Diamond Bombs

When Charles Causley’s first collection of poems came out in 1951 – Farewell, Aggie Weston, the first in Eric Marx’s elegant series of ‘Poems in Pamphlet’ from the Hand and Flower Press – a fellow teacher at the ‘chalk Siberia’ in which he earned his living, picked it up and remarked dismissively, ‘Good Lord – is this the best thing you can do with your spare time?’ ‘What he didn’t know’, said Causley later, ‘was that it was the teaching I did in my spare time.’

He was still teaching when I met him first in 1952 – he had broadcast a kind review of a small collection of poems I’d published, and asked me over to his house in Launceston (he loved showing people around the town, and I recognized much of it from lines in his poems) – but I used to see him mainly in Plymouth when he came up to read at the Arts Centre in Looe Street, or at one of the pubs down on the Barbican – he was one of only two people who knew both my wife and me independently, before we met. Charles was born in Launceston in August 1917. His father, a groom and gardener, had joined up to serve in the First World War, was gassed and, as a result, died prematurely when his son was 7 and still at elementary school. Later Charles went on to Launceston College, and when he left his mother announced that she had got him a good job in a builder’s office. He moved on to work for a local electricity supply company but he felt trapped: it was ‘the end of the world’, he said, and certainly not a promising start to life as a poet, though poetry was already stirring in his veins – brought to bloodheat, he always said, as a result of reading Siegfried Sassoon’s war poems. Meanwhile, he wrote a couple of one-act plays (which were published) and played the piano in a four-piece dance band. This period of literally marking time came to an end when, called up for war service, he joined a naval shore establishment at a former Butlin’s holiday camp and later, at Scapa Flow in August 1940, the destroyer Eclipse, on a day when (he said later) he actually became a working poet. He didn’t manage to place any poems with magazines until 1947, when they gradually began to appear in the Adelphi, the New English Review and the Observer. His friend the poet Frances Bellerby introduced him to Eric Marx, and the result was a traditionally slim volume of verse. Almost all the poems in it prove his point that in naval service he had found his first subject. Most are clearly autobiographical – ‘Convoy’, ‘HMS Eclipse Approaches Freetown’ and, most movingly, the short poem that provided Marx with the title for the booklet. ‘Song of the Dying Gunner, A.A.1’ begins

Oh mother my mouth is full of stars As cartridges in the tray My blood is a twin-branched scarlet tree And it runs all runs away . . .

and ends

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz, Hang my tiddley suit on the door I’m sewn up neat in a canvas sheet And I shan’t be home no more.

‘Aggie Weston’ was the hostel in Devonport founded by an extraordinary woman who set up a string of them in seaports all around the country. Charles was delighted when he was told that someone had attempted to order a copy of Farewell, Dame Agnes Weston, DBE. By now he was back in Launceston, trained and teaching at the same primary school he had attended as a boy, and living with his mother in a house with no indoor water supply and an outdoor lavatory shared with three neighbours. In his ‘spare time’ the poems ‘burst from him like a diamond bomb’, as he wrote of John Clare. In 1957 Hart-Davis brought out Union Street, with a preface by Edith Sitwell, who had become an admirer. It was extremely well reviewed, and from then on the steady appearance of his poems, singly and in collections, built a reputation which, while it never quite matched those of his friends Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, was solid and popular. Particularly admired were his ballads – the first of which, ‘Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience’, had appeared in Farewell, Aggie Weston. The reference to Blake was no accident: Causley always aimed at simplicity – though not at easy clarity. He wasn’t interested in being instantly understood: when I told him I didn’t ‘get’ one of his poems, he simply said drily, ‘Well, if you don’t understand it today, you may tomorrow.’ Perfectly reasonable. He was always that, sometimes to one’s discomfiture. I was rather pleased with a poem of mine, ‘Delius in the Cathedral’, which was anthologized here and there in the Sixties. It ended:

Hares came out under my seat And clustered, waiting for the corn.

