One of the most quoted openings of all 20th-century poems in English is the start of Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux-Arts (1938):

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters

But the first time I read the poem, in my teens, I wondered, who exactly were these Old Masters?

I’m not sure I really know now, though a broad definition seems to be painters who worked with a certain level of skill in Europe between about 1300 and 1800. It’s a geographically specific white male club. It seems to include many painters, though I wonder how many of them thought of themselves as masters.

These days things have changed a little. When we talk about modern masters, this includes women too.

But what about the rest of the world?

Averting my gaze from this eurocentric lens, I note that China had its own (male) masters. These were a more exclusive band, however. One example is 明四家; pinyin: Míng Sì Jiā or Four Masters of the Ming dynasty. The dynasty lasted from 1368 to 1644, so the period was thinly populated with masters.

The term ‘master’ also exists in the Japanese art world, though there is a division between masters of Japanese art, Nihonga Gahaku (日本画画伯) and masters of Western art (洋画画伯, Yōga Gahaku).

This bifurcation only came about after the Meiji Restoration as Japan opened up to the Western world. Before that, there was no such thing as Nihonga: Japanese art was all that was practised, and it was divided into “schools”.

The painter Takeshirō Kanokogi (1874–1941) was born into the rapidly changing world of the Meiji Restoration. In this sense, he was like author Natsume Sōseki (1867 - 1916), whose novels reflected the Westernisation and industrialisation of Japan.

At a recent major exhibition of Kanokogi’s work in Tokyo, I was struck by the painter’s commitment to learning his craft systematically. And while the exhibition was subtitled “Return To Realism”, what really cried out to me as I walked through the museum’s rooms full of his works was Kanokogi’s single-minded pursuit of one goal: to become a modern master of Western Art in Japan, a Yōga Gahaku.

*

I didn’t buy the typically expensive catalogue, and there is little detailed information about him online in English. But from what I could glean from the notes at the exhibition, he came from a privileged enough background to travel. In 1900, he travelled to the US, crossing from West to East by railroad and holding a small exhibition in Boston.

He then went to France to immerse himself in French art and its traditions for several years. He made at least two later trips, each one apparently with a view to improving within a particular genre.

He picked up his own mentor: Jean-Paul Laurens (1838 – 1921), a ‘romanticist’ French painter and sculptor who worked within the French Academic style. Laurens has been described as the last great exponent of history painting.

In following Laurens, whose work looked to the past both in content and style, you might think Kanokogi was backing the wrong horse. But cannily, he seems to have hedged his bets, making copies of Courbet’s work and creating his own powerful work in homage to Millet’s moving and moody L’Angélus.

I’m unable to show Kanokogi’s own painting in this style because photography was forbidden for most of the exhibits. But his work’s convincing transposition of Millet’s work into a Japanese context clarified the meaning of the exhibition’s subtitle as he progressively edged away from the grand historical art of his mentor, Laurens, focusing instead on creating his own form of grittier realism.

Kanokogi also studied with Émile-René Ménard, whose influence is clear in several of his paintings.

For example, his painting Girl with a white rose features a female nude in almost exactly the same pose as in the French painter‘s Spring (1850) with the same wry expression on the faces of the two sitters.

The exhibition displayed a large number of his early works, including landscapes and portraits. Some of his portraits, especially, it seems to me, of Euopean subjects, are rather gauche. However, the later portraits seem to gather real power. The poster of the exhibition features one example (as mentioned above, I couldn’t take a photo of the painting myself).

I enjoy paintings that immediately pose questions. I relish the mental back and forth, and it creates a dialogue between me and the work. In the case of this portrait, I found myself asking, ‘What’s the book in her hand?’ ‘Who or what is she looking at?’ ‘Why does she look so concerned?’

The portrait is painted in a modern house with modern furniture (the painting seems to be undated, but perhaps the late 1920s or early 1930s?). Yet the sitter is in traditional Japanese dress, a kimono, featuring a lovely obi (belt). When stood before this canvas, I found it hard to look away from her slightly startled gaze.

*

In the museum’s main foyer, before the start of the main exhibition, two large works were on display. Perhaps the curators thought of them as guides to our viewing of the rest of the exhibition. One was by Laurens, an example of his grand historical style:

Another was a monumental, dramatic work by Kanokogi himself:

This huge canvas was painted in the wake of that huge natural catastrophe. It shows the influence of Laurens in its scale and concern with historical events. Yet despite its specificity in terms of detail and reference to a single event, it has a timeless feel to it too – this could be the wake of any natural disaster anywhere.

But more than that, as I stood in Tokyo in 2026 in the knowledge that another massive earthquake is fully expected to happen within decades, I felt I was also seeing a rather horrific vision of the future. That’s perhaps one reason I felt that the power of this painting surpassed anything in the work by Laurens.

*

Finally, the exhibition also gave me the chance to see another large canvas which is considered Kanokogi’s masterpiece: Beach in Normandy (1907). It’s a compelling work seen at full scale.

I confess I initially found the faces of the adults a little unconvincing – the standing figure, dressed as a woman, seems rather masculine, for example. I wasn’t sure whether this was deliberate.

But the charm of the scene is generated by the depiction of the little children, with the girl tenderly looking after her sister amid the pots and fishing boats. I enjoyed, too, the blending of red and orange and yellow; the rough texture of hull and basket; and the green hue of the sea lapping on the pebble shore.

The humble scene brings us closer to real life than Laurens’s, taking me back to Millet’s realism and subject matter. And the painting took me all the way to the beach in Normandy, and I could almost smell the sea and the fishing boats as I gazed at it.

The painting also seems to have taken Kanokogi where he wanted to go.

On 26th March this year, the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that Beach in Normandy would be designated as an “important cultural property” of Japan. This is a very bureaucratic designation, and as such it will mean, among other things, restrictions or controls on the overseas use of the work.

But the importance of this move doesn’t lie in export restrictions or subsidies for restoration.

Rather, the message this sends is that Takeshirō Kanokogi, a century and a half after his birth, has become, in his own country at least, what he always strove to be: a modern master.

Dear Supporters,

Before I get into the topic of this short essay, the Finnish painter Ferdinand von Wright, I’d give an update about the English Republic of Letters.

About this time last year, finding my publishing schedule no longer in harmony with my available time or energy, I resolved to switch from weekly to fortnightly essays. In the event, however, I seemed to gather momentum as the year progressed and continued more or less with weekly essays.

However, as one or two of you may have noticed, I haven’t maintained that rhythm of work recently. Obligations of various kinds that I won’t go into here have meant that I am unable to write as much or publish as frequently as before.

So I am letting you know that you can expect two regular free essays from me per month for the foreseeable future. The Supporter Sidebar, such as this one, which comes out roughly once a month for paying subscribers, will continue as before.

I don’t expect these changes to lead to an outcry – our inboxes are all full of newsletters, and few people complain that they don’t have enough to read. But I thought I should let you know, rather than silently defaulting on the previous publishing arrangement.

As always, thank you for supporting and reading the English Republic of Letters!

While finishing off my essay Wagtail tales, I began to search for images to accompany the piece. I had hoped to use one of my own photos, but I find them difficult birds to photograph. For one thing, they never stay still for very long! So I looked online for images. I didn’t expect to find too many images of wagtails, but I soon came across a rather stunning image of a white wagtail by a painter whose name was unfamiliar to me: Ferdinand von Wright.

I found myself intrigued by von Wright’s vivid art featuring the natural world. It was a long way from the ethereal colouring of the world of von Wright’s approximate contemporary Claude Monet, whose work I’d seen in Tokyo earlier this year. And while looking through his work, if I didn’t fall into a deep rabbit hole, I did at least trip happily over the nest, or form, of a hare.

Read more

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In 2024 I wrote a “ brief and incomplete cultural history” of quail. I planned at the time to follow up with a similar piece. It’s taken a while, but here’s a new and incomplete cultural history. This time, it’s about the pine.

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Walking around my part of Tokyo, I don’t have to go far before finding a pine tree. Older houses will often have one at the entrance, often with a branch running across the top of the entrance. These are known as monkaburi no matsu (門被りの松, literally ‘gate-covering pine’.

I’ve written before of the three friends of pine, plum and bamboo. The pine represents longevity in Japanese culture. It’s evergreen and endures.

*

Waiting for the gods

But there’s another connection to time. The Japanese word ‘matsu’ (松) for pine is an exact homophone for the etymologically unrelated ‘matsu’, meaning ‘to wait’ (待つ). This “sacred pun” connects to Shinto belief: that these trees are yorishiro, or places where the kami (gods and goddesses) descend to interact with the mortal realm. So the trees are places to wait for the gods.

*

There’s a curious parallel with English. The noun “pine” is phonologically identical to the verb “pine”. And our pining for people and places can also involve waiting. Again, as with “matsu” in Japanese, there’s no etymological connection with the word for the tree, but the link is suggestive.

*

And now as I look back, the solitary Scots pine that grew on the family farm in my childhood seemed to have been waiting – pining, even – for centuries.

But waiting for what?

*

I love the traditional depiction of pines in Chinese painting and saw many examples of the genre when I lived in Shanghai.

Apart from being symbols of endurance and longevity, it seems there could also be a political dimension to such paintings. For Yuan-dynasty scholars living under the Mongols (1271 to 1368), depictions of ancient pines apparently became a metaphor for survival in the face of political discrimination.

*

English poet Peter Levi in his Five Ages of a Poet (1978) was possibly inspired by Chinese painting when he invoked the image of

“... the young scholar under a pine tree

with the thin inward meaning of pine trees”

This delicate poem continues:

“Later the impure smells of the moon.

The heavy scratch of brushes on canvas

then the faint scratching of a charcoal twig

the infinitely silent fall of snow

then the light silence of the fallen snow,

the young scholar studies the pine tree.

Daybreak is perfect, a quiet brush

silently painting the sky with light.”

*

Not long before Wu Zhen completed the beautiful painting of a pine tree shown above, Lady Nijō wrote one of the classics of Japanese literature, Towazugatari (C.1307) - literally “An Unasked-For Tale”. 1

Here, pine trees appear in their guise as symbols of longevity:

*

Classification

Pines sit within the larger conifer family, which includes firs, spruces, larches, cedars, junipers and yews.

*

Britain has only one pine (the Scots pine, like the one on the farm I grew up on) and just two other conifers – the yew and the juniper. The Scots pine is a source of timber and creator of a natural habitat for many other species. I associate yews, which are found in churchyards, with death. And junipers with gin, of course. But if we look at TS Eliot’s poetry, we find that junipers may have other meanings.

And yews seemed to have other meanings for Eliot, too. He ended his poem Dry Salvages (the third part of Four Quartets, published in 1941) with

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

And towards the end of Little Gidding the last part of his quartet, he observes, rather gnomically, that

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration.

*

The tiny number of native conifers and single species of pine are now outnumbered by the many imported pines and firs in Britain, mostly cultivated for their timber.

Thomas Hardy, an acute chronicler of the English countryside, captures the displacement of native species by cultivated cash crops in his poem, The Pine Planters (Marty South’s Reverie), which is linked to his novel, The Woodlanders (1887).

In the novel, Giles Winterborne notes that “there was a thousand young fir-trees to be planted in a neighbouring spot which had been cleared by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands.”

The planting of these firs (or rather pines, as indicated by the poem’s title) is the setting for Marty South’s Reverie.

The scene in the novel and poem seems quite unlike that in Lady Nijō’s Towazugatari quoted from above. For one thing, the physically demanding nature of the work is emphasised.

We work here together
In blast and breeze.

I think it’s unlikely that the ex-emperors in Nijō’s story would have experienced the ceremony as physical labour.

The two scenes are united in one way. They both stress the pine’s longevity. But while the scene in Towazugatari invokes the image of the pines living gloriously for a thousand years, Hardy’s poem inhabits a bleaker universe. Marty imagines the pines in their grief at having to grow and suffer the “storm and drought” of nature:

Thus, all unknowing

For whom or what

We set it growing

In this bleak spot,

It still will grieve here

Throughout its time,

Unable to leave here,

Or change its clime;

Or tell the story

Of us to-day

When, halt and hoary,

We pass away.

Marty folds the story of her and Giles (for whom she has an unrequited love). The grieving here is ostensibly done by the tree but surely also by Marty. The tree is “unable to leave here” – rather like Marty, as it turns out. Adult trees are, after all, sessile – and so, in effect, is Marty.

