Apology for Prophecy (Majority Ode)

(to my loving parents; Claudia Fitzherbert; Toby Buxton; Xavier Yvo Buxton-Fitzherbert; and Allegra Fitzherbert; those of the blood or non-blood who put in an appearance or sent elephantine envoys

The roaming halves have reserved themselves for supplementary birthdays and subordinate odes)


When Tipu rises twenty-one
The elephants will fleshly be
From ‘jet’ to pearl they’ll be transposed
Wash-wallowing the Arabian Sea

And they will carry a loud set
Of kings and queens and minstrelsies
And discord richly trailed will drape
About, till peace reclaim the trees

In Madhya Pradesh. There will ride
‘Grim Dante’, with his settled stare;
Let on that howdah lie a man
Who gardened, ere engrained, his glare

His siesta ne’er unavowed,
Let him sprawl in some queendoms’ sight,
When Tipu rises twenty-one
Love shall step forth in plural rite

And God knows who’ll have married who,
Or where the complex things will knot,
Whether Sister and Hood will strive
With Bolognese pinko rot

But CS Lewis long ago
Pointed out practicalities
Relating to old Edmund’s art –

‘Behold the start of Britomart!
For she is English and bourgeoise
She wonders who could fit the bill
With maximum of pomp and fuss…’

One doesn’t quite know now indeed
How it may be – but the lights yet
Will flicker, Tipu twenty-one,
Microhard, Apple serpentined,
The globe in Toby’s verdant debt.

Catullus Chooses

That one is stunning for us all;
I’d like to stand stunned, first, myself
- a witness vouching in that hour
For pallor like that, gait, height, all.

I’ll codify each separate carried
Point about these vital matters,
I’ll reference them properly –

But not for me. There is a difference
That raiments around tenderness,
That renders one languescent staring
Only wearing, one a chain.
When I am standing and she isn’t
Sure I sense justification
Both times; but this first and other
One is not my cause for stunning.

And that’s because she is all salted,
Looks like frost and thaws down drifts,
There is no border and no country
In her state that knows the worn,
Or cannot fight it, or is wan –

I couldn’t witness you then darling
In the stunning gaze parade
For I’ve been stunned and brenned and bonded
To the astral sleeping staid.

Nod to the Smiths

There were times when I could
Have murdered her
But the fact is she died
At eleven
Which wasn't amongst them

De Angelorum

It is just sentiment that crawls
About my head, around my bed,
Roughly proceeds, ends up scraping
The barking farm dogs far way

Chaps till the lips it's harping on
Are less lipsticked than, battered, mine;
Drinks till the 'eau de robinet'
Ten atoms to one, settles wine

And sentiment before novels
Meant much to think about; and still
It sounds like love let in on mind
Bred to angelic oversweep

I buy angels so long before
I let God in the basket-case
And even if they won't be there,
They're needed for, they thrill, the chase:

The old chant is a confused thing,
The mothers' loving heresy
The gives four dead, if wise, men wings
What then would Luke, the doctor, think?

Did he attain a case-study
With relevance to the doctrine
(Aquinas' sapling) of the pure
Untouchable, or Plato's sap?

What about fathers' heresies?
There's one about the grail, sure,
Which makes us see the golden throng,
The red, last, the transparent one -

Then she is one, my sentiment,
A neutral virtue fledged to pause,
Her sometime silver shimmer steel,
Under the overshadows' force.

And another - pseudo-Waugh?

Golddigger

My father, Henry Golding, admired the novels of Evelyn Waugh, never read another writer after them, and was heartily sorry he had ever had the misfortune to encounter the written word before them.

Of that canon, he said he liked A Handful of Dust best, really liked The Sword of Honour best, and laughed most conspicuously when reading Scoop. Nevertheless it was after a conceit at the beginning and end of the Master’s second novel, Vile Bodies, that he determined he would name his daughters. The Pentecostal angel choir, the angelic voice of Chastity, directed his wishes. He wanted four daughters, and outdoing even his teacher’s choice of abstruse virtues, decided that they should be called Integrity, Dignity, Liberality and Diligence.

