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Cambridge

CELEBRITY

Bought for the Coronation,  our first TV

had a nine inch screen. It stood in a corner

of the front room. My grandmother, who

had outlived two husbands, two World Wars,

and once had tea with Buffalo Bill,

thought that those appearing on ‘the box’

could see those watching, so was discerning

about whom she chose to watch, and when.

 

She particularly liked ‘What’s My Line?’, an import

from America, in which a panel

of four TV ‘personalities’ guessed

what a range of guests did for a living.

It was broadcast early Sunday evenings.

An hour before she would heat her curling tongs

in the small range in the kitchen. The house

would fill suddenly with the smell of singed hair.

 

Her favourite panellist – she thought him ‘refined’ –

was Gilbert Harding: a choleric,

Cambridge graduate; a poorhouse orphan,

prematurely middle aged; a good

BBC voice with the proper vowels,

a hint of tobacco. The Corporation

kept his secret, when ‘the love that dare not

speaks its name’ risked penal servitude.

 

Outed by the tabloids ‘as the rudest man

in Britain’, he was recognised in the street.

He described himself as a ‘tele-phoney’,

and recounted a journey on the Tube

from Russell Square to Oxford Circus

when he was pointed out, and fêted,

while, at the other end of the carriage,

T.S. Eliot was ignored. Old Possum,

another smoker, feared ‘the television

habit’, thought the word itself ‘ugly

because of foreignness or ill-breeding’.

Eliot, a confused anti-Semite,

and Groucho Marx were mutual fans.

As the latter might have said to the former

on the one occasion they ate together,

‘Tom, just because you’re a genius,’

flicking cigar ash, raising an eyebrow,

‘doesn’t mean you’re not also a schmendrick!’.

Harding lived for many years in Brighton,

whose bus company named a bus after him –

i.e. ‘bus’ as in short for ‘omnibus’.

 

My grandmother filled part of my childhood

with tales of her girlhood in Liverpool

from some sixty years before: the bloody

sectarian skirmishes; the frequent

prophecies of the end of days; the hulks

beached and rusting on the Cast Iron Shore

at the bottom of her steep street; and the boy

next door gone to America, and lost.

I can still recall his name six decades on –

and many decades since he sailed to Boston –

Johnny Flaws, Johnny Flaws.

 

 

 

 

APPLES AND PEARS

For Alison and Georgia Robson

 

‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Isaac Newton

 

The ancient pear tree next door has not been pruned,

I would guess, for at least seventy years,

long before our time here, or the neighbours’.

It is now as large as a medium-sized oak,

with the remains of a magpie’s nest.

Its fruit, in these last days of summer, glow

a ruddy green; are plentiful, bountiful;

inedible, unusable even

for perry cider. The tree does what flora

is meant to do untrammelled – make seeds.

 

My occasional naps, lulled by the bees

in the ivy, beside our olive tree –

with its rare fruit the size of sheep droppings –

are interrupted randomly by the sounds

of falling pears: the slithering rush through leaves

to thud on the lawn, to thump on the summerhouse,

to gerthwang on something metallic.

Nevertheless our neighbours practise yoga

on the grass under the bombardment, dodging

the erratic proofs of Newton’s physics.

 

Isaac was born the year the Civil War began.

Soon after he graduated, Cambridge closed

for two years because of the plague. At home,

on the family’s Lincolnshire farmstead,

he split light into its spectrum colours,

developed differential calculus,

and one day noted the apple falling –

while the flocks of sheep grazed on enclosed fields.

 

My angels are busy on Jacob’s Ladder –

like apples and pears displayed on a barrow –

up the steps from the cellar to the hall,

up the stairs to the long window, from there

to the landing, and the stars. The blind giant

Orion had his servant Cedalion

stand on his shoulders, to guide him eastwards

to the vast healing sun.

 

 

 

 

 

THE POKER

An upper room, somewhere

in Cambridge, England, 1943.

 

Outside, a rainy night, the Kardomah closed,

long queues at the Alhambra

for Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie.

 

 

 max-miller-3

 

 

Inside, a roaring fire and a pride of philosophers.

 

Wittgenstein:           The world is everything.

 

ludwig-wiittgenstein

 

 

Russell:                     Man is not a solitary animal.

 

 bertrand-russell

 

Popper:                    History has no meaning.

 

karl-popper-1

 

Zeleznik:                  The world is a fiction of memories.

 

 

untitled                                

 

 

Did Wittgenstein pick up the poker

to emphasise a point?

Or silence Popper?

Did Popper mention the poker

to point a moral paradox?

Or mock Wittgenstein?

Did Russell call one an ‘upstart’,

the other ‘erudite’?

Or admonish them both?

Did Zeleznik arrive with Wittgenstein,

agree with Popper,

and leave with Russell?

Or was he at The Alhambra?

 

Next morning, the skivvy, who had

certainly been at the music hall, removed

the ashes and re-set the fire. The poker

she moved from wherever it was to

wherever she judged it should be –

and chuckled.

 

Woman:                   Is this Cockfosters?

Max:                         No, madam, Miller’s the name!