Thoughts on a funeral

There are two opposing views about today’s famous funeral in London. I can’t go along totally with either of them, and I don’t intend to get involved in political arguments about them here. So I’ll just quote from some famous epitaphs and leave the choice to you.

This is Requiem, by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Under  the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

But here is Hilaire Belloc’s Epitaph on the Politician Himself:
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept, for I had longed to see him hanged.

Finally, Shakespeare had it right (doesn’t he usually?) with this:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.

The Master of Comedy Songs

I’ve been  on a Noel Coward binge these last few days. It’s been wonderful.

As regular visitors will know, I’ve recently had some surgery done on my right elbow. It’s gone well, and I’m definitely on the mend, but I’m still in plaster down to my right wrist, so I’m not able to be enormously active. A great excuse for listening to music…and I received a stack of Noel Coward CDs for my birthday last week, songs written and sung by The Master in his inimitable style, which I’m certain are helping my recovery along nicely.

Why is he The Master of comedy song-writing? How long have you got?

For starters, he chose such wonderful subjects to make fun of. Like “Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the Midday Sun”, or “Nina from Argentina”, the girl who wouldn’t dance. And who else would ever have thought of “Don’t put your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington”?

And then again his songs were so finely crafted, rhythm and rhyme and verse structure perfect. Some of his rhymes are beautifully surprising:

“People’s behaviour
Away from Belgravia
Leaves one aghast…”

That’s from “I Went to a Marvellous Party”, about high jinks on the French Riviera, as is one of my very favourite bits of Cowardiana:

“If you have any mind at all,
Gibbon’s divine Decline and Fall
Sounds very flimsy,
No more than a whimsy.
By way of contrast
On Wednesday last
I went to a marvellous party….”

I love that description of Edward Gibbon’s heavyweight (in all senses) magnum opus about Rome! Some day I plan to give a talk entitled “Gibbon’s Divine Decline and Fall” and see how many scholars are shocked.

To me the best thing of all about his lyrics (Coward’s, that is, not Gibbon’s) is his compact, snide wit, cramming a thousand words’ worth of meaning into a brief couple of lines…as when he describes the hapless Mrs. Worthington’s daughter:

“Though they said at the school of acting she was lovely as Peer Gynt,
I believe on the whole an ingenue role might emphasise her squint.”

Oh boy, I wish I’d written that!

And I must mention that The Master could use his word-power in more serious and yes, sentimental, numbers. My favourite is “London Pride”, a tribute to the city he loved written in 1941 in the darkest days of World War 2. It sends shivers down my spine with its hope and courage at a point in time when it can’t have been at all clear that London, or Britain even, would win through:

“Every blitz your resistance toughening,
From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown,
Nothing ever could over-ride
The pride of London Town.”

I could, as you can tell, go on for pages more. If you’re a Coward fan you’ll know why. If not yet, give some of his songs a try, and I bet you soon will be. Either way, I’m sure you’ll excuse me if I slip away now and play a few more tracks.

Spring and birdsong and all that

“Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king.” That’s the start of a poem I remember from my schooldays. I found myself quoting it on a beautiful spring morning recently; it’s short, it’s sweet, and it’s by Thomas Nashe, who lived from 1567 to 1601 – which makes him a contemporary of Shakespeare.

Like most youngsters, I assume, I had to learn and recite great chunks of our Glorious Literary Heritage in school English lessons. We memorised an assortment of poems, and Shakespeare speeches of course, and (if we were taking any foreign language exams,) we tried to learn a tiny bit of France’s or Germany’s G.L.H. too, so we could drag in a quote to liven up an essay.

I can still recall some poems now: “If…” (I can do most of that!) and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (only the first verse alas, but I know it has a dreadfully sad ending,) and “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” – yes, I was interested in the Romans even then.

And, as I said, “Spring, the sweet spring”. It has stuck in my mind because it made us kids laugh. I still think it’s comic on account of the Elizabethan “special effects” at the end of each verse, which aren’t at all what one expects of the G.L.H.

Try reading the first verse out loud:

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Now even at the ripe old age of twelve I could identify birds that went “cuckoo” and “to-witta-woo”. But what in Bill Oddie’s sweet name are the others? “Pu-we” could be a peewit, I suppose. Or maybe a thrush, one of those that has a big repertoire of phrases, and (to quote a quite different poet) sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture that first fine careless rapture.

But I can’t recall ever having heard anything on the wing or up a tree going “jug-jug”.

I wonder, was Nashe just having a laugh, or was he making a serious attempt, in those pre-sound-recording days, to reproduce birdsong for his audience’s delectation? It’s hard to credit it now, but there used to be people who made a living in the variety theatres by performing bird impressions on stage…anyone in the UK remember Percy Edwards? He was a terrific mimic of birds and animals. But I’m sure he never went “jug-jug”.

Well, we have wonderful spring weather as I write this, which I’ll celebrate with the rest of Nashe’s poem.

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!

And to think I’ve remembered him all these years! Isn’t education wonderful?

It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

It’s exactly 100 years since the first public performance of a very famous British music-hall song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

And it’s exactly 100 years and one day since it was written – on January 30th 1912. Well, if you’ve composed a good number, you may as well sing it to the world. In my folk-singing days I occasionally wrote a topical song one day and sang it the next – I remember the day the Berlin Wall came down…but I digress.

I’d always assumed the song was composed during World War 1, because that’s certainly when it was at its most famous, and the well-known recording by John McCormack was made in 1914. It was one of the best-loved songs among the British soldiers in 1914-18, and even though that seems a very long time ago now, I’ve only got to hear it played or sung and it conjures up  the horrors and the heroism of that “war to end all war” as nothing else can.