*

The Pine Tree Riot.

In April 1772, the inhabitants of New Hampshire rioted against the British monarchy to protest the enforcement of the Broad Arrow Policy. This was a policy of the English government from 1691 to preserve tall trees in the American colonies, which were of critical use for the Royal Navy. It applied to Massachusetts from 1691 and was extended to New Hampshire in 1698.

A law was passed in 1722 but apparently it wasn’t strictly enforced until John Wentworth became governor of New Hampshire in 1766. It seems a rather barmy and authoritarian thing to do – a typical piece of authoritarian colonial rule.

I have to say I enjoyed Wikipedia’s summary card of the incident, especially the entries under “caused by” and “methods”.

*

I’m going to end, as I did in my essay on quail, with Shakespeare. This gives me an excellent excuse to quote from Richard II, which contains some of the poet’s most beautiful dramatic verse.

In Act 3, having been warned that his rival Bolinboke is gathering forces against him, Richard launches into this wonderful passage of verse:

Discomfortable cousin! know’st thou not

That when the searching eye of heaven is hid,

Behind the globe, that lights the lower world,

Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen

In murders and in outrage, boldly here;

But when from under this terrestrial ball

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines

And darts his light through every guilty hole,

Then murders, treasons and detested sins,

The cloak of night being pluck’d from off their backs,

Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves?

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,

Who all this while hath revell’d in the night

Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,

Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,

His treasons will sit blushing in his face,

Not able to endure the sight of day,

But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

Richard arrogantly and fatuously compares himself to the sun, cleansing the world of the traitor Bolingbroke (spoiler: he’s the future Henry IV).

But I find the image of that sun as it “fires the proud tops of the eastern pines“ to be simply wonderful.

And the choice of the trees may not be incidental: pines grow tall and straight – like his own (imagined) majesty.

Then in Act 5, Richard, now in custody and facing imprisonment and death, laments,

I toward the north,

Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime;

My wife to France: from whence, set forth in pomp,

She came adorned hither like sweet May,

Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.

Here we return to the other meaning of ‘pine’ mentioned above.

The word clearly no longer stands for the upright and sunlit tree he mentioned in his earlier glorious speech, dismissing Bolingbroke. The use of ‘pine’ here describes the huge change in Richard’s fortune and marks the passage from glorious sun king to sad prisoner, longing for better days on his way to his death.

It strikes me as remarkable how, through the changing use of this one word, ‘pine’, Shakespeare economically but powerfully traces the arc of his protagonist’s fate.

Not every journey is a pilgrimage. Not every search is a quest.

But spring has arrived in full bloom here in the northern hemisphere, and that is the time when the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set off to visit a holy site in the east of England:

In modern English: 1

When that April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced root deep,

And bathed each vein with liquor of such power

That engendered from it is the flower,

When Zephyrus too with his gentle strife,

To every field and wood, has brought new life



Then people long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers who seek out foreign strands,

To far-off shrines, renowned in sundry lands.

And this spring I have found myself setting out in search of something. In my case, it was a flower – the humble Japanese primrose (Primula sieboldii).

Here it’s known as the サクラソウ or ‘sakurasō’. The name is usually written in katakana, as above, but its Chinese characters add something to its attraction. 桜草 literally means “cherry-blossom grass” or “cherry-blossom plant”.

Unlike Chaucer’s assorted group of travellers, I have never thought of myself as a pilgrim. Even as a tourist I usually travel without much direction. I guess you’d say I’m an aimless rambler.

But this was a flower I had to track down.

*

I recently wrote of the AI man arriving in a blaze of speed down the lane of the Devon farm where I grew up in the 1960s. The tarmacked track was banked by solid hedgerows, and at the lower end near the farmhouse was a grassy bank where effervescent yellow was refracted through the bright dew of morning. The source of this enchanting light was the primroses (Primula vulgaris).

I was reminded of this sight when I recently came across Tom Disch’s poem, “Memories of a Primrose”, which begins,

Always the mornings

were miracles of delight

The English word “primrose” seems to derive from “prima rosa”, literally the first rose of the year. They were true harbingers of spring, and even my childish self recognised their special beauty. And I know they also meant a lot to my mother.

I think it was this childhood memory of the primroses that spurred me to set off in search of ‘sakurasō’, so many years later and with a distance of many miles.

*

My haphazard research first told me of a sakurasō festival at a park near the Arakawa River. So one afternoon, I took two buses through an industrial landscape along the edge of Tokyo and eventually found myself in the park.

Skirting a lake that used to be part of the river, I soon arrived at the site of the festival. It looked rather like someone’s garden or backyard had been shifted into the park, and it was covered in flowerpots. The “festival” was little more than a collection of potted garden sakurasō, which were cultivated by local enthusiasts and one or two local schools.

The volunteers on duty were friendly and apparently proud of their work, though they seemed most interested in chatting to eachother. They were all dressed in rather fine, matching 法被 or “happi” jackets, which proudly displayed their affiliation to the festival.

The flowers themselves were a disappointment, however. There were some striking variations from the standard pink of Primula sieboldii, but generally the primroses did not seem to be flourishing. And while plum blossoms, like sakura, always seem to gain in effect when many are seen together, the effect here of the collected plant pots seemed to be one of diminution.

And anyway, I wasn’t really looking for a collection of potted plants. What I really wanted to see were wild primroses. The plants growing in their natural habitat were central to the story that had led me to this part of Tokyo, going back to the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan.

*

None other than Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543 – 1616), the first Tokugawa Shogun and one of the great unifiers of Japan, came across these plants growing in their natural habitat along the marshy flanks of the river.

He was out hunting with hawks along the Arakawa River when he saw the primroses. He was enchanted by them and ordered some plants to be taken back to Edo Castle for cultivation. 2

It’s an incongruous image: fierce Ieyasu, the warrior who united his country by force, chancing upon these flowers with delight in the wet, marshy lands along this powerful river.

But it appears that his enthusiasm for the charming and vibrant pink flower in a landscape of dark green was genuine. And it set in motion a fashion for cultivating the flower that lasted right through the Edo era and into the 21st century. 3

The flower has also caught the attention of Japanese poets. This haiku is attributed to one of the most celebrated poets of the Edo period, Kobayashi Issa (1763—1828):

*

These days with the river rerouted and tamed and with warmer weather drying up the land, the flower’s natural habitat is dwindling.

Meanwhile, the spring was progressing. Was I too late to see any wild sakurasō this year? Or indeed, were there any left to see?

More hurried research led me to online reports of a small pink flower along the banks of the Arakawa a little further downriver. So the following Sunday I took a couple of trains to take a look for myself. It was a day of bright sunshine and heat that almost felt like the start of summer. Arriving at the river, I saw that, as so often in this area, part of the old river flood plain was given over to baseball fields, and games were in full, raucous swing. Along the banks I saw a rich carpeting of small pink flowers. Had I found the sakurasō?

Hurrying to investigate, I soon realised my mistake. These lovely flowers were not sakurasō but shibazakura (芝桜 - Phlox subulata). The Japanese name means “lawn cherry blossoms”. It’s not native to Japan but rather to North America and was introduced here during the Edo period. It creates some spectacular displays, and I enjoyed seeing it in full flower, but it was not what I was looking for.

I had only one more lead to follow. Upriver, there was, according to Google Maps, something called “Tajimagahara Sakurasō Habitat”. Perhaps I might find a wild sakurasō there?

A twenty-minute walk took me to the next station, and then two trains later I was walking again, this time for about 40 minutes, hoping to get to the park where this habitat was located before the light faded. Wandering through a landscape of pylons, flood barriers and embankments I recognised from a previous hike in the area, I was glad of my sunhat and water flask in the warm afternoon sun.

Reaching the top of a low hill, I finally saw it – an expanse of green in the distance, fenced off and signposted as Sakurasō Habitat, one of the ten Natural Monuments which had been the first designated under a new law in 1920.

As I approached, I saw signs mentioning a festival, and I could hear music in the distance. I hurried forward in expectation. As I got closer, however, I saw that the tall dark grass showed no specks of colour as I had expected. Were all the flowers gone?

And the music, though welcome, came from a brass band rehearsing in another corner of the park and from individual musicians who’d come to practise out of earshot of their neighbours’ apartments. There was no sign of a festival in progress.

I stopped in front of the fenced enclosure and peered hopefully into the grassy green depths. Nothing. Not a sign of the sakurasō either.

Tired, thirsty, and disheartened, I sat in the shade of a tree and despondently ate the snack I’d picked up at a convenience store near the station. Meanwhile, the music continued: I could hear the wistful sound of trumpets and horns through the trees at one edge of the park. A breeze sprang up – one of Chaucer’s spring zephyrs? And children were excitedly learning to ride bicycles guided by anxious fathers on the nearby paths.

And soon, despite my disappointment at not finding the flower I came to see, I felt myself relaxing, overcome not by tiredness but by calm enjoyment of the afternoon in the park. Maybe I had missed the sakurasō, but here I had found a welcome harmony, a gentle and relaxed scene that soothed away the frustrations and exertions of the day.

*

As the sun began to get lower, I set off for home, walking back past the green expanses of grass. As I did so, I noticed a man, a little older than me, with the tell-tale lanyard of a volunteer, walking along one of the paths that crossed the protected fields of green. He stopped and knelt to put something in the ground before getting up and moving on. I followed him and saw that he’d placed a simple wooden marker next to a pink flower almost entirely hidden by the long grass.

It was a sakurasō. At last I’d found one! I looked around and saw two (or perhaps it was three) others. A meagre haul for a day’s journeying, perhaps, just a few tiny pink flowers shyly huddled in a wide thicket of grass.

But the joy I felt on seeing them took me back to my days on the farm and those first twinkling lights of spring. As my spirits rose, I wondered if this was the same spot where the great Shogun had first lost his heart to the flower. I could now understand how he might have felt.

Unlike Chaucer’s motley crew of pilgrims, I hadn’t come in search of a holy site. But the sight of those tiny flowers in the fading afternoon did make this, in the words of the “Pardoner’s Tale”, its own “perfect glorious pilgrimage” and the ideal prologue to the arriving beauty of spring.

3

The great military leader’s delight in the primrose reminded me of Jocelyn Brooke's hauntingly beautiful series of novels, The Orchid Trilogy (1948-50):

“The Military Orchid had taken on a kind of legendary quality, its image seemed fringed with the mysterious and exciting appurtenances of soldiering, its name was like a distant bugle-call, thrilling and rather sad, a cor au fond du bois.

The idea of a soldier, I think, had come to represent for me a whole complex of virtues which I knew that I lacked, yet wanted to possess: I was timid, a coward at games, terrified of the aggressively masculine, totemistic life of the boys at school, yet I secretly desired, above all things, to be like other people. These ideas had somehow become incarnated in Orchis militaris.”

This passage is from page 3 of The Orchid Trilogy in my Picador edition. You can read about the trilogy here. Brooke’s beautiful image of the “cor au fond du bois” seems to come from Alfred de Vigny’s poem, Le Cor (1826), which begins,

J’aime le son du Cor, le soir, au fond des bois.

“I love the sound of the horn in the evening, deep in the woods”.

.

Dear Readers and Supporters of the English Republic of Letters,

Welcome to all new subscribers!

I’m currently busy with other projects – which include enjoying the spring weather and flowers in this part of the world – so I have no new writing to offer you right now. I hope there will be new posts coming along soon, however.

Meanwhile, here’s a post from the archive, originally published a year ago.

Thank you all for reading.

Jeffrey

I’d probably never have read Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander if I hadn’t followed an old-fashioned English syllabus at university. Marlowe is mostly known these days as a writer of plays, a rival of Shakespeare’s, and, perhaps most of all, for being murdered. 1

I loved the poem, and I still have the book of his poetry and translations I bought all those years ago at university. If the story of Romeo and Juliet brought out some of the best of Shakespeare, the story of Hero and Leander, which has some similarities as a tragic love tale, inspired Marlowe to write some of his most beautiful verse.

Marlowe may or may not have been the poet referred to in Shakespeare’s sonnet 86 when he wrote “the proud full sail of his great verse", but he’d deserve those words of praise for this work alone.

Here he is writing with a deft touch about the first physical contact between the two lovers:

He started up, she blushed as one ashamed,

Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.

He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled.

Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.

