona: You really do? My God.
Poet (Hugh): Oh yeah, actually I bought the book.
Elizabeth: Fabulous.
Poet (Hugh): Zatopec was our hero. I mean then the other people who were our hero were Hungary beating England 6-3 at Wembley where everybody else probably was absolutely devastated. We all went out and bought these red shirts and we wore them, it was just wonderful.
Elizabeth: You weren't beaten up?
Poet (Hugh): No, because everybody in Belsize Park was part of the Communist Party.
Duncan: Yeah, I bet they were.
Elizabeth: God. You've had a rich history actually.
Poet (Hugh): All of this is totally true, and the replacement was absolute and complete and utterly deracinating. That was because I went to a prep school.
Duncan: What was the replacement?
Poet (Hugh): I went to a prep school.
Elizabeth: But the why did your parents send you to a bloody prep school?
Poet (Hugh): Exactly. The contradiction is there. Well because my mother came from middle class Wolverhampton and went to Cambridge and my father was a Stamford Hill Jew who went to St Pauls, never went to university.
Cahal: So he'd already been through part of the system.
Poet (Hugh): Yes, and he reacted against it when he was nineteen and he became a very early member of the Communist Party.
Cahal: But it's not unusual for people who, I mean reacting against it is I suppose a different argument, but the number of people who hated their school then sent their kids to a similar school 'because it made me what I am'.
Poet (Hugh): There were all sorts of other things. I mean the local school was Haverstock and I was terrified ... I mean it was a really tough comprehensive school, one of the early ones. Anyway, all of that. But either it's in the poem or it isn't, But Duncan's got a good point, you know, there are probably several poems jostling here a bit unhappily.
Chris: I think there's a lot of it too which could, you know, it is so rich ...
Duncan: Did your dad mow the lawn at night?
Poet (Hugh): My dad mowed the lawn at midnight four times a week and I thought this was totally normal.
Duncan: So I'm not so weird after all.
Poet (Hugh): No, no, but every so often people would come up say will you stop that bloody row, you know, you shouldn't mow the lawn at midnight, it's odd.
Duncan: It's the best time to do it ...
Poet (Hugh): It's was normal to me because we slept in the front room with the curtains open and the street light coming in and I listened to Death of a Salesmen on my mum's portable radio under the blankets and there's the violin at the end just before Willy commits suicide, and so that in a way is just straight autobiography. Now why it was under the pillow and so on was probably something to do with my psyche. Also I was quite young, you know, and I didn't understand what was going on, but there it was, this quite early recording.
Duncan: What year was Death of a Salesman?
Poet (Hugh): Well Death of a Salesman was in Britain in '47, '48. I probably listened to it in about '55, '56, something like that I think, well I was born in 1948. I don't know. This was thrown off anyway last night just to have a poem to bring.
Leona: Seriously?
Poet (Hugh): No, I wrote this probably in a different form about two months ago and it was crap and so I put it away and I took out some lines and then last night I thought, well I ought to bring something so I went back to it and changed some of it. I rewrote the opening and the business about the replacement, that's what came in.
Duncan: ... Can you really say "it was the argument"?
Poet (Hugh): Well it's very stylised writing.
Duncan: It was the argument over Hungary.… No, you can't say that, no.
Poet (Hugh): No, no, it's the arguments night after night, night after night, and every Friday night on the branch meeting night and so on, and me listening up above and the argument happening down there below, which I can't remember anything of now. So you see, is any of this true, because this is really about how do you tell it. Can you tell it? I mean can you really remember it? Or are you fictionalising it? Are you making it all up? And how important is it anyway?