Jabberwocky

by Lewis Carroll

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the JubJub bird, and shun,

The frumious Bandersnatch!

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

Long time the manxome foe he sought —

So rested he by the TumTum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of black,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through, and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head,

He went galumphing back.

‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’

He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Rudolph Reed was oaken.

His wife was oaken too.

And his two good girls and his good little man

Oakened as they grew.

‘I am not hungry for berries.

I am not hungry for bread.

But hungry, hungry for a house

Where at night a man in bed

‘May never hear the plaster

Stir as if in pain.

May never hear the roaches

Falling like fat rain.

‘Where never wife and children need

Go blinking through the gloom.

Where every room of many rooms

Will be full of room.

‘Oh my home may have its east or west

Or north or south behind it.

All I know is I shall know it,

And fight for it when I find it.’

It was in a street of bitter white

That he made his application.

For Rudolph Reed was oakener

Than others in the nation.

The agent’s steep and steady stare

Corroded to a grin.

Why, you black old, tough old, hell of a man,

Move your family in!

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,

Nary a curse cursed he,

But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,

And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye

That squeezed into a slit.

But the Rudolph Reeds and the children three

Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own

With windows everywhere

And a beautiful banistered stair

And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass?

The first night, a rock, as big as two fists

The second, a rock big as three,

But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.

(Though oaken as man can be.)

The third night, a ring of silvery glass.

Patience ached to endure.

But he looked, and lo! small Mabel’s blood

Was staining her gaze so pure.

Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed

And pressed the hand of his wife,

And went to the door with a thirty-four

And a beastly butcher knife.

He ran like a mad thing into the night,

And the words in his mouth were stinking.

By the time he had hurt his first white man

He was no longer thinking.

By the time he had his fourth white man

Rudolph Reed was dead

His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.

“Nigger –” his neighbors said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,

For calling herself the cause

Her oak-eyed mother did no thing

But change the bloody gauze.

Setting standards

How and when do we make a decision to follow a particular political ideology?

Is it actually a political decision or is it something we grow into?

Some might think I was born in a privileged position. My father, as a pharmacist, was considered to be professional rather than trade and although he managed shops for others when I was born it was not too long before he had his own business.

Added to this I attended a grammar school and was expected by some to go on to university.

Then came the twist.

I rebelled.

Not an uncommon happening in the 1960s with the hippy movement and the “summers of love”, when the children of the middle class turned on their parents and adopted the ideals of socialism and muddled it up with free love.

I didn’t rebel against my parents. I initially adopted the principles they appeared to live their lives by.

My mother and father never really talked about politics at home. We did talk about almost everything else. In fact mealtimes could get quite heated – not acrimonious, just heated as each tried to support their point of view.

Later in life I was surprised to find people who shied away completely from this form of discussion, seeing it as argument.

It was more like democratic socialism in that we all were allowed to put our point of view and nobody actually “lost”.

Also my father sometimes talked about his wartime service as a Sgt. Dispenser in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

The majority of this service was in the Middle East, serving at base hospitals in Khartoum and near Tel Aviv and Suez.

He also spent time on troop ships going from Durban to Suze and across to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India.

He rarely talked about the serious side of war but occasionally he did talk of the sights he saw which really moved him.

One such was seeing the caste system in India and seeing people living in the gutters while others lived the good life and never gave a thought to the poor. He was always very emotional about this and blamed himself for not being able to do anything.

His attitude to the troops he dealt with, including the people he worked with, was also egalitarian. He did not care who they were, what they had been before the war, or even what colour, religion or sex they were.

As he said: “We carried troops from all over, often taking them up to join the desert fighting. We had Australians, Indians, Boers, Kiwis and African troops and at the end of the day they were all the same to me. The Boer and the Kenyan were treated the same. If they were sick they got medicine.”

With that sort of attitude when I was growing up it was not surprising I did not differentiate between people on the basis of their colour or their creed.

Yet my socialist beliefs, which were mainly based on everyone doing their bit and if they were not capable then others would do it for them, may have been passed on to me by two people I met when I was really too young to know better.

We were living in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and Dad was managing a chemist shop.

I was still a toddler and sometimes Mum would take me shopping and we would stop at the shop to see Dad.

One day he had two customers in, a man and a woman, who were chatting away to him as though they were old friends.

When my father introduced my mother to them and then myself they both smiled and the man ruffled my hair and said: “What a lively lad. Let’s hope he grows up to be a socialist eh?”

Of course, at the time, I had no real idea of what he said, just that they had smiled, which was always a good sign, and the man had ruffled my hair.

It was years later that my father told me who they were. They were MPs who lived on a farm just outside Chesham because it made it easy to get into London when Parliament was sitting.