These lovers parleyed by the touch of hands;

True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Marlowe’s readers would have been familiar with the original Greek myth and thus known that the two lovers cannot escape their fate. As Marlowe sums it up:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is overruled by fate.

Love is seen as a force that knows no degrees but comes at once with all its energy or not at all, as in the famous lines:

Where both deliberate, the love is slight:

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

However, the poem’s sumptuous and erotic language cannot disguise an undercurrent of violence. Marlowe uses, for example, an extended military metaphor as Leander tries to seduce Hero:

Yet ever, as he greedily assayed

To touch those dainties, she the harpy played,

And every limb did, as a soldier stout,

Defend the fort, and keep the foeman out.

And even Marlowe’s description of night falling is as powerfully violent as it is forcefully beautiful:

But he the bright day-bearing car prepared

And ran before, as harbinger of light,

And with his flaring beams mocked ugly night,

Till she, o’ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,

Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage.

*

In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are separated by family allegiances. In Hero and Leander, the lovers are separated by water in the form of the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles). This stretch of water had long loomed large in the Greek imagination. The dividing point between Asia and Europe, it was previously the site of the famous crossing by the troops of Xerxes the Great in 480 BCE, an amazing feat of engineering and a pivotal point in the Persian Wars.

One mile wide at its shortest point, it’s a notoriously treacherous waterway, but Leander manages to swim across it often to spend the night with Hero.

At the time I came to read the poem, I was also discovering love for the first time. For the first year, the woman I loved was just a trip by bus and underground away. Later, a four-hour flight out to a small island in the Atlantic separated us.

Unlike Leander, I didn’t need to produce any heroics to bridge the gap but just save up for an airfare. I didn’t need to swim the “rising billows” of the “narrow toiling Hellepont” but simply get myself to Stansted Airport to catch a cheap flight to Tenerife.

The heroically determined Leander had to suffer being pulled down by the dangerous waters to meet his love:

Leander strived; the waves about him wound,

And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground

Was strewed with pearl, and in low coral groves

Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves.

All I needed to do was sit in my seat and be jostled by turbulence over the ocean for a few hours in the charge of the unsinging cabin crew.

But at least I was travelling, to use Marlowe’s words:

Much like a globe ...

By which love sails to regions full of bliss.

And many times since, at the end of long journeys around the globe that he could barely have imagined, I have experienced the feeling that Marlowe captured so well when describing Leander’s return home after seeing Hero:

Home when he came, he seemed not to be there,

But, like exiled air thrust from his sphere,

Set in a foreign place.

*

Caught up in my own story as well as the sheer romance and beauty of Marlowe’s poem, I never imagined that one day I’d see the Hellespont (Dardanelles) for myself.

But in 2007 I found myself working in Turkey. And my duties took me to the town of Çanakkale on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, to visit British artist Mark Wallinger’s ‘Sinema Amnesia’, part of an EU-funded arts project that my employer, the British Council, was managing.2

And viewing the swirling waters near this artwork, I realised that we weren’t far from where the ferocious 1915 battle for Gallipoli (Gelibolu Muharebesi in Turkish) had taken place. This bitter campaign between Ottoman and Allied forces led to the death of over 100,000 soldiers.

One of those killed was Jean Verdenal, a friend of the poet TS Eliot, who later dedicated his Poems 1909-1925 to his friend:

To Jean Verdenal

1889-1915

mort aux Dardanelles

Eliot also used an epigraph from Dante’s Divine Comedy, words spoken by the Roman poet Statius and addressed to his revered predecessor, Virgil:

Or puoi la quantitate

Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,

Quando dismento nostra vanitate,

Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.

(You may see the measure of the love which

warms me towards you

When I forget our insubstantiality

Treating shades as if they were solid and real)

(Translation by John Peter)

Some have also suggested that Verdenal’s death influenced Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), and that he was the inspiration for Phlebas the Phoenician (“a fortnight dead”) in the Death By Water section.

But as I stood by those waters, I also recalled that Leander’s feat of swimming the Hellespont had caught the imagination of another poet, Lord Byron. On 3 May, 1810, he swam it himself in emulation of Leander’s epic journey and was very proud of the fact: “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”

Byron’s short poem about the feat is playful rather than full of vainglory, however:

For me, degenerate modern wretch,

Though in the genial month of May,

My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,

And think I’ve done a feat today. 3

*

Two years later, another adventurer came along, following in Byron’s footsteps (and his wake) around the Aegean: the actor Rupert Everett, who was making a documentary called The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron.

Keen to emulate Byron (and Leander), Everett bravely attempted to swim the Hellespont but had to give up; it’s now a busy shipping lane, with large cargo ships constantly ploughing through the straits, a real hazard to swimmers.

But the actor attempted less arduous feats, too. He attended a reception hosted by the consul general for a group of visiting ministers and officials. They were attending a conference regarding Turkey’s relationship with the EU. This was held in Pera House, which was constructed as the first purpose-built British embassy starting in 1844— a successor to the building that Byron had visited during his own visit to what was then called Constantinople. It’s a grand building, overlooking the waters of the Golden Horn, described to me, though, by one previous inhabitant as “sub-optimal for modern diplomacy”.

However, Pera House was a superb venue for this reception, and you can watch Everett attending it on this YouTube video. 4

*

Killed on 30 May 1593, Marlowe left Hero and Leander incomplete. The poem was finished by George Chapman, now most famous as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus, or Ulysses, also sailed through the Hellespont).

Like Marlowe, the fictional Leander met an early death. In his case, he drowned, “bruised and torn” – to use Chapman’s words – when the light from the lighthouse that used to guide him blew out on a stormy night.

O sweet Leander, thy large worth I hide

in a short grave

exclaims Chapman, before dispatching Hero with an even shorter grave of words:

And with Leander’s name she breathed her last.

Byron survived his swim across the Hellespont (despite catching “ague”), but, years later, he would succumb to fever while supporting the fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1824.

*

The last time I left my current “foreign place” and travelled across the globe to London, I took a fast train down to the city of Canterbury. Leaving the station, I crossed the river (fortunately, there’s a bridge) and made my way to the city centre. There I visited the cathedral, the centre of the worldwide Anglican communion. I also found it to be, to a remarkable degree, a museum celebrating England’s history (Henry IV is buried there) and above all commemorating its wars. A striking number of individual and collective war memorials are on display there.

In this most official of English buildings, the repository of so much pageantry and pomp, it came almost as a surprise to recall that Marlowe, called by some a heretic or “magician”, was born in Canterbury. In the city, though, there’s a theatre and a moment in his honour. The other visible sign of him was the hollowed-out tower of the church where he was christened in 1564.

Apparently, Marlowe attended the King’s School, which is very near the cathedral, a building he would have known well.

According to one account, “Elizabethan schoolboys spent much of their time being told what they had to believe without ever being given intellectual reasons for doing so.”

At the same time, they were let loose on the pagan classics, which included Ovid, Catullus and, of course, Virgil. Perhaps it’s little wonder that Marlowe (who would be accused of atheism shortly before his death) seemed to relish the pagan theology around Hero along with her beauty:

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus’ nun,

As Nature wept, thinking she was undone.

As I stood amid the almost oppressive orthodoxy and gloom of the cathedral, it was difficult to envisage Marlowe’s deviation from dour Elizabethan religious norms. It was much easier, astonishingly, in the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to imagine Marlowe’s brutal death, which the violence in his unfinished poem seems to prefigure.

Because the cathedral is, of course, famous as the site of the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. He was killed by four knights keen to act on the intemperate words of their monarch, Henry II.

The king had apparently said, with reference to Becket, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” The knights (along with a cleric) took this as a regal command.

TS Eliot, long after his friend Verdenal’s untimely death, wrote a play about Becket’s martyrdom. In Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written in the long run-up to the Second World War, the doomed Archbishop Becket muses at one point,

...from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others' experience.

As I stood in the massive cathedral’s transept, these words seemed to express the crisscrossing patterns of history and legend ricocheting in my mind while I thought of Marlowe’s last poem and the turbulent waters of the Hellespont.

At that moment, surrounded by the stone tombs of kings and bishops and countless memorials to those fallen in war, I began to wonder if the dead weren’t beginning to whisper their own versions of history to me.

I even imagined I could hear Marlowe parsing the Latin of Virgil or Ovid while huddled over his desk at school in Canterbury, just a few hundred yards from where I stood. The vast building seemed to reverberate with the voices of the past.

But I shook my head at these unheard sounds and at my folly. Because I felt the danger of drifting too far into the shadows of antiquity, of becoming a captive to the unrelenting ghosts of history.

That’s what happened, after all, to the poet Statius in Dante’s Divine Comedy: about to leave purgatory, he declared he’d be willing to stay there a year longer, in defiance of the rules of the place, if only he could have lived in the time of his revered Virgil.

And I began to fear that if I stayed too long listening to those murmurs in the towering stone building, I could grow too warmly attached to them and that, like Statius, I might find myself “treating shades as if they were solid and real”.

MIRANDA:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world
That has such people in ’t!

PROSPERO:

’Tis new to thee.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.

You’d hear him before you saw him. The car in low gear, engine thrashing, the tyres whooshing over the cowpat-spattered farm lane.

Then the car would pull into sight and skid slightly as it passed the entrance to the house and headed to the lower part of the yard and the grey bars of the yard next to the milking parlour before sliding to a halt. This wasn’t an emergency; the hurry must have come from some innate sense of urgency in the work or perhaps just sheer joy of tackling the country lanes and farm tracks as a rally driver would. Out of the dark green Ford Escort (they all seemed to drive the same colour and make of car), heavily splattered with mud and dung, would jump Bill, or John, or Dave.

The AI man had arrived.

This was rural Devon in the 1960s. The word ‘computer’ was hardly, if ever, uttered. And though algorithms stretch back centuries in human history to perhaps the Babylonians, and the term derives from the 9th-century Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, known as the “father of algebra”, the word was a stranger to those parts of rural England in the mid-20th century.

For us, AI meant one thing: artificial insemination of cattle.

The routine was always the same. Bill, John, or Dave would open the back of his car and take out what looked a bit like a coolbox for the beach. When he opened it, steam seemed to appear – actually CO₂, dry ice – but I didn’t know that then. He’d load up an impossibly long syringe and place an arm-length plastic glove on his right arm and head for the milking parlour, where one of the cows had been secured by my father. He’d then plunge his arm up to the shoulder inside the flinching cow, and very soon it was all over.

The artificial insemination man, or AI man, as he was known, had done his job. A brief signing of forms would follow, a quick chat with my father, and he’d be on his way again, engine roaring as he departed from the slippery yard at the Ford Escort equivalent of escape velocity. The honorary sire of entire herds of cows, he probably never gave a second glance at his progeny, who were glancing incuriously at his accelerating vehicle from the nearby fields.

Growing up on the dairy farm, I never saw a bull. Having heard my father’s stories about them – more than once as a young farm worker he’d had to take action to save himself from the ire of a Jersey bull – I was glad about this. 1

My father was very keen on selecting the right bloodlines for this milking herd. He was no scientist but a firm believer in the usefulness of science nonetheless. And no doubt he owed a debt to pioneers in selective breeding, such as George Coates, whose 1822 herd book for the Shorthorn breed was arguably the first pedigree herd book for cattle in the world.

My father was an heir, in a sense, to the Agricultural Revolution. His was a world that looked backwards to hundreds of years of labour and wisdom in the fields of England. But it also looked to the present and the presumed future of insatiable demand for more food for an ever-growing population. 2 Science was a part of that future.

Working on a small farm on mortgaged land and, for years, owning a healthy (read: terrifying) debt with the bank, my father needed to “maximise productivity” and get the best milking cows he could. It was a question of economic survival – and it was in sync with the then-current demands of the country, which demanded milk and, via the Milk Marketing Board, would guarantee to buy whatever you produced at a minimum price (that would all change within a couple of decades). My father was lucky – he lived in a time when he could make a living from the way of life he’d always wanted.

*

My father’s data repository, apart from his head, was not a spinning hard disc or even punched cards. They were the slurry-spattered paper records kept in the milking parlour with a bulldog clip and some string hanging from a hook screwed into the cement wall. These were the key genealogical documents he needed to preserve. Sometimes the records would appear indoors, awkwardly straddling the two distinct worlds of home hearth and farmyard, the latter normally kept at bay by a dim porch and a rarely locked wooden door. Here he might check records and measure results. Like the AI man, he knew his job.

