Sunday Night is.. The Child Catcher

Seasonal Christmas fare. First catch your children. Begin with Benny Hill and Robert Helpmann, add Dick van Dyke. Script, partly, by Roald Dahl. There's also Anna Quayle and Gert Fröbe and James Robertson Justice and Lionel Jeffries and even Barbara Windsor.

But that is genuine child's play compared to this. One of the greatest films ever made about childhood fear, The Night of the Hunter.





The film was a failure at the time. It was Charles Laughton's only directorial work. Robert Mitchum, who helped direct, is superb. The real child catcher. Simon Callow wrote a book about the whole thing.

Somehow Laughton walks the line between childhood fairy-tale and adult dread. I still have to steel myself to watch it.

Domain 4

My mother as a young girl. No date. Transylvania. C. 1936 at a guess.


I have long meant to return to the subject of my mother in the kitchen and the question of domain. I am saving the actual photograph to the end.

This is what I wrote on 22 November, beginning with some definitions of domain:

▸ noun: a knowledge domain that you are interested in or are communicating about ("It was a limited domain of discourse")
▸ noun: territory over which rule or control is exercised ("His domain extended into Europe")
▸ noun: the set of values of the independent variable for which a function is defined
▸ noun: people in general; especially a distinctive group of people with some shared interest
▸ noun: a particular environment or walk of life

It's the second definition I am interested in, the territory over which rule and control is exercised. What are rule and control? They are what we seem to need in order to keep the threatening and ravenous at bay. How are they exercised? How are they asserted, wrested, defended?

I talked a little about her restricted domain as a girl, following her bout of rheumatic fever:

But somewhere here there once existed a much reduced domain. A place by the window: skaters outside shouting and waving back.

That domain, that rule and control we all crave, a sphere in which our will matters, is the subject. It is often imagined that the traditional male domain was greater than the female. I am not sure this was the general case. When I think of the lives of most boys in most times, it was school, followed by work and a brief period of limited licence, then marriage and responsibility for ever and ever till death. There was no career. Perhaps I should repeat that: there was no career. There was a job that meant everything and which offered relatively little opportunity for initiative or control. The factory was not your domain if you worked on the factory floor, as one of my grandfathers did. Nor was the office, if there were superiors overseeing you. It was not impossible to advance there but the fact is that, by definition, the overwhelming majority did not advance. The job, at the same time, was, in essence, your certificate of masculinity. If you lost it, you were emasculated and became an object of pity and/or contempt. The same happened once you retired. You got under feet. Many shuffled off pretty soon after retirement.

Even if there was some improvement in your position at work it would still be subject to the approval of others above you. You had to channel your energies very hard to progress. You had to retain your vigour, inventiveness and optimism. Anything else and you'd go under, like the thirty-bob-a-week clerk in John Davidson's poem.

The home was distinctly not your domain. The home was generally the wife's. If you were lucky enough to have a shed or an allotment, or even, God granting it, a den, that was your playground. In the family you were brought in as a threat. 'Wait till your father comes home!' I don't think being a so-called patriarch was all beer-and-skittles. Once the long day was finished, often just one day a week for most, there might be both, together with some comradeship. Otherwise it was frustration, powerlessness, and in some cases drunkenness and violence. Most men got their wage packet and, if properly socialised, handed it over to the wife for housekeeping, with some pocket money for amusement (drinking or displacement activity) handed back.

This is the class of men that generally gets it in the neck as being vulgar, crude, worthless. Today the boys are taught their uselessness or made to feel it before they even get out there and work. The alternative is fantasy and a kind of despairing loutishness, an eternal defraying of the cost of responsibility. Because what does responsibility ever bring you? Answer: see above.

