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CHAPTER 1

The Lone Sailsman in Exile


The friendless foam follows my boat. Island Mists float and weep. No more is the Kingdom for me,
Only the grate and boom and the wind's bite.
I do not know where I go, whence I come.
The sail shines to the moon, and I must share Salt on eyes and a heavy chest. I talk To no-one. Wet, cold, I head for the ice-floes,
The curse of my father's will seething the foam Behind me as the gull swoops. Empty space Awaits, when the dark cliff looms from my sleep.


Song of Three Thames-Daughters

"Order has been restored,
We have reconstructed our broken land And buried our ruined continuity Under new estates and new towns;
The centre is now repaired,
Some other mouth may be as fair as ours But a crashing blast now brings Barely remembered frowns."

"We can make our land more just,
Sequestrate the estates of Dukes;
Otherwise we have no social purpose But to maintain the status quo.
Washington is the new Rome,
And New Britain, at last alone,
A Hellenistic rally into Europe,
Like an old lady dying In her rich son's home."

"Ours is the vicarious generation;
Neither lost nor tragic, no longer angry,
We live at one remove 20
Like a bedridden old lady,
Watch others discuss our fate,
Read of others' exploits and decisions Or lose ourselves in television heroisms,
Courting a garish world,
Unnourished by its synthetic opiate."

ALL:
  "As good a time as any
  To find our way back to the spring
  Of real consciousness within."


An Inner Home

"The forest which surrounds them is their godhead."
(From a review by Mr Geoffrey Gorer of Wayward Servants, a book on the Mbuti pygmies in the Ituri rain forest, N.E. Congo.)

I have followed the Waltham stream:
Winding through sunny meadows,
Stilled by lilies and reeds It seems a long way from King Harold's rough-hewn bridge And Edward's two arches,
Till under the Abbey's tower On either side of stone Under two modern humped bridges With a sudden tugging of weed The stillness overflows To plunge in a cascade down And froth into gentle channels And trickle underground And I turned away in a panic,
There was weed in my hair and toes.
That child, who, sick from fleeing a baying form,
Lay on the humming Stubbles near the Witches' Copse Like a sacrificial victim near Stonehenge,
And, seeing a six-spot burnet, suddenly felt secure,
Walled round and alone in a forest enclosure;
That child seemed a long way from that adolescent Who, sick at having seen the universe In a string of bubbles blown through a child's wire-ring,
Stood in Loughton Camp among writhing pollards Like nerve tracts rising to a memory rooted in The skulls of Boadicea's unconscious dead,
And, under the dark grey cortex, distinctly heard The silence beneath the distant hum of cars And knew himself under the patter of falling leaves;
And that young man, who, retching at one last sigh,
Stood where he fished as a child with sewn flour-bags And skidded to the island on an icy slide And stared past his reflection in the gravel pit As if seeking an image in an unconscious mind,
Until his darkness split, and in the autumn sun The pond blazed in an unknowable revelation,
He said Yes, and, looking back through the blinding leaves,
He longed to be a statue between the two ponds And gaze for ever on the thrusting of those trees;
Or that poet, who, sick with impending exile,
Having driven round Lippitt's Hill to Tennyson's estate,
Crunched broken glass in the littered Witches' Copse Alone in the centre of a living mandala,
And knew, although before him was approaching stone,
Like a hermit enfolded in a godhead he projects He would always be enfolded in this Forest,
In this unchangeable image of an inner home.

Like the tree-enfolded face a still stream reflects Below humped bridges where waving weed is pressed Before it plunges down and is lost in foam. 50


Orpheus-Philoctetes at High Beach

The leaves turn red, around High Beach Are beechnuts, toadstools; in Turpin's Cave The coal fire glows faces, in the grave Of my love dark phantoms screech.

I twine long hair round a tree nymph's breast,
In a dark glade whisper "Greensleeves!"
And clasp her on these fallen leaves,

Shed tears, a highwayman obsessed.
She sits up with leaves in her hair, the moon Is caught in a forked bare beech tree.
Back at the house my little sleeps peacefully.
Tied to the big clock-tower is a yellow balloon.

I tuck her closer, stroke her hair.
Tomorrow we'll go to Robin Hood Hill Where oyster mushrooms cling to logs, and she will Show me her red-veined leaf from the garden pear.


