W.B. Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

I like nearly any movie the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan), have produced or had a hand in – Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski (my favourite), O Brother Where Art Thou?  I tell you, if there’s a cult following happening for those guys, then I’m a part of it.  So it’s only natural I sat up and took notice when I’m reading a biography on the English poet, William Butler Yeats, and there it is, the opening line to his most famous poem, Sailing To Byzantium – the line is, ‘That is no country for old men’.  No Country for Old Men!  That would have to be one of my best Coen brothers’ movies.  It’s one of those movies where you can always remember where you were when you first saw it, how old you were, who you were with, what shirt you had on, where you went to afterwards ……….  ‘No Country for Old Men!’  Oh boy, I just had to add ‘Sailing To Byzantium’ to my list of favourite poems.  And that wasn’t easy for me, because the poem is a difficult one to understand.  But a number of things drew me towards this one – first off, I’m always interested in a poet’s life, how he or she lived (or lives), what they believe in, their education, family life, experiences, joys, sufferings ….  That’s why I added a dog-eared, marked up, student copy of a W. B. Yeats biography to my library before ever having read any of his poetry.  It’s sort of like, ‘is it better to read the book first and then see the movie, or see the movie and then read the book?’  For me, coming to Yeats was definitely a case of, read about the poet and then have a look at what he wrote.  Yeats was an Irishman – a pretty smart guy from a good background, but I think throughout his life he got lost in a struggle to find the Truth and enlightenment along pathways of Irish myth, Eastern religions, mysticism, spiritualism, magic and the occult – a true poet, a visionary man and a poet of symbolism.  But Sailing To Byzantium was written when he was sixty years old so he’s starting to make a lot more sense and becoming more open, compared to his earlier work.  The poem’s about getting old – an old man agonising over getting old, ‘fastened to a dying animal ….. ‘, requesting that God take his soul and set it, ‘upon a golden bough …… ‘.  I can relate to the getting old thing here, so the poem appeals to me.  Being a classic poem, there’s much been written about it on the web, so look it up, Sailing To Byzantium, W.B. Yeats …...
 

Sailing To Byzantium

(W. B. Yeats – 1865-1939)

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

To me, there are two fundamentals that go towards making a great poem – ‘content’ and ‘construction’.  The content in Sailing To Byzantium I find OK because I see it as an expression of age and belief.  But read this poem a few times and see how brilliantly it is constructed.  I know we’re in modern times and it’s all free verse, no constraints – but it’s only a master, no matter from what era, who lays down such a construction to endure all of time.  W. B. Yeats is the master – Sailing To Byzantium; four verses each of eight-lines; the rhythm is iambic pentameter (ten-syllable lines); and the rhyme pattern has two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet (ABABABCC).  That is something to study and aspire to.
 I post my poem, Must Be at My Best, as a link, and I know it ain’t even half-the-way there!  Except the common thread is, like Yeats, I’m arrived at a point where I ponder on growing old.  Bouts of illness warn me that fading vitality, stamina and strength will soon declare the venues and arenas where I once brashly and boldly walked in, now, ‘no country for old men’.

2011.  This was another year sucked quietly from the blood (Kenneth Slessor).  We went to Malaysia for a holiday and then stumble from one disaster to another.  I come down with some fever-chill virus (Chicka Wu Wu virus for the want of a professional term).  I abandon myself to that relaxed realm where I don’t give a care and I feel so old.

Must Be at My Best.

 

In the Priceline chemist

the old bird behind the cash counter

has her eyes follow me in,

she stays with me a tad too long,

either suspicious, or

she fancies me,

I’m fighting off the fever chills,

dressed in my old black corduroys,

a black T-shirt beneath the V

of a black sweat top

that I slept in recently.

