Fairburn & Byron

A FAREWELL

What is there left to be said?
There is nothing we can say,
nothing at all to be done
to undo the time of day;
no words to make the sun
roll east, or raise the dead.

I loved you as I love life:
the hand I stretched out to you
returning like Noah’s dove
brought a new earth to view,
till I was quick with love;
but Time sharpens his knife.

Time smiles and whets his knife,
and something has got to come out
quickly, and be buried deep,
nor spoken or thought about
or remembered even in sleep.
You must live, get on with your life.

A R D Fairburn

SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A-ROVING

So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

Lord George Gordon Byron

Word quickly got round that Inspector McQueen liked poetry. So I saw a lot of poetry lessons. Once a teacher read Byron's "So We Will Go More A’roving" and then Fairburn's "Farewell." It was a comparison I had made myself. It plucked a chord of nostalgia. Indeed I had talked about it at an in-service course. Clever teacher! I settled back prepared to watch an interesting lesson. Instead he said, "both poets use the same theme, but let's look for hidden meanings." The heave of the two poets turning in their graves was discernible. He found hidden meanings in those two simple poems I never dreamt could exist. They were not The Waste Land and it was irritating, watching the passion for poetry being stifled in this way.

When the kids left the room he said, "There. I know you like poetry. Went well didn't it?" After a noncommittal sound I commented something to the effect, why didn't he look at the obvious comparison between the end of two love affairs and different poetical responses. "A bright class, they see that straight away. It's the profundities I'm interested in."

I cursed T.S.Eliot as a role model all the way back to the principal's office. When it came to the grading I said "I can't support an increase, he's not as good as he thinks he is".The principal, doodling on his pad, rapidly looked up and said, "you blokes amaze me, if anyone could pull the wool over your eyes it would have been him. A con-artist from way back."

It was not all bad news. Poetry well taught was amongst the best lessons observed. Nearly always Baxter and Tuwhare engaged attention and discussion. Another impression I gained was how popular Wilfred Owen's poems were. Rachel McAlpine’s contemporary research confirmed my observation. They were safe poems to present in front of an inspector, soldiers frantically scrabbling for their gas masks, the disabled remembering the trenches, that unanswerable question at the end of Futility, "what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ to break earth's sleep at all"; certainly so in the post Vietnam War era. The kids responded well to them.

I wonder how many of the seeds of New Zealand's late 1980s anti-nuclear policy were laid down by English teachers in the previous decade. It was not just Owen. Many lessons were observed about the horrors of the First World War based upon the writings of people like Graves and Sassoon. If my generation had the imperial writers, Newbolt, Brooke, Buchan and Kipling, this one had the trench writers. The heroes of my youth, Alan Quartermain, Lord Jim, Sydney Carlton personified issues of sacrifice, duty and service. These students were learning an anti-authority message.

Likewise in History and Social Studies I saw many lessons on apartheid and South Africa. Cry the Beloved Country was one of the most popular set English texts. Again, I observed the 81 Springbok tour protests in the making. But I saw very few lessons on race relations in New Zealand. Teachers used a safe distancing in their content selection.

Cooking

Anne – a good cook - had been looking at apple tarts in famous French chef and restaurateur Joel Robuchon’s book. I picked it up and have been flicking through. It’s full of mouth-watering recipes. I had used and adapted several of them. A favourite was roast lamb with a red pepper, garlic, olive oil and breadcrumb crust. I’ve had guests drooling over that one.

One of my regrets is that I’d hoped to develop my culinary skills in my retirement years. For over a year now I’ve not trusted my strength enough to put a casserole in to the oven, let alone get it out. Last time I made pancakes I ran out of steam stirring the mixture and had to ask Anne to cook them.

I came late to this interest. When I finished varsity I’d flatted with two other ex-students. We took it in weekly turns to do the cooking. One of them Bob and I loved our roast meat. So I learnt to roast. But when I got married my first wife and I both accepted customary role models. She did the cooking. I washed the dishes. Except in the weekend, when I often made breakfast - scrambled eggs, cheese toasties, pancakes, sausages.

When I started living with Anne she had a wider range of food and I became interested in dabbling in the kitchen. She introduced me to garlic and olives. That dabbling turned to usage. I began to pickle onions. I chanced a casserole. One wet Saturday I said to her eldest boy what pudding would he like. ‘Lemon meringue pie.’ That was a challenge. I cheated in that I did not make the pastry. I learnt a valuable lesson, make sure the ingredients and implements are available before you begin.