The man was Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan and the woman was his wife and fellow MP Jennie Lee.

To me nowadays they are two of the finest Labour MPs of the 20th century. Both were part of the great Labour victory of 1945 and served with Clement Attlee during the time the NHS was created.

Meeting the Queen or Prince Philip after that would have been an anti-climax.

My full enlightenment to politics was still to come but that was an auspicious start.

Anne Hathaway

by Carol Anne Duffy

“Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed . . .”

from Shakespeare’s will

The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas

where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words

were shooting stars, which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch

a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed

a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance

and drama played by touch, by sense, by taste.

In the other bed, our best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –

I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head

as he held me upon that next best bed.

A new day – a new beginning?

The next day I arrived at the office earlier and, after parking my scooter, I went to a nearby newsagent shop and bought a copy of another local paper (the Flintshire Leader), a copy of the Daily Mirror and a copy of The Guardian . . . and a packet of cigarettes.

I went straight up to our office, or the reporters’ room, whatever you wanted to call it, and put my crash helmet, goggles and gloves on the low cupboard top where the newspaper files were.

I lit a cigarette and stood looking down the High Street as the town bustled into life below me. I could see the town hall on one side and shops the other.

There was a big pub, also on the right, (I think it was called The Crown) and some other businesses. I decided if today turned out like yesterday then I would take a walk along the High Street later in the morning.

Delwyn arrived a few minutes later and we headed downstairs to see Bill.

He was sat at his desk with a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

“I’ve checked the copy you typed yesterday and it all looks good. You’ve stuck to style and there were only a couple of errors which I amended.

“Now for today. Who enjoys sport?”

I was quick to respond: “Playing or watching?”

I was actually quite keen on certain sports. Rugby had become a passion, naturally, and I had played a bit at school. My real interest at the time, however, was hockey.

When I had first been introduced to hockey at school I had taken to it like a duck to water and I quickly showed a preference for the Indian head as opposed to the English head.

When I mentioned to my father that I needed my own stick for the second year he immediately recommended the Indian head.

It turned out that during the war he had played hockey for an RAMC side when stationed in Egypt and had been quite proficient.

Delwyn said: “I like football and cricket, prefer to watch rather than play.”

This seemed to meet Bill’s approval: “Well you can take a shot at typing up the sports reports we’ve had in from local clubs. You’ll see the style to follow in the files.

“Don’t use every jot and tittle they write. They tend to play up most of their reports and most can’t spell for toffee.

“There’s a stack of them dropped off yesterday and this morning. They’re in that basket over there. Take them up and get started.”

After Delwyn had left the office Bill turned to me: “I don’t think you are a sporty person are you Robin? There was a hint in your response.”

I admitted that beyond hockey, rugby and darts, there weren’t many local club sports I was that bothered about, and I only supported Liverpool FC because it was a family tradition on my mother’s side.

“Well there are probably lots of things you won’t enjoy but will still have to report on but in this case I had a willing volunteer.

“We don’t just get sports reports sent in. We also get the WI, Scout and Guide reports and similar club activities. There’s a pile of those in that basket and the same goes for those as sport – follow the style in the paper.

“I’ll be going to the magistrates’ court at 10 and I’ve got some other meetings to attend and won’t be back until after three.”

With that I realised I had been dismissed so I grabbed the pile of association reports and headed upstairs.

The previous day I had laid claim to the window end of the table desk, meaning I had the light from the window over my shoulder and not in my eyes.

I put the stack of reports by my typewriter, put my jacket over the back of my chair and said: “Fancy a coffee Delwyn? I’m just going to get myself one.”

He nodded a yes and I headed downstairs.

Once we were sorted out with coffee and copy we started tapping away. My typing lessons stood me in good stead, even though I had only scraped a Pass in touch typing. I could at least retain a couple of lines at a time in my head and amended spelling and grammar as I went along.

By mid-morning we were ready for a coffee break and Delwyn did the honours. I took my copy of the other local newspaper and started going through it.

Initially I was comparing stories, page leads, secondary stories, even weddings, funerals and social items.

One thing I did notice was that our paper had more court stories with fuller details. Some of the opposition court pieces were little more than names, ages and addresses; charges; pleas of guilty or not guilty; verdicts and sentences. Sometimes they ran similar cases together, such as tv licence prosecutions.

I also read through the Mirror and The Guardian to compare a “working class” newspaper and a “middle class” newspaper. This was a more complicated comparison and I decided to leave that until I got home.

We worked on until lunchtine again and once more I headed down the hill for a pint with Roger.

In the afternoon, if we didn’t rush the reports available, we had enough to keep us going until 5pm.

About twenty past three we heard Bill return and a few minutes later we heard his typewriter clattering away in the office beneath us.

