Hastings

24 Hours in Mugsborough

Mugsborough was a town of about eighty thousand inhabitants, about two hundred miles from London.  It was built in a verdant valley….. To the south, as far as the eye could see, stretched a vast, cultivated plain that extended to the south coast, one hundred miles away.  The climate was supposed to be cool in summer and mild in winter.

Or so Robert Noonan, who wrote under the pen name of Robert Tressell, would have us believe.  In fact, Mugsborough was Hastings, a borough on the south coast in the county of East Sussex, 53 miles south east of London and famous for a battle which took place eight miles to the north, at Senlac, in 1066.  The population at the 2001 census was 85,029, of whom 96% were white (British, Irish or other)…..

When Noonan lived here (1901 – 1910) the town was really a vast whited sepulchre; for notwithstanding the natural advantages of the place the majority of the inhabitants existed in a state of perpetual poverty which in many cases bordered on destitution.  Robert Noonan, the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, a Dublin Police inspector, and Mary Noonan, was born in 1870.  In 1890 he emigrated to South Africa, where he worked as a sign writer.  He married and had a daughter, Kathleen, but his wife left him for another man, and eventually he and Kathleen returned to the UK to stay with his sisters in Hastings.  He was already affected by tuberculosis, but he found work, wrote his one novel, and became involved in political groups, until he decided to emigrate again, this time to Canada, in 1910.  Unfortunately, he died of bronchial pneumonia, aged just 40, in Liverpool and was buried in a pauper’s grave.  

I am not a stranger to the area; my mother’s parents lived near Robertsbridge until my grandfather’s death and then grandmother lived in Bexhill for some years before moving inland to Cripps Corner until her death. My parents were married at Seddlescombe, a couple of miles from Battle.  My aunt and uncle moved to Winchelsea when he retired, and later we brought our children to stroke skates in the Blue Reef Aquarium and to watch the fishing boats winched up onto the shingle by rusty bulldozers.  Now we are back as guests of friends who have moved to live in the Old Town.

But I had not connected Robert Tressell, nor his Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with the town, until now, and over a hundred years since its first publication it comes to life anew, not because it is about Hastings, because it isn’t, but because somehow it makes more sense when you climb Noonans Steps to Milward Road, where the flat described at the end of the book looks out over the railway bridge.  Or where, at 241 London Road, a Tanning, Massage and Beauty Salon under the name of The Haven sports a blue plaque bearing the inscription: THE FIRST WORKING-CLASS NOVEL WRITTEN IN THIS HOUSE 1906 – 1910. 

There’s another plaque, on Plynlimmon Road, which commemorates Robert Tressell socialist reformer & writer; this was where he lodged with his widowed sister Adelaide and her son in 1901 (having first stayed with sister Mary Jane in St Leonards).  In July 2013  there was a one-day festival held at the University of Brighton Campus in Priory Square, to celebrate Tressell’s work, and some years before this the proud burghers of Hastings set up The Robert Tressell Society to provide an archive and information point for all those interested in Robert Tressell and his work (see http://www.1066.net/tressell/index.html).

There are some 48 plaques on buildings in Hastings, but Tressell is the only person to have two to himself.  Other famous residents include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who married Lizzie Siddal here (he has two but one is shared with Lizzie); Michael Faraday, Queen Adelaide, Prince Augustus Frederick (sixth son of George III and Duke of Sussex);

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (Victorian educationalist and artist, feminist, women’s rights’ activist, and founder of Girton College); Lewis Carroll (who often stayed here with his aunts, the Misses Lutwidge), Lucien Pissarro (whose beautiful painting All Saints’ Church, Hastings: Sun and Mist, 1918 is currently not on show at the Tate, which would have taken £150 off me had I posted a copy here….);  Katie McMullen, aka Dame Catherine Cookson (who ran a guest house here for sufferers from TB, epilepsy and other such illnesses from 1931 for many years); General Sir John Moore who fell at Corunna (Not a drum was heard) was billeted here in 1805; Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, set up his HQ over an Antiques Warehouse in 1806 and dined nearby at the Swan Inn; William the Conqueror lunched near here, and the Celebrated Movie Stars, Mr and Mrs Michael Mouse once spent their summer holidays here…... 

