Whitby

Doggerel Bank

When I was a child, I was much amused by this little rhyme that my dad used to recite.

Here’s to my true love, Big Joe White.

Went out winching every night,

First with me, then with another.

To hell with him for a two-faced bugger.

 

It doesn’t rhyme properly, it doesn’t entirely make sense, but I found it hilarious. It has the hit-and-miss quality of what we used to call naïve painting. The naivety, the lack of subtlety in invective, the imperfect rhyming, and of course the fall-flat-on-your-face bathos of the last line all contribute to its being funny. And as Joseph Bologna, playing a thinly disguised Sid Caesar, says in the film My Favourite Year, ‘In my business, we don’t cut funny.’

Remember that the past is a foreign country when I tell you that Linda once remarked that when she was a child in Yorkshire, the girls had a skipping rhyme which went:

I like coffee, I like tea,

I like sitting on a black man’s knee.

 

Moving swiftly on, when I was six years old, I learned this rhyme, sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy, at primary school and found it very funny too.

Captain Cook was making soup,

His wife was making jelly.

Captain Cook fell in the soup

And burnt his rubber belly.

 

Years later, when my brother John’s children were babies, he used to rock them to sleep in his arms singing the above. Years later still, when Linda and I were courting, we once had a very pleasant weekend in Whitby. I remember telling our John that we had been to the home of James Cook, and had seen where he had sustained an injury to his rubber belly. John remarked, ‘You’ve been to soup and jelly country, then.’

When I worked in Falun in Sweden, there was a restaurant there called Kapten Krog, which gave me the idea of transposing the events to Sweden and translating the verse into pretend Swedish. I came up with the following:

Kapten Krog är macken sog,

Sin frun är macken djäle.

Kapten Krog in sog befellt

Og sin rubbörbäle geburnt.

 

Just so you know, ä in Swedish is pronounced like the e in bed, ö like the i in bin and e like the y in belly.

I suppose you are wondering what on earth I am drivelling on about. Me too. I guess with my sixty-seventh birthday coming up next month, I am having intimations of mortality and as a result am harking back to childhood memories. But I am also starting to appreciate poetry more- real poetry, not the daft verses above.

I used to think poetry was a waste of time for both the writer and the reader. Prose fiction was the only thing worth reading when I was younger. However, when the kids were babies, I used to read them poetry, and it seemed to please and soothe them. For our wedding anniversary the other week, Linda and I had a weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon, and we saw the Royal Shakespeare Company doing As You Like It. It is brilliant but the plot is a lot of stupid nonsense. The important thing is the beautiful dramatic poetry of the lines. The great American humourist Peter de Vries said, ‘I agree with Samuel Johnson that there are not six consecutive lines of good poetry in Shakespeare. Yet what move us are the peaks, for which we endure the stretches of claptrap and the tiresome clowns and the idiotic plots’.

He and Johnson are right about the plots and the clowns but wrong about the six lines. Just think of Macbeth’s soliloquy, or Iago’s ‘farewell’ speech, which includes the magnificent line, ‘Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!’ and ends, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone.’

ANYWAY, in recent years and months I have decided to let poetry off. Not only is it worthwhile, it can sum up what we feel better than the words of our own hearts. Here are some that perform that function for me.

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold. I find Arnold’s view of the world alarmingly Aryan-centred, but who can fail to be moved by the lines:

…the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

 

Outlaws, by Robert Graves- I first read this in Mr McNamara’s English class at school and found it deeply haunting:

Old gods almost dead, malign,

 Starving for unpaid dues;

Incense and fire, salt, blood and wine

 And a drumming muse,

 

Banished to woods and a sickly moon,

 Shrunk to mere bogey things,

Who spoke with thunder once at noon

 To prostrate kings

 

Moonlit Apples, by John Drinkwater. This was one of Muriel Spark’s favourite poems:

 

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,

And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those

Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes

A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

 

How haunting is that? Linda’s grandfather was a farmer, and Linda tells me that in the farmhouse, they used to have the apples laid out in rows in the attic.

To return to reading to babies, our son Bill aged only a few weeks, loved the sound of The Maldive Shark, by Herman Melville:

 

About the shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive Sea,

The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,

How alert in attendance be!

 

So recently, I have put together a year in verse, twelve poems, one for each month. I am not going to bore you with them now, but instead, shall descend from the sublime to the gorblimey, another quote from my dad. In the nineteen-sixties, there was a chap who used to live in Ballingray in Fife, Snowy Law, he was called, and he always spoke in rhyme. One Saturday, there was an outing planned to a horserace meeting at Ayr racecourse in the west of Scotland, and Snowy was one of those planning to go. However, a friend met him in the middle of the day, still in Ballingray.

‘I thought you were going on the trip to the races, Snowy,’ he asked.

Snowy replied:

‘I peyed the fare

But I didnae get tae Ayr.

I missed the bus

So shut your puss.’

 

                                                    Captain Cook with a seagull on his head