Orpheus-Prometheus in the Blackweir Region of Hell

We looked in this Blackweir pond at sticklebacks And minnows with green and silver bellies,
At water beetle, skimming dragonflies –
Looked down through the bars, and then picked blackberries.

As a boy I climbed into the round tunnel,
Crouched underground, under this high-barred grate Where the pond overflows in a cascade down,
Heard voices echoing up to this dungeon gate.

Now squatting beneath the bars within my mind,
Watching gnats dance from an awful torture cell,
I look up at blue sky from a dark tunnel.
Will there ever be an opening in the Gates of Hell?


Flow: Moon and Sea

I loved you like the tortoise-shell You loved up on the Downs with me.
The light leaps off your Worthing sea Like shoals of leaping mackerel.

The sea flows like a bent hawthorn.
Now, up the night, the harvest moon Floats and sails like a child's balloon Over this darkly rippled corn.

This glow behind the moon and sea Affects my way of seeing.
What, oh what is happening to my being?
I thrill to a pebble's flow, and a bumble-bee.


Shooting

This weekend my daughter is shooting with Sir John.

I stroll on Staples Hill, where golden leaves and a knighthood Like moss have buried the footprints of Sir John's grandfather Who, a hundred years ago, as lord of the manor,
Fenced in a thousand acres of foresters' firewood.

Here brave Willingale lopped a branch And went to jail.
An Act of Parliament gave these trees back to me,
Sir John's grandfather gave us Lopping Hall, and drew a veil.

My father bought our childhood house from Sir John Who then left this manor for Lincolnshire.
And now my daughter shoots with him,
Retrieves his pheasants; he gives her antique furniture.

Oh, like a beechwood, levelling down!
May Parliament condemn All stealers of all trees on Forest hills And all who flatter them,
And all bringers of revolutionary bills Who would drag this manorial freedom down –
Let us celebrate all virtuous men.

I have a bone to pick with you, Sir John,
But I will let you keep it. In return,
Teach my daughter your leisured wisdom,
Teach her the good things that the landed learn.


From "The Flight"
1. A Green Country

Apples are green under a fluttering flag,
Green are my daughter's eyes, green is her breath.
Green are the children among brambles and ferns,
"Oi-olly-ocky," they yodel, "I see Liz,"
Stealing on tiptoe like scrumping thieves.
And let us run together now, across the road, down the hill to the Forest,
To where the stream trickles from the long arched tunnel,
And, legs astride it, hands on the curved walls, walk bow-legged And stand under the grating overflow, as if in a Hellish dungeon.
I took you there, and found a Victorian penny.
O this Blackweir pool, where I fished up green frogs in flour-bag nets!
We scuffled up through leaves, leaving the water-boatmen and dragonflies,
And at a meeting of green paths plunged right, into beeches,
I held your hand and said, "Look, the banks,"
And we ran on back into blackbirds and sticklebacks and newts,
And there, still under water-lilies, was the pond I had not found for two decades,
The Lost Pond!

  Apples, pears, wasps.
I came from the Essex flats, green fields round beech thickets.
When the daisies were humming with bees, I lay under summer skies. 20
I see a clearing where I kicked a ball, where my father swung his lame leg And scored with a toe-punt. There I picnicked with two boys from the first form.
I ran through the Forest in the summers.
I caught caddice in the ponds, I had a glass aquarium that cracked at the top,
And green slime slopped down the sides. Near a fallen apple tree I grew tall to the trembling of leaves. Upstairs, under green eaves,
I sniffed my death. I said to my brother
"I will live to be a hundred," clicking and reshutting the small black cupboard door Until a voice from downstairs called "Go to sleep."

Brown is the earth of this Clay Country, and hard under frost,
Hard are the fields around Chigwell where we were sent on walks,
Stepping over iced hoof-marks in the frozen mud,
O those glistening stiles and brown dark thorns!
Crisp are the leaves of the heart in winter When the bonfires smoulder no more. Bright is the air,
Remote the golden suns smashed across the icy pool of the sky.
Fingers are numb, cheeks pink, breath misty, clear.

