Extravagant Strangers, page 19
Know what that mean. You’ll become one wid Gawd.
In the land of the blind …
’Tis the other way round. In the land o’ de one eye the blind is king.
You see, partner, if you can’t see, we’ll all start thinkin’ that’s w’at we got eyes for, not to see.
You know Bustamante?
Ask him. He come from Jamaica.
Me take to Mr Manley more.
Who’s Manley?
Him know ’bout Busta, but him ain’t know ’bout Mr Manley. Me always say English people got everything upside down. The wrong things catch they eye.
Are there any communists in Jamaica?
Not since Stalin lef’.
When was he there?
He born there.
Come to study?
Where do you chaps come from? You don’t mind me asking, do you. My sister’s a missionary in Africa, says it’s a nice place, and your people very good people. She adores the Africans. Says we haven’t been very nice always but things are changing. Your people are gradually getting to understand us, and the future promises to be brighter. That’s what I’ve always said, you know. Understanding. As soon as people get to understand one another life is easy.
Is it true what the papers say about unemployment?
Of course it is. Don’t you expect it. Wherever there’s an economic contradiction in the whole process of production and distribution you’ll find that. Wages dropping. Prices soaring. Finally slump. We haven’t got to that yet but I give us three years. This country is heading for an economic suicide, and all because they won’t face facts. There’s going to be hard times ahead, but all you’ve got to do is keep on the right side of the fence. Don’t listen to the lies you hear. People are so blinded by lies in this country that they see an enemy whenever a friend stands up to speak the truth. But history is an open book, and those who read and understand realize that their duty is to change. The key word is change. Before anything like peace and prosperity can come about in this country the whole economic structure of the society must be changed. They are people who lie and fight and would even die to keep the old order. They want to build a new house on old, tottering foundation. You must be careful. Keep on the right side of the fence and play your part in the struggle.
You speak excellent English for a foreigner. Much better than the French.
How nice of you to say that. ’F course the better classes get much the same standard of education as you do. I’m really from the middle class. Among us, that is my circles an’ my circles’ circles there isn’t an upper class. In a sense you might say we were the upper class.
Where is this may I ask?
Grenada. One of the islands. My father is a magistrate. Was educated here in England.
Where is Grenada? I don’t seem to recall the name.
Don’t you know? You’re kidding. Were you at university?
No, but here is a map of the world. We might look for it.
Excuse, old man, but how much you think I should give the baggage man.
W’at you talkin’ ’bout?
As a tip.
Tell him you hope de weather change.
WILL PASSENGERS TAKE THEIR SEATS PLEASE
You see dat chap over dere. Well he vex as hell to see we here on dis train. Long ago only he could come, an’ when he see dis he start to feel he not as rich as he should be. You know that fellow from Trinidad. Whole family solicitors. They spend six months here and six months at home. Every year. He got a young woman wid him.
‘Tis he wife. You doan’ know she … Chinese girl from Woodbrook. Come into prominence when the Yanks was at Point Cumana. When the Yanks went back home everybody say she days did come to a end. But only Gawd know how it happen, ol’ man, my friend pick it up, an’ who goin’ help him wid it now is anybody guess.
I wasn’t in Trinidad when the Yanks was there.
Well you miss something, ol’ man. The Yanks turn Trinidad upside down, an’ when they finish they let we see who was who. They is a great people, those Yankee people. It take a man like Lord Kitchener to put they fame in poetry.
WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS WITHIN THE TRAIN
What him get drunk on so?
The limeys know how to get drunk on bitter. They make up they min’ before they take a sip. Doan’ pay him no mind.
Him turn real stupid but me no say for certain him ain’t better man than the one me see back down yonder who let coal pot in he mouth make dumb man outta him.
WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS WITHIN THE TRAIN
England’s a pleasant place
For those that are rich and free
But England ain’t no place
For guys that look like ye.
