Homesick

There are times - many times in this strange Proustian nether world I inhabit - when a picture or a scent can deliver a stomach wrenching reminder of home.  This afternoon has been one of those clear September afternoons with enough chill to remind you of winter but with the sun's warmth strong enough to remember summer. Why such a quintessentially English seasonal day should make me think longingly of Calcutta in the cold weather I don't know. Maybe it is because autumn is a season of the heart and I am heartsick for India.

I wonder how those old Cheltenham koi hais used to deal with this longing - as they sat in their Georgian faded splendour and talked of times when they took the memsahib to Simla to meet the Viceroy. Is my longing for a country that is not mine like theirs - a longing of possession and desire for what can never be achieved? I wish I knew the answer. I wish... oh how I wish time went back and I was a small baba again, safe in my cushioned world.

Many years ago my darling Dubby, second only to Annabel in being a beloved friend, gave me a book of poetry called The Mersey Sound. It was the work of three young Liverpudlian poets, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Their poems opened my eyes to the a new way of writing poetry and for years I penned poor imitations of their work. When I was writing my undergraduate dissertation - sidebar: when I was evicted last year I took only my mother's photograph and my master's and BA dissertations - I became more aware of how poetry and literature link through time. Without Shakespeare and Donne we could not have had the Romantics, without them the Modernists would have had nothing to be modern about and without Eliot and Pound and Joyce, Patten, Henri and McGough would have been reduced to writing limericks for TV ads.  Why you may ask is she writing about this having started with a longing for India? What does a book of poetry have to do with it?

The answer is here in this poem - my life that I read about years ago and didn't recognise until now.

Somewhere between heaven and Woolworth’s

She keeps kingfishers in their cages
And goldfish in their bowls
She is lovely and is afraid
Of such things as growing cold.

She’s had enough men to please her
Though they were more cruel than kind
And their love an act of isolation,
A form of pantomime.

She says she has forgotten
The feelings that she shared
At various all-night parties
Among the couples on the stairs,

or among the songs and dancing
She was once open wide,
A girl dressed in denim
With boys dressed in lies.

She’s eating roses on toast with tulip butter,
Praying for her mirror to stay young;
On its no longer gilted surface
This message she has scrawled:

‘O somewhere between Heaven and Woolworth’s
I live I love I scold
I keep kingfishers in their cages
And goldfish in their bowls.’

Brian Patten

And the connection is as clear as clear to me ....