I and my grandfather walked for tobacco in fog,
He fell and blood streamed from his white hair.
He had a stub of a finger he lost in a Canadian saw-mill. 40
Later my father took me for a walk. As we left the gate The siren wailed. We wheeled to a white white flash,
The whole street shook, the windows clattering out.
Five bombs had fallen. Two houses up the road were annihilated And the cricket field had a hole in it. The war I lay in a Morrison shelter and read books, swapped foreign notes,
While in the blue air puffs of smoke ended pilots.
When I moved home, I carried my battleship.

Red bricks and lilacs droop over the wooden shed.
On our rockeries, young hearts have wept and bled.
Ivy, and a garden hose.
A home is a rattling front door,
A broken flowerpot under a scarlet rose.

Green are the clumps of Warren Hill, green and scummy pond,
Green are the Oaklands fields, green round buttercups,
Green are those fields where children squat in camps,
Green is the ride down Nursery Road, purple the thistles,
Green are the Stubbles and the open heath,
Green is Robin Hood Lane, green past Strawberry Hill,
Green and brown are the two gravel-pit ponds,
Green is High Beach, green around Turpin's Cave where beechburrs cling to hair,
Green round Lippitt's Hill and the Owl, green the fields beyond,
Green back through Boadicea's camp, where you climbed the brown mud walls,
Brown are the leaves round the hollow tree we climbed,
Green along Staples Hill, where we shuffled through leaves to the brown stream,
Green past the Wheatsheaf, green up to Baldwin's Hill Where we ran down to Monk Wood, and you were remote from me;
Green holly, green beech leaves, green oaks, and only the trunks and banks are brown.
Green to the Wake Arms, green to the Epping Bell,
Green down Ivy Chimneys, green up Flux's Lane Between the poplars and the farmers' fields Green are the trees round distant Coopersale Hall,
Green are the fields of Abridge and Chigwell,
Green is Roding Valley before hilly Debden,
Green fields, wide open, back into cratered Loughton,
A green country with hosannah-ing pollards, arms raised in jubilation.
And green is that gate, green the lime trees that hide the green porch door,
Green is that house of echoes. O how you despised my cradle! 80
You found the buildings false, the people mean and ugly,
But couldn't you feel the kiss in the swishing wind?

O the medieval churches of rural Essex:
Magdelen Laver, Abbess Roding, Great Canfield With its 1250 fresco of Mary offering her breast;
A flat country of fields of wheat and rape And Elizabethan barns and sleepy hamlets,
3 Lavers, 8 Rodings and 2 Easters.
O Essex, I love your green and drowsy haunts!
All this we have known in the green time, and more.
These are the places I return to now, in my heart-sorrow,
These Essex flats. Here I stood, waiting to meet you,
Here I knew you, in a green glade among beechnuts.
Here the city is a boot among yellow lilies, an iron roof that blocks the sun.
All this I left for the city, with a young man's impatience;
All this I left, seeking to meet a loyal woman.

I have starlings under my sunflowers.
I love the trunks of these pear-trees, whose ant-bands are sticky.
O these images that haunt me, that I fly to, to which I cling!


Cold Men, A Cold Sky

I drove out one fine Saturday to see the winter.
A hundred miles north of London,
The first patches of frost,
The ice in hoofmarks.
Forlorn crows on ploughed fields frozen white,
Pheasants hugging the road.
I saw iron men striding over white hills Linked like mountaineers.
Under their heels, flocks of sparrows Scattered into the hedgerows.
While above, laced with blossom,
The hawthorns wore a grief of snow.
White roofs of farms – all Nature huddled Against cold climbing giants and a foundry sky.

But oh the warmth of the children in the school hall Laughing and singing under the Christmas decorations!


Yew

Marble steps, birds' cries, dripping trees,
A seat on a riverside lawn, looking through Ornamental urns at bare ploughed fields.
Above the splashing weir, hear
  the stillness
    above the cuckoo.

This is the England I would have as home.
Here is perfect peace, away from crisis crowds. With this view Here all summer I could ponder like a willow Or love the earth like that rooted yew.

Rewarded by the Conqueror, D'Abernon Had this. Where is my reward? MY due?
The city speaks of you with tongues like bells But here my heart speaks true.