Looking back, the visits of the AI man were an odd introduction to reproduction. Country kids are supposed to be acquainted with the “facts of life”, but the facts I learnt through the AI man’s ritual visits weren’t exactly the stuff of country lore or even natural biology. I confess that years later, when I read Aldous Huxley’s chilling novel, Brave New World, its depiction of the careful breeding of humans felt weirdly familiar.

These days, another kind of AI is plunging us into a new world with very few brakes being applied. A regular user of AI (the digital kind) for my day job, I’m sceptical of claims of its proximity to real intelligence. A tool that sometimes (in my experience, at least) doesn’t know what day it is doesn’t seem poised to take over the world.

But I am also a little unnerved by the way the field has swung from one of curiosity and caution to its current incarnation as a tempest sweeping up all available computer chips and memory, monopolising energy supplies and bringing abrupt and uncontrolled change and challenges to schools, universities and offices. 3

*

My father’s coveted brave new world, however, went no further than to have a thriving dairy farm, which had been his somewhat quixotic boyhood dream growing up in the naval city of Portsmouth. And although he used methods and techniques based on science, most of the success he enjoyed came from arduous manual labour, coupled with a deep understanding of animal husbandry gained from practical experience.

As Bill, John, or Dave drove off at 60 mph up the small farm lane for their next appointment, my father would already be turning his attention to shoring up the plastic covers on the silage pit or mending a broken fence. He’d plan ahead as far as he could, but the future event he’d mostly look to would be the birth of the calf in nine months’ time.

With luck, it would be a heifer, an excellent milker like her mother. She’d become a welcome addition to the herd that would help keep milk production high and the overdraft tolerably low. After a few summers grazing the green Devon pastures and a visit from the AI man, she’d give birth to her own calf from a carefully selected and invisible sire.

And the cycle would begin again.

Dear Supporters of the English Republic of Letters,

As I was drafting the essay which I eventually called Almost all songs are possible, I found that the connections between my experiences and essays I was reading began to proliferate quickly.

At first, I tried to make that essay the vessel for all the connected ideas. But eventually I realised I had on my hands what Amanda Bray has called a “ballooning” essay. So I decided to fill another balloon, cut the guy ropes, and tether it somewhere else.

The published essay was short, and the exhibition called For the sake of a single verse was at the heart of my reflections. But I didn’t want to completely lose sight of the other content, so I have untied the errant balloon, let about half of its hot air out, and pulled it gently into the confines of this Supporter Sidebar.

Read more

Dear Subscribers,

Here’s a post that I had a lot of fun researching last year. I hope you will enjoy reading it again or – for the many new subscribers since then – for the first time.

Thank you for visiting the English Republic of Letters!

Jeffrey

Arriving at the former house of Japanese writer Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951) this winter, the first thing I noticed was the tall bamboo culms (stems) that dominate the entrance. Hayashi had enthusiastically planted a lot of bamboo, a plant she loved. It had apparently once covered much of the garden. Thanks to her, in the typically brilliant winter sunshine of Tokyo, I was able to enjoy the komorebi (木漏れ日, the Japanese word for the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees), which for me has a special quality seen through a bamboo grove.

Hayashi was proud of her garden, proud of the house she’d designed, inspired by residences she’d seen in Kyoto. It’s now a museum in her honour. The garden was a main feature, but unlike the poet Shiki, whose house I’d visited earlier in the year, she didn’t gaze at it much from her study – apparently her sight wasn’t very good, and she even had to press herself up against the paper to see what she was writing.

However, the room seemed cosier than that of Soseki and well equipped with a huge teapot. And while Shiki had his sister to look after him, Hayashi wouldn’t let anyone in her study, which she insisted on cleaning herself. I doubt if Shiki ever did a lot of housework.

The quiet calm of the house made me think of the one that features in her late story, Late Chrysanthemum (1948), in which a geisha’s former lover, Tabe, coarsened by war and the realities of post-war life in Tokyo, visits the geisha, Kin, to ask her for a loan:

Tabe was mystified by the way Kin lived, by the way the cruel world outside had, it appeared, left life in this house completely untouched.

*

Like Soseki, Hayashi had a difficult childhood. Hayashi faced rejection from her father, who refused to recognise her legitimacy, and then took a geisha mistress, causing Hayashi and her mother to leave home. Her mother then remarried, this time to a much younger man, and together they eked out a living as peddlers in the coal-mining region of northern Kyushu.

After finishing school, Hayashi relocated to Tokyo, where she supported herself working as a maid, a factory worker, and a café waitress while writing and seeking a literary career. Hayashi’s poverty in early life also sets her aside from Soseki, and her work, though well-known in Japan, is not, as far as I know, part of the school curriculum in the way his is.

Hayashi’s most famous work is Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki), a semi-autobiographical novel which was published in 1930. This work and some of her other stories, such as The Accordion and the Fish Town (1931), invite comparison with the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). But unlike the Eton-educated Orwell, Hayashi had no privilege behind her. And nor did she turn to politics as a main theme, though it’s certainly present in her writing.

There is instead a definite lyricism in her work, and I find the light and shade combine beautifully in her writing, rather like a literary form of komorebi. For instance, in Diary of a Vagabond, the narrator is initially scathing about the conditions of the factory she’s working in.

Morning to night we daubed on primary colours, wriggling like earthworms in a warped factory hidden away from the sun. Slowly but surely, without respite, they squeezed from us long hours, youth, and health. Pity overwhelmed me whenever I looked at the faces of all the young women.

She then continues, however,

But wait. Just think of how the kewpie dolls and butterfly barrettes we made festively decorated the heads of poor children. It was probably all right to smile a little bit beneath that window. 1

The compassion of the writing shines through here, as well as a determination to see the brighter side of life, despite the darkness that surrounded her. Perhaps this was a survival strategy that drove her on through the hard times she had to endure.

I wrote in relation to Shiki and his friend Soseki about their troubled relationship with modernity. The critic Joan Ericson has written of Hayashi in terms of the impact of modernity too, but for her it’s not just a spiritual issue but a physical, even visceral one:

In my view the originality and power of her work are rooted in...the clarity and immediacy with which she was able to convey the humanity of those occupying the underside of Japanese society. She captured the resilience of people who existed on the margin and the ever-resurgent tenacity of those for whom modernity was an unrelenting catastrophe. 2

A moving example of this solidarity is from Diary of a Vagabond when the narrator describes the solidarity she finds in the women who, like her, are working on the fringes of society:

Despite its location at the exit of the red-light district, this shop was surprisingly quiet. I was able to become friends with the other waitresses right away. No matter how ill-natured or hard-boiled they might be at first, no matter how guarded and without the least inclination to be friendly or altruistic, at some point women working in a place like this open up to reveal their true selves. They suddenly lower this guard, and, as if they'd been fast friends for years, they're closer than sisters. When the customers had gone, we would often curl up like snails in a circle and talk. 3

An element of Hayashi and her narrators’ resilience is their love of poetry; not only poems but the magic and the wonder of the everyday. Diary of a Vagabond is full of quotes of poems from her or other writers, and amid the grimness of daily life, she’s determined to see the beauty in it too.

Hayashi will switch from realism to a kind of poetic lyricism in her descriptions of the world she observes.

In my two-mat room the earthen pot, the rice bowls, the cardboard rice bin, and the wicker clothes basket, together with the small desk all stood firm, as if my lifetime debt. The morning sun sparkled through the transom and streamed above my futon laid out diagonally, dividing the room. The dust danced in stripes over my head. Where exactly blew the wind of revolution? You Japanese radicals certainly knew many clever words. I wondered exactly what kind of fairy tales the socialists were inventing. Exactly how much longer did we have to separate newborn babies by class, babies puffier than brown rice buns, by choosing for them a silk or a cotton diaper? 4

The narrator’s emphasis on self-reliance and independence – from employers, from politics, from family and especially from men – extended even to religion. In one striking outburst in Diary of a Vagabond she says,

I could hear a faraway Salvation Army brass band playing, "Come to me, all ye who believe, to your Savior." What was this "ye who believe" stuff? If you couldn't believe in yourself, you couldn't believe in Jesus or Buddha. Poor people didn't have time to believe. What was this religion that they even advertised with a brass band? They didn't have to worry about making ends meet. So it was "Come to me, all ye who believe," huh? I'd had enough of such dour music. I wanted a spring song. I'd rather be retching my guts out, crushed by a nobleman's car on the beautiful streets of the Ginza, than listening to this. 5

*

Hayashi’s Diary of a Vagabond sold very well and was made into a film in 1935. The book’s success made her money and eventually allowed her to buy the plot of land in Tokyo where she’d build the lovely house she spent her last few years in. And the films made from her work and the success of a long-running play about her early life have helped to keep her name well known in Japan.

But she is relatively little known outside Japan. Her works are not readily available in English. We’re indebted to Joan Ericson for including Diary of a Vagabond in her excellent critical study Be a Woman. But it would be wonderful to see a collected works appear in English.

After the war, with mournful elegance, Hayashi captured the state of the burnt-down Japanese capital in her story Downfall (1947):

The most beautiful lights that civilisation had left behind flickered here and there in the devastated city. From somewhere came the sound of a steam train. The toot of the train’s whistle rang out mournfully over a scorched field and out towards the night sky. It was silent all around, except for the occasional passing car or train, as if declaring that Tokyo’s nights would remain desolate for all eternity. 6

*

Wandering around the grounds of her garden this winter, I imagined a writer who, despite the destruction she’d lived through, looked back with justifiable pride at how her work had brought her financial security and a reputation as one of Japan’s leading writers.

But having survived such hardships and the war, Hayashi did not live into old age to enjoy her hard-won tranquillity, dying of heart disease in 1951. Her friend, the Nobel laureate for literature Yasunari Kawabata, spoke at her funeral.

I don't have a record of what Kawabata said about her on that occasion. But from her own writings, the words that I think best sum up her remarkable life are the beautiful, buoyant words from The Accordion and the Fish Town as she considers the light and shades of life:

The moon wanes and the wild goose flies high, but no matter how miserable things get, as long as my body is in one piece there must be a way to get through it all. 7

“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls.” This was how John Donne began one of his verse letters to his university friend Sir Henry Wotton, who later became English Ambassador to the Republic of Venice.

Wotton was himself a prolific letter writer and a polyglot. On his way to take up his post in Venice, he inscribed the words “Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causa” in an album amicorum, which was somewhere between a modern guestbook and a LinkedIn profile. The sentence can be translated as “the ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the sake of his country.” 1

Back in the 20th century, while in public service overseas (and, of course, never sent to lie to anyone), the letters home I would write to my parents probably didn’t allow me to “mingle souls” with them, but they were important to me. I hope they were for my parents, too.

Donne’s letter to Wotton would have taken some time to reach him at the turn of the 17th century. This delay was still a feature of letters at the time I was writing them, three hundred years later. It would sometimes be two weeks before my parents would receive a letter from Quito or Kyoto, and even if they replied immediately, I might not receive the reply for another two weeks. So if I’d asked a question, like “how’s X?”, I might have had to wait a month for the answer.

These days, of course, we are accustomed to the near-instant receipt of messages irrespective of distance. And we fret when things don’t arrive or are not read immediately. Perhaps we were more patient back then.

It’s likely that time delays will affect radio communications between astronauts elsewhere in the solar system in the future. But this would probably be nothing like that experienced by earlier human explorers and colonisers.

In the early 19th century, letters between Britain and its Australian colony could take six months or more to arrive. This kind of extreme delay in a correspondence was highlighted in typically brilliant and hyperbolic fashion by Charles Lamb. Writing to a friend in Australia, he said, “The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination.” 2

He goes on to ask, in frustration, at the time lapse between writing and receipt,

What security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before you get it unaccountably turn into a lie?

He continues:

It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one’s thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity.

Even the language itself might change or fall into disuse, he says, during such a long passage:

My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you.

*

In reality, even if the language doesn’t change between dispatch and receipt of the letter, the correspondent’s own condition or feelings are likely to. I was reminded of this aspect of letter writing when I recently read Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, A View of the Harbour 3

Here the delay in transmission from a schoolboy at boarding school to his mother, Tory, leads to a result which is pathetically comedic as the mother reads out the letter from Edward to her friend, Beth:

‘Dear Mummy,’ Tory read, ‘I hope you are well I am. Please send envelopes. It is not very nice here. And stamps. I have a bad throat. Other boys have pots of honey. I am having a lovely time. Regards. Yours truly Edward.’

