From Pilgrim’s Way
It was just after seven and the pub was almost empty. The only other customer apart from Daud was a thin, old man leaning over his drink at a corner of the bar. The barman was talking to him, and nodded at Daud to show that he had seen him and would presently attend to him. It was getting towards the end of the week and money was short, so Daud bought himself the cheapest half-pint of beer and sat in the alcove by the window. The beer tasted watery and sour, but he shut his eyes and gulped it.
He heard the barman chuckling softly at something that the old man had said. They both turned to look at him. The old man grinned as he leant back to stare at Daud over an angle of his shoulder, nodding as if he intended to reassure and calm him. Daud made his face as lugubrious as he could and his eyes glassy and blank, blind to the old man’s antics. He thought of the grin as the one that won an empire. It was the pick-pocket’s smile, given tongue in cheek and intended to distract and soothe the innocent prey while the thief helped himself to the valuables. It had travelled the seven seas, flashing at unsuspecting wogs the world over. Millions of them succumbed to it, laughing at its transparently conniving intention, and assuming that the mind behind such a ridiculous face must be as idiotic. Daud imagined how embarrassing the sight would have been: half-naked men, skins baked red by the sun, smiling with such complete insincerity. By the time the victims discovered that those bared fangs had every intention of chomping through their comic and woggish world, there was little for them to do but watch with terror as the monsters devoured them. Never again, Daud vowed. Go find yourself another comedy act, you old fool.
He felt exposed when he sat in a pub alone, and worried that somebody would come to speak to him, and flash yellow teeth at him. When he was new in England, and innocent of the profound antagonism he aroused by his mere presence, he had gone into pubs he should not have gone into. At one he was refused the cigarettes and matches he had gone in to buy. To begin with, he thought that the barman was mad, a character who was going to shame him by some act of perversity. Then he saw the grins all around the pub and understood. He had wanted to protest, to make a scene and perhaps hurl a curse on the inn-keeper. Afterwards he had replayed the scene in every detail, except that in these latter versions he was not flustered with surprise and had the perfect riposte to their abuse. He imagined and rehearsed in front of a mirror how he thought his father might protest at such a public indignity. But that first time he had simply stood in the pub, unable to summon the words in the stranger’s language, and watched the grins turn him into a clown.
At another pub, the Seven Compasses, he was told that the spaghetti advertised on the menu was finished, when he could see hot, steaming plates being passed over the counter. He had asked to see the landlord, sniffing his pound note ostentatiously to indicate the drift of his case, but he had noticed a few of the beefier patrons getting interested. No need for alarm. God save the Queen, he said and ran.
A group of burghers had chased him out of another pub with their stares and angry comments, incensed that he had invaded their gathering and ruined their pleasure. This could have happened to you, he cried as he stood at the door. Fate could have dealt you such a body blow too, and you might have found yourself as unfortunately miscast as I, chased from one haven to another, wretched and despised. They had turned round and barked their hearty burgher guffaws, their breaths smelling of the burnt fats of animals. Oh my goodness, they said. Oh goodness gracious me.
The most poignant exclusion was from The Cricketers, where he had gone two or three times and had begun to feel safe. The photographs oh the walls were a disappointment, honouring only English and Australian players. There were no Sir Garys and no Three Ws, but he found the cricket paraphernalia on the walls soothing. In the end the landlady had asked him to leave. She told him she could not be sure of restraining her husband from jumping over the bar and cracking him one. So he had gone, saddened and shaken that it was a lover of that noble game who had so misused him.
Daud took as long as he could over his half-pint, but nobody turned up to buy him another one. It was still light outside when he left. He turned into one of the lanes by the cathedral and headed towards the hospital. The route he followed was the same as the one he took in the morning when he went to work. It occurred to him that he could have found something more interesting to do in the evening than that. Had his life become so empty? How would he feel if anyone found out that this was how he spent his hours? He shrugged off the intimations of inadequacy, tossed his head at them, and walked on.
It was a warm June evening, and Daud would not have been surprised to see pavements teeming with frisky teenagers and cocky young men, with a sprinkling of responsible adults taking a stroll and shooting the breeze. Instead the streets were empty and afflicted with gloom. He hurried now, made uncomfortable by the silence and the expectancy of the streets. It was as if the town had been abandoned, its purpose fulfilled, and its inhabitants engaged elsewhere in other pursuits. He avoided the darkest alleys. Who knew what might jump out of them? Who would hear his screams for help?