I think maybe she’s watching me,

but then I’m sitting in a chair

at the prescription counter, and

she comes out from behind the cash counter

through a swinging door, and

talks to the prescription guys

about going to lunch

and could they man the counter

and all the time, I’m sure

she’s taking peek glances at me

I’m slouched back as much as I can

in the plastic chair

with my corduroy legs stuck straight out

above my brown suede slip-ons.

She disappears out the back to lunch.

The prescription guy takes my money

at the cash counter,

and as I go through the automatic sliding doors

I’m thinking about other missed opportunities.

 

Kenneth Slessor - Five Bells

It’s funny how you can arrive at something via many different paths or a path for which you did not plan.  That’s how it was for me with the poem Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor.  I remember saying in an earlier post, quite emphatically, that Five Bells was too full of hidden meaning for me to appreciate.  I know they study the poem at school and it’s considered Slessor’s best work, but for the times I had tried to read and understand it, the thing forever seemed too difficult – “Deep and dissolving verticals of light    Ferry the falls of moonshine down;  Why thieve these profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought anchored in time? …………?”

And that’s how Five Bells might have remained for me.  Except, I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks back listening to Radio National and they’re playing a track from a newly released album – a collaboration between the Australian National Academy of Music and singer song writer, Paul Kelly.  I like Paul Kelly’s work.  The experience gets better – the album is called, Conversations with Ghosts, and it’s a collection of poetry from a number of known poets where Paul Kelly sings their poetry set to modern classical music.  Each poem has a, talking to the dead, reflection, bells or ghost experience about it, so you’ve got poets like W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and of course, Kenneth Slessor with Five Bells.  Hearing the words from Five Bells being sounded out made a big difference to my interest in the poem.  I could hear that it had something to do with the ringing and sound of a ship’s bell – that also got my interest.  I did some research to find out why the poem was written and who it was about.  Essentially, Slessor is looking out on Sydney harbour at night while reminiscing about a friend and work colleague of his (Joe Lynch) who went missing off the back of a ferry, presumed drowned, because they never found the body – controversy over whether he fell or jumped.  It does help in understanding the poem if you do some background reading on Joe Lynch.  His biography is pretty much followed throughout the poem – the drowning in the first couple of verses; mad drinking sessions; walking out to a friends place at Moorebank; living and working in Melbourne as a cartoonist on Punch magazine; back to Sydney working on Smith’s Weekly; drinking and partying (reports say Joe sunk because he was wearing an overcoat weighed down with bottles of beer he was taking to a party on the North Shore); his father, a fiddle player and stone mason carving graveyard headstones for a living. 

Another aid to understanding Five Bells is to have knowledge of the maritime tradition of ringing a ship’s bell to denote time.  The title Five Bells is a direct reference to the maritime time-keeping system, so here it is.  A ship’s daily routine is broken up into 6, four-hour watches:

 

Midnight to 4am (middle watch);

4am to 8am (morning watch);

8am to 12noon (forenoon watch);

12 pm to 4pm (afternoon watch);

4pm to 8pm (dog watch – usually split into 2, two hour watches); and

8pm to midnight (first watch)

 

During each four hour watch, the ship’s bell is struck sharply on each half hour (8 ‘bells’ in total).  To signal a complete hour, the bell is struck in a quick ‘double’ bell movement (ding-ding!) and the half hour is signalled by an additional ‘single’ bell movement (ding-ding! …….. ding!).  So ‘Five Bells’ indicates it is two and a half hours into a watch (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  The question is, in which ‘watch’ is Slessor’s Five Bells rang out?  It must be either the first watch (10.30pm) or the middle watch (2.30am) because it is definitely at night – ‘Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness ………. ‘, ‘I look out my window in the dark ………. ‘, ‘ ………. in the moon’s drench ….. ‘.  It is unlikely to be the middle watch because the bell is not normally rung in harbour at night at this time in the morning (disturbs the neighbours).  So we imagine Slessor is sitting up around 10.30pm, pondering upon the settling lights and night sounds of dark harbour …….