At least in the house, possibly (with luck) in the bedroom and above all in the kitchen there was a female domain. To be sure it was absolutely hung about with work and responsibility. But no-one told you what to do in your own kitchen. You had to manage it yourself. It was restricted as hell, and, unlike with the male so-called domain, there was no hope of advancement, to even the next level of motherhood or matriarchy. It was a trap full of children. You had authority over them, but, like the young women in Larkin's poem, they were pushing you to the side of your own life. And that was something you had to accept, lovingly or unlovingly. The steps were, proverbially, scrubbed bright. The nest was yours to make though it cost you in effort and upkeep. Dusk is a great time for voyeurs. Walking past lit rooms with their curtains still open you cannot help but notice how feminine most environments are. The house domain remains feminine even now.

Domains, or what you can make into domains, are very precious. Our domains are chiefly in our heads and our imaginations. Our entire habit of buying things on credit is an extension of domain in a world where we seem to have ever less power, or at least where we are so much more keenly aware of powers beyond ourselves. The bread must still be earned. The circuses have grown to phantasmal size.

But it is my own mother's domain: that house and that kitchen that is my concern. It is the way we were brought up to move and act in it that I want to explore. And will carry on doing.

Back from London

I have been back from so many places recently it might as well be London this time. Being an obliging sort of man I did a freebie (I mean it cost me the return rail fare to London) for a magazine I thought worth supporting and set off to be there for 11.00 am. The wind turned my umbrella inside out twice on the way to the station where the ticket office was closed since it was Saturday. So half an hour or so on the platform, my person centrally heated by the energy of Otis Redding entering through both ears and meeting himself vigorously in the middle. Singing this among other things:



There is a deeply searching essay on male self-image in the songs of Otis Redding waiting to be written by an appropriate person. Could be me. Might not be me. Probably will not be me. In any case Otis warms you somewhat on a frozen windswept bare platform. So shake. You might as well, you are shaking anyway. He also invented the lift, did you know?

The weather was no different in London. Umbrella blows inside out a third time.

On the way to the venue I walk past Stockwell Bus Garage, a great hangar with space for ten thousand small boys of circa 1960 with bus-spotter's notebooks in their hands. I was asked if I wanted to go bus-spotting at the age of ten by a classmate called Jimmy Kendall. I said I had seen a bus before. He explained about the numbers. Next thing was to get a big fold-out map of London with all the bus routes on it. The numbers I was most used to were 183 and 79, but there was a whole exciting world of more numbers waiting for us out there. The trouble was I was short sighted but hadn't yet had an eye test, so while I had no difficulty in spotting buses as such, the numbers were not even a blur. Nevertheless the power of having a big map in my pocket and almost countless numbers of buses to catch was as exciting as life could get at age ten, having already walked over a mined field between Hungary and Austria one night two years before, aged eight. Well, I think it was mined.

Jimmy Kendall later kissed a girl called Wendy on the very last day of school. She was standing against the back wall of the class. I liked Wendy anyway. After he left I told her I loved her. First girl I told that. And meant it. She gave a little scream then ran away. I heard from her last week. From Australia. She needn't have run that far.

The event? In a house/gallery full of Picassos, Matisses, Lucian Freuds, Craigie Aitchisons, David Hockneys and Tracey Emins among other things. It was all very friendly and rather mystifying. The magazine editor had, in the meantime, resigned, and the deputy editor was not there. I had written a poem about a Howard Hodgkins painting. There it was. I read the poem about it to about eight people, that and three more Hodgkins poems. Also present: Robert Vas Dias, Anita Klein and Eileen Cooper. One of my stranger readings.

This is Eileen. Very good painter. Find her on Google.

From Bath

No rest for whacked. From Bath to London to Hitchin to Wymondham to Norwich to Wymondham and tomorrow to London and back again, before London again Monday and Coventry Tuesday.

In Bath reading with Zoe Brigley, young Welsh Bloodaxe poet, followed by Indian meal to midnight then hanging round the deserted bar of the hotel with Zoe, Tim L and Carrie E until about 1am when one of us (not me, constable) inadvertently sets off the bar alarm in trying to get a drink of water. We continue sitting around for another fifteen minutes waiting to see what will happen. Nothing does. Eventually the night attendant, a sheepish boy from somewhere in Europe, appears and smiles sheepishly but doesn't know how to turn off the alarm. Then, at last, someone else does turn it off. I was faintly expecting the cops to burst through the door.