‘Yes, well,’ Charles said, ‘that’s fine until you read it aloud.’ He read his own poems well, sharing platforms all over the country with his contemporaries. He occasionally broadcast, often about Cornwall. He was a guest on Any Questions? – once. Answering a question about some problem of the time, he commented on a particular politician ‘sitting on his velvet bottom doing nothing’. He wasn’t invited again. Though he could be gregarious enough among friends, he was a very private person (the truth about his life is in his poems, he said). The fact that he lived with his mother until she died – after she had a stroke he nursed her for six years in the little house they always shared – and never apparently had a close personal relationship suggested to some people that he might be homosexual, but when A. L. Rowse once said to him ‘You’re one of us’, he was unimpressed. ‘I hope he only meant we’re both Cornishmen,’ he said. Though he was clearly delighted when, in 1976, he was able to take early retirement, he must surely have been a good teacher. Certainly his poems display tremendous empathy with children (this led to the patronizing description of him as ‘a children’s poet’) – think of ‘Timothy Winters’, which I suppose is probably his best-known poem:

Timothy Winters comes to school, With eyes as wide as a football pool, Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters: A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark, And his hair is an exclamation mark. His clothes are enough to scare a crow And through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks he won’t hear a word And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird, He licks the patterns off his plate And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet And he lives in a house on Suez Street, He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor And they say there aren’t boys like him any more . . .

It ends:

At Morning Prayers the Master helves For children less fortunate than ourselves, And the loudest response in the room is when Timothy Winters roars ‘Amen!’

So come one angel, come on ten: Timothy Winters says ‘Amen Amen amen amen amen.’ Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen.

Release from teaching meant he was able to travel more freely. Postcards came from Canada, Russia (‘Was given a nice badge by a friendly boy and wore it with pride to a Literary soirée, where they were too polite to tell me it was a badge of honour given to Russian Mothers who had borne more than five children’) and Australia – he was an extremely popular poet in residence at the universities of Western Australia and Victoria (there are a lot of Australian poems in Secret Destinations, 1984). Union Street was followed by Johnny Alleluia (1961), Underneath the Water (1968), a number of collections for children, and eventually, in 1975, the Collected Poems (subsequently revised several times). He called one of his collections Survivor’s Leave (1953) – to some extent, he thought, that’s what his life was, after the war. He returned often to the war and its consequences as a subject, but his poems are enormously varied – from the many, often oblique, religious poems and the readable and re-readable ballads to poems concerned not only with poverty and deprivation but also with the persecution of animals – the hunter who shot himself by accident, and the dancing bear his mother once saw in the streets of Launceston: They paid a penny for the dance But what they saw was not the show; Only, in bruin’s aching eyes, Far-distant forests, and the snow. When Charles was 70, there was a Festschrift in which contemporaries from Hughes to Larkin, Seamus Heaney to John Heath- Stubbs paid tribute. Larkin told Charles ‘you

Make lasting friends with all you do, And all you write; your truth and sense We count on as a sure defence Against the trendy and the mad, The feeble and the downright bad.’

There was ‘official’ recognition for him as he grew older: the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, the £15,000 Heywood Hill prize for a lifetime’s contribution to literature, the CBE and C.Lit. The latter honour came when he was 83. ‘What an encouragement!’ he said. On his eightieth birthday the Cornish flag was flown over Launceston Castle and there was a giant street party. Hughes, perhaps Charles’s greatest friend, appeared, with his wife. Charles introduced him to the 5-year-old boy who lived next door to him in Cyprus Well. ‘“This is Ted Hughes,” I said. “He’s the Poet Laureate and he’s a much better poet than I am.” The 5-year-old fixed his eyes on Ted’s shoes and allowed his gaze to travel slowly up Ted’s considerable height, and growled, “No he isn’t.”’ Incidentally, both Hughes and Larkin had recommended Causley for the position of Poet Laureate after the death of John Betjeman. Gradually, ill-health overtook him. There was a series of ministrokes, the postcards in that clear, lucid hand no longer arrived. He had to leave his cottage for the care home where he died, on 4 November 2003. Described on an elegant tombstone simply as ‘Poet’, he lies next to his mother in St Thomas’s churchyard at Launceston, a hundred yards from where he was born. He was a steadfast though by no means conventional Christian, and maybe he had hoped after death to join his mother and father at a celestial picnic like those of the dim past:

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Derek Parker 2011