Five Bells

(Kenneth Slessor, 1901 - 1971)

 

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels

Is not my Time, the flood that does not flow.

Between the double and the single bell

Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells

From the dark warship riding there below,

I have lived many lives, and this one life

Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light

Ferry the falls of moonshine down.  Five bells

Coldly rung out of a machine’s voice.  Night and water

Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats

In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve

These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought

Anchored in Time?  You have gone from earth,

Gone even from the meaning of a name;

Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips

And hits and cries against the ports of space,

Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face

In agonies of speech on speechless panes?

Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

 

But I hear nothing, nothing . . . only bells,

Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.

Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,

There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait –

Nothing except the memory of some bones

Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;

And unimportant things you might have done,

Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,

And all have now forgotten – looks and words

And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,

Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales

Of Irish kings and English perfidy,

And dirtier perfidy of publicans

Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.

Five bells.

 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder

Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain

The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,

So dark you bore no body, had no face,

But a sheer voice that rattled out of air

(As now you’d cry if I could break the glass),

A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,

Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,

Of Milton, melons and the Rights of Man,

And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls

Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls

Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.

But all I heard was words that didn’t join

So Milton became melons, melons girls,

And fifty mouths it seemed, were out that night,

And in each tree an Ear was bending down,

Or something had just run, gone behind grass,

When, blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,

The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,

Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.

There’s not so many with so poor a purse

Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,

Five miles in darkness on a country track,

But when you do, that’s what you think

Five bells.

 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,

Your angers too; they had leeched away

By the soft archery of summer rains

And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp

That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,

And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,

The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.

I thought of what you had written in faint ink,

Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind

With other things you left, all without use,

All without meaning now, except a sign

That someone had been living who was now dead:

“At Labassa.  Room 6 x 8

On top of the tower; because of this, very dark

And cold in winter.  Everything has been stowed

Into this room 500 books all shapes

And colours, dealt across the floor

And over the sills and on the laps of chairs;

Guns, photos of many different things

And different curioes that I obtained . . . . “

 

In Sydney by the spent aquarium-flare

Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,

We argued about blowing up the world,

But you were living backward, so each night

You crept a moment closer to the breast,

And they were living, all of them, those frames

And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,

And most your father, the old man gone blind,

With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,

That graveyard mason whose fair monuments

And tablets cut with dreams of piety

Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men

Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment

At cargoes they had never thought to bear,

These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

 

Where have you gone?  The tide is over you,

The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.

You have no suburb, like those easier dead

In private berths of dissolution laid –

The tide goes over, the waves ride over you

And let their shadows down like shining hair,

But they were Water, and the sea-pinks bend

Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed,

And you are only part of an Idea.

I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,

The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,

And the short agony, the longer dream,

The nothing that was neither long nor short,

But I was bound, and could not go that way,

But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.

If I could find an answer, could only find

Your meaning, or could say why you were here

Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath

Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

 

I look out of my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-bouys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,

Five bells.  Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five bells.

Slessor wrote Five Bells in 1937, ten years after Joe Lynch drowned.  In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, 31^st July, 1967 (Bread & Wine, Kenneth Slessor, Angus & Robertson, 1970), Slessor said part of his inspiration for Five Bells came from an old Arabian fairy-tale where a man dips his face in a basin of magic water and between the time he dips his head in and withdraws it (5 seconds, 5 bells), he dreams he has lived another life - sailed many voyages, been shipwrecked and captured by pirates, married a princess, fought in battles and finally executed.  The fairy-tale suggests the life the man experiences as vision is just as real as his actual life except it was lived on another time-scale (who’s to say it wasn’t for ‘real’?).