On the Monday back at work a colleague asked what had I done over the weekend. ‘Made a lemon meringue pie’ I said. ‘Can’t Anne cook’ he replied assuming that would be the only reason I would descend to such a menial occupation. After all real men only cook on the barbecue.

When I’ve been at home as a consultant we took a week and week about. For a while Anne was going off to work so I did most of the cooking. Then when I was director of the Teachers Council I was too exhausted at the end of the day to do much so she took over the activity. I’m a meat man. I love my roasts so until recently I’ve cooked most of them since we’ve been together. Pork cooked in milk proved a discovery. Winter casseroles became a specialty, cooked in wine or beer. Steak and kidney made with a dark beer is superb.

Cooking for and eating with friends is a great act of fellowship. I recall one particular meal. We couldn’t go to friend Rae’s 65th birthday party. Our present a few day's later was to cook a meal from the Loire valley recipe book she’d given us after visiting that area. We did buy the entrée, a home-made pate. For the main course I cooked pheasant. Anne did the dessert, an apple tart from the same recipe book.

I hadn’t eaten pheasant since I was a boy when Uncle Charlie gave Mum an occasional one during the shooting season. She plucked and dressed the bird – such impressive plumage. However, I bought a frozen one from the butcher.

I began by stir-frying in a small amount of butter medium-sized chunks of smoked bacon with sliced red cabbage leaves (Savoy would do equally well). At Anne’s suggestion I add a few crushed juniper berries. I worried about the mixture sticking so I added a slosh of white wine but I don’t think I needed to, the cabbage sweated and the bacon’s fat provided a little liquid. When that dish was cooked I set it aside.

I then laid strips of streaky bacon over the bird and cooked it in a large baking dish in a high temperature oven. The book said 220 but I did it at 200; even then the bacon crisped considerably. After half an hour I placed the cabbage and bacon mix around the pheasant returning it to the oven for a further half hour. I was surprised how little fat emerged from the bird even though it was farm reared.

Only after it had been placed back in the oven did I think of looking at Elizabeth David. Her recipe for pheasant is very similar though she said that juniper berries are a must. She also uses white wine. Another idea she put forward was that beef stock and kirsch could replace the white wine. Her suggestion of adding pork sausages to the mixture opened up further possibilities, pheasants being expensive as well as hard to get. Mashed garlic spuds with chopped parsley completed the course.

(A few weeks later Anne did cook pork sausages with cabbage and bacon – it proved a very tasty dish).

The Old Place

Looking back at my teaching days I realise I always had a sprinkling of rural kids in my classes. That meant a poem like this one would have some in the group who would understand the described event.

THE OLD PLACE
So the last day's come at last, the close of my fifteen year-
The end of the hope, an' the struggles, an' messes I've put in here.
All of the shearings over, the final mustering done,-
Eleven hundred an' fifty for the incoming man, near on.
Over five thousand I drove 'em, mob by mob, down the coast;
Eleven-fifty in fifteen year ... it isn't much of a boast.

Oh, it's a bad old place! Blown out o' your bed half the nights,
And in summer the grass burnt shiny an' bare as your hand, on the heights:
The creek dried up by November, and in May a thundering roar
That carries down toll o' your stock to salt 'em whole on the shore.
Clear'd I have, and I've clear'd an' clear'd, yet everywhere, slap in your face,
Briar, tauhinu, an' ruin!-God! it's a brute of a place.
... An' the house got burnt which I built, myself, with all that worry and pride;
Where the Missus was always homesick, and where she took fever, and died.

Yes well! I'm leaving the place. Apples look red on that bough.
I set the slips with my own hand. Well - they're the other man's now.
The breezy bluff: an' the clover that smells so over the land,
Drowning the reek o' the rubbish, that plucks the profit out o' your hand:
That bit o' Bush paddock I fall'd myself, an' watched, each year, come clean
(Don't it look fresh in the tawny? A scrap of Old-Country green):
This air, all healthy with sun an' salt, an' bright with purity:
An' the glossy karakas there, twinkling to the big blue twinkling sea:
Ay, the broad blue sea beyond an' the gem-clear cove below,
Where the boat I'll never handle again, sits rocking to and fro:
There's the last look to it all! an' now for the last upon
This room where Hetty was born, an' my Mary died, an' John ...

Well, I'm leaving the poor old place, and it cuts as keen as a knife;
The place that's broken my heart - the place where I've lived my life.

Blanche Baughan

This is one of my well-loved poems. When I boarded in Akaroa to go to the secondary school there I was fascinated to learn that the old lady slowly pedaling around on a creaky bicycle was Blanche Baughan. To my school mates she seemed a figure of fun but I knew better. Poets were flesh and blood, not just something in a book. On my grandfather’s death I’d inherited his copy of her poems, Shingle Short.