Tory’s friend, Beth, then comments:

‘Oh, dear,’ said Beth. ‘They just don’t think what they’re saying. They write what they can spell. I remember when Prudence went away once. She wrote: “I am in agony. I cannot say what.” When I telephoned, I discovered that she couldn’t spell diarrhoea — indeed, who can? — and was better anyway long before the letter arrived. I shouldn’t worry.’

The letters from Edward to Tory remind me of letters written by my father during the Second World War when he was briefly evacuated from the English naval port of Portsmouth. One of these began this way:

Dear mum,

Please send me some money and apples and other things to eat. I am not very happy here.4

*

Both the fictional Edward in A View of the Harbour and my father were disarmingly honest and straightforward in their communication. This sincerity can fade under the pressures of later life. Sometimes that might be for good reasons. For example, like many young adults writing to my parents, from university onwards, I aimed to carefully manage the story I gave of my life, editing out incidents that might cause concern, such as getting lost in bandit country on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want them to worry.

However, sometimes the reasons for editing or embellishing the story might be more self-serving. A classic example of this is Hernán Cortés’s letters to Charles V of Spain. As a soldier who had gone rogue and disobeyed orders but then found himself successful in his campaign to conquer parts of Mexico for Spain, Cortés strove to put himself at the centre of a narrative that served exclusively the greater glory of Spain and its king. The letters were crucial in his attempt to create a favourable narrative about his actions and save himself both from the king’s wrath and the machinations of his enemies.

However, one feature of Cortés’s letters that was perhaps less self-serving was his astonishment at what he saw in this (to Europeans) new and strange land.

Decades ago when I lived in Spain, I was struck by something I read in a magazine interview with Gabriel García Márquez. As usual, he was asked about the term ‘magic realism’. Part of his slightly weary response was to cite – almost as an early example of the genre – those five letters sent by Hernán Cortés back to Spain.

Unlike the creeping obsolescence of language that Lamb imaginatively thought he was battling against, Cortés’ challenge, as García Márquez saw it, was to discover or create new words to describe the new sights – the magical new reality – that he was seeing.

In his second letter, he wrote,

I am fully aware that the account will appear so wonderful as to be deemed scarcely worthy of credit; since even when we who have seen these things with our own eyes, are yet so amazed as to be unable to comprehend their reality. 5

A more poetic and political description of a similar episode was by Jamaica Kincaid 6 In her essay In History, Kincaid writes of Christopher Columbus, “He couldn’t find enough words to describe what he saw before him: the people were new, the flora and fauna were new, the way the water met the sky was new, this world itself was new, it was the New World.”

For Kincaid, though, this naming in this case was a form of erasure, ignoring what came before.

Less politically, but also eloquently, Hazlitt wrote, “There are more things in nature than there are words in the English language, and he must not expect to lay rash hands on them all at once.” 7

My own letters were probably not very “exotic” in their content. Though I may have written about cuy in Ecuador. Or even about coyote in Mexico. Both are words that entered Spanish from local languages, as the animals were not found in Europe. 8

*

I often found myself putting off writing a letter home, and not only because I was stumped for words to use but also because almost all writing, as we know, can be hard work. Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki, himself also a distant correspondent for part of his life, wrote about the difficulty of letter writing in his early novel Botchan (1906), where the eponymous hero baulks at writing home to his former maid and nanny Kiyo, who is like a mother to him.

Her request had been that I should write her a letter with more detailed news; so I must get it done with care. But as I took up the rolled letter-paper, I did not know with what I should begin, though I have many things to write about. Should I begin with that? That is too much trouble. Or with this? It is not interesting. Isn’t there something which will come out smoothly, I reflected, without taxing my head too much, and which will interest Kiyo. I grated the ink-cake, wetted the writing brush, stared at the letter-paper—stared at the letter-paper, wetted the writing brush, grated the ink-cake—and, having repeated the same thing several times, I gave up the letter writing as not in my line, and covered the lid of the stationery box.

Botchan sums it all up this way:

To write a letter was a bother. It would be much simpler to go back to Tokyo and see Kiyo.

I know what he means.

Sōseki’s hero gives up the idea of writing but is still wracked by guilt until he hits upon a useful bit of magical thinking:

Then I thought this way; If I am thinking of her from my heart, even at such a distance, my sincerity would find responsive appreciation in Kiyo. If it does find response, there is no need of sending letters. She will regard the absence of letters from me as a sign of my being in good health.

A distant correspondent like Botchan, I did at least commit pen to paper sometimes, though I was not as regular a writer as I should have been. There were perhaps times when I gave in to the weakness displayed both by Lamb and by Botchan and didn’t write for a few weeks at a time.

Botchan’s philosophy could be summarised as “it’s the thought that counts”. That’s often questionable wisdom. But I recall that my mother used to tell me that sometimes she would think through doing something (perhaps writing a letter to her son) and then somehow come to believe – really believe for a time – that the task was already completed. 9

There were, no doubt, months when no letter with a foreign stamp thumped onto the hallway carpet next to the front door of my parents’ house for a few weeks because the effort of writing across the “weary world of waters” had been too much for me.

But now I wonder whether, on such occasions, my mother – aware of her tendency to live her life in her own head – might have given me credit for following her practice – for having written marvellous letters in my mind just for her.

And if she did, perhaps the unhindered magic and the unchecked realism of those unwritten letters would echo in her heart just as much as – maybe even more than – any self-conscious or stilted missive I might actually have sent her.

Donne’s poem, from which I quoted at the start, continued in this way: “For thus, friends absent speak.”

Perhaps letters “mingling our souls” are not the only vessels to allow absent friends to speak. Maybe our thoughts, our hopes, and our solitary contemplations of love can also help us speak to those we love across the weary waters of the world.

As I stumbled from the Monet exhibition I wrote about recently, I found myself by chance in the middle of another.

I wasn’t really in the mood at that moment for more paintings. But somehow, the sense of the materiality and detail of life in For the Sake of a Single Verse 1 refreshed me after the ethereal paintings of Monet’s Water Lilies.

The painter was Ben Shahn, and he published this work in 1968, the year before his death at age 70. According to the exhibition notes, Shahn recalled encountering this novel during his stay in Paris after he moved there from America at the age of twenty-eight. He seems to have found an affinity with the following words from Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

I think I ought to begin working on something now that I’m learning to see. I’m twenty-eight and virtually nothing has happened. Let’s go back: I’ve written a study on Carpaccio, which is poor; a play entitled ‘Marriage’, which seeks to prove something false by means of ambiguities; and poems. Ah, but poems written early in life don’t amount to much. One should wait and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long –and as long a life as possible – then, at the very end, one might possibly write ten lines that are any good.

Rilke’s narrator goes on,

For poems aren’t, as people think, feelings (one has those early enough) ; they’re experiences. To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make as they open up in the morning.

The narrator goes on to list, rather beautifully, other experiences that need to be had to create poetry:

Roads in unfamiliar regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long before; one must be able to think back to those days in one’s childhood that are still unexplained, to one’s parents whom one could not help offending when they brought a delightful gift and one didn’t appreciate it (it was a delight for someone else), to those childhood illnesses which arose so peculiarly and with so many profound and difficult changes, to those days in peaceful and secluded rooms, and to those mornings by the sea, to the sea anywhere, to seas, to nights of travel that swept along high above, flying with the stars;

But Rilke’s hero, however, is not equating poetry with autobiography; the memories don’t form a story. The following passage suggests experiences only become poetry later and indirectly: “For the memories themselves are not important.”

They become a good poem “only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves.”

Stahn seems to have spent decades preparing for this exhibition – simply by living. Having gained all the experiences of a full life, which was then near its end, Stahn painted the experiences listed by Rilke’s narrator. The full quotation he was working from – a poet’s manifesto of intent, perhaps – was also part of the show:

As I wandered around the exhibition, thinly populated compared to the crowded lily ponds upstairs in the main gallery space, I found an echo of my own experience in many of the works.

I recalled, for example, the “mornings by the sea” I spent while accompanying my mother on her last summer in this world in the English seaside town she lived in.

I also remembered the many “roads in unfamiliar regions” I have travelled, from Ecuador to Japan, China to Mexico and Turkey to Egypt.

And “The Gestures of the Little Flowers” took me back to my childhood and the primroses that lined the hedge of the farm lane, bright yellow sentinels waving their welcome upon our return home from school.

I thought some of the paintings were beautiful. I can’t share them all, but here are some of my favourites.

Rilke wrote, after the novel’s publication,

Poor Malte begins so deep in misery and, in a strict sense, reaches to eternal bliss; he is a heart that strikes a whole octave: after him almost all songs are possible.

It’s a beautiful description. 2

And for me, Stahn’s use of the passage from Rilke and the yearning quality in many of his paintings certainly “strike a whole octave”.

But I think ultimately the exhibition persuasively contradicts this line I quoted earlier from the novel: “For the memories themselves are not important.”

This may be true for the poet, or at least in Rilke’s case. But seeing the power of Stahn’s paintings in this exhibition reminded me that the experiences we remember do matter, very much.

Hi everyone,

As I have been busy with other things, this week’s post isn’t quite ready to be sent out. So I am sending this post from a year ago. It will be new to some and a second chance to read for others.

Thank you as ever for visiting the English Republic of Letters.

Jeff

The town where I attended secondary school in the 1970s was in rural Devon and far from being cosmopolitan. It had apparently seen migration from other parts of the country in its distant heyday as a manufacturing town, but I wasn’t aware of that then. London, just two hundred miles away, seemed to belong to a different country altogether. Even those of us brought up on farms in the area hardly saw the local town as an outpost of civilisation, more of a refraction of our own cultural backwardness. The most exotic thing about the place was probably the smell of hops simmering in the local brewery that would blow across the school grounds a couple of times a week.

But the state school I went to became a catalyst for change, even a beacon for hope for those looking to escape. I was only dimly aware of this at the time, but looking back, the teachers, many from other parts of England and holding what were then still rare university degrees, brought a different perspective to our lives. This showed in the curriculum and also in the pioneering series of international exchanges that the school would embark upon about the time I arrived.

A keen rugby player, I spent most of my time in practice or playing matches—we sometimes had two or three fixtures a week—and I didn’t have a lot of time for other pursuits. To be honest, I wasn’t hugely interested in exploring other cultures. There wasn’t a big athlete vs the rest divide in the school, but I didn’t feel I had much in common with the small band of talented artists and musicians in the school.

In my first year I’d resisted learning the basics of musical notation from a teacher who seemed as old as—and no more interesting than—the composers he mentioned—Mozart, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky—and whose names I quickly forgot. But by the time I reached the third year at the school, there were some keen and progressive music teachers who sought to stir our interest in the subject.

Under duress, I’d learnt to emit a few feeble sounds from the recorder and even blew along in a school concert, but I didn’t feel drawn to music as a subject or a practice. I’d grown up in a household where nobody played an instrument. The music on the radio was just occasional background to a life in which everyone—my parents anyway—was just too busy to pay much attention to such things. I remember just one classical record perched on the shelf without its original cover at home—Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2, which my parents played once or twice. I know my mother enjoyed piano music, but I now wonder how that LP found its way into my parents’ meagre collection.

English state schools (they’d be called public schools in the US) aren’t famous for their wonderful infrastructure. Although this one had a fine old redbrick main building, many classes, including music and art, were taught in prefabricated cabins dotted around the school’s battered all-weather sports pitch. No doubt they were intended originally as temporary ways of dealing with expanded school numbers. Of course, they became permanent.

I think it was one day in early spring during the lunch break that I happened to be walking through the school grounds past one of these huts. Without any preamble, the sound of female voices floated out from inside the hut and stopped me in my stride. I don't remember if I was with anyone at the time, and almost certainly I wouldn’t have commented on the music. But it was without a doubt the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

We often talk of being transported by music, and this really did feel like a bodily experience, a kind of musical teleportation. I had no idea at the time what this music was or where it was from. But its beauty seemed like a new country being staked out in my heart.

I later found out that it was a section from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, The Polovtsian Dances, sung by girls of the school choir. They were probably rehearsing for a concert I had no thought of attending. The Polovtsian Dances exist in various forms and arrangements, but if you listen to the opening of this version, you will hear the piece exactly as I remember it.