Knight

I go to find the black Knight in this locked country.
The sundial by the river says
"Sit Patriae Aurea Qua Vis 1940."

The flint church is unlocked. En-
-ter, roll back the chancel carpet – and stiffen:
Hood, hauberk, sword and shield. 1277.

I have wanted to take a rubbing Of a gold standard for our time.
I have not found a better model Than this brass Gawain's reverent mime.

I come out, the sun goes in –
Where is our country's gold?
I will remember the hidden Knight with the steeple hands In this locked, silent cold.


At Battle: A Violent Event, Serene Nature

Primrose and daffodil scent the hill Where Harold faced the Norman thrust.
Primrose and crocus where the blood Of England's flower stained the dust.

Now a great tit see-saws in the thorn,
Sheep graze down to the sparkling lake And all nature, this serene morning,
Sleeps out its remembrance of a violent ache.

I know a battle a mood from here –
May crocus bloom on that terrain.
May the primrose dance across the fields That grow over that scarred plain.


Closed

Here I came for my first honeymoon.
The Castle was like my reason.
I wandered round, it was logical –
It is closed now. Winter season.

Across the road in a sloping house We saw a collection of masks,
Witchdoctor's garb, primitive spears –
Now it is a tea-room. Thermos flasks.

Down by the river we sat on the grass And looked at summer swans.
Now it is a concrete car park For minis and pantechnicons.

Only the Norfolk Arms Hotel Where we spent our wedding night Remains unclosed. Under the arch I peer for brass.
I cannot remember the room in this sunlight.

I am a lover of tradition And store castles in my heart.
O may developers never change This Hotel, this old yellow cart.


Silent Pool

In the woods near Shere Not far from Newlands Corner A spring trickles out from a rooted hill Near pussy willow in the water.

It is limpid clear, the Silent Pool,
All quiet save for piping robins And warbling children's laughter Until, beyond the hazel catkins,

It runs into a clear brook,
And tugging mossy weed,
It pours under the path and down a shoot And cascades into a pond like pigs' feed.

O in my mind there is a spring And a silent pool below,
Before the froth and the roadside scum And the chickweed grate and overflow.


Chased

I stand in Shere church Before the North Wall squint and quatrefoil,
Where Christine Carpenter, anchoress,
Was walled within a hole, like a gargoyle.

I look at ancient petitions.
She broke out and wandered the world,
Was bitten by "the rapacious wolf"
(Satan), anchoress skirts unfurled.

O Christine, you were self-divided.
You wanted to be chaste and chased.
But how unfair that you were judged By married men who never faced

Your vow, who forced you to keep What you freely offered one year,
And then freely took back. Walled in Again, you genuflect despair.


Arundel

Across the river on a hill The Castle hangs above the town,
Isolated. The ruling class Shut out the people, kept it down.

Fantail doves cling to the keep walls Which tower above with battlements.
I cross the drawbridge, mount the steps And peer at meadows, hear past laments.

I amble through the luxurious rooms.
Old Masters – Howards – line the walls,
Including the Earl of Surrey, who Invented blank verse, cared where stress falls.

I pass a shield Surrey was given In Florence. I pass a buffalo's horns.
Then I go to the Fitzalan chapel Across new-mown lawns.

A wooden Christ on a decaying cross,
Gargoyles, marble tombs – bare flagstones.
One tomb has a statue of a dead man With a skull and decaying bones.

And this is the truth. A ruling power Walled round with luxuries must decay.
The people prosper then, but like An old flag, standards go the same way.

I walk between chestnuts to the gate And leave this civilised rampart And have a cream tea in what used To be the Museum of Primitive Art.

Here when African masks lined the wall The self was not curbed or restrained.
In our social life and religion The self should be disciplined, and trained.

I think of Surrey's pentameters,
And the ornate shield in the sumptuous room,
I think of the standards before all freedoms,
The statues on each Fitzalan's tomb,

And I taste the centrist's dilemma:
The bubble round the ruling class Has been burst by huffing from the left,
Yet standards, like a well-blown glass,

May be huffed to bursting too. On the hill The Castle hangs above the town Isolated. The ruling class Shut out the people, who would level standards down.

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Excerpted from "Visions of England"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Nicholas Hagger.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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