And among those who for various reasons (including the fact that some of them are still alive) do not (yet) seem to be plaqued (forgive me if I missed something) are: Teilhard de Chardin, Grey Owl, Screaming Lord Sutch, Suggs, Paula Yates, Emma Blocksage (bodybuilder Emma B), Edward Burra, David Hare, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2016) winner (Tightrope) and Man Booker Prize (2009) shortlister (The Glass Room) Simon Mawer….. with whom (and Connie) we stay.

Hastings is an attractive place, and apart from attracting all the above, the Normans built a castle here in 1070 and Eugenius Birch designed the 1872 Pier, which hosted stars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s.  

Unfortunately, due to storm damage and lack of maintenance, it became unsafe and was sold off to a Panamanian offshore investment company Ravenclaw (not to be confused with one of Hogwarts’ Houses – at least I don’t think so….) who neglected it and ignored requests to take action; subsequently it was almost completely destroyed by fire in 2010.  In 2012 the Borough Council repurchased it and with the help of community shares and a dedicated charity the structure has been partially restored and it opened to the public again in 2016. 

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists do not walk on the pier, nor is the sea a factor in their lives.  The only fish mentioned in the whole book are bloaters….  But the community is quite recognisable, when you give it thought.  One hundred and odd years ago there was no Welfare State, and the First World War was yet to reduce the ruling class to a shadow of its former self.  The post-war influenza epidemic was unthinkable, and further into the twentieth century the development of the unions, the Beveridge Report, the social levelling of the Second World War, and the landslide result of the 1945 election, which saw Clement Atlee become Prime Minister – all this was beyond the imagination of Edwardian Socialists.

Tressell portrayed the conditions of working people and their families with incisive realism, but also lampooned the excesses of the wealthy and skewered the hypocrisy of so-called Christians and do-gooders (the death by spontaneous combustion of Jonydab Belcher of the Shining Light Chapel on Monte Carlo railway station, after a rest cure paid for by subscription from the poor of the town, is a literary gem well in advance of Mr Creosote’s timely death in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life…..)

The book is about Tressell/Noonan’s experience, however, and actually the most telling thing about it is the apathy of his workmates, who insist on blindly accepting a system that not only perpetuates their pauperism but condemns their children to infinite suffering, always at the expense of a manipulating and thieving ruling class.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the story of twelve months in hell, told by one of the damned.  In his own preface, Tressell wrote that his intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working class life.  He also said that the subject of Socialism was incidental.  As a readable story of human interest it succeeds where few others have touched the happenings of everyday life so closely, but it falters when it tries to offer solutions.  

Overall it is agonising in its detail of poverty and destitution, and painful in its satiric depiction of the scheming, corrupt, greedy and depraved aldermen of the borough, though it is also extremely funny.  Howard Brenton, who adapted the book for the stage, wrote, in The Guardian in 2011, that in ‘The Great Oration’ [a key chapter, late in the novel] Tressell describes the creation of a new kind of state: the co-operative commonwealth.  It is a communist vision, utopian, even quaint, but deeply moving.  Writing a stage adaptation made me think, paradoxically, that everything is different but nothing has changed.  We too are enmeshed in a feckless and dangerous capitalist system.  Tressell’s wonderful book convinced me that it’s time to begin the struggle for the co-operative commonwealth all over again…..

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was not published while its author was alive.  Kathleen, Noonan’s daughter, managed to get a truncated version into print in 1914 (since when it has never been out of print), but it was not until 1955 that the entire work was made available.  Its influence has been immense – not only on writers such as George Orwell (both Animal Farm and 1984  are indebted to Tressell) and J B Priestley (I am guessing here, but I cannot think but that Mrs Birling of An Inspector Calls derives from the wives of wealthy citizens and retired tradesmen, richly dressed, ignorant, insolent, overbearing frumps, who – after filling themselves with good things in their own luxurious homes – went flouncing into the poverty-stricken homes of their poor ‘sisters’….. Some of these overfed females… belonged to the Organised Benevolent Society, and engaged in their ‘work’ for the purpose of becoming acquainted with people of superior social position – one of the members was a colonel, and Sir Graball D’Encloseland – the Member of Parliament for the borough – also belonged to the Society…..)