The train home is delayed half an hour. Spend time listening on iPod toy to Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and Schubert's Quintet in C, another of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

The university has been asking to see my naturalisation papers. After fifty-two years in England they had better check I am not illegal or a terrorist in a sleeper cell. No one ever bothered before. In any case I find it and see, surprisingly, that what I had remembered about becoming one of her Majesty's subjects was wrong. The wording, according to the 1948 British Nationality Act is THE ABOVE NAMED HAS BEEN REGISTERED AS A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED KINGDOM AND COLONIES.

So British, United Kingdom and colonies. A pretty kettle of halibut. Now they want to see my P60 to check that the NI number they have had for a number of years is the NI number they have had for a number of years. It is, I assure them, the NI number they have had for a number of years.

The meeting I dashed into Norwich for was. appropriately enough, about refugees and asylum -seekers, as part of the City of Refuge programme.

*

Directed to a lovely review of the New and Collected Poems in The Morning Star today. Which reminds me. The hotel had a decorative book-case in the restaurant. Clearly no-one was expected to actually take a book from it. I did this morning. There was a well preserved copy of a New Statesman anthology, including H.G.Wells's interview with Stalin. It is faintly comical, Wells imagining he is putting Stalin on a spot with the odd Fabian half-nelson. Bernard Shaw also finds it amusing, but then Shaw is a repulsive bag of self-conceit. Neither of them pick Stalin for the monster he is. At that precise moment in fact. The purges were happily proceeding while the interview was going on.

Incidentally, pleased the Menezes case has exposed the police cover-up. The thing stank to high heaven from day one. And now the knife-crimes figures. It is getting very hard voting for this lot.

To Bath

I am off to Bath for a reading. C set off to Hitchin earlier to look after her mother. Except the car has broken down on the way, with a flat tyre. The car was fitted with new tyres only last week, whether this particular tyre I don't know. She's at the side of the triple carriageway, ringing me. This is a couple of hours or so before I am due to get the train. So I ring the AA and tell them to hurry then call a taxi for myself to get down there. Who cars about cost? It'll be about half an hour's drive to where she is. The AA say they'll be there soon. The taxi arrives just as C is ringing. 'Don't come,' she urges me. They are almost there. So I send the taxi away with £10 for his trouble. He scowls. He has only come round the corner so there's not much call for scowling.

Meanwhile the rain raineth but the sky cleareth. Maybe it cleareth.

It will be a series of phone calls now to make sure she's OK.

*

The issue of assisted suicide. I understand there need to be safeguards. Old people, sick people, shouldn't be pressurised into it. There should be no guilt attached to choosing to stay alive by whatever means. But the fact is I myself would feel guilt if it were me. And I value my dignity too. The man in the news finished off the job himself. No-one murdered him.

I cannot begin to express how deeply I loathe those who mouth on about sympathy at a safe distance but still want the final say on what others do with their lives. I see them as a crew of moral Health & Safety officials who would prevent you crossing the road without their say-so. Totalitarians of the spirit.

Enough fuming. Other things to do. Check C. Shave.

Hah.

Assisted suicide

My opinion on suicide has turned a 180 degrees since I was in my teens. My mother kept talking about euthanasia. I hated it. Her desire for death, after many years of suffering, seemed to be an infringement of my rights to feel rosy about life. It was adolescent self-centredness. That's how it seems now anyway. Everything at that age is an attempt to construct the world as one would wish it to be. An adolescent has so little control over anything and has such an insecure sense of self that other people's actions often constitute a threat. As Harry Enfield's teenager Kevin on the TV show used to repeat time and again: It's so-o-o unfair!

No, it isn't. I can see why she yearned for it. I can see I was a prig to feel as I did.

