A World of Shining Beauty

My small Welsh primary school lay at the end of Boundary Lane, on the Flintshire-Cheshire border. It was a good 20 miles from any beach. Nevertheless, the first thing I remember having to learn was ‘Sea Fever’, possibly the best-known poem at that time in the English-speaking world.

This was the Sixties and ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky’ had been taken to heart by successive generations before mine. The entire class would soon be word-perfect with ‘And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,/And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’ I suspect most of us had only a vague idea of the poem’s meaning. Next Miss Roberts made an attempt on ‘Cargoes’, but the ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack’ defeated us. Written when their author was only 24, both poems are by John Masefield. Born into a modest Herefordshire home in 1878, at his death in 1967 he was Poet Laureate, Doctor of Letters, novelist, playwright, critic and a literary lion on both sides of the Atlantic. The response now to mention of him is usually dismissive, but for me two lines from those lessons stuck fast, though neither ‘Sea Fever’ nor ‘Cargoes’ furnished them. They were: ‘One road leads to London,/One road leads to Wales.’ As an adolescent I misread them, thinking they were a celebration of ‘getting out there’. But they made me curious enough to read as an adult Grace before Ploughing, which Masefield describes as ‘Fragments of Autobiography’. Motherless at 6, by 12 every adult with an interest in the young John Masefield was either dead or, in his father’s case, committed to an asylum. Foisted on an aunt, he was denied access to the books that were his solace and sent to toughen up as a cadet at HMS Conway. (Not resentful, he would one day write its history.) At 16, on his first voyage, aboard the four-master barque Gilcruix, he rounded the Horn but was stricken by sickness and then by sunstroke and had to be invalided home. A cold reception from the aunt goaded him into trying again. When he reached New York he jumped ship, preferring life as a hobo to more of ‘the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking’. Eventually he got a job in a carpet factory in Yonkers and in his spare time resumed the programme of self-education begun at HMS Conway. He read widely, buying 20 books a week, but it was Chaucer who opened his eyes to poetry. In 1897 he returned to England and began to write, his poems reflecting his experience at sea of nature’s lethal beauty pitted against human grit. ‘Sea Fever’, ‘Cargoes’ and the like were born out of that. The extraordinary thing is that none of this appears in Masefield’s ‘autobiography’. When he sat down to write it in the mid-1960s, he knew he was approaching the time ‘when the long trick’s over’. Grace before Ploughing is no misery memoir, but his last word on the beloved Herefordshire border country he was forced to leave. In these glittering fragments he retrieves his impressions of his first six years and eight months when he ‘lived in Paradise’. The impressions come, he claims, ‘from a memory that has forgotten much, but what memory exists is vivid beyond all other memories’. We can discount the disclaimer. His recall is superb and where gaps occur it is because, as he admits in exasperation, he didn’t go and look when he had the chance. The teams of mummers at Ledbury’s October Fair are a good example. ‘I grieve that I never saw these!’ So Masefield torments himself with missing the last performers of the old, lost plays, preferring, as any child would, the cheapjacks and the merry-go-rounds. As for the rest, his descriptions are precise in every line, shaded so cleverly that the whole ninety pages work on you like a painting by Seurat. The dabs of colour are pretty enough – but stand back and there lies an entire landscape. And what a landscape: the scene is conventionally ravishing, but it is filtered through Masefield’s immature mind to produce something not adult or childish but fantastical. A brighter bright is suddenly shot through with black lightning: on his favourite waterway, to attain ‘a lovely reach’ for swimming or fishing, he must pass ‘a very terrible . . . drowning place for unwanted dogs’. The book proceeds in a series of individual episodes: a chapter on the subject of terrors is followed by one on moles and moleskin. Another on the Romans softens you up for prize-fights but fails to prepare you for the killing of a stag. In the year the Harrier jump jet made its maiden flight and the Rolling Stones played at the Hollywood Bowl, Masefield was writing from personal recollection. More than once I was forced to flick back and check on that ‘First published 1966’. Each episode whets the appetite for the next so that ninety pages fly by without your noticing the extraordinary omissions. There is hardly a reference to family or to any named friend. Instead Masefield takes refuge in the passive voice: ‘Here I was helped to get down, and was shown how I was to go alone on the hill, just below the first great trench, and watch them coming to me by the usual path to the summit. It was my first free walk on any Malvern hill. . .’ The rest of the party – them – were soon to be snatched away. And before many more years that little figure seen stoutly labouring up the ‘rough wild hill’ would be ejected from a Paradise he knew ‘better than the grown-up knows his parish’. Once out there Masefield did ‘make it’, through extraordinary effort. There was early success with his Salt-Water Ballads, from which legions of rote-learners, myself included, can still quote. In 1923 his Collected Poems sold 80,000 copies. Yet Masefield the man remained diffident. (As Poet Laureate he submitted new work to The Times and always included a stamped addressed envelope in case of rejection.) Sadly ‘Sea Fever’ and ‘Cargoes’ and the long narrative poems that followed have failed to find a new audience. Unlike Housman, Masefield is unfashionably straight. If exotic, he somehow lacks Kipling’s glamour. Despite individual lyrics of rare intensity he has become what marketing men would call ‘a big ask’. Of his prose, The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, written for children, are in print, reinvented by Quentin Blake’s quirky illustrations. The Bird of Dawning, the rollicking young man’s adventure that appealed to me most as a teenager (I was odd), is available courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. To read his ‘Fragments of Autobiography’, though, you will have to scour the second-hand bookshops. A long and happy marriage to a loving older woman, two children and an embarrassment of honours were to come to the boy of Grace before Ploughing. So often the deviser of anthems for other men’s lives, Masefield ends it with a pure, fresh image for his own: ‘the scramble up in a world of shining beauty . . . seeing all manner of strangeness’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 33 © Gee Williams 2012