Good night Irene, Good night,
Pam, pan paddan pam pam.
WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS WITHIN THE TRAIN
On the hill beyond where the grass is, green, greener than the hedges here, in the sun, look, like a print of plaster made against plain, look a white horse. Did you see the white horse. If you look now you can see it, where the grass is, green, greener than the hedges here. And the sun makes it real like an animal in stride. It looks as if it had been set on the side so that one flank of ribs rests on the grass, and the sun seems brighter there, the grass green, greener, than the hedges here. Now. The horse. The buildings have come between us. You won’t see it for some time, that white horse like a plaster print on the grass. Look how the buildings slip past. And these, obviously these were destroyed. Destroyed by fire. Two, three, four of them, all in a row. These, oh, these were hit from above. Bombed. The War. Everything seemed so preserved nearer the sea that it didn’t register. The War. But there was a War. These buildings were bombed. That is, bombs fell on them, and they went up in flames, leaving as a memorial of their destruction what you see now. The War. It was fought here, and you read about it. Heard about it. Saw people who had seen it. And now the buildings. Of course they were bombed. And this is the first time you have been to a country that was bombed. Now you are in the war zone. England. Am I really in England. Remember the battles. England was always the place that fought battles, the country with some enemy, but England, it was Britain the books said, For Britain. It was Britons, Britons never never shall be slaves. This is England. Look you just missed it. Ah, there again, there it is, the white horse. Gone. There ah, there it is. White against the grass. Who put it there. Look. There again. Ah, it’s gone. Gone. All the buildings are solid here. These were not bombed. Or perhaps these were rebuilt. They have blocked out the white horse. Forever. The white horse is gone. Only the buildings now.
How long you been sleepin’?
WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS WITHIN THE TRAIN
Look partner dat’s where they make the blades, partner, all yuh shaving you say you shave you do cause o’ that place. Look it, ol’ man, they make yuh blades there.
Ponds, ol’ man, look Ponds. They make cream there. All those women back home depend on what happen in there. Look, Ponds Cream. Look Tornado you see that. Paint. They make paint there. Look. Paint. You dint see that, partner. You see that. They make life there. Life. What life partner. Where you say they make what.
Life partner. Read it. Hermivita gives lie. You ain’t see it.
In the same direction, look, they make death there, ol’ man. Look. Dissecticide kills once and for all. Read partner. Look what they make.
They make everything here on this side. All England like this.
Peter Porter
[1929-]
Peter Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, and lived his early childhood in the shadow of his mother’s illness. She died when he was nine. Porter remained in Brisbane for the duration of his formal education and from 1947 to 1948 worked there as a journalist. In 1951 he moved to England, where he has lived ever since.
For ten years, Porter worked as a clerk, bookseller and advertising writer in what he would later refer to as temperate London, our educated city’. He married Jannice Henry in 1961 and the couple had two daughters. The year of his marriage Porter published his first collection of poetry, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten. In 1968 he began to earn a living from freelance writing and broadcasting. He has also, since 1970, been a university lecturer and has been writer-in-residence at various English, Scottish and Australian universities.
In 1974 his wife committed suicide, an event he has written about in several poems, including ‘Exequy’. The majority of his themes, however, seem to have been inspired, as one critic put it, by a ‘queasy fascination with the London scene, consumer goods, and casual sex’, all seen with the eyes of a ‘privileged outsider’. As an Australian, Porter is ‘alienated’, according to his compatriot Clive James, by his ‘European sensibility’, and perhaps to counteract his alienation he has, through his writing, ‘set about imaginatively possessing Europe’.
Since 1961 Porter has produced a substantial body of poetry that has earned him recognition as a satirist and rhetorician, and has prompted comparisons with W. H. Auden. In addition to publishing collections of his own work, Porter has been represented in numerous anthologies. In 1976 he received the Cholmondeley Award and in 1983 he won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for Collected Poems. He also won the Whit-bread Prize in 1988 and was a recipient of the Gold Medal for Australian Literature in 1990.