He imagined a recently returned representative of the greatest empire the world had ever seen walking these streets, after what had seemed like centuries of absence, when the thought of the conviviality of his people would have sustained him while he tortured the silent, sullen peoples under his charge. He would surely have screamed with anguish as he strolled the soulless streets of the evangelical heartland of the old country, and saw the self-deception he had practised in the isolation of his imperial outpost. With what relish he would then recall the hypnotic throbbing of the jungle drums and the scratchings of the shrill cicadas in the tropical night. How fulfilling would seem those endless, dreary afternoons in the tropical hell-hole, where men were still men and knew the potency of rank and power. Surely, surely! But there was very little for him to feel smug about, Daud reminded himself. Shrill cicadas or no, at least the streets were paved and clean, and no scavenging dogs roamed the streets at night, looking for carrion. When he arrives at his house and runs the shower, water will sprinkle out of the rose, instead of dust and the whine of rusted cogs and nuts. His lights worked, his toilet flushed and there were always onions in the shops. He admired the organization that could make all that function, and pave the paths and make the trains run.
The clock on St George’s Tower said twenty minutes past eight. It was always seven minutes slow. He knew this from long experience, but felt it was a small and bearable eccentricity. The tower was the only thing within a radius of hundreds of yards to have survived the wartime bombing. Perhaps, he thought, its heart had stopped for seven minutes. It survived and now stood squat on its arches and colonnades like an old molar. The bombs had been meant for the cathedral, but it had escaped almost untouched, its precious glass long since secreted away, and its granite walls and spires secure from all but the most direct of hits. Almost by a miracle, the little streets leading to the cathedral had also survived, leaving the monument to Norman piety nestling in its medieval inaccessibility, buffered by a warren of winding alleys.
He looked through the open gate to the cathedral into the floodlit maw of its precincts. He caught a glimpse of the stone massif, with its elegant spires looking even more like fairy-tale towers in the unreal light. For all the years he had lived in the town, he had never been inside the cathedral. He had walked through the grounds hundreds of times, taking a short-cut through the Queens Gate. He had been chased through the cloisters by a group of skinheads: Gi’ us a kiss, nigger- He gave them a good view of his right royal arse and shouted abuse as he ran. Go suck a dodo, you fucking pricks. But he had never been inside the cathedral; which those skinheads probably had.
He took the path across the common to Bishop Street. Most people called it the rec, which had disconcerted him at first. He had thought it was wreck, the site of some immemorial foundering. The rec was in a sunken piece of ground surrounded by high banks overgrown with bushes and trees. One path ran alongside the road just below the bank. The one he took cut across the playing pitches and would bring him out by the disused water mill near Bishop Street. He knew it was a mistake as soon as he had gone far enough to be unable to withdraw without looking scared. He saw a man scrambling down the bank from the road, watched him bend down to take his dog off the lead. He was always wary of dogs, and this one was large and sleek, with a drooling lower jaw that made it look hungry. He glanced away quickly so as not to attract its attention, the way a child might shut its eyes tight to rid itself of a monster that was threatening it. He kept to the path and stretched his legs, aware that with every step he was moving farther from the road and the street-lights, and deeper into the darkness. After a while it became obvious that the couple were after him. From a dozen yards, Daud saw the man start to grin. He threw dignity to the winds and fled, the dog panting and leaping behind him. He heard the man laugh and then whistle for the dog to come back. When he reached the little bridge that straddled the stream, which was the boundary of the rec, Daud stopped and called down a round of curses and plagues on the man. He had not seen him properly, only a glimpse of a skinny figure in an overcoat, with greying hair slicked back like an unfunny parody of a silent-movie star, but he was sure God would have no difficulty identifying him. He had probably come across him before.
He heard the cathedral bells tolling nine as he reached his door. He let himself in, holding his breath and then allowing the air to enter his lungs in small pockets. The landlord believed in piano keys but was very reluctant to have the rotten floor-boards seen to. Daud had even openly questioned his belief: How can you say you believe in the co-existence of the races, like the black and white keys on a piano, and then exploit me and my people in this way? He had especially enjoyed that my people, and had watched the man squirm with shame and anguish, confident that his floor-boards would be fixed. But the landlord had controlled his pain in some way, and confessed to Daud that he could not get the repairs done unless he received a little more rent.
Daud switched the television on and sat down in front of it. It was more for the noise and distraction that he put it on, to dispel the grip of misery that the silent house had on him. It did not work; and he heard through the strident music on the television the angry grumbles of his mind as it refused to be silenced so easily.
