Dada was in the Army at Alamein; also at Rye and Monte Casino. I have his cap at home gathering dust, the dust he went to fourteen years ago.
There’s other stuff in the trunk in the loft, mementoes of more settled times post War: letters, certificates and photographs, sundry notes made on work trips to Tehran.
Memories, he’d say, are lost to common consciousness after two generations. His legacy of strong, patient, wisdom is getting older, harder to recall.
I think of Guernica, Dresden and the Blitz; Nagasaki, Stalingrad and Auschwitz.
For a few moments, maybe some minutes, let’s dreamy drift into the feather crush of London’s clouds of cherry blossom bliss.
The buds, which season-swell with ruby flush, fill as racing pulses fill impatient flesh with rhapsodical urges to burst.
Then Beauty comes in given radiance and resting adoration of the first and lasting shapes and shades of love.
It comes in silence after flowering, where stillness is reflected in the sky, colour pinks the ruffling swirls above, sense enslaves the energies of thinking and, for some moments, we are gratified.
As winter ends, winter starts again. Late March warmth lies with coughs and fever, face-grey shadows darken longer days, and high-sky sun shines on windowless wards. Hospital green is the season’s colour.
Garden foxes play in rose-dawn light, rising doubt hangs in latent streets, odd wasps drift between blossoms spreading and seeding unwanted fruit, and the numbers explode like purple globes of allium blooms.
Thoughts of renewal are not what they were: first-cut strips of grass mask earth beneath and, at a safe distance, tender leaves grieve. Summertime begins. Winter starts again.
Nights are the worst: dark acres of time are unfilled with anything but low noise as cars burr along the northbound carriageway.
Mum is cold, anxious in unsettled grief. There’s no point getting up: without him there’s nothing to do. Days see diversions but now, why does sitting there beat lying here?
Wide awake in darkness she heard herself say: “Dada?” and reach out her hand. He used to take it and warm it. This cold, Dada-less night, as she reached for him again, he warmed her again. The sheets softened, the noises dissolved and she stopped thinking. She felt him, she knew he was nearby and she slept.
It is pretty ugly between Gravesend and Stone Crossing. Puzzling through Rosherville, to Northfleet’s exhausted ragstone quarry, Kimberly Clark is making Andrex.
At Ebbsfleet, the footpath runs in zigzags spanning voids and empty strips of railway behind galvanised pikes battened by bars.
Half an hour later we see discarded bottles of corrosive tipped in a ditch and wild snapdragons grow beside hawthorns spray-painted grey with exhaust-fume silt.
We take a wrong turning, re-trace our steps, pass a builders’ merchant’s stockpile of slabs and an elephants’ graveyard of buses.
At Greenhithe the rain comes. Soon silent Spring will spread – not unlike the virus – and hide hedgerow crud beneath blankets of brambles, nettles, bindweed, storksbill and bittercress.
Same train, same bus, same strange metal giraffes. This, though, is different. The storm wind is armed: tiny water dumdums, as hard as ice, spear and splay, needling my defenceless face.
Plastic mud-larky litters the foreshore: old rope, smashed flowerpots and bookies’ pens blown out of the water by gale forces.
At Shornemead Fort we rest and eat our pies. We pass short-shank horses and burnt out cars. We walk the wet backs of Gravesend boatyards. Shocked and silenced, we board the train back home.
From my Granny (Alice Blodwen) to her son, my uncle, Iolo Dyfnan Davies. 29 January 1920 – 5 April 2009
I am remembering my Uncle Iolo with a bitter-sweet chuckle. The letter dates from 1940, as does the photo, I’d guess. It begins: “Now that our British Winter has set in, campaigning is less than ever a picnic. Well keep your bowels open and keep as dry as possible. A good motto for the dark days . . .”
Like many others, I expect, I have long been confused why and how the ‘Jesusalem’ verses by William Blake have become stuff of English patriotism, even jingoism. Yeah, I know, Hubert Parry has a lot to answer for. But it becomes even more confusing when one notes that the repeated question marks written in orignial editions are omitted in many reprints. Not my OUP edition, mind, edited by Geoffrey Keynes. It has more question points than Blake’s engraving!
William Blake’s ‘Jersualem’ engraving
I am sure all of this must have been said before, so this just to get it off my chest. The question marks are essential to the reading. I think of them as rehetorical with the unwritten answer an overwhelming “no!”
Furthering my interpretationis this excerpt from Bible’s book of the Apocalypse, which I came across today. Blake was nothing if not apocalyptic and I suggest these lines from Chapter 21 (or ones similar) might have been an inspiration.
“Vision of the New Jerusalem
And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. It has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”
Rethought and redescribed for our heterodox age, we are a long way from Jerusalem.