Porter’s poem ‘An Ingrate’s England’ (1989) reveals a great ambivalence about his relationship to Britain. After nearly forty years as a resident, the poet is still attempting to write and think his way into the essential fabric of the country.
AN INGRATE’S ENGLAND
It is too late for denunciation:
That the snow lingers on the sill
And that there are too many newspapers
Is the same as telling yourself
You’ve given this country forty years
Of your days, you’re implicated
In the injustices of pronouns
And the smarter speech of sycamores.
This is the England in your flesh,
A code enduring Summer while
Tasteless birds flap at the edge of
Civilizing concrete. Some have found it
Necessary to reimagine Nature
And stop importing Wordsworth
To shame the bugles from the evening air –
You were born in not the colonies but God.
Yet the brain cannot be Gloucestershire
And vents of human hate are viewed
As old cathedrals across osiers.
The selling of the past to merchants
Of the future is a duty pleasing to
The snarling watercolourist. Prinny
Used to ride by here, and still the smoke
Of loyalist cottages drips acid rain on voices.
The trains in their arched pavilions leave
For restless destinations, their PA Systems
Fastidious with crackle; nobody
Will ask you to identify yourself
But this will lead to hell, the route
The pilgrims take – down the valleys
Of concealed renewal to the pier-theatre,
The crinkle-crankle wall, the graveyard up for sale.
J. G. Ballard
[1930-]
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, China, where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. During the Second World War he was interned in a civilian prisoner-of-war camp. In 1946 he was repatriated to Britain, but the vision of a ravaged and desolate post-war Shanghai left a powerful impression on him and was to influence his writing in the years to come. His urban landscapes appear as places of numbing destruction (London as ‘a city of hell’), or lose their identities completely in the face of chaos.
After attending King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine but left without taking his degree, Ballard worked at odd jobs and, in the early 1950s, served in the Royal Air Force. In 1954 he married Helen Matthews and the two settled near London. His first short stories, written in the early 1960s and later published as Terminal Beach (1964), appeared in the British science-fiction magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds. Ballard gradually gained a reputation for science-fiction writing that transcended the traditions of the genre and his explorations of psychological ‘inner space’ earned him respect among purveyors of science fiction’s ‘New Wave’ movement.
It is widely acknowledged that Ballard’s canon can be divided into ‘serious’, more demanding work and lighter ‘entertainments’. His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), would most likely fall into this second category. It was followed by The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965; previously issued as The Burning World in 1964) and The Crystal World (1966), a trilogy which explored the disintegration of civilization in the face of environmental catastrophe.
In 1964 Helen Matthews died. The loss of his wife, with whom he had three children, had a profound effect on Ballard’s writing. His production of short stories decreased and his fiction became increasingly sombre. Crash (1973), which was seen as a cult triumph by some but as unnecessarily provocative by others, explored themes of violence, sexual perversion and moral and emotional sterility. Two stories of Robinson Crusoe-type castaways, Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975) followed Crash. In the former, the protagonist is trapped on a traffic island; in the latter, a luxury apartment building becomes the isolated setting for social savagery.
In 1984 Ballard received the Guardian Prize for Empire of the Sun (1984), a largely autobiographical novel set in Shanghai during the Second World War. Empire of the Sun, which decries the senselessness and brutality of war, also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1985. His subsequent works include Running Wild (1988) and The Kindness of Women (1991).
In 1966 many of Ballard’s essays and reviews were collected in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.
In stark contrast to Lawrence Durrell, Ballard sees London as not decadent enough. His ‘First Impressions of London’ (1993) is a commentary upon Britain, which to his eyes never recovered from the ravages of the Second World War.