He had at the time for a farmer a large library – Dickens, Sapper, Buchan, Haggard, Left Club books and one poetry book, Blanche Baughan’s Shingle Short. I devoured them all, Oliver Twist side by side with Bulldog Drummond. I'd looked at the Baughan. With few reference points I found the poems hard to understand for at that stage my reading was almost entirely narrative. One long poem about burnt logs scattered all over the new land intrigued me. The rotting remnants of such logs remained on Banks Peninsula - my first connection between New Zealand and the world of books.

We studied The Old Place at the District High School. It struck a chord. I’d seen retiring farmers with tears in their eyes, heart-broken, as they said goodbye to the land they’ve worked for decades. Later, I taught the poem myself. Several times I set an essay topic, ‘what happened to John’. While there were always fantasies – captured by pirates or flying saucers - a considerable number wrote about a father’s grief, a testament to Baughan’s capacity to evoke a feeling.

Indeed, I harbour a secret heresy, that our poetry began not just with Bethell but began to shift from Old Country imitative with Baughan, especially her two longer poems Maui’s Fish and A Bush Selection. But then she wrote about Banks Peninsula my homeland and I can hardly be called impartial. An anthology I was pleased to do I titled The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand 1952-1914. The last poem in it is The Old Place. When the new place has become the old place, settlement has taken effect.

I know roughly the life history of most New Zealand poets but I little about Baughan. Researching the internet I found an story of gothic dimensions. She was aged 10 when her mother murdered her father, insane homicide. Baughan resolved never to marry, which she stuck to, though at a finishing school in Switzerland she fell in love with and ran away with a bear trainer from a travelling circus. Family members quickly intervened to bring her home and to her senses. To run away with a bear-tamer - heroic as well as foolish.

Baughan graduated from university with first class honours in classics. While nursing her sick mother she worked in the London slums and was active in the suffragist movement. In 1900 on her mother’s death she migrated to New Zealand, living on Banks Peninsula. In the brief period before the First World War she wrote her poems and travel essays.

She had inherited from her father a modest private income, but heaven knows why with her abilities she felt impelled to live a virtual recluse. Her poems suggest she saw hope of a better life in the energetic new world. But she stopped writing saying that her “poetic muse” had departed. She devoted the rest of her life to good works, penal reform and an exploration of Indian spirituality.

Things

A youngish friend coming in to our kitchen and looking at the array of implements hanging on the wall said innocently they were such a motley lot, why didn’t we buy a modern uniform set. Anne's response wavered between outrage and amusement. Every piece has its history, part of the narrative of our existence. She and I were both brought up in households shaped by the Great Depression and wartime austerities. We pre-date the throw-away society. In some aspects we have very different temperaments but there are others we share. One is the capacity to cherish things for the memories they carry. We know in time they rust, fade or wear away and will need replacing.

We accept the need for a sense of proportion. Alexander Pope’s lines spring to mind
'When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last;
Or when rich China vessels, fall.n from high
In glitt’ring dust and painted fragments lie'
Pope makes an assumption that women are the people who react foolishly.. But men can equally make unnecessary fuss about insignificant matters. All human beings do. A broken vase no matter how treasured on the scale of human disasters is trivial though I’m aware that a rare piece is irreplaceable.

Nevertheless, neither of us are clean sweep sort of people. Such liking for memorabilia carries the seeds of a problem. Sooner or latter we will have to downsize and get rid of a lot of these things. Most only carry meaning for us.

Chaplin and Garbo

Anne has just brought inside a bunch of sweet-smelling daphne, a harbinger of spring.

There were two disks in the Chaplin City Lights DVD. Last evening I put the second one on, footage of the actual filming, discussions about the film and other Chaplin movies, casting problems, a visit by Winston Churchill to the set, clips from other movies and a bonus – an early Chaplin movie The Champion in which Chaplin won the boxing match.

Chaplin himself said the ending of City Lights was his finest bit of cinema. Other critics agree. The realisation of the girl, her sight restored, that the down-at-heel tramp was her benefactor is a real tear-jerker. As I discovered the previous night.

It was fascinating to see rehearsals. Chaplin was a perfectionist. I had not realised that he wrote the music for the film himself. He decided not to have voices - he saw the tramp as universal and for the character to have a voice and in one particular language would diminish the image.

Earlier in the day I’d been surfing the net. I got into a Mata Hari site. There was a short video clip of Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro in the 1931 movie about the dancer executed on the suspicion of being a German spy.