As it happened I finished all my reports by 4pm and had double-checked the copy as well so I continued with comparing our newspaper with the opposition.

It wasn’t too difficult to see which reports had been sent to both newspapers simply by the order and wording in which they were presented.

Just before five we went down to Bill’s office and handed him the sheaf of reports we had done.

Over the two days we had probably typed up enough to fill at most two broadsheet pages, even allowing for adverts.

I wondered how much of the rest of the news was going to come from Bill and where he was getting his stories from.

We handed our copy to Bill and he quickly looked over it before telling us we might as well head home.

When I got home this time I took my two daily newspapers and also took my parents’ newspapers, the Express and the Mail and started running a four-way comparison on which stories appeared in all newspapers and which only appeared in one or two.

If I didn’t get much direction at work I intended finding out as much as I could for myself.

We are seven

by William Wordsworth

A simple Child,

That lightly drew its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

I met a little Cottage Girl:

She was eight years old she said;

Her hair was thick with many a curl

That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,

And she was wildly clad;

Her eyes were fair, and very fair;

— Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little Maid;

How many may you be?”

“How many? Seven in all,” she said,

And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they? I pray you tell.”

She answered, “Seven are we;

And two us at Conway dwell,

And two are gone to sea.

“Two of us in the churchyard lie,

My sister, and my brother.

And, in the church-yard cottage, I

Dwell near them with my mother.”

“You say that two at Conway dwell,

And two are gone to sea,

Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,

Sweet Maid, how this may be?”

Then did the little Maid reply,

“Seven boys and girls are we;

Two of us in the church-yard lie,

Beneath the church-yard tree.”

“You run about my little Maid,

Your limbs they are alive;

If two are in the church-yard laid,

Then ye are only five.”

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”

The little Maid replied,

“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,

And they are side by side.

My stockings there I often knit,

My kerchief there I hem,

And there upon the ground I sit,

And sing a song to them.

“And often after sun-set, Sir,

When it is light and fair,

I take my little porringer,

And eat my supper there.

“The first that died was sister Jane;

In bed she moaning lay,

Till God released her of her pain;

And then she went away.

“So in the church-yard she was laid;

And, when the grass was dry,

Together round the grave we played,

My brother John and I.

“And when the ground was white with snow,

And I could run and slide,

My brother John was forced to go,

And he lies by her side.”

“How many are you then?” said I

If they two are in heaven?”

Quick was the little Maid’s reply,

“O, Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead, those two are dead?

Their spirits are in heaven!”

‘Twas throwing words away, for still

The little maid would have her will,

And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

Time for a break

That first morning at the office in Holywell was quite a drag and enough to put some people off journalism for life.

Halfway through the morning we had a coffee break and decided to switch subjects. Delwyn took the wedding reports (how many people can get married over one weekend?) and I took the obituaries (how many people can die in a week?).

At least with weddings you could have fun. The first line on the reports was always the surnames of the couple – the bridegroom first.

Sometimes they were simple:

Jones-Davies

Evans-Roberts

but occasionally you hit the right combination:

Farmer-Giles

King-Cole

Obituaries did not offer much relief especially as the form normally had a list of mourners (the undertakers used to leave small cards on the pews for mourners to leave their name) and lists of floral tributes (the undertaker would collect all the cards which had to be returned).

The funeral of a civic personality could take half an hour or more to complete.

Lunchtime came as a relief.

Delwyn had brought sandwiches and intended to stay in the office.

I decided to go down the hill to Greenfield to meet a good friend at the pub at the bottom of the hill.

The pub was right next to one of the Courtaulds mills and my old friend Roger Steele had got a job there working as a trainee laboratory technician.

At the weekend we had agreed to meet up for a pub lunch and a game of darts.

Legally we had no right to be in the pub. I had celebrated my 17th birthday just two months earlier and Roger had celebrated his the previous October.

We must have looked confident in our right to walk up to the bar and order pints because the barman didn’t bat an eyelid.

As well as my pint I ordered a ham bap and it was quite clear they used their own home-cooked ham because the meat in the bap was no thin slice of tasteless rubbish.

We were used to playing darts as we had often monopolised the yacht club board on a Friday night.

We ignored the darts kept behind the bar, which often had cheap plastic flights or tatty-looking feather ones which had seen better days.

We were proper dart players and had our own sets kept in protective boxes. Mine were medium light with feathered flights almost as elegant as an arrow.

At about 10 to two I said cheerio and headed back up the hill to Holywell.

The next hour went quite quickly. We had completed all the wedding forms and funeral reports that had been in the wire in-trays and I went over to look at the file of previous editions.

At about 10 past three we heard footsteps clumping up the stairs to the floor below and then a door slammed shut. After about five minutes we heard a typewriter being hammered in the office below us.