In reminiscing, Slessor realises he can imagine, replay in memory, the whole span of Joe Lynch’s human life (or a human life) in the interval between the strokes of a ship’s bell (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  Five Bells is written with the two time-scales interposed upon each other – the mechanical time-scale of five bells being rung out in three to five seconds, and a memory time-scale that compresses the thirty years of Joe Lynch’s life into the same five seconds (note the words, Five Bells repeated three times throughout the poem – 3 seconds of the ship’s bell; 3 decades of Joe Lynch’s life).  The words remind the reader that at that particular point in the poem a lengthy period of time has advanced along the time-scale of Joe Lynch’s life, but it has only occupied a few moments on the mechanical time-scale of the ship’s bell.

The construction of the poem gets us thinking about time and the mystery of time in relation to memory, ‘the flood that does not flow.’  What is memory?  It comes in a chronological order but it does not advance or ‘flow’ in the same pace or manner as real time.  It can be held in a compressed form.  We mechanically measure real time by it’s passage, but time may simply be this moment, nothing more than now.  Anything in front of now does not exist.  Anything behind is compressed in memory, mystery ….

“The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.”

 

I’ve dug up another old poem of mine as a link to this post.  Father Ashley is my midnight reflection on another man’s life.  A man who lives in my memory, who lives in the compressed time-scale of memory, between the double check that the cars are locked and the single throw of the front door latch before I go to bed, at Five Bells ……..

1992.  Living in Sydney, in the Catholic faith, I met an old priest during frequent visits to Melbourne.  At the time it seemed an odd friendship.  Little insights and understandings came much later; Father Ashley insights.  How important is it that other people hold us in their minds?  What happens when there’s nobody to pray for us?  What is life without prayer?

Father Ashley

 

Father Ashley, you must be dead now.

When was it?  ’76 or ’77?

Did you think I was a visionary convert?

Did you think I knew what you knew?

You pursued me.

I felt you took an interest in me that wasn’t encouraged.

And I, like always, to all people,

Dealt with you at arms length.

 

Remember 4/187 West Street?

I cooked us a meal there more than once.

You would visit Sydney,

And stay at the North Sydney Jesuit College.

I would look you up there and drive you to my place.

There was one time when you were in the city,

At that little old church at the western end of George Street,

Almost going into Parramatta Road.

It never dawned on me to remember why you were there.

 

You always knew when I was in Melbourne.

I don’t think I got in touch.

I think others used to do that for me.

You were a priest put out to pasture,

At Campion College, Kew.

Your stationary showed an embossed crest,

Oh, that’s right, there was the occasional letter.

Why didn’t I keep them?

 

Were you lonely?

Is that why you sought out my company?

Did you want to talk?

But what could I possibly say that you would want to hear?

Were you expecting to hear me speak of discovering the Truth, maybe?

When I didn’t even know I was looking for it?

Couldn’t you see me for what I really was?

Were you so easily fooled?

 

Looking back I’m ashamed to admit,

I did think you were a bit of a fool,

A little man.

You always wore your black coat and wide clerical collar,

Manacled about loose skin.

You giggled and fussed and shuffled and shook a little

Because you were old.

I wondered why the hell I was with you at all.

 

Father Ashley, I remember only one thing you ever said,

You asked me seriously if I prayed.

“Do you pray”? you said.

I remember I struggled with the answer,

I didn’t really know if I did but I thought I didn’t but should’ve.

I said yes, hoping that would be the end of it.

You seemed satisfied with the answer, remember,

For you were quite serious again when you asked,

“Will you pray for me”?

 

Couldn’t you see me for what I was?

Couldn’t you see through me?

Were you so easily fooled?