First Impressions of London
My image of London was formed during my Shanghai childhood in the 1930s as I listened to my parents’ generation talk nostalgically of West End shows, the bright lights of Piccadilly, Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence, reinforced by a Peter Pan and Christopher Robin image of a London that consisted entirely of Knightsbridge and Kensington, where I per cent of the population was working class and everyone else was a barrister or stockbroker. When I actually arrived in 1946 I found a London that looked like Bucharest with a hangover – heaps of rubble, an exhausted ferret-like people defeated by war and still deluded by Churchillian rhetoric, hobbling around a wasteland of poverty, ration books and grotesque social division.
To understand London now one has to grasp the fact that in this city, as nowhere else in the world, World War II is still going on. The spivs are running delis and restaurants, and an occupying arm of international bankers and platinum-card tourists has taken the place of the American servicemen. The people are stoical and underpaid, with a lower standard of living and tackier services than in any comparable Western capital. The weary camaraderie of the Blitz holds everything together. Bombs should fall tonight but probably won’t, but one senses that people would welcome them.
How to improve London? Launch a crash programme to fill the city with pirate TV stations, nightclubs, brothels and porn parlours. London needs to become as decadent as Weimar Berlin. Instead, it is merely a decadent Bournemouth.
Eva Figes
[1932-]
Eva Figes was born Eva Unger in Berlin, Germany, into an affluent Jewish family. Her father was imprisoned in Dachau following Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). Eventually, he managed to procure visas for himself and his family, and in 1939 Eva, her parents and her brother fled to England. Figes later received a scholarship to Queen Mary College, University of London, where she received a BA in English.
In 1952 Figes began working as an editor at a London publishing house. In 1954 she married John George Figes, with whom she had two children. It was after the breakdown of their marriage that she wrote her first novel, Equinox (1966), which tells of one critical year in a woman’s life. She then left publishing and began writing and translating full-time. In 1967 she won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her second novel, Winter Journey, which chronicles a day in the life of a confused, elderly man. Figes wrote several more novels before publishing a personal memoir, Little Eden: A Child at War (1978), in which she recounts her experiences during the 1940–41 Blitz of Britain. In this book the sense of personal alienation and ‘statelessness’ that she shares with many of her fictional characters is evident.
Figes has often been termed a ‘modernist’, for her novels digress from traditional forms. In keeping with her desire to reshape conventions, she questions accepted sexual stereotypes and in her writing she often addresses the issue of female estrangement from the mainstream of power. Her later works include Ghosts (1988) and The Tree of Knowledge (1990). Her latest novel, The Knot, was published in 1996.
The following extract from Figes’s personal memoir Little Eden: A Child at War, reveals the pain and anxiety of being both Jewish and German in the England of the 1930s and 1940s.
From Little Eden: A Child at War
In London, for the past year, apart from a few weeks in Scotland waiting for a German invasion which never came, I had been trying very hard to get myself accepted in the childhood network of streets, school and playground whose laws were strange to me. I was foreign, used to large households with servants. All my life I had been sheltered, not only from the realities of poverty, but from the much harsher realities of life in Germany. As a small child I did not look particularly Jewish, and I could not have told you what the word meant. The adult world was wrapped in mysteries, sensed tension not understood, but always I was cushioned from the impact of harsh reality. My father had been arrested while on a business trip to Dusseldorf, so his continued absence was easily explained. He was simply ‘away’ on business. My nursemaid, who later died of cholera in a concentration camp, organized a singsong in a back room away from the street while the smashing and looting, the beating and killing, went on four floors below at street level. All the servants had instructions to lie, and they must have been quite good at it. My nursemaid only got caught out once: when I stopped outside a shop displaying brown uniforms and leather belts and boots, and asked what they were for. She did not answer, she had no answer ready, which is why I remember that shop so vividly. But the smashed shop windows did not make much impression, because my question was promptly answered by prearrangement: they are being repaired. My brother and I could see that the shops were being repaired, so the aftermath of the Kristallnacht faded into everyday reality.