The clack of the keys and the thump of the carriage return continued incessantly for the next hour or more with just brief quiet intervals when Bill must have been changing the copy paper or lighting a cigarette or taking a swig of tea.

Just after half past four there was a longer lull and we thought it time to take our typed copy down to show Bill and take any instructions.

I led the way and knocked on the door. When Bill called out: ‘What?” We entered and there he was, ensconced at his desk as he had been that morning except now there were clouds of cigarette smoke over his head and an ashtray full of stubs by his typewriter.

What was obviously his copy out tray was stacked with sheets of paper stapled at the corners.

“Right boys, how did you get on?”

We presented him with our reports on the marriages and deaths and he picked a couple up at random and flicked through them.

“Good, very good. You’ve done well. I’ll check through them and get them up to head office at Chester on the bus. You two might as well have an early break and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

That was our first day.

Tea, coffee, beer and a ham roll; a stack of wedding reports and an equal stack of obituaries.

No dashing out to report on fires; no reports of bank robberies; not even a simple local story on a break-in at the church; or a swarm of bees setting up home in a primary school.

My first day as a real journalist had proved to be somewhat of a damp squib.

Never mind, tomorrow was another day.

O Captain! My Captain!

by Walt Whitman

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of the red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! My Captain! rise and hear the bells;

Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head!

This is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult O shores! and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

The Rainy Day

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;

It rains, and the wind is never weary;

The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,

But at every gust the dead leaves fall,

And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;

It rains and the wind is never weary;

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,

But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,

And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds the sun is still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.

Hands across the sea

Today is the weekend and I digress from the story of a wannabe journalist to look back at the actor’s life.

I don’t know who came up with the idea but Joe Holroyd and Angela Day announced that we were going to take part in a youth group exchange – with a group in Germany.

First of all we had to find out who wanted to go and who could afford to do so. It was only when the numbers were confirmed that we discovered this was to be more than a group exchange.

It was to be a cultural exchange which would involve us presenting a one-act play while we were there.

I don’t remember the actual play but it was to do with a prince who concealed his identity and his foppish brother who tried to steal his inheritance.

Did I get the hero’s part?

No!

I was to play the foppish brother. My costume appeared to be loosely based on a Cavalier outfit with a doublet and wide-hipped breeches tucked into boots. The outfit looked as though it had been cut from a set of 19th century curtains in a russet and gold pattern, with a deep lace collar and lace cuffs.

There was a wide-brimmed hat with a feather (think ostrich not eagle) and – a wig! Plus a shoulder length chestnut coloured wig that would have been the envy of any Cavalier, even Prince Rupert himself.

Now I had always faced a dichotomy when it came to Roundheads and Cavaliers; or Union v Confederates; even the Wehrmacht v the Allies.

My head was always with the “good guys”, those fighting for the rights of the people; the freedom of the individual; democracy etc.

The problem was the Cavaliers had a better flair for fashion; the Confederates made the Union Army look like a crowd of Bowery bums; and, no matter how wrong their ideals were, you have to admit German officers had far sharper uniforms than our boys.

The problem was we were all responsible for our own costumes on the trip and I got an odd look from a customs officer when I opened the cardboard box I was carrying to reveal the carefully coiffured tresses of my chestnut wig being kept in shape by a blow-up rubber ball.

We travelled down to London by coach and stayed overnight at a small hotel as part of the trip included a night at a London theatre.

The following day we were up early to get on the cross-channel ferry to Belgium and then we continued on to Ülm in our coach where our hosts would meet us.

Ülm is a beautiful city but we were scheduled to stay with our hosts in two small neighbouring villages, Donaustetten and Gögglingen.

We performed our play three times during the two-week visit. The rest of the time was taken up with visits to Ülm and other beauty spots. We even spent three days camping in a German forest with old-fashioned nights around the camp fire, singing folk songs in Welsh and German; baking potatoes and drinking German beer (the under-18 rule didn’t apply) and having a great time.

The thing was that we were all post-war children on both sides and this was just 20 years after a war that split the world apart.

Our young hosts were our age but their parents, like ours, had been involved in that war, whether at home or abroad.

We made friends with those people because we put the past behind us. Many of the adults who were our real hosts had been conscripted, just as many of our troops were.

In a way it had not been personal. From pictures we saw in their homes these had been ordinary people caught up in a conflict not of their making but of the monsters who had taken control.

Their children could not be blamed for the actions of their parents. Just as our children and their children cannot be blamed for the many mistakes we have allowed to happen over the past 60 years.

The future belongs to the young. They will inherit the world and they will have to clear up after us, just as we did for the generation before us.

Watch out for tomorrow’s poem but I’ll be taking the rest of the day off.

Back on Monday with the continuing story of a cub reporter.