This moment of pure joy didn’t create an instant transmutation. I didn’t become a performer or even a concertgoer overnight. But within a year, I’d find myself taking part in a major school musical production, urged on by the new music teachers.

But most importantly, I would gradually find music beginning to take a central place in my life—not only the pop or rock I listened to at home on the radio but also classical music, which I’d go on to explore widely at university. As I look back, I see that that moment outside the music hut was the starting point for that. It was as if a chain reaction had been set in motion.

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I also see now that the inclusion of this music into the school repertoire was part of an enlightened way of teaching “integrated studies", where music and art combined with the history and geography of Russia and America, our main topics that year in school. Both these great countries captured my imagination for their huge expanses of territory and dynamic history so different (it seemed to me then) from the rather stolid evolution of the small land of gently rolling farmland that I lived in.

These varied and engaging classes stimulated my mind and began to make me yearn to see more of the world. And I believe that hearing the beauty in that music by Borodin also got me to appreciate the classes even more.

We would read, later that spring, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1962, as the first account of Soviet labour camps. 1 The book left a huge impression on me in its account of the loss of liberty but also about how people struggle to thrive even in the most inhospitable of environments.

We also learnt of how the people suffered under the Tsars and the ultimate demise of the Romanovs. What I didn’t know then was that Borodin (1833-1887) was an education reformer as well as a doctor and chemist. If I’d heard his name then, I’d have said it belonged in the periodic table, and indeed he made important contributions to organic chemistry.

But as I sat bored at the back of chemistry class later that day, stashing away unused chemicals with which to conduct my own aimless (and mercifully harmless) experiments, I had no idea that the man who composed such astonishing music was among the first chemists to demonstrate nucleophilic substitution, as well as the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction.

I can now almost imagine him clumping into our old chemical lab that reeked of ammonia to lecture us on the electrolysis of water while his music played in the background. These kinds of rich connections across the curriculum and across time are like the bonds of a new compound formed in a reaction; they could not have been planned or even foreseen by those in charge of our learning.

It makes me realise that only we can join up the dots of our own education, dots that then shape the journeys that we will go on. But it’s the wise alchemy of good teachers that provides us with the elements we need and which we will over time recombine into the substance of our lives.

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Borodin died before finishing Prince Igor, which is based on a 12th-century poem about the Russians’ battles with the Polovtsians, who were Turkic nomads of the Eurasian steppe. The famous song I listened to was a “song of the slave women", and to be honest, the whole piece feels to me now like a classic example of orientalism (a term I didn’t know then, of course). But still, it retains a special place in my heart.

Borodin wrote many other fine works in his spare time from the lab and medical practice and when not pioneering medical education for women in Russia. Among his other works that I’ve since enjoyed are his beautiful string quartets and the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia.

My school’s commitment to internationalisation—which I think was a new initiative in the state-funded school sector then—would take me on a life-changing school exchange to France later that year, where I’d spend two months at a school in the French Alps (a story for another time).

But, looking back, I think that my first international journey wasn’t that trip to France but was the earlier voyage of the spirit that Borodin’s music took me on.

Decades would pass before I was able to see in person the giant expanses of the steppes of Eurasia depicted in Prince Igor for myself from the window of the Trans-Siberian Express. But thanks to those teachers and the happenstance of hearing Borodin’s music outside that modest music room hut, when I finally gazed upon that majestic landscape, it felt like the music had already taken me there, that I was experiencing it for the second time.

When I lived in China, I was lucky enough to visit several beautiful gardens in Shanghai, Suzhou and Yangzhou, among many others.

Recently, I visited another Chinese garden – but this one was in Tokyo. It was Koishikawa Korakuen, which was first established in 1629 and is one of the oldest gardens in Tokyo. It was completed by Mitsukuni Tokugawa, one of the most influential “daimyo” (大名), or lords, of his time.

Mitsukini incorporated Chinese concepts into the garden's final design, guided by the exiled Confucian scholar Zhu Shunshui from China. For me, one of the most striking elements was the name of the garden.

The word Korakuen (後楽園) is derived from the famous prose work Yueyang Lou Ji (岳陽樓記), or "Record of Yueyang Tower," written in 1046 AD by the Northern Song Dynasty statesman and poet Fan Zhongyan. The park’s name means something like “Garden for Enjoying Later”, which is a compressed form of the original saying, 先天下之憂而憂，後天下之樂而樂.

In English it could be rendered: “Be the first to worry about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures.”

This represents the Confucian ideal of the leader putting the welfare of the people and the state before his or her own personal concerns and pleasures. It embodies a spirit of selfless dedication to public service.

In the park there’s also a rice field planted by Mitsukuni with the intention of teaching his family about the harsh realities and hard work of a farmer’s life. Brought up on a farm, albeit in a different era and another country, I found myself approving of this gesture.

As I walked around the beautiful garden, I was impressed that an atmosphere of calm and order – even moral order – still seemed to prevail there after all these years. Just as the trees and sky shone placidly on the still and bright surface of the pond, so the harmony and poise of the place found a reflection in my mind.

Rather than “worry about the world’s troubles”, I’d gone to the park to escape them. And, especially, I was looking to enjoy what is for me one of the world’s truest pleasures: to wander among plum trees as they come into full blossom and fragrance.

There are many plum trees in my own neighbourhood, including in many private gardens. But Korakuen has a special selection of beautiful varieties. And unlike many popular plum-viewing venues in Tokyo, where there might be a colourful but crowded plum blossom festival, all such frivolities are frowned on in this garden. The viewers were few and the blossoms many.

I won’t try to describe the joy I felt to see the wonderful petals of different colours and shades dappled with sunlight as I wandered around this “moral garden”. Instead, I leave you with some of the images I took that day, perhaps my last day of plum blossom viewing for this season.

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You can read my 2024 post about plum blossom here:

Stepping off my train on the Tokyo metro system, I made my way to the Artizon art museum, housed in a new and imposing building in Tokyo’s wealthy Kyobashi district. It’s surrounded by office blocks, hotels, and the stores of major brands.

Entrance to exhibitions there is via a lift: having booked a ticket and a timeslot, you wait your turn to be ushered into its cool steel interior to be whisked away to a distant floor.

The exhibition I was going to see was: Monet: Questioning Nature. 1 It had been some time since I’d been to a solo exhibition of the painter, and I entered the busy space with a strong sense of expectation.

But if the lift to the start of the exhibition felt like a confinement, so did the experience of moving all in space at the same time with a group of strangers randomly thrown together. The crowds were as big a presence as the artwork.

And if there is something pleasingly communal about it, to be united in appreciation of works of art, there is also something a little inconvenient about it too, in a very big city kind of way. In fact, at times I felt I was commuting along the Monet line, with only a brief stop at each painting. There’s just enough time to focus your eyes on the canvas you’ve arrived at before the momentum of the crowd persuades you forward to the next station.

In shows like this, much of the time our view is partly obscured by fellow commuters, just as we impede their view in turn.

Monet famously wrote, late in life, “All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.” And amidst the crowds, on the conveyor belt of devoted appreciation, even seeing it was a challenge.

But I was not surprised to see the popularity of this most accessible of artists. As novelist and essayist Julian Barnes has said, Monet’s work is possibly “the best way to introduce someone young to art – and not just modern art. This is partly because of what he didn’t paint.” 2

Certainly Barnes makes a good case for Monet’s seeming universal attraction:

He didn’t do historical or religious subjects: no need to know what is happening at the Annunciation (let alone the Assumption of the Virgin) or what Oedipus said to the Sphinx or why so many naked women are attending the death of Sardanapalus. He never painted a literary scene for which you need to know the story. None of his paintings refers to an earlier painting. He was the first great artist since the Renaissance never to paint a nude. He painted portraits but it didn’t matter (except to him) whom they were of. You don’t need to know the history of art to appreciate a Monet picture because he wasn’t much interested in the history of art himself (though he revered Watteau and Delacroix and Velázquez). He had even less interest in the science of visual perception. His art was secular and apolitical.

I wonder whether this also explains in part my muted reaction to his work. Perhaps too much was left out?

Not even his beautiful waterlilies could get my pulse racing. Perhaps I’d seen them too often and on too many T-shirts or tote bags. Perhaps we can have too much beauty. Perhaps we can grow complacent about even the best things in life.

I certainly enjoyed some of Monet’s work on display – for example, the beautiful painting of the train on Charing Cross bridge or the twilight in Venice, both in this show.

But something was missing.

When I walk around an exhibition (or watch an opera or film), I wait for “the moment” to arrive when the work grabs my attention and creates a special level of attraction and interest. It’s that aria, scene, or painting that transports you to a new level of appreciation and harmony. But in this exhibition, though I experienced an even sense of pleasure (which occasionally dipped and was sometimes marred by the cramped and crowded venue), that moment never came.

Back in the day when people were searching for genetic explanations for everything, I might have felt (or been told) I was lacking the Monet appreciation gene. But in the absence of such easy reductionism, I find it very hard to explain why this much-loved artist fails to make my pulse race.

Historically, reactions to Monet and his fellow impressionists have tended to be more animated. Reporting back to Monet on the success of the Fourth Impressionist exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte commented: ‘The public is cheerful, people have a good time with us.’ 3

And in a light-hearted response to the piece by Barnes, the renowned art critic TJ Clark wondered,

But is it cheerful à la Wodehouse, or à la Winnie in Happy Days? Or cheerful in the way of Ian Dury, listing his reasons? (‘Going on forty no electric shocks.’) I for one can never decide.

I have no idea either. In fact, I’m not sure I really find his work cheerful at all.

And to be honest, cheerfulness seemed absent from the viewers the day I was there. The atmosphere was more intense than that. Was it awe, rather? Or reverence? Or bewilderment? Or, in some cases, who knows, was it even the boredom of the commuter waiting to get to the end of the line?

The end of the Monet Line actually seemed to arrive abruptly with the display of the museum’s own Water Lily Pond (1907), one of those works that perhaps points the way towards the abstractions of 20th-century art.

One moment I was admiring the work; the next, I was on the down escalator heading for the gift shop and its copious merchandise.

My commute was complete, but my expectations had been derailed. I’d “had the experience but missed the meaning”. Like a train scheduled for another day or running on a different line, the hoped-for moment of intense joy never arrived.

Years ago, I harboured vague and improbable ambitions to be a translator of poetry. What could be more fulfilling, I thought, than to try to capture the beauty of a poem from another language and culture and render it the homage of a translation into my own?

But after many discouraging attempts, I began to feel daunted by the hopelessness of the task. If unravelling the knottiness of poetry in Spanish wasn’t hard enough, the sheer slipperiness of the right words in English, not to mention the right tone or the right rhythm, seemed to grow almost exponentially the longer I tried.

That was some time ago. Since founding the English Republic of Letters here on Substack, I have occasionally gone back to translating poems, such as here.

Most recently I was, I have to confess, disappointed with my lame attempts at translating “cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor” from Jorge Manrique’s poem Coplas por la muerte de su padre [“verses on the death of his father”].

For “cualquiera tiempo pasado", I wanted to use “each time past”, but thought that would sound too much like Eliot’s Burnt Norton, too much like a 20th-century meditation on time. Switching it round, I could say, “Every past time was better.” But that hardly sounds natural to me. I’m going to continue to tinker with that for a while and perhaps come back with an amended version.

But then again, why bother, I ask myself? It’s a fraught business. For those who venture into print/digital publication with their translation, you might say there are double the usual lines of attack from a critic.

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I’ve written before that when I went to live in Spain in the 1980s, I was impressed by the optimism in the country, compared to my own. One of the moments that this spirit became apparent to me was when I watched a TV show which featured a not very good song, with the title “Cualquiera tiempo pasado fue peor” [literally, “every time past was worse”]. 1

I understood that the song was an adaptation of the phrase ‘Cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor’ [“every time past was better”]. Despite the cheesy song (and worse hair – see this later video of it), the change of one word in that expression had real political meaning in a country that was still emerging from the shadow of dictatorship and grappling with the realities of freedom and democracy. The message was that the country needed to consider the condition it had been in – having suffered a dictatorship for decades – to fully appreciate its present and future. Nobody could change the past, but they could change how they talked about it.