Now I am for it. Especially since the Scottish clergyman insisted that it is God's right to make us suffer and that we have no right not to suffer or to save other's suffering by ending our own. Not my kind of God then, vicar. That one can get lost.

In the current brouhaha about the televising of the death of one man who wished to be shown dying, whose surviving wife also wished it to be shown, I am wholly with the couple. I don't think it is sensationalist TV. It is reality, and it is about time death was shown as something real rather than acting and shoot-em-up. Someone pro-life on radio was saying there was no counter-argument to be heard on the programme. It's not argument. It is an event. No one has to watch it. People know it's there. It has been fully signposted. It is not glamorous. It is not youthful death wish. The man would have wanted to go on living if living had been possible. He would soon not have been able even to swallow. Would God have been satisfied then? As it was, from what I read, it was a loving leave taking.

I don't intend watching it myself. Can't, as we're out anyway. But I know it's there and am not sorry it is. The Roman route in such things seems far superior to the later model.

*

A footnote

See comments but this one is mine and I want it here, where it belongs. As below:

What annoys me are those people who keep repeating:

Your life doesn't belong to you. Not even to those who love you. It belongs to us. To God, to the community, to anybody but yourself.

And then they have the gall to say:

We fully sympathise and it isn't aimed at you, but those who choose this method are cowards and bad citizens and will fry in hell (not meaning you, of course, because we have full sympathy for you.)

I've heard several like that these last two days. Go fuck your sympathy, is what I think. You don't have to do anything about it, you patronising bastard.

Two local events

Events are almost more frequent than non-events at the moment but I am retrospectively registering these two, both in Norwich, both quite different.

1.



Last Friday we had booked the King of Hearts - a very old building that serves as cafe, art gallery and music room/performance space upstairs - for the local launch of the New and Collected. The idea in this case was not to have a reading by me, but to invite writer friends, ex-colleagues and ex-students, including a couple of present ones (some of these categories overlapping) to come and read a poem. In the event there were some nineteen readers, which is a lot, plus me topping and tailing the two halves with drinks at half-time. I realised in the course of the event there could have been more, but it was a grand audience, mostly on the younger side of thirty-five, and it was as joyful as I can remember. I took sixteen copies of the book, all of which went. Then it was over to the bar for another couple of hours. What I love about teaching is that doing it it becomes blazingly obvious that poetry is not the preoccupation of the middle-aged and middle-class, but is live and shared and pleasure across all boundaries.



2.



Then, on Monday night, Dragon Hall, another ancient Norwich building, or a dual event: the launch of Shuck, Hick, Tiffey including some of the music sung and performed, and the farewell do for the angelic Tom Corbett, who despite being angelic is nobody's fool. Tom has had an extraordinariy life as run-away, sailor, briefly priest, then publisher, headmaster and much else, lord of the universe for all I know. I think of him as an improbable cross between the angel Clarence in 'It's a Wonderful Life' and Jack Sparrow in 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. Clarence Sparrow set up poetry groups, set up publishers and was so bursting with ideas they had to tie him down with sellotape. He is also, according to one calculation, about two-hundred and forty-three years old.

The place was packed with about a hundred people, perhaps more. I did a read through of the Tiffey, or rather a spoken performance. The composer Ken Crandell then did about half of the work-in-progress with singer Anna Bentley - then Helen Ivory for fifteen minutes. A break, then a reading from me and from three other Gatehouse Press writers: Jo Kjaer, Gary Kissick and Jenny Morris. Then the well-deserved tributes to Master C. Sparrow-Corbett.

*

In view of my feelings about localities and communities, their potential exclusiveness and hostility, it is peculiarly good to have written three fully regional pieces. It's a kind of integration. We live here. By this river. Near that mill. In this town. In this city. On that street. It seems a proper integration to me, that is to say it is internationalism on the small, local scale. Whether it seems so to others, I don't know. I once wrote that all poetry was local, and in a sense it is. The Tiffey is our Pimlico.