The thought of the letters he needed to write reproached him with its habitual and irresistible force. With it came the memory of what he had left behind, and he felt resolve wobbling, and wondered if the habit of endurance had made him uncritical and self-deluding. Flashes of warm golden beaches appeared in his mind, although he was often unsure if the image were not one he had culled from brochures of other lands. He could not resist the romance and drama of his isolation, and he felt himself giving way. He remembered the walk to school and felt himself straining for every step, for a picture of the shops and the people he would have passed. Then he knew he had gone too far as the faces of old friends came to chide him with his neglect.
He rarely heard from anybody, and he was happy with that. Letters from old friends were always full of an optimism about England that he found embarrassing. They were so far removed from the humiliating truth of his life that they could be taken for mockery, although he knew that was not so. For they had done a good job, he thought, those who had gone to take the torch of wisdom and learning to the benighted millions of Africa. They had left a whole age group hankering for the land that had produced their teachers. Poor Rabearivelo, the Malagasy poet, had committed suicide when he failed to get to France. It was enough to make you laugh, Daud thought, until you read his poems. And then you wondered how a mind like that could be so easily eaten. He hated getting letters from his friends, and dreaded having to reply. He found himself cultivating an eccentric style when he wrote to them, in the hope that they would be too embarrassed about his decline to be able to reply. His father’s generation was safe. They had been born while the memory of a time without Europeans was still fresh in people’s minds, before the grin of empire had filled the rest with the self-despising anxiety of frightened men.
George Szirtes
[1948-]
George Szirtes was born in Budapest, Hungary. In 1956, following the uprising in Budapest, he and his parents left for England. In 1970, while at Leeds College of Art, Szirtes married Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has two children. He received a BA in fine art in 1972. Leeds was also where he met the poet Martin Bell, who, impressed by the younger poet’s combination of ‘English individualism and European culture’, encouraged Szirtes’s writing. Szirtes himself recognizes the dualism that inhabits his work, although he has referred to it more bluntly as ‘a conflict between two states of mind’.
From 1972 to 1973 Szirtes studied at Goldsmiths’ College in London, and in 1973 he began to teach part-time. Between 1975 and 1987 he worked as the head of art at various schools in Hertfordshire. Szirtes’s art education has had a subtle yet profound influence on his poetry, as is evident from his first collection, The Slant Door (1979). In 1980 he received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and in 1981 he published his second volume of poetry, November and May. Short Wave (1983) soon followed, as did an Arts Council grant in 1984. In the mid-1980s, Szirtes made a series of return journeys to Hungary, some of which were supported by the British Council. His first visit rejuvenated his sense of his native language – a language that he’d nearly forgotten after many years of speaking and writing in English. He began to translate poetry and prose, and published The Photographer in Winter (1986), which, he says, is an attempt to understand his own ‘dual heritage’. Szirtes received the Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and in 1988 he wrote Metro, a highly personal volume of poetry. Metro explores the period of time from 1944 to 1945 when his father was held in a labour camp and his mother was imprisoned in Ravensbruck. Several of the poems are written as imagined letters from his mother to her brother. In 1991 Szirtes published Bridge Passages.
Since 1987 Szirtes has worked as a part-time staff member at St Christopher School in Letchworth, Hertfordshire and is a proprietor of Starwheel Press in Hitchin. He continues to publish work in which he utilizes history and myth, as well as certain English sensibilities and literary traditions, to evoke Central European events.
Szirtes’s poetry explores the interface between ‘this’ England and a ‘remembered’ other, all the while gently probing the past in an attempt to make sense of both a personal and a public history. ‘The Child I Never Was’ (1986) and ‘Assassins’ (1983) are meditations upon England, whoever or whatever she may be.
THE CHILD I NEVER WAS
The child I never was could show you bones
that are pure England. All his metaphors
are drawn from water. His ears admit the sea
even to locked rooms with massive doors.
Look, let me make him for you: comb his hair
with venus comb, a wicked drupe for mouth,
twin abalones for ears, sharp auger teeth,
an open scalloped lung, a nautilus
for codpiece, cowrie knuckles, nacreous.
Let him shiver for you in the air.
The English schoolboy cannot understand
a country that is set in seas of land.
The child I never was makes poetry
of memories of landscape haunted by sea.
He stands in an attic and shows you his collection
of huge shells, and with an air of introspection
