A Poet in London Monitor

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Most of my verse is about London and Cornwall.

Here in the traffic roar of the city of London,

I've written quite a lot of verses

because this part is associated with my childhood.

I can remember when, where we are now, was the Manchester Hotel.

And where this bracken and rosebay grows, once,

down in the passages which are tiled, you can still see the tiles,

once people hurried along with trays of tea.

And now, all that remains is this

and the bombed ruins there,

of Aldersgate Street station.

Long after the amalgamation of all the independent railways...

..Aldersgate Street station in the city of London remained

a memorial of unwilling cooperation.

On one side of the station, to this day,

steam trains come in early in the morning from the suburbs

and go out in the afternoon to the suburbs.

And on the other side, electric trains are constantly and efficiently

whirring to Hammersmith and round on the Inner Circle.

And that huge station had, up at the top as you went out,

a refreshment room, which I can remember before the war.

It had plate-glass windows, and on the plate-glass windows

in China letters were the words "Afternoon teas a speciality".

A very nice place to have tea. And then...

..last year, or maybe the year before,

they took the enormous cast-iron roof off the station

and that took away a lot of its personality

and a lot of the feeling of the old city people who used to use it

when people wore silk hats

and travelled in a very respectable manner in non-smoking carriages.

This is a monody on the death of Aldersgate Street station.

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station

Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam

City of London

Before the next desecration,

let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

Sunday silence, with every street a dead street

Alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews

Till "tingle tang", the bell of St Mildred's, Bread Street

Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews

And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing

With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls

Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing

On the roaring flood of a 12-voiced peal from Paul's.

Then would the years fall off and Thames run slowly

Out into marshy meadowland flowed the fleet

And the walled-in City of London, smelly and holy

Had a tinkling mass house in every cavernous street.

The bells rang down and St Michael Paternoster

Would take me into its darkness from College Hill.

Or Christ Church Newgate Street (with St Leonard Foster)

Would be late for Matins and ringing insistence still.

Last of the east wall sculpture a cherub gazes

On broken arches of rosebay, bracken and dock

Where once I heard the roll of the Prayer Book phrases

And the sumptuous tick of the old west gallery clock.

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station.

Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train

For us of the steam and gas-light, the lost generation

The new white cliffs of the City are built in vain.

What people don't realise, who build these big blocks in the City,

these huge new white cliffs, is what an awful time

the people who have to work in them have in getting to them.

The struggle, for instance,

that business girls, young business girls, fresh from home,

have to go through in order to reach these cliffs.

I'm always touched by the sight

of people struggling to get to these places

and they live very often in furnished rooms in large houses,

originally built for large families

and now turned into flats.

You can see them all over London,

particularly in the inner, steam railway sort of suburb.

And this poem, I wrote about business girls in Camden Town.

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down on a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels

Steam's escaping here and there

Morning trains through Camden cutting

Shape the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors

At the back, precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor, unbeloved ones

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast

Trolley-bus and windy street.

Unfortunately, I can't keep sex out of my poems.

It would be hypocritical for me to do so.

Everywhere you go in London in public transport,

you can't get away from the beauty of the girls.

The sort of girl I like to see

Smiles down from her great height at me.

She stands in strong, athletic pose

And wrinkles her retrousse nose.

Is it distaste that makes her frown

So furious and freckled, down

On an unhealthy worm like me?

Or am I what she likes to see?

I do not know, though much I care,

Eithe genoimen, would I were

(Forgive me, shade of Rupert Brooke)

An object fit to claim her look.

Oh! would I were her racket press'd

With hard excitement to her breast

And swished into the sunlit air

Arm-high above her tousled hair,

And banged against the bounding ball

"Oh! Plung!" my tauten'd strings would call,

"Oh! Plung my darling, break my strings

"For you I will do brilliant things."

And when the match is over, I

Would flop beside you, hear you sigh;

And then with what supreme caress,

You'd tuck me up into my press.

Fair tigress of the tennis courts,

So short in sleeve and strong in shorts,

Little, alas, to you I mean,

For I am bald and old and green.

CHILDREN SHOUT PLAYFULLY

Finally, some of my verses are connected with childhood

and memories of it which we all share in common.

My own childhood wasn't quite so successful

as that of those beautiful tennis-playing girls

we've just seen.

And the other day I went back to Hertfordshire

and my verse is always about places

and in Hertfordshire, I recollected painful times

when I went wrong, shooting with my father

and that brought forth these verses.

I had forgotten Hertfordshire,

The large unwelcome fields of roots

Where with my knickerbockered sire

I trudged in syndicated shoots;

And that unlucky day when I

Fired by mistake into the ground

Under a Lionel Edwards sky

And felt disapprobation round.

The slow drive home by motor-car,

A heavy Rover Landaulette,

Through Welwyn, Hatfield, Potters Bar,

Tweed and cigar smoke, gloom and wet:

And now I see these fields once more

Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,

Pale corn waves rippling to a shore

The shadowy cliffs of elm between,

Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched,

and weather-boarded water mills.

Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,

On mildly undistinguished hills -

They still are there. But now the shire

Suffers a devastating change,

Its general landscape strung with wire,

Old places looking ill and strange.

One can't be sure where London ends,

New towns have filled the fields of root

Where father and his business friends

Drove in the Landaulette to shoot;

Tall concrete standards line the lane,

Brick boxes glitter in the sun:

Far more would these have caused him pain

Than my mishandling of a gun.