In Hastings, veering up the East Cliff on the steepest funicular railway in the UK, we can overview the Old Town and the Stade.  But to the east lies a problem, for the coastal path to Pett Beach and Fairlight was interrupted by a landslip at Ecclesbourne Glen in 2014 and so far little has been done to rectify the situation.  

The landslip occurred at the southern end of Rocklands Caravan Park, and it revealed some unauthorised developments previously hidden from public view, including the erection of a storage building without planning permission (for which the owners are now required to seek planning permission to keep the building) and that eight caravans have been sited on the lower part of the site without requisite planning permission (to which the council responded that the secluded location of the site means we have only recently become aware of these caravans….) In October 2014 Council Leader Jeremy Birch stated that, I am determined that we will learn the lessons of Rocklands…..  Sadly Councillor Birch died after a stroke in May 2015…..

There is something here that smacks of the Band of Brigands (The Forty Thieves) in the RTP…..

I suspect there may even be a closer resemblance in the question of the development of the Stade….  In the RTP Tressell makes much of the elaborate shenanigans the councillors get up to rid themselves of the burden of trying to maintain control of the electricity supply in the face of the quite extraordinary ploy of the gas company to site itself outside the Borough. 

In Hastings there has been ongoing controversy about the Jerwood Art Gallery [leased by a Lichtenstein registered entity] which is sited on the Stade (the shingle foreshore in Old Hastings).  The Save our Stade committee, on its Jerwood-No website, has this to say…..  A row over land ownership is costing taxpayers up to £20,000 a month.  Legal red tape surrounding the development of The Stade and the Jerwood Gallery means the electricity supply to the new café and Stade Hall is running from two generators. And a third will shortly be needed to power the gallery.

The dispute, which has already cost taxpayers almost £100,000 so far, centres around who owns ‘a strip of land, around three square metres in size, where an empty electricity substation is based.  When completed this should provide power to the whole Stade development but UK Power Networks refuses to put in any of its equipment until legal difficulties have been resolved,’ Kevin Boorman, marketing and communications head for Hastings Borough Council (HBC), said.

One angry resident said: ‘It's a scandal as it has cost the taxpayers, so far, tens of thousands of pounds and someone needs to be accountable for what has gone wrong.’ The disputed piece of land is part-owned by the council and the Foreshore Trust, a charity that was set up in 1893 to run the whole of the town's seafront.

In RTP, in Chapter 30, The Brigands Hold A Council Of  War, where the issue is the loss-making electricity supply (which these capitalists own): Sweater laughed quietly: ….No.  What I propose is that we Sell Out.

Who’s to buy? Repeated Sweater, replying to Grinder.  The municipality of course!  The ratepayers.  Why shouldn’t Mugsborough go in for Socialism as well as other towns?

Another smart move concerning the town council and the sea front is Mr Grinder’s offer – on behalf of the ‘Cosy Corner Refreshment Company’ – to take the Kiosk on the Grand Parade.  Mr Grinder submitted a plan of certain alterations that he would require the Corporation to make at the Kiosk, and, provided the Council agreed to do this work he was willing to take a lease of the place for five years at £20 per year.  And, despite Dr Weakling’s observation that the alterations would cost £175 pounds and that the council would be out of pocket by £75 after five years, the move is agreed, as is Councillor Rushton’s suggestion that a shelter for 200 people be erected close to the Kiosk.  Again Dr Weakling objects, even suggesting that this was a put-up job,  but this provokes loud cries of ‘Withdraw’ ‘Apologise’ ‘Cast ‘im out’ and terrific uproar….

But this is Mugsborough, of course, not Hastings.  Never Hastings!

It would be most interesting to walk the front with Robert Noonan today, and to hear his thoughts on the state of the world.  He would no doubt be bitterly disappointed that capitalism is still the system and that The Golden Light is not yet diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism. He would, however, acknowledge that some things may be better for many working people, that the work house is no more, that children in poverty get free school meals, that retired workers receive pensions. 