It was many years before I realised that the phrase ‘Cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor’ had literary origins. It can be traced to the poem Coplas por la muerte de su padre [“verses on the death of his father”], written between November 11, 1476 and before his own early death in 1479 by Jorge Manrique (1440- c.1479). 2

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The opening to the poem is rather beautiful

Recuerde el alma dormida,

avive el seso y despierte

contemplando

cómo se pasa la vida,

cómo se viene la muerte

tan callando;

cuán presto se va el placer;

cómo después de acordado

da dolor;

cómo a nuestro parecer

cualquiera tiempo pasado

fue mejor.

[Let the sleeping soul recall;

let the mind grow keen and wake,

considering

how life slips past,

how death creeps

so noiselessly near;

how swiftly pleasure fades —

and how, once brought to mind,

it turns to grief;

how, in our eyes,

everything seems

better back then.] 3

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There’s a subtle qualification to the phrase in the poem that is missing in the everyday use of the phrase: “cómo a nuestro parecer” – how to us it seems. Manrique is not necessarily stating that life was always better, just that it commonly seems so. 4

This part of the poem seems to suggest an already familiar enough trope. The unhappy look back takes us to the most famous of all mediaeval European poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Nessun maggior dolore

che ricordarsi del tempo felice

ne la miseria

[There is no greater sorrow

Than to think backwards to a happy time,

When one is miserable.] 5

But Manrique’s poem points towards another familiar trope – the rejection of the world with its evanescent pleasures – and this reminds me of Ben Jonson’s classic satirical poem, A Farewell to the World 6

My tender, first, and simple years

Thou didst abuse and then betray;

Since stir’d’st up jealousies and fears,

When all the causes were away.

Then in a soil hast planted me

Where breathe the basest of thy fools;

Where envious arts professed be,

And pride and ignorance the schools;

Where nothing is examined, weigh’d,

But as ‘tis rumour’d, so believed;

Where every freedom is betray’d,

And every goodness tax’d or grieved.

Two hundred years later, another English writer, William Hazlitt, who I have quoted before, showed similar contempt for the world in prose, launching an attack on the hypocrisy and sycophancy of his age and those who attach themselves to “the chains of despotism and superstition”.

Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions.

These writers’ sorrow or scorn took them in different directions. Manrique appears to head off towards a severe, unforgiving orthodoxy; Hazlitt vents; Dante is moving slowly towards the tranquillity of Paradise, while Jonson takes control of the narrative with relish and veers off towards self-reliance:

But I will bear these with that scorn

As shall not need thy false relief.

Nor for my peace will I go far,

As wanderers do, that still do roam;

But make my strengths, such as they are,

Here in my bosom, and at home.

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It can feel easy enough, looking around the world, to nod agreement at “cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor,” or find an echo in Jonson’s rejection of the world and, like Hazlitt, long for a time in which “love had its seat in the human heart.”

It’s also tempting for me, as this month marks the sixth anniversary of my father’s death, to give myself up to the cold grasp of the wrench of grief and allow the nature of “our frail condition” to get the better of me.

What’s more, as I move further into my 60s, it’s sometimes hard to resist the impulse to bemoan the infirmities of incipient old age. It’s as though I’m mourning for my own past time.

And yet the determination of many in 1980s Spain to shed the burdens and sorrows of the past and change the script publicly and loudly to “everything in the past was worse” remains a lasting inspiration to me.

It’s not, of course, about approving the literal truthfulness of the phrase they coined; it’s surely as false as the phrase it replaces. Rather, what I applauded – and still celebrate – was their grabbing of agency, their taking charge of the narrative in pursuit, as they saw it, of a greater good.

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At the end of his mournful and sometimes complex poem, the grief-stricken Manrique concludes with an unexpectedly more attractive, even comforting note. And the feeling expressed in Manrique’s ending finds echoes in my own heart.

The situations and people are very different. The father mourned in the poem was applauded for his military heroics, whereas my own father only fought battles with the elements to make a success of farming. They lived centuries apart and probably shared few beliefs.

Nevertheless, Manrique’s surprisingly muted and tender closing of this complex poem made me think of the father I mourn and, even, perhaps, the mourning of the “death” of my own past. And in choosing to celebrate memory as a kind of victory over the passing of a life, Manrique, like the Spaniards of the 1980s, found a way to change the script of the past:

y aunque la vida perdió,

dejónos harto consuelo

su memoria.

[And though he lost his life,

He left us the immense consolation

of his memory.]

If one of the most famous endings in literature in English is Joyce’s much-quoted ending about falling snow in his story The Dead (1914), then one of the most celebrated openings in Japanese literature is the atmospheric beginning of Snow Country, the 1948 novel by Yasunari Kawabata:1

The train came out of the long tunnel on the border and there was the snow country. The earth lay still under the night sky.

And recently I also noticed that Kawabata also mentioned snow and tunnels in his later novel Rainbow (1950), recently translated into English (2023).

*

I didn’t grow up in snow country. But I recall being “snowed in” a few times growing up on a farm in Devon. The local country lanes were the last to be cleared, if ever, by the few snow ploughs in operation in that county.

For us as children, snow meant huge drifts to play in, snow holes to dig and crawl into like luminescent caves, or snowball fights when sometimes things got out of hand and would vindicate one of my mother’s cherished pessimistic predictions: “It’ll end in tears."

But snow also meant a slippery farmyard in which to work and cold, chapped hands and feet as we completed our chores. On the farm, every childhood joy had an adult corollary of work.

*

In her beautiful poem White-Eyes, Mary Oliver conjures in the haunting final lines,

the feathers

               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,

    that is asleep now, and silent—

         that has turned itself

             into snow.

The poet says she doesn’t know what bird it was, and neither do I. But the poem reminds me that one of the joys of a snowy day in Tokyo is the sight of the plum trees, already in blossom, laden with fluffy white snow. And if I’m lucky, I’ll spot a mejiro, a Japanese white-eye, scattering snow as it seeks the now-hidden flowers and their promised goodness.

*

I used to live in Quito, which is on the equator. The city is at about 2,800 metres above sea level, and from my perch in the city, I could admire the volcanoes that proudly displayed their equatorial snow all year round – among them, Cayambe and Antisana, both well over 5,500 metres. I would never tire of the wonder they inspired.

My first taste of snow on mountains, however, was in the Alps on a school exchange. The exchange took place in late spring and early summer. The five or six of us who decided to trek into the mountains weren’t prepared for the snow we found at that time of year.

The dazzling white of the snow made us giddy with excitement, though that quickly turned to something like panic when the weather changed in an instant and we were surrounded by clouds. Fortunately, the weather cleared in time for us to get down the mountain before any search parties needed to be organised.

*

The snowiest city I have lived in was Ankara, high up on the Anatolian plateau in Turkey. One winter, I awoke to over half a metre of snow on the balcony, an improbable quantity of snow in a city that was warm and mostly dry for much of the year. The winter’s snowfall, as I recall, was crucial for the reservoirs and for local agriculture.

It was in Ankara that I read Orhan Pamuk’s beautiful novel, Kars (2002). Kars is the name of a city in northeastern Turkey. But “kar” is also the Turkish word for “snow”.

In the novel, one of my favourites by Pamuk, snow takes on a kind of moral force:

The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.

But my best memories of snow in Turkey – perhaps from anywhere – come from the day I saw soft snowflakes begin to fall over the beautiful mosques and courtyards of Istanbul, just as night fell one winter evening. The mixing of the natural beauty of the ice crystals and the equally exquisite Ottoman architecture certainly created one of the most beguiling sights of my life.

It was as if the snowflakes, with their infinite and unique structures, fell like eager worshippers finally reaching a place of pilgrimage upon the beautifully crafted tiles of blue and white.

They were, it seemed to me, like a billion crystal kisses laid on the cool, inviting skin of the city.

One of the birds I most often see as I walk around my part of Tokyo is the wagtail. The Japanese wagtail (Motacilla grandis), known here as the セグロセキレイ (“seguro-sekirei”), is the official bird of my district of Tokyo. I guess they feel at home here: wagtails like to be near water, and there are many ponds and small rivers in the area, and at one edge of the neighbourhood is the Arakawa River.

Before relocating to Japan, the last time I had seen wagtails on a daily basis was while I was growing up on a farm in Devon. They made their home around the farm buildings, where I looked after the pigs, and especially near the large slurry pit where cow manure was piled before being spread on the fields.

The surface of this pit often formed a shiny grey crust. Despite its firm appearance, the crust wouldn’t support the weight of a person – making it a potential deathtrap for a curious child. But the wagtails delighted in it, as the pit was a magnet for the insects they liked to prey on. They’d scurry over the surface like frenetic avian astronauts hunting for lost treasure on the moon.

*

As well as the Japanese wagtail, I also see the white wagtail (Motacilla alba) in Tokyo. To my inexpert eye, they can be hard to tell apart. The white wagtail is said to prefer a more urban setting. In England I’d see either the pied wagtail (Motacilla alba yarrellii), a subspecies of the white wagtail, or the grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea).

Regardless of the species, two characteristics of wagtails are consistent – their incessant motion and the constant wagging of their tail. The Latin name of the genus comes from the word meaning “to move about”.

I associate the wagtail with the long days of early summer on the farm, when good weather and seasonal work would keep us outside for many hours at a time. But in Japan the wagtail is associated with autumn. In fact, the word for wagtail, セキレイ “sekirei”, is a seasonal word, or “kigo”. That’s a word or phrase used in Japanese poetry, particularly haiku, to evoke a specific time of year and its associated feelings. And the bird even has its own micro-season (one of 72) – “The Wagtail Calls” (September 12 to September 16).

The cultural references to wagtails in this part of the world go further than this. For the Ainu people, the indigenous ethnic group who inhabit northern Japan and parts of southeastern Russia, the wagtail had an important role in the creation of the world. According to one version of their mythology, the creator deity Kotan-kar-kamuy sent down a wagtail to flutter around and splash water away from the land, which they made habitable by patting down with their feet and tail.

Japanese mythology also assigns a role to wagtails in its creation myth. The thrusting movements of their tails were credited as the inspiration for Izanagi and Izanami, the central deities in the myth, to mate and produce the eight islands that now make up Japan.

Wagtail myths pop up elsewhere, too. In Ireland the birds apparently had associations with the devil. And I’ve come across references to wagtail involvement in myths in ancient Greece, South Africa and Borneo, though I’m not sure how substantiated those stories are.

Their image in Britain, though, is more at the level of folklore and generally more prosaic. Indeed, the workaday nicknames used for them suggest this; for example, Peggy Dishwasher or Chiswick flyover.

*

I am struck by the differences of settings I have experienced them in – first entirely rural, now entirely urban – and the contrast between their role in mythmaking in Japan and their workaday, almost comic representation in England.

The bird’s reappearance in my life in this different guise reminds me that I started the English Republic of Letters with the aim, in part, to “connect the dots” of my life. It’s a desire to see patterns, I guess.

The reoccurrence of wagtails in my life, though, linking my childhood with my present life, suggests not so much a joining up of dots as a kind of harmony.

Here I mean harmony not so much in the sense of “pleasing arrangement of parts” but rather in the sense of “an interweaving of different accounts into a single narrative”. 1 The wagtail, mixing the comic and serious, prosaic and mythological, both the protagonist of early cosmology and the everyday companion of humans in cities and on farms, becomes, in this definition, an instrument of harmony as I experience or read about its part in different stories.

But perhaps harmony is the wrong word. Maybe my experience is actually closer to chirality, the property of an object not being identical to its mirror image (our hands are an example of this). I’ve touched on this term before. Now I reflect that my bucolic childhood and my current life in a megacity – and my earlier and recent experiences of the wagtail in those contrasting settings – are like mirror images of each other. Put another way, they are like two outstretched hands spanning my existence.

*

I said that the English were rather prosaic about wagtails. But there is an English poem about them: Little Trotty Wagtail by John Clare.

The title, though, is another example of a more down-to-earth view of wagtails; “Little Trotty” is hardly the stuff of myth. And the poem itself beautifully demonstrates Clare’s acute interest in observing the natural world around him. Rather than entering into mythmaking, it focuses on the movements of the birds and their habits. He throws in earthy phrases such as “tittering, tottering sideways” and “in the dimpling water-pudge you waddle in and out.” And his use of the wonderful phrase “you nimble all about”, as he addresses the bird in the final stanza, perfectly evokes its perpetual motion.

Clare’s charming poem, of course, takes me back to when I used to happen upon the bird on the farm, and its final two lines seem to be the perfect note to end on:

Your home is nigh at hand, and in the warm pig-stye,

So, little Master Wagtail, I’ll bid you a good-bye.