                                               J. O. White

Michelle Cahill - Renovations

I try to make myself easy to shop for at Christmas.  I say, “if you must, then don’t spend more than fifteen dollars and make your selection from either a bottle of port or a discounted red wine; or confectionary which must include Rocky Road and anything that’s got ginger in it, maybe a gift voucher from Bunnings; next year’s diary (A5, one day to a page), or a poetry book (new, second-hand, doesn’t matter), and don’t worry if I might already have it, because I will find somebody to swap or share it with.”  I’ve got to admit, most years, people take me on my word.  That’s how it was this Christmas.  I received a paperback anthology, The Best Australian Poems 2013, edited by Lisa Gorton, Black Inc. publishers.  It becomes my distraction for the rest of Christmas day.  What I like to do with a book like this is go through it quickly the first time with a pencil and rate each poem based on the immediate appeal it has for me.  I will mark it a definite ‘NO’, a ‘Maybe’, or an ‘OK/YES’.  The ‘OK/Yes’s’ become part of me, then I go back through the ‘Maybe’s’.
In this post I include one of the immediate ‘OK/Yes’ poems from Best Australian Poems 2013.  It’s a modern sonnet by Michelle Cahill, Renovations.  I’ve only ever read two of Michelle’s poems (the other is in an earlier post of mine), and yet her style and content appeals to me – refreshing, because I am surprised at how few female poets are included in my list of favourites.  With Renovations, it seems the poet has just separated in a divorce (marriage laws defied me), and is busy setting up her own place in Sydney, renovating and furnishing.  There’s a sense of busy-ness and excitement but also a feeling of aloneness and a need for help to live a single life.  Anyway, see what you think of Renovations.
 

Renovations

Michelle Cahill (1969 -  )

 

It was a summer of stinking heat, hell-fire days,

nothing predictable but the violence of time

whistling throu a sou’ westerly, the dragon lizard

scampering to underbrush from crops of dry lawn.

Boxes in every half-filled room, masking-tape rolls,

anarchic cockroaches slewing between floorboards.

I learnt how to correct grey hair roots, presbyopia,

leaking showers.  The marriage laws defied me.

Then one tradie after another, phone calls, texts.

in my alacrity, I’d confuse their names, driving

from Canada Bay to Lidcombe, Ikea to Parramatta Road

for blackbutt, bamboo, terracotta.  Scott from Prospect

gave a quote I accepted for all the drop sheets, all

the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single.

Reading some notes on Michelle’s background, I find she is a practising medical doctor – the same as William Carlos Williams was (another of my favourite poets).

One thing I like in this poem is the running together of lists of things (boxes ….. masking-tape rolls, anarchic cockroaches ……. blackbutt, bamboo, terracotta ….).  You see this in a number of Kenneth Slessor’s poems.  I believe Renovations in the title refers not only to our usual association with repair of property, but also to the poet herself making new again, restoring herself to good condition (I learnt how to correct grey hair roots, presbyopia …).  But why wait until you’re separated to attend to these things?  And there is so much to have to learn or re-learn in coping with this emotional change.  So much, that you get the feeling at some stage the poet could have easily given in and returned to the security of the relationship (all the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single.).

 

My poem links into the post by way of another perspective on the often crappiness of human relationship.  Sometimes you’ve got to have a tough skin; have a laugh.  It’s a game; it’s a grinding down; a business and you’ve got to believe the outcome is worth it.

 

2012.  Even in a long standing marriage or relationship I have no control over how a person may speak to me.  I learnt this in a conflict resolution training course I did once.  It said I can only choose how I respond – totally unaffected or aggressive.  Unaffected is best, but I should still firmly and calmly let the other person know that I do not accept being spoken to in that way – I am too good for that!  Anyway, that’s the course I did, while there must be another school of thought that says, “you’ve got to accept, when you’ve provided the justification, then people can speak to you however they want.”

Keeping up Appearances
 

Driving the suburbs in Sydney

and I miss the turn at Turramurra

so we have to back-track from Pymble

getting lost not knowing the right turn-off

or which BP service station it’s supposed to be

around Kissing Point Road left into Yenko Drive

and then Simon rings her mobile

to find out where we are

because he wants to know when

to put the piece of pork on

and that sends her into a fury

because her mobile’s a ‘piece of shit’

and it’s embarrassing and our sat-nav

has not yet been returned

and technology’s leaving me behind

because for some reason

I refuse to - ‘get with the program!’

but don’t worry, as soon as the house sells

she’ll walk out and is going to get one of those

Samsung Galaxies on Monday

and I’ve kept my calm right up to now

because I don’t like being late

or lost either

though I am feeling very, very tired

and I start to say a sentence beginning with the word, ‘look’

and she says, ‘shut your fucking mouth!’

as we smile our way down the driveway

to where Simon and Jan and the kids

seem so pleased to see us.