Garbo asks Novarro why he has a candle burning before the Madonna. He explains his mother asked him to light it and he has never let it go out. She flirts with him. He tells her he loves her. She asks how much. More than God or country. He claims to. She then says its too light. He puts out the lamps. She says it’ still too light, would he put out the candle He refuses. She pouts and says he doesn’t love her. Reluctantly and asking forgiveness for his action he blows out the light. It was powerful theatre, the femme fatale brilliantly acted.

Choice and Trade

I make few claims to be economically literate. Passing Stage I Economics in 1954 does not qualify me to make profound statements. I may regret aspects of globalisation but I feel its unstoppable.

Quite a while ago my mother rang up on the warpath. She’d been shopping and bought a new cardigan. The label said New Zealand wool. But when she got it home and checked she was disgusted to find it was made in China. She was in a good mind to take it back and get it changed for one made in New Zealand. I told her that’s just about impossible now; nearly all the clothes I was wearing were made elsewhere - Vietnam, Germany, Indonesia, China, only the old jersey and underwear were Kiwi. No wonder the country’s going to the dogs she declared.

In some ways I agree. At the end of the 19th century liberal Minister of Labour Pember Reeves was very proud of legislation which insisted that shop-girls be provided with a chair to sit on as part of their working conditions. That’s gone. One of our large supermarket chains was recently taken over by an Australian company. They’re insisting that our pork suppliers drop their prices to the same levels as their Australian counterparts. Otherwise they’ll import their pork from across the Tasman. Part of me says that’s neither sensible nor right. I am told I have more choice now. I wonder; especially for the majority of us. Butcher’s pork is nice but more expansive.

There are basically two foodmarket chains. Like the oil companies whose fuel price seems to rise and fall in lockstep fashion these two companies have little variation. Shopping around takes time, is more difficult for the elderly. Anyway I’ll enjoy Anne’s pork and tamarillo casserole tonight, a recipe I created years ago.

There’s nothing new in these concerns. When the Dutch conquered what is now Indonesia they tried to corner the world market for cloves by concentrating production of five small adjacent islands and cutting down clove trees galore on the other islands. Likewise they tried to create a monopoly for nutmeg by concentrating its production to the Banda Islands.

Things BeingVarious

I’ve been watching a blackbird foraging on the lawn. He keeps finding worms. There must be scores of them in the patch. He’s a colourful character, sheer black except for beady eyes and a lovely shining bill. The six polyanthus that Anne planted over the weekend provide a good foreground for the scene.

I’ve just received in the mail from friend Fiona a copy of Tim Upperton’s poems, A House On Fire. By coincidence the other day when I was reading Tim Jones’ blog I enjoyed reading an interview with Upperton. I look forward to reading the volume.

After a good previous day I had a bad day yesterday. My bowel played up. Utter embarrassment. And frustration. Poor Anne had to tidy up. I felt tottery and fragile. The several things I’d planned to do were not done. The sad part is that it effects my confidence. I wondered about putting this dirty linen on my blog but to be honest it is part and parcel of my present existence.

I’ve been looking at Louis McNeice’s poems. There are two I particularly like. The first is Snow. It is snowing outside but inside in front of the bay window is a huge bunch of roses. Here is the middle stanza.
'World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.'

The other poem is The Sunlight On the Garden. It’s about the inevitability of death. It begins:
'The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;'
And ends.
'But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.'

For much of yesterday I was a couch potato in front of the new TV. I watched the replay of the rugby between South Africa and Australia. Newlands looked spectacular on the larger screen. When our critics were baying for the blood of our coaches I had the heretical thought that probably the Springboks were the best team in the world at present. And so the match proved, the Aussies no better than the All Blacks when outplayed.

During an ad break I flipped channels, Even the trots in Invercargill looked spectacular on the wide screen.

After the news we caught the end of Wild Vet, a cheetah being introduced to Orana Park in Christchurch. Then Antiques Roadshow and then Earth. This time the topic was the atmosphere. Two intriguing pieces of information. One, the prevailing wind carries Sahara dust westwards. Much of it falls into the Atlantic Ocean but a considerable amount is precipitated onto the Amazon rainforest where it supplies nutrients.

Two, when the earth was formed the atmosphere was poisonous to life. After aeons bacteria in the ocean began to release oxygen. At first this combined with the iron atoms in the water to settle into the formations that now are iron ore. As the iron was all used up the oxygen began to increase in the atmosphere and thus the conditions for life were created. Marvellous.