He might not be surprised, however, that workers such as Crass still say things like, you know very well that the country is being ruined by foreigners….. and that such as Sawkins might chime in, Wy , even ‘ere in Mugsborough – We’re overrun with ‘em!  Nearly all the waiters and the cook at the Grand Hotel… is foreigners. And depressingly he might also not find it unusual that the papers his workmates read are filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade.  These were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners. 

And if Robert Noonan were to have read yesterday’s Observer (not the Obscurer!) he might sigh a little reading Tom Kibasi (Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice)’s piece on the challenges facing Britain today:  We are living at a moment when an old economic settlement is in crisis, but a new settlement has yet to be formed. It has been apparent since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a serious breakdown in the economy; what is now becoming clear is that this is leading – and needs to lead – to a new approach to economic policy, with a new underpinning of economic ideas.

And he might shiver just a little reading that ex-Chancellor George Osborne has declared that he earned £800,000 for fourteen speeches in the last year and that he is also gaining £650,000 a year for working 48 days at Blackrock, the world’s biggest fund management firm.  And all this while drawing his MP’s salary and supposedly working full time.  As William Keegan said, some people are shameless.

In 1907, an article in the Nation stated that half the total national income of Britain accrued to one-ninth of the population, and that half the national capital belonged to one-seventh…. In yesterday’s Observer I read that in this country the richest 10% of households have incomes that are 11 times those of the poorest 10%.

Robert Noonan was not a blinkered idealist.  He recognised, with a great deal of frustration, the blind, stupid, enthusiastic admiration displayed by the philanthropists for those who exploited and robbed them; their extraordinary apathy with regard to their own interests; the patient, broken-spirited way in which they endured their sufferings, tamely submitting to live in poverty in the midst of the wealth they had helped to create; the callous indifference to the fate of their children, and the savage hatred they exhibited towards anyone who dared to suggest the possibility of better things, and this forced upon him the thought that the hopes he cherished were impossible of realisation. 

One character in the book, the ‘renegade socialist,’ says, and Tressell has Barrington repeat this: You can be a Jesus Christ if you like, but for my part I’m finished. For the future I intend to look after myself.  As for these people, they vote for what they want, they get what they vote for, and, by God! They deserve nothing better! 

It’s a sad, depressing reflection, echoed, perhaps, by Nick Cohen yesterday (though in a slightly different context): As I keep saying, the problem is not the liars, it is the millions who want to be lied to.

Robert Noonan died, depressed by publishers’ rejection of his book, in the Royal Infirmary, Brownlow Street, Liverpool, on February 2nd 1911. The death certificate described the 40-year-old as a Sign Writer (Journeyman) and gave the cause of death as phthisis pulmonalis - a wasting of the lungs sometimes associated with tuberculosis - and cardiac failure; yet the Sister told Kathleen that he died of broncho-pneumonia and No mention was made of T.B.

Robert Noonan was buried on 10 February 1911, in the Parochial Cemetery, Walton, which belonged to the Overseers of the Poor. Unlike most of the other twelve corpses in Plot T.11, a 25-foot deep public grave, his burial was under a Relieving Officer’s order, though a curate officiated.

The cemetery was not identified until 1968; the grave was not located until 1970, and it remained unmarked until 1977.  [Information from Dave Harker, TUC Online History, 2014]

*     *     *     *     *

As a curious footnote to this story, in Hastings I come across a Freedom of Information request which asked for figures showing the Borough Council’s expenditure on Public Health Funerals in the last five years. Total amount spent 2011 – 2016 £182,409.22; amount recovered £98,114.20; therefore £84,295.02 monies still owed…..

There were 19 such funerals in 2016, at an average cost of £2,000 each.  The cost of just one of those has been recovered.

The poor are still with us.....

*     *     *     *     *

Hastings is a fine place.  But perhaps it is time that Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists became a set text in schools.  It’s a faithful picture of working-class life… in a small town in the south of England and it’s far from irrelevant today…….

