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| Roger McGough at St Mary's, Snettisham, September 3rd, 2025 |
Meteorological autumn already. Season of fruits and mellifluous substances. I am up early and out, walking to the sea, breathing the fresh, slightly sharp air,
enjoying a feeling of peace. Sometimes the world is too much with us, but not this morning. Sunflowers turn their heads to the rising sun,
while berries ripen, grateful for the recent showers.
I love Ingoland (my name for the area of Norfolk where I live, drained by the river Ingol) or even Engerland, the land where my mother lay labouring to give me life. I have always loved you. From the days of branch lines,
and steam trains, from the days of Winnie the Pooh, or where Trevor Dudley-Smith (Elleston Trevor) mused By A Silver Stream, I have lived and loved in a sweet bubble of family and friends, of farmers and hauliers in Sussex, of aunts and uncles and cousins in London and beyond. I have loved Dame Edna Everage, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, Duke Ellington, Count Arthur Strong and others of the no(a)bility. I love village churches,
And old vicarages; Laurence Sterne and William Cowper, John Donne and George Herbert.
I used to drink in Levenshulme with Kendo Nagasaki and my friend Spen, who had done time for manslaughter as he came home from the army and found his wife in bed with another man, whose skull, it turned out, wasn’t adapted to a blow from a soldier. I ate cow’s udder sandwiches with a workmate at Viner’s in Sheffield, swapped Raymond Chandler novels with Angela Lansbury’s uncle at Brown Bailey’s. I was a student when uprisings were de rigeur. I drank too much on occasions, and ate what I could from Lancaster market, wandered lonely as a clown in the Lake District, and fell into impossible love in Scotland, twice..... Old flames, now dowsed.....
It was my country. The country of Nelson. The country of Shakespeare and Joyce and W B Yeats (You sure? Ed.)
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W B Yeats
He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
We had Sooty and Sweep. Andy Pandy. The Flowerpot Men. Bruce Lacey. Mr Pastry. We played in bombed out buildings and air-raid shelters. There were two tv channels, and we only had one, and I had to go to Denys's house to watch The Lone Ranger....
Then, around the time that JFK and Pope Giovanni XXIII hit the big sleep, the Beatles wanted to hold my hand, and I grew a little bit up, (thank you Jackie Short, et alios....)
And along came the Liverpool Poets, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Pattern, and her majester Lily the Pink with a scaffold to uphold her.... And life turned from B & W to colour. From 350 lines to 525. And, eventually, from analogue to digital.
And perhaps that’s where it went awry? We used to drink ententes cordiales, and get along with our neighbours – after all, in 1966 we made amends for WWII in a penalty shootout, when I was at Warcop Army Camp. What was going to go wrong?
Which brings me to Mr McGough....
He has just been to stay. He came to perform his show, “Alive and Gigging,” (not as some promoters would have it, “Alive and Giggling,”) at St Mary’s, Snettisham, the high church of Ingoland, and we had a wonderful evening. Full house, many laughs, a few tears, much reflection on the world we have grown to inhabit.
But there’s the rub.
All the while, there’s an acid eating away at this world, dissolving the things we hold/held dear. My grandparents, and my parents, wore uniforms and lost their youths defending a world they believed in. A generation stood against fascism and beat it back and proved it wrong.
But like the Hydra, it has come back, fag ash and Burberry, fake tan and golfing cheats, a creeping, crawling resurgence of things that ought to have drowned in sewers. And we are all affected, all conflicted. I want to love my enemas. I could even give Nadine Doilies space (she, like me, never made it to the Hows of Lourds) but, like Martin Loofah’s reformation, the slate was not whipped clean and so there is still the seed of disquiet, the worm of hatred.
Angerland, My Angerland.... So....
I must arise and go now, and go to Italy,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and bottles made:
Nine lean-tos will I have there, a cave for my honey-bee;
And live apart in the free-trade grave.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.....
Who am I/are you kidding? We are all caught in the sticky spider’s web of life. We are as insects who eat the world and leave nothing useful behind. It is too easily beautiful to walk out on the shores of Ingoland and to ignore what is going on all around.
Ow! Ow! brief candle!
I’m but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets my hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
Which is why we are off to Italy..... Better the devil you don’t know.....
I love my Engerland. I love my country of birth, but I am not English. I am not British. I cannot fly the flag of some obscure saint who was probably martyred at Diospolis, now Lydda, in what was Palestine, around the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century. I am as English as W B Yeats, as James Joyce. I am a European, and am uncomfortably proud of that. Don’t paint my house with red crosses. Don’t paint the roundabouts with symbols of some kind of purity. Around 12.000 years ago no one lived here. We are all migrants or descended from such. No one is pure anything.
And to return to the beginning of this piece. I have just had the privilege, honour and pleasure of hosting Roger McGough in my house. At 87 years of age, in that awkward period between birth and death, he still raises a giggle and pokes fun at the world. Whether you would consider him a National Treasure or not, some have called him the Patron Saint of Poetry. Others say he has done more for poetry than champagne has done for weddings. I would say he has brought light into a dark world and made many many people feel better about their worries.
At breakfast he told me of a poem-in-progress. I don’t have total recall, but it was about the stink of politics, and the punch line (yes, poems are like jokes) was that the Speaker of the House of Commons was calling for quiet.... “O Dour! O Dour! O Dour!”
Arrest my case.....
We are bound for Italy, where at least somethings are different.....
This is for Roger and my other fellow travellers through this world.