Like so many of the best songs, it wasn’t composed over weeks of agonised creativity. Jack Judge, a music-hall entertainer, wrote it one night in Stalybridge, near Manchester, when somebody bet him five shillings that he couldn’t come up with a good number in 24 hours. Five shillings…hardly a fortune even then! (Later some of his family, who were Irish, disputed this charming story – but I like it.) And he performed it the following night at the Grand Theatre, Stalybridge.

What turned it into an iconic war song? Serendipity, I suppose; plus the fact that it had all the ingredients for a catchy popular hit. An easy tune with a simple chorus, and the sentimental universal theme of homesickness. Irish songs lamenting the disappointments of London compared with the joys of the Emerald Isle were fashionable just then. “The Mountains of Mourne”, another such, was written only twelve years before “Tipperary.”

So many wartime favourites, not surprisingly, have had wistful wish-we-were-home themes; “There’s a Long Long Trail A-winding,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and from World War 2, “We’ll Meet Again”. And of course “Tipperary”, from a soldier’s point of view, had a good rhythm to march to.

In its original context of the music-hall, it had a mixture of sentimentality and humour. There were some comic verses in between the familiar choruses, which the Tommies would have heard on the gramophone records they played in their dugouts, but probably didn’t sing much on the march. You can find the complete lyrics on the Internet: here’s just a tiny sample:

Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O,
Saying “Should you not receive it, write and let me know!
If I make mistakes in spelling, Molly dear,” said he,
Remember it’s the pen that’s bad, don’t lay the blame on me.”

All good knockabout stuff, and written at a time of peace, the so-called Golden Age of Edwardian England. I wonder how Jack Judge felt when his jolly five-shilling refrain became a world-wide hit? Was he surprised…pleased…proud? He should have been proud, to write a song so universal and so memorable.

And I wonder which, if any, of the songs composed today will still be remembered in another hundred years?

Musing about muses

Yesterday I looked up the names of the nine Ancient Greek muses, which is the sort of thing you find yourself doing when you’re trying to solve a cryptic crossword. The clue pointed to a muse with a name five letters long, ending in –o.

Anyone who knows this name without reading further…give yourself a gold star. I didn’t; the only two I could remember unaided were Clio (the muse of history) and Terpsichore (dance and song.) When I found the complete list, I saw the one I wanted was Erato. She’s the muse of erotic poetry and (my list says) mimicry. An odd juxtaposition, that…but all the myths surrounding these goddesses are weird.

I’m sure you’re dying to know who the rest of them were –yes, of course you are. There’s Thaleia, the muse of comedy; Euterpe, lyric poetry; Calliope, epic poetry; Melpomene, tragedy; Urania, astronomy; and Polyhymnia, divine hymns and harmony.

It’s disappointing that none of them were responsible for prose writing, let alone mystery and detective fiction. Having our own muse would be useful for answering that Frequently Asked Question that confronts all mystery authors: “Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s a fair question, but I don’t find it easy to answer. I’d like to be able to reply, “Naturally I seek inspiration from Whodunnito, the muse of mystery stories.”

But no; as Victoria might have said, “We are not a-mused.”

Oh well, I’ll attempt a serious answer; a personal one of course, because all writers do things differently. For me, some ideas are so basic to a book that I have to sort them out before I start writing anything. I like to choose the location and the year of each of my books; Roman Britain wasn’t a homogenous whole, and I need to know the when and the where of my story exactly. And I like to have an idea of the main crime, who did it, how and why…in rough outline anyhow. This may all result from research, or brainstorming with friends, or just bashing the little grey cells to deliver something new and fresh.

Most details of story and characters will come when I’ve started writing, or at least working out the plot. I don’t like to plot in too much depth beforehand, I find that makes the writing itself too mechanical, so I rely on fresh ideas flowing into my head anywhere and any time, whether I’m pounding my keyboard, delving into books, surfing the Internet, listening to the day’s news…or out and about thinking of something else entirely.

The ones that arise by pure serendipity are the most unpredictable and the most fun. They can be triggered by anything at all: a flash of childhood memory perhaps, a phrase of music, or a brief snatch of conversation. Part of the plot of one Aurelia mystery came from two women I overheard on a train: one remarked, “It beats me why they’re so determined to buy that house, it’s nothing special,” and her friend laughed and answered, “Maybe they think there’s treasure buried in the garden.” Click! Flash-bang! Gotcha!

Yes, the world is full of ideas, which is why it’s so hard to pinpoint where they come from. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to offload the responsibility onto a muse?

Daffodils

The daffodils are coming out in our garden. I love to see them. They make me feel that at last it’s spring.

I ought to take a photo of them to show you how lovely they are, but it’s night-time so I can’t. By tomorrow morning they’ll still be lovely, but I’ll be too busy.

Anyway, you don’t need a picture of daffodils, do you? All you have to do is think Wordsworth…

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

But I’ve a confession to make. When I think of W.W.’s poem, I can’t help remembering some other versions of it too. Sorry, Wordsworth…but  if your verses become that famous, they’re going to get parodied, aren’t they? For instance:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I met a crowd
Who pelted me with unpaid bills.
Who from? How much? I couldn’t tell.
I turned around and ran like hell.

My Uncle Max (a group captain in the RAF in World War 2) taught me a different take.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That on the rugged hillside sits,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of yellow Messerschmitts.
Now I’m interned for the duration.
I wish I’d never lost formation.

But my current favourite, and on the original floral subject too, is Roger McGough’s “downsized” version. I don’t know what Wordsworth would have thought of distilling his original four verses into six lines. I think it’s brilliant.

Wandering along the road
by the lake, I saw a load
of golden daffodils
Ten thousand, give or take.
Now and then
I think of them again.