With very many thanks to Simon and Connie.

  

 http://www.simonmawer.com/

And please sponsor my upcoming 5 day 100 mile South Downs Way trek in aid of Alzheimer's Society....

www.justgiving.com/Richard-GIBBS5

(Greater) Manchester - 2 - Now....

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out….

Take me out tonight

Where there's music and there's people

And they're young and alive

Driving in your car

I never never want to go home

Because I haven't got one

Anymore

STEVEN MORRISSEY & JOHNNY MARR

The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Back in Manchester, forty years (and more) on, some things have changed, though the air still hangs heavy and dark over the city.  Media centres, flats and businesses rise high above the Salford Quays, though much of the inner dockland areas and the canals are weed-strewn and crying out for development.  The older buildings of the city centre jostle now with towering hotels and gleaming office buildings.  

Tiny scraps of history remain amidst the tramways and roadworks of the future, their chimneys out of place in the new green world, but their gutters filled with buddleia and assorted growths. 

Friday night and the city is waking up.  Only two weeks to party before Christmas and the populace is in strutting out.  

The centre is packed with (as the visitManchester website boasts) world-famous markets feature[ing] nearly 350 stalls spanning 10 distinctive market sites [Albert Square, Cathedral Garden, Market Street, Exchange Square, Corn Exchange, Exchange Street, New Cathedral Street, French Christmas Market in King Street, German Christmas Market in St Ann's Square, World Christmas Market in Brazennose Street], transforming the city centre in to a festive wonderland….. Regularly named one of Europe's best Christmas Market attractions, nine million people visited in 2014.]  The list is almost as exhausting as the reality, with endless strings of stuffed Santas, electric reindeer, and tacky stalls selling anything and everything. 

  

The pubs and restaurants are steaming. The Briton's Protection (opened in 1806 as a recruiting office for the war against Napoleon, but also the only place in town to commemorate the 1819 Peterloo Massacre) is rammed.  The Pev (full name, Peveril of the Peak, the title of Walter Scott’s longest novel) has burst and the crowd spilled onto the pavements.

I book a table at Mr Thomas’s Chop House (Est. 1867) and innocently ask for a quiet corner.  A pleasant lady informs me that it’s our busiest night of the year! And sure enough, I have to fight my way in through the crowds to reach the spot they’d secured for me by the back door, utilising the fore-arm smash that I learned all those years ago from Kendo (see http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2016/12/greater-manchester-1-then.html for the story behind that…..)

The morning after is as dark as the night before.  At eight a.m. one of the clubs in the Gay Village is evacuating itself, with clients swaggering and staggering amongst the jaded taxis; silvered ampoules litter the cobbles, a peroxide head leans forward and spouts peroxide fluid….  Further down the road The Midland Hotel (where Rolls met Royce) has rooms for one starting at £254 (without breakfast) but there don’t seem to be many lights on at this hour (you may be interested to know that, as their website says, The Midland provides some of the finest dining experiences in Manchester. The team of chefs work constantly to ensure every dish, be it our traditional afternoon tea to the award winning cuisine in The French by Simon Rogan, is prepared with love and passion and full of amazing flavours and tastes. Where possible, we strive to use locally sourced produce to enhance the offerings on our bespoke menus.)  

Too bad I chose a Lancashire Butter Pie at the Chop House.  I truly missed out on this bespoke menu…. And I wonder what locally sourced really means in St Peter’s Square…..

Across the street the pantheon-like Central Library sticks limpet-like to the Kafka-esque book depository (the Town Hall extension), which in turn is attached by sighing bridges to the fourteen million bricks of the Victorian Town Hall (encased in grimy Spinkwell stone).

Down Deansgate lies the John Rylands Library, built by Enriqueta Rylands with no expense spared as a memorial for her husband.  

It houses an exceptional collection of books (including, I note, several tomes entitled The Bible in Vence!  Tut!  Even my cat knows how to spell Venice! sic) and a hushed gothic reading room – What an amazing place! Opines K R Higgins, Brisbane, in her recent tripadvisor review.  This was like being in a Harry Potter movie! 