                                              J. O. White

Cyril Tawney - Naval ditties, The A25 Song

I’ve noticed that a couple of my posts featuring naval ditties sung brilliantly by Shep Woolley or Cyril Tawney attract a bit of interest (probably from ex-RN’ers around the world).  Anyway, where I think there might be interest I will endeavour to please, so here are the words to another favourite Cyril Tawney Navy song.  It’s called, The A25 Song.  As with most of Cyril Tawney’s work, the song is ‘old’ Navy – fledgling days of the Fleet Air Arm and set in the struggle of WWII.  Cyril did thirteen years in the RN (joined at 16 years old), but had talent and left to do time as the longest serving professional folk singer in Britain.

The A25 Song

(Cyril Tawney 1930 -2005)

 

They say in the Air Force a landing’s OK,

If the pilot gets out and can still walk away,

But in the Fleet Air Arm the prospect is grim,

If the landing’s piss poor and the pilot can’t swim.

Cracking show! I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

I fly for a living and not just for fun,

I’m not very anxious to hack down a hun,

And as for deck landings at night in the dark,

As I told wings this morning, blow that for a lark.

Cracking show!  I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

When the batsman gives lower, I always go higher,

I drift o’er to starboard and prang my Seafire,

The boys in the gofers think that I’m green,

But I get the commission from Super Marine.

Cracking show!  I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

They gave me a Barra to beat up the fleet,

I shot up the Rodney and Nelson a treat,

I forgot the high mast that sticks out from Formid….

And a seat in the gofers was worth fifty quid.

Cracking show!  I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

I thought I was comin in high enough but,

I was fifty feet up when the batsman gave ‘cut’,

And loud in my earphones the sweet angels sang,

Float, float float, float, float, float, float, float, float,

Prang!

Cracking show!  I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

The moral of this story is easy to see,

A Fleet Air Arm pilot you never should be,

But stay on the shore and get two rings or three,

And go out every night on the piss down at Lee.

Cracking show! I’m alive!

But I still have to render my A25.

 

I have seen versions of The A25 Song where there are up to seven additional verses, but this is the one I have on CD.  For the uninitiated, an A25 is an accident report form; a Barra is a type of aircraft; and ‘Formid..’ refers to HMS Formidable, an Illustrious class aircraft carrier in commission during WWII.  The times I read this song, it makes me feel how quickly we distance from actual experiences and recollections of what we once knew as familiar technology and methods.  Very soon, the people of a time won’t receive that feeling of how it was and what it was like.  That’s why it’s important for poets in the present to capture and preserve observations, emotions and experiences of our time, no matter how mundane.

I use a poem of mine titled, ‘Nirimba’ as the link in this post.  It’s a Fleet Air Arm link.  I was totally unaware of the history of ‘HMAS Nirimba’ when I first joined the Navy and that establishment to undertake my three and a half years of trade training.  We had joined the Navy to see the sea so why were we being bussed inland, miles from any water, to an abandoned airfield west of Sydney?  The Navy’s hold on an inland aerodrome went back to the second world war when the British Pacific fleet used the RAAF facility (Schofields aerodrome) as a maintenance base for their Fleet Air Arm (a Mobile Naval Air Base – MONAB).  At that time, it was commissioned as HMS Nabstock.  After the war, the RAN set the base up as their apprentice training establishment (RANATE).  In my poem I try to go back and capture ‘Nirimba’ and the beautiful innocence of our young time when we were Naval Apprentices.  Soon, there will be too much distance for anybody to feel how it truly was or know what it was like.  The Navy’s ‘Nirimba’ decommissioned in 1994 and the facilities handed on to the Education Department to become a college precinct in western Sydney.

