I met the late John Wareham at Liverpool University’s Poetry Society in October 1962. I was in my second year, and Barry, as he was known to everyone, was beginning his first. We became close, comfortable and trusting friends almost immediately, and continued to remain so, each of us becoming, in due course, the other’s Best Man.
We felt able to share the first and further drafts of our poems with each other, and continued to do that for the next four years while we were students. We recognised that each of us had the makings of a good poet, that what we were producing was original work of value in its own right, and which might be enhanced by the views of a critical and informed friend. Critiquing and supporting each other’s work that way was, I realise now, an invaluable apprenticeship for me.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS describes what that friendship meant to me at the time, and its continuing influence.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
i.m. John Wareham
The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!
THE OPPORTUNITY, Thomas Hardy
Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –
chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s
on West Derby Road at the ready –
he and I would turn on the TV
in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s
‘Opportunity Knocks’. It was an hour –
including adverts – of metaphors
of the mid-sixties: kitsch; schmaltz; condescension;
nudge-nudge; the cruelty of class; fifteen
seconds of fame; occasional talents.
We had no doubt we were poets – actual
not aspiring. Would we settle for minor
recognition – or would only major count?
How this would happen we never discussed.
Maybe we hoped we would be discovered
like others in their twenties in the city!
I can see him now chortling at the absurd –
his laughter bubbling, his kindly eyes gleeful.
He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy,
ever the collector of the bathos
of pretentiousness and misfortune.
He told me tales about the writer’s heart.
Hardy had willed, though an atheist,
his body be buried in the churchyard
of the village in which he had been born.
But his young widow was strong-armed by the Dean
of Westminster Abbey. Her husband’s ashes
were interred in Poets’ Corner near Dickens’.
His heart, however, was preserved, and borne
in a biscuit tin – Huntley & Palmers
Bath Olivers, it was claimed – from Paddington
or Waterloo to Dorchester then Stinsford.
One tale had the heart buried in the tin.
Another, the tin being on the grave digger’s
kitchen table with, for some reason, the lid
off, maintained the family cat ate it.
He published little. Re-reading what he wrote
when we lodged together in Liverpool
I am shocked by the matureness of his talent,
and his ability to make the mundane
original, significant, portentous:
Spareness is the point.
November’s manifest in skies of ash,
Branches whittled by the edge
Of winter, the parkland quite
Quit of final birds.
And how his, over years, has shaped my work,
like an underground, uncharted watercourse.
Barry wrote the following (previously unpublished) poems – one of which is referred to in OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS – while we were sharing lodgings in the Newsham Park area of Liverpool in 1965. He read the poems at a meeting of Liverpool University’s Poetry Society. Re-reading his work makes me realise anew both what an original poet he was and how accomplished he had already become in his early twenties.
A VERY STUDENT PIECE
Ten weeks overdue with rent
I creak downstairs to basement views
Where mother, father and daughter bend,
Night-gowned with the three God-sent
Sunday papers, and gnaw on rind,
Potato-eaters of College Mews.
I pay my due. But the kind
That seems still owing no fork-out
Across a table will cover or justify.
Well within my means, it would find
On admittance the outraged cry,
My pity shown the short way out.
And then, the thing cuts two ways:
Against me, hearsay’s gamut filed:
The gay, reviled, Hell-Fire, half-tight,
Cracked up, sleazy student days.
My cool denials would seem to blight
The means our boredom is half-beguiled.
To take a stand on the shown bergs
Of other’s lives, the definition unsuspect,
Becomes a last and private stand
By impure guesswork that may not urge
It first impression on this hand:
We dress estrangement as respect.
©Estate of B.J. WAREHAM 2023
INCIDENT
Sparseness is the point
November’s manifest in skies of ash,
Branches whittled by the edge
Of winter, the parkland quite
Quit of final birds.
My footsteps carry
To the shut faces of three men
Whose stitched storm-collars upturned
Shield hooked heads, intent
By a pond’s stone ledge.
Instantly each face dissolves,
As poles pierce us and skim
The sluggish bottom scum.
One pole gains purchase,
Grappling limp weight
And bending as our knuckles blanch.
A body surfaces
Whose hands caress its flanks,
The head is bowed and matt.
Our jaws keep clamped
With chill or some embarrassment,
As it’s hauled to the path.
I start to relive
The wish, pellucid and definitive,
That had perfused a gainliness
Or whole corruption.
A note was left, general trait,
Hours between the writing
And the deed; an extensive purpose
Battening to live nescience.
One man lights a cigarette
And funnels the smoke high.
Another coughs.
I make to move off,
Victim of consciousness, not conscience.
©Estate of B.J. WAREHAM 2023
THE MAJOR’S WIFE
The major’s young wife sits alone tonight.
The home is incomplete. Remote lads whiting puttees
Know a thing or two; their brushes jig quicker
As they smirk. The square is disciplined
By windlessness; only a flag is at ease.
Kafka does not exert himself to amuse
The lady in blue cocooning dress; she sighs
For event, remote fulfilment, different privacy.
She has a past, her posted major his own
Deflating memories. She glances at his portrait’s eyes.
How their chaotic story is publicised!
The barracks is never finished
With its brutal talk of men lost or loved,
How recruits awhile renew them both,
Each incident’s hard glare daily furbished.
Grotesques of the starched-khaki world know too well
The gloss of competence, the insufficiency.
Past deed and present need are one still.
The major’s young wife resumes the page,
Thinks she hears howls, cannot see the fantasy.
©Estate of B.J. WAREHAM 2023
GRAPES
For them, the evening started well,
That central couple whose names are known,
And silences understood, whose nods are identical
And heads nearly so. Ageing and concerned,
Limited in everything, they are vulnerable.
While they drink halves, their small feet scuff
Damp sawdust and fag-ends in uneasy circles,
But they like to see a crowd, brass rails
And dented fender shine, the hazed wall-mirror
As big and familiar as a bed sheet,
Lacework in each drained Guinness glass,
And some controversy to cock their heads to.
So when noise towers up as some row begins,
They settle, and the scuffing stops.
Even mouthed threats and a lifted fist
Are entertainment, commonplace and canned,
Much like their screen’s manoeuvred bluff –
Here everyone’s in character.
But then, which no one had rehearsed,
Drawling action’s sweaty blur,
No clean-cut straight for putting out
A stewed tough’s glaring light, but near the bar
Two top-heavy bodies lurch and cling
Until one the couple know, firm’s name
Stencilled on his duffled back, goes down,
A raspberry ring bottleneck-sized glistening
And jagged under one closed eye. A table is upturned,
The air close; screams are locked in threats, hands
Agitated in the jug-handles. Restraints all round:
The goitrous tenant-barman out of sorts,
Indignant with all, bawling that all should stay,
That nothing had changed. The couple go, and leave
In glasses lace-bedraggled by the great mirror
An insidious trace precipitating – almost dissatisfied.
©Estate of B.J. WAREHAM 2023
NOTES:
1. OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS was originally posted on the website in September 2019.
2. I am indebted to Clive Watkins [https://davidselzer.com/2021/06/other-peoples-flowers-twelve-poems-by-clive-watkins/] , a mutual friend, for copies of the poems. Clive was also a member of the Liverpool University Poetry Society, and has retained several of the cyclostyled sheets circulated for discussion at meetings of the Society in the academic year 1965 – 1966.
By David Selzer