The Cathedral (the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Mary, St Denys and St George), is virtually empty,

and I imagine (though I am not an expert!) it is even more like being in a Harry Potter movie.....   

A priest intones the liturgy, almost to himself, while two Chinese girls admire the Christmas Tree.  

A statue commemorates Humphrey Chetham, whose Hospital School and Library (Charity no. 526702) spent £10M of its £11.3M income in the financial year ending August 2015.  Outside a sign points to the North Pole, and a carousel stands parked and fenced in (to stop the horses leaping away?)  

In front of the titanic prow of the National Football Museum,

a homeless man begs on the cold street.  He could be in the Cathedral.... except that no one would even pass him by in there.

In 1937 George Orwell wrote, in The Road to Wigan Pier, about how Southerners go north… with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilised man venturing among savages….  

He writes about the snobbish, effeminate, and lazy Southerner.  He identifies how, In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop. 

Things have changed.  No one in Coronation Street wears curlers or hair nets any more.  

The Whitworth Art Gallery [Winner of Visit England's gold prize for Large Visitor Attraction of the Year 2016 and winner of the Art Fund's Museum of the Year 2015] has been reconstructed and currently has Andy Warhol on display, 

as well as 'works' by contemporary artists. 

And on Salford Quays, 

there is Media City, where the BBC and ITV hang out, there's a branch of the Imperial War Museum, lurking like the Bismark, and there is this shiny MI6-lookalike just by the Manchester Ship Canal.

Quay West, just across the Manchester Ship Canal from The Lowry

In The Lowry, (two theatres plus galleries with works by L S Lowry and modern artists ina landmark quayside building) I wander free around L S Lowry – The Art and The Artist (A permanent display of the best of LS Lowry) and am astonished at the range and depth of the man. I realise he was still around all those years ago when I lived here, so feel a tenuous connection even.... though, like many a snobbish and lazy southerner, I previously 'knew' Lowry to be a painter of stick men and factories, where people come and go in a 'normal' way.....

but this really is something else. The building is spectacular outside as well as in.... 

And the range of the Lowry works, from early life drawings to mesmeric scenes of the North Sea, and from a vast portrayal of a Welsh industrial landscape to a slightly eerie portrait of a quiet woman, is breathtaking. One picture in particular catches my attention and I have been kindly granted permission to reproduce it here.....  

LS Lowry The Funeral Party 1953 © The Lowry Collection, Salford

As the official website explains, In 1957 the News Chronicle described The Funeral Party as 'a painting with all the love and compassion drained away.' Lowry himself entertained listeners with his explanation that the man on the right is being treated as an outcast for coming to the funeral in boots and a red tie.' {Read more at http://www.thelowry.com/ls-lowry/microsite/art/people/the-funeral-party/#QguaCFJidAQjAJjl.99}

The extraordinary thing about this funeral party is that it perfectly captures the people in The Union Inn, Levenshulme, when I returned there yesterday (again please see my previous piece for more of this.....)

On my way back to Piccadilly station, on my way back to the snobbish South, riding the brilliant Metrolink, then lunching through the now spacious and quiet Briton's Protection and The Pev, 

the streets are relaxed with people living their bright lives under the damp grey skies, as Lowry loved them. 

Morrissey (currently 57) sang:

There's a place in the sun for anyone

Who has the will

To chase one and I think I've found mine

Yes, I do believe I have found mine

Let Me Kiss You

Manchester is not quite my ideal place in the sun, but there is a light and it never goes out….  

Nowhere, not even paradise, is perfect [remember Peter Cook’s comment to Dudley Moore as they wandered amongst clouds with white hats and scarves?  Pete: Is this it then?  Dud: What?  Pete: Is this Heaven then?  Dud (quizzically): Yeah….  Pete (after a pause, sardonically): Bloody hell!] 

If nothing else, Manchester, Greater Manchester, has been an inspiration, as it clearly was to Chopin..... 

I return to the soft, fat, lazy, effeminate south, topped up with Northern grit and subtleties.... 

And no, I won’t look back in anger….

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster.....

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

Pip! Pip!