1

Saori (Madokoro) Atsutagawa

Atsutagawa’s Woman B (1955) was, for me, one of the strongest works in the exhibition. Its energy leapt off the canvas and certainly kept me guessing. Was this a greeting? or was the figure trying to shield her eyes to see better? Was she surprised or delighted? or shocked?

I also admired her powerful and warm painting, Sphinx (1964), with its beautiful ginkgo yellow and alluring tones of brown. It was hung opposite Woman I (1955 – see below), and I enjoyed the dialogue between them.

On the wall of the exhibition there was a large quote from Akutagawa that showed how she reacted to the action art movement: 1

( ... ) Everyone was throwing, dripping, and piling on paint. It was like any painting that wasn’t lumpy and uneven was considered outdated. It was a new trend from France, but it wasn’t a girl’s hairstyle. I couldn’t just follow blindly and paint the same picture.

I was disappointed in how superficial the Japanese art world was.

2

Hideko Fukushima

Fukushima was an artist who received no formal training but became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. I found her White Noise (1959) almost bewitching.

And even more powerful was Human (1952):

The painting seems to float between a representation of a human head and something almost otherworldly.

This quote from Fukushima gives perhaps a hint of the inspiration she took from the rapidly changing world around her in post-war Japan:

Perhaps, for those living in the modern world, directly engaging with something that has become inorganic – rather than something that is merely human – is more novel and moving.2

3

Kazuko Enomoto 3

I found Enomoto’s Section (I) (1951) to be really powerful with its suggestion of folding and unfolding. And her use of red here is stunning.

I also enjoyed the textured surface of Start from Interruption (1952).

Critic Izumi Nakajima wrote the following of Enomoto in her catalogue essay:

Enomoto was lauded for the “cerebral” quality of her compositions with geometric shapes… In fact, a highly structured space, such as the one seen in her signature work, Section (I)… was an exception rather than the norm. During the 1960s, Enomoto experimented with a variety of printmaking techniques, using materials like cork and sponge to create complex surfaces.

4

Minami Tada

And finally, the artist whose work I perhaps most enjoyed from this exhibition...

Here is Tada’s mysterious 1960 painting, An Encounter.

It made me think of the night sky and trees. Or were they just competing textures and spaces and colours? And what is floating there in the dark space? The work was created with oil, nylon thread, and sand, creating a beautifully complex texture.

In a quite different style was Transformer Substation. Of this 1956 version of the theme, above, the critic Chiba Machiko writes in her essay in the catalogue the following: “The electric substation – a structure symbolic of modernisation and the high-growth era – is painted as a massive architectural form befitting a site of condensed energy, while the light streaming in from above, or perhaps emanating from the rear of the building, brims with the sublimity of someplace completely detached from this world.”

The 1958 version below is more abstract, and it’s a truly gorgeous work. It was also a treat to see these two treatments of the same subject hung together.

Tada was perhaps best known as a sculptor, working often with aluminium, as here in Frequency 37303055MC (1963):

The same critic, Chiba, has also written:

Tada’s early three-dimensional works arouse interest because they reflect light while simultaneously holding an invisible void within, corresponding to her approach to light and darkness as practised in painting...Tada has stated that “The intricate and detailed wrinkles symbolise the forms found in the natural world. Not simple abstraction. it’s somehow like energy, in a sense.”

Tada’s versatility was also shown in the way she dealt with the subject of Coal Mine (1957). It felt like a politically engaged work.

Certainly, this detail of the raised iron fist would not be out of place in a pamphlet about the labour movement.

To close, here’s the critic Chiba once more:

We cannot see matter without light, and we can only sense light as such through matter. “Coal Mine”, which Tada tackled intensively after receiving a commission, is an inverse world from that of this light: here, Tada depicts the world of darkness that can never be seen in and of itself.

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When I went to live in Quito in 1988, it didn’t take long for me to become immersed in the music of the country and the region. And I found people refreshingly indifferent to, though not ignorant of, the US or British pop or rock music that I would hear in the UK.

Above all, I found people proud of their own strong musical traditions. It was, in hindsight, a relief to get away from the monolingual culture of the world of pop and rock I grew up listening to.

And it didn’t take me long to hear of Silvio Rodríguez, one of Latin America’s greatest singer-songwriters. Rodríguez is Cuban and was born in 1946. He was a leading figure of the Nueva Trova movement.

I found his music, full of beauty, passion and poetry, moved me in ways that virtually no popular music in English ever did. Thoughtful and committed, his songs speak directly to the heart.

In my experience, Latin Americans might not agree with all – or indeed any – of his politics, but they could still be stirred by Rodríguez’s passionate and lyrical songs.

Without doubt, discovering his music – along with the voices of other musicians from the region, such as Mercedes Sosa and Víctor Heredia – was one of the most thrilling periods of my musical education.

*

In 1969, Rodríguez spent time on a Cuban fishing boat, which operated off the Atlantic coasts of Africa. This was apparently a very fertile period for the singer/songwriter, with over 60 songs composed in that time (many hundreds have followed since). His career was almost literally launched.

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If my main memories from the infant section of the rural primary school I attended were fields of buttercups in summer and the whirling cascade of sycamore seeds in the autumn, then my strongest sensory memory from the junior school is that of ice.

I recall this part of my childhood rather like the winter scene in Love’s Labours Lost: 1

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail

In this case, it was the ice that frequently formed on the walls of the school’s outside toilet. It was a roughly made brick structure tucked away in one corner of the school playground. Even for a child brought up in the rough and tumble of a large family in a crowded farmhouse, it struck me as a rather grim amenity.

The main school building was a draughty converted Victorian house, and the need to trudge out in all weather to the outside toilet added to the sense of our living in a version of 19th-century austerity. When, a few years later, I read my first Dickens novel, Hard Times (1854), its opening description of “a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room” struck a chord.

In fact, I remember that we once studied a project about the Victorians. Our teacher had unearthed documents about the school that dated from that period. And it was partly the excitement of reading these precious handwritten documents, simple and practical missives from the past, that instilled in me a love of history.

But more than that, the rudimentary design of the old schoolhouse, with its austerely echoing vaults and the charcoal fire that gave out thick fumes in winter, made me feel that we weren’t just studying the Victorian era; we were living it.

Fortunately, though, the education we received could not have been more different than that expounded by Gradgrind and Bounderby in Hard Times. At the start of the novel, Gradgrind admonishes a local schoolmaster with these words:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them... Stick to Facts, sir!’

By contrast, the schooling I received seems to have been heavily influenced by the recommendations of the Plowden Report in 1967, which strongly advocated a child-centred approach to learning. So, rather than being drilled with facts, we were engaged in project work and problem-solving. We also spent a lot of time on what academics might describe as “self-directed learning”, but what was in reality permission to quietly read whatever books might be of interest to us from the small but colourful library.

And while the “library” was no more than a corner of the draughty schoolroom, semi-enclosed by low bookcases, it was to this calm harbour that I would direct myself whenever I could.

Our teachers (there were, in succession, two in my time in the junior school) seemed skilled at keeping us engaged as we sat at our tiny tables in small groups, not individual desks. I don’t remember either of them ever addressing us as a whole class, though they must surely have done this often.

We were certainly lucky not to have a teacher like the one Goldsmith describes in the Deserted Village:

There, in his noisy mansion, skill’d to rule,

The village master taught his little school:

A man severe he was, and stern to view;

The first of my teachers there was a Mrs Williamson. She had been married to the celebrated writer – and notorious Nazi sympathiser – Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter. This was my first, mostly unwitting, human contact with the world of literature – and the dark currents of 20th-century politics. But I simply remember her as a gentle, if aloof, guide to our learning.

*

The journey to the school was another echo of harsher days. Dressed in short trousers throughout our time in primary school, I and my brother would wait to be picked up at the top of the farm lane, well out of sight of the farmhouse, with just thin anoraks to keep out the winter winds.

Each morning for years we stood near a platform holding milk churns waiting for collection, which my father would already have deposited there after finishing the morning milking. We would be picked up by a car provided by the local authority and taken in one direction; the precious milk, almost our sole source of livelihood, would be loaded onto a lorry and driven off to the dairy in the other direction. 2 In winter, our bare legs would be whipped by the cold winds until they were bright red, and on the coldest days the milk froze in the churns before it was collected.

The first car that we would gratefully clamber into on those freezing mornings was a pale green 1950s Ford Consul, driven by a Mr Spencer. The car was in immaculate condition, in complete contrast to the messy state of our own vehicles. For a farm kid like me, it came as a shock that anyone would have the time – or inclination – to keep a vehicle that clean.

Perhaps out of thrift – and here was another hint of Gradgrind and Bounderby in my early life – Mr Spencer would switch off the engine and coast down the steep hill that lay between our farm and the village where the school was. When I think back, I can still see the red ignition light on the dashboard of the car shining brightly while the vehicle coasted down the sharp descent on that single-track road. Gripping my seat as the car swayed down the hill, I would find myself studying the creases on Mr Spencer’s neck, which formed almost the same pattern as the shallow grooves where the string bit into the joints of meat we would sometimes have for Sunday lunch.

He was risking all our lives by driving in this way, and it’s a wonder that he was never caught.

Or perhaps he was, because at some point he was replaced by a Mr Gibson, whose car was larger and less clean but had a wider back seat where we’d slide from side to side and against each other as we negotiated the curves on the winding road to school. And it was on this back seat, shiny with use, that I was destined to sit next to Jill, my first crush at the age of 10.

*

Effervescent, dark-haired, smiling and with a strong Lancashire accent (her family swapped their farm in the north of the country for one in Devon during the final two years of primary school), Jill was unlike anyone I’d met before, and I was soon smitten. She was, you might say, my Girl in Winter. 3

Innocent and shy, I barely understood the feelings she provoked, and although I tried to spend as much time in her company as possible, my devotion was forever unspoken. Later, when I heard Frankie Valli’s 1975 song My Eyes Adored You on the radio, I immediately thought with a pang of Jill, who by that time was attending a different secondary school from me.

But the original soundtrack of that year spent sliding towards and away from Jill on the backseat on that journey to and from the school was supplied by the Osmonds. This included Jimmy Osmond’s Long Haired Lover from Liverpool (1972), but the foundational text was, inevitably, Puppy Love (Donny, 1972).

*

In those days, the government tried to ensure a healthier diet for children through food-based initiatives at primary schools. Above all, there was the school milk, scarcely necessary for those of us who lived on dairy farms, that was served in third-pint bottles left outside the school by the milkman before it opened. Left from early morning on the stone steps at the entrance of the school, the milk would sometimes go sour in the summer, freeze in the winter or be attacked in the spring by adventurous blue tits, 4 who’d puncture the brightly coloured foil tops with their beaks. I don’t think I ever drank any of it. After all, at home I could enjoy the stuff fresh from the cow.

In any case, the bottles stopped appearing after 1971 when Margaret Thatcher, then Minister of Education, decided to save money by ending free school milk for children over the age of seven. This earned her the sobriquet “Thatcher, Thatcher Milk Snatcher”. But at least she didn’t stop the supply of apples that would arrive for us and which were, I think, supplied by the local government. 5 The delicate, earthy fragrance of these apples delivered in large cardboard boxes to the school porch still lingers in my memory.

That last summer at the old Victorian schoolhouse we became, for the last time, “The playful children just let loose from school” in Goldsmith’s village idyll. I don’t remember much about how we spent our last holiday. But I guess the six-week break would have been spent in the usual benign find-your-own-amusement spirit of my parents, punctuated by bouts of helping out with haymaking or other work on the farm. And there were the preparations for secondary school – including my first leather satchel and the purchase of the grammar school uniform.

With many destined for different secondary schools, most of my old classmates would soon disappear from my life. But it was the absence of Jill that gave me my first case of heartache. At least I was able to learn that August, from Marie Osmond’s 1973 song, Paper Roses, that I wasn’t alone in dealing with the illusions of life and love.

*

While it’s Dickens’ Hard Times that I think of when I remember the old school building, it’s the words of another 19th-century novelist, Thomas Hardy, that come to mind when I recall that last summer in the village school.

His words evoke for me that now-forgotten final trip back home, sliding along the back seat with Jill for the last time, as the poem wistfully suggests the more definitive partings to come:

A bell: they flee:

Silence then: —

So it will be

Some day again

With them, — with me. 6