2011.  HMAS Nirimba was the Royal Australian Navy’s apprentice training establishment from 1956 to 1994.  It was located at Quakers Hill in Sydney, miles inland on the site of a fleet air arm base from the second world war.  Apprentices spent three and a half years (seven terms) at Nirimba before going to sea.  A lengthy time by today’s terms to develop a unique culture.  I was an apprentice there from January 1969 to July 1972.

Nirimba

 

Go back,

way, way back,

  before the Richmond line was electrified,

    before Parklea,

      before muppets, before round rig,

when Bruno was the bouncer at the Blacktown RSL,

  and the Robin Hood was out of bounds,

before Facility 12,

  before purpose built brick buildings

    replaced corrugated iron and concrete floors,

      open ablution blocks left over from the war,

bucket and pogo stick laundering,

before rough play became bullying and bastardization,

  when character guidance was still taught,

    debutante balls with white gloves,

      cardboard detachable collars and crisp starched shirts,

Look up, look up! Don’t look down,

  there’s nothing on the ground,

    one day you may find,

      you have to square off and show you are the better man,

and some of the old salts still remembering,

modeled it on the British,

with an emphasis on pride,

loyalty, example, perseverance, guts and heart,

  Saturday morning working parties,

    winter afternoons on sporting fields,

     assembled under patron explorers,

Bass, Banks, Stirling and Tasman,

Dampier, King, Bligh, then Cook,

  where cheers went up for service,

    for division, for term, for hut

     for being a part, and the love of life,

when attendance at Sunday service was compulsory,

and lingering, longing looks,

upon Chaplain Rossier’s daughters,

  when rejection hurt,

    before free love,

when local schoolgirls were bussed in to cinema dances,

no alcohol, no drugs and strict ten o’clock finishes,

  before videos, before computers and personal television sets,

    competed with the focus and jibes at Mr Marks movies,

clacking mechanically through projector sprockets and guides

reel changes, jams, burnt celluloid and missing cinemascope lenses,

  and the cinema, the cinema the central point,

    when warrants were read from the steps,

to the prejudice of good order and discipline,

and a boy could get fourteen days in Holsworthy prison,

or seven days MUPs for silent contempt

  and a man’s morals were measured in his performance review,

    and Mrs Clarke knew every boy’s name,

      looking eagerly and expectantly for mail,

back when folk packaged parcels and wrote letters, cards

for which waiting taught virtue of patience, and receiving

was something held to carry treasured

in a private corner of a cheap wood ply locker,

  kit musters, cleanliness and inspections

    when liberty men presented at the main gate

     before cars,

      before civvies

shaven hair, blue blazers and private school pocket rig

uniforms massing down Quakers Hill road on foot

when that was still a brisk walk in the country

and a full weekend and freedom tasted sweet

released early from Friday workshops and classrooms

divisions and gunnery jacks with red faces

Look up, look up!  Don’t look down,

  there’s nothing on the ground

    look me in the eye, stand tall!  With men

who believed pride and confidence, something

having to be yelled into a boy,

  before economies and efficiencies argued

    and a seven term investment

      seemed not too long

        to have to wait for return

and it was mind, body and soul to be fed

  before R & Q, before outside catering

    when tables were always laden with generosity

fresh bread, unopened jars, clean butter, and

canned herrings in tomato sauce

take all you want, eat all you take

  you have to be fighting fit, to be fit to fight

when Sister Hazel practiced a brand of military nursing

based on the Crimea, when PTI’s were still feared

and leather soled boots struck at the double on roadways.

Look up, look up.

  don’t look down.

nothing on the ground, anymore

  nothing on the ground

    .... anymore.

                                                                   J. O. White