Word Magic

Are writers born or bred? One of my grandfathers was a poet – an exact contemporary of Kipling, though rather less famous. His main contribution to literature was the invention of the poetry postcard. He also invented ‘The Quick and Easy Method of Washing Floors’, that ingenious bucket with a pedal that presses two rollers together and squeezes your mop, and which is found in every school and hospital throughout the universe; he sold the rights to it for, I think, twenty guineas. I’m sure I’ve inherited his lack of business acumen. Perhaps I’ve also inherited his way with words. But if there is indeed such a thing as a literary gene, I don’t believe it’s yet been mapped.

I can, however, map the beginnings of my path to writerhood, the nurture rather than the nature. First, there’s me lying in a cot in a bow window, listening to a blackbird singing in the silver birch, and to my father and his friends playing string quartets in the room below (probably Haydn, and jolly, though they had their darker moments). In my memory, music comes before words. But words come early, too, together with images. There I am again, still in the mewling and puking phase, being wheeled along the road to see my favourite image, the Esso Tiger.

PUT A TIGER IN YOUR TANK!

my mother would say, reading the slogan on the giant hoarding. Then one day she recited,

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night . . .

The words came like a spell. The Tyger devoured ‘This Little Piggy’ and all its feeble peers; or nearly all, for there could still be poetry in the nursery rhyme:

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark: The beggars are coming to town . . .

thrilled me, and still does. More thrilling still was Matins, which we attended every Sunday in ‘the fairest, goodliest, and most famous parish church in England’, as Queen Elizabeth I justly called it. Columns, chords and words soared and burst far above in vaulting and echoes. Best of all were those Sundays when my big brothers, beruffed and deceptively angelic, sang the Benedicite. I loved the way it went through the gamut of creation from angels to whales, and ended,

O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever.

I was never quite sure who or what those three were, but their names were magic to my ears. Words, music and magic interwove. At home, my growing life began to revolve around a piano. Life did, necessarily, for us all: the piano was a concert grand, the elephant in the room. But it was a lovable monster, a member of the family. I spent many happy hours sitting under it (a sign of an artistic bent in children, Jan Morris says). I’m looking now at a photograph of us four siblings with the great beast: my sister at the keyboard; my brothers with guitar and trumpet; me, aged 3, bashing a tin drum with grim concentration – and a disturbing resemblance to weird little Oskar in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel . . . That orotund German word brings me back to why the piano came to mind. It had brass letters on the inside of the lid, and some of my earliest stabs at reading were attempts to decipher them. When I finally did make them out, they seemed to have no meaning: HERMANN WAGNER STUTTGART ‘It’s the piano’s name,’ my father explained. And the way he pronounced it, with Teutonic vowels and growls – ‘Hairrghmaan Vaagnairrgh Shtootgaarrght’ – sounded absolutely right for that mahogany mammoth. (Poor Hermann: we eventually all but killed him with Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, played fff, sometimes the whole quartet of us pounding away together at once. He’s now enjoying a well-earned retirement in a Chinese community centre, if he hasn’t been bored to death by woodworm or by endless performances of ‘Chopsticks’.) Then, suddenly, letters and meaning came together. I was in bed with Alice, and can remember the moment: the Tenniel picture of the White Rabbit, the words that went with it –

Oh my ears and w-w-wh . . . And whiskies? No, and whiskers

– and the rapturous realization: I could read! Music, meaning, magic, letters now began to coalesce, and soon to issue – in verse – from my infant pen: ‘The lions in the jungle’, went one effort, perhaps subliminally inspired by Blake’s ‘Tyger’,

Have a huge great roar, And little things that pass by night Are frightened of their snore.

There would be no looking back. A few years on, at the age of 9, the roaring of lions and tygers accompanied my first ventures into Latin. My school was next door to a zoo, and Mr Hutchinson’s classroom was filled with verbs, nouns and safari sounds. ‘The subject goes in the nominative,’ we chanted, to a background of bestial howls and grunts,

The object goes in the accusative, Genitive ‘of’, Dative ‘to’ or ‘for’, Ablative ‘by’, ‘with’ or ‘from’ – POM-POM!

‘That’s it, boys, never forget the “Pom-pom!”’ (An elephant trumpeted agreement.) Mr Hutchinson had longish grey hair, and a faint resemblance to the first Dr Who, the television Time Lord. It was Mr Hutchinson who gave me the final, fateful push down the path to writing. Along with Latin, he taught us English. In Latin I did well; in English I starred, together with a boy called Snowy Owen. (Snowy, where are you now? Is your hair still that same ashen alien blond? Or has it gone to dust and ashes like mine?) I can remember none of my rival’s productions; but fragments of one of mine have survived, from a poem entitled ‘Agincourt’. Miniature fogey and ghastly swot, I declaimed unblushing to the class,

The English army, lo! it sought The way that led to Agincourt . . .

Down in the zoo, a gibbon gibbered. I ignored my classmates’ giggles and continued. There were some good bits coming:

Then, Twang! the bowstrings go again – The sky is filled with arrow-rain.

We were in the era of Howl, The Naked Lunch and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. But Mr Hutchinson’s literary taste transcended time and trend, for he awarded me twenty-five marks out of twenty for my prodigious anachronism. With that sort of encouragement, how could I not have become a writer?

*

Not long ago, on the Internet, another series of word-and-memory associations (for that is all that these paragraphs have been) led me to the news that Mr Hutchinson had died in his ninetieth year. I hadn’t seen him for the best part of half a century, and – to be honest – had hardly thought of him; I’d had other teachers who were more flamboyant, more eccentric, even more memorable. And yet I felt the loss, and still do. I needn’t. Mr Hutchinson is a Time Lord. We all have some gift of the Spirit, some spark of Promethean fire, and teachers like him find it, fan it into flame,

Et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt And, like runners, relay the torch of life

– as he himself might have quoted, if we’d ever got as far as Lucretius. Great teachers relay genius as parents pass on genes. They all transcend time. But no one else has ever given me twenty-five out of twenty, and no one ever will.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Tim Mackintosh-Smith 2019