After securing a wife with the correct mixture of courage and complacence to allow him to implement his scheme, Henry engendered Integrity and Dignity. My mother, Mrs. Golding, fell pregnant a third time and gave birth while re-reading Ivanhoe. Henry was ushered through the hospital, throwing all feigned male indifference to the mysterious rites of Juno aside. His excitement built as he perceived the little creature had a gloriously dark head. Integrity and Dignity were fair in a monotonous yellow way, and Henry Golding, my father, that is, must have felt translucent with pride that he could forge a dark-haired daughter also.

No doubt she would be more trouble than her placid sisters, this dark Liberality. Those half-blind kitten eyes would plague her benevolent father’s existence, but he was ready for that, expectant and gleeful at this third, precious, unruly...but, oh, what aberration. Dark Liberality proved to be Henry Golding the Younger. Furthermore, my hair grew sandier as I reached adolescence.

I am a vain person, and have wanted to write my biography for a fairly long time, in fact ever since I worked out the difference between the words “autobiography” and “biography”. But I have noticed that most autobiographers almost always make those heroic colossi, themselves, look heavy-handed, portentous and unbearable; while a secondary character is capable of annexing some of the glitter shed by even the basest of pens.

So I am writing the biography of the younger of my two sisters, Golddigger, as everyone but her father called her since some distant playground, where the social concept of Golddigging was unknown and someone called Dignity Golding demanded a little attention. Golddigger has turned out to be a most unfair name with regard to its connotations, as my sister inherited a good deal more than I did, and has spent a good deal of her time ducking rich men. These things are in the hands of the Fates.

No, this isn’t working. It’s the first-person narration that’s the problem, though I have flirted with omniscience, with that silly comment about my father’s translucent pride for example. No, all these facts and jokes and bitternesses are yoked to my tongue, and I seem a bore already and will seem a boor by the end.

The solution has struck me. I like the first-person narration well enough; why should I not narrate as Golddigger? Yes, from now on he will be a discreet enough figure, my brother, narrow-faced and sympathetic at odd moments, a distant, failed young thing with a tinge of nobility. Only I must learn to mention him less.

Another novel beginning from Eton, pseudo-Poe

Soleil D’Or

Everything could be ruined this afternoon, I thought in the early morning. But of course you have to remember that everything could be ruined most afternoons. It very often is, but I suppose we survive somehow, jettisoning dignity or comfort or earnestness or morality or pride. Yet I had no wish to behold any such unravelling; to be present when a certain pair of my friends I had rather not meet each other met each other; when certain truths I had rather not be illumined were illumined. I felt a great deal less shame in the act of a coward, ringing the Soleil D’Or Hotel, Cannes, than I would have done at the supper of Pervis, and Grunte, and the shared knowledge of Grunte, and Pervis.

For such reasons I took my holiday. The time was not irregular, fortunately enough; the schools were disgorging their burdens, and, though I had no children, the egoism of the parents who smugly hold the power of this world would easily forget this, and assume that, as they were compelled to move at half-term, so too was I.

I wondered for some minutes if I ought not to take with me a companion. But the chaperone I found most congenial was the cause of my migration in the first place, and I am no Antony to flaunt my Cleopatra; indeed I always hoped to be more of an Octavius. Even Octavius had an Imperial Cupboard filled with skeletons; I was only unfortunate in that my Imperial Cupboard had rattled the harder. Besides my little Corinna of Drury-Lane (you see I am a well-read man! enough to condemn anyone in the City), I could have chosen my sister; but that would, I think, have been a metaphorically masochistic course, (dear Corinna verges on the physical) for we are that type of sibling that scourge each other to reassure ourselves of the affinity of our blood.

I resolved, then, to go to Cannes alone. It was of crucial importance for my peace of mind, of course, that I should have left England by the time I knew Pervis to be meeting Grunte, so I left on one of those absurd airlines that still present you with tattered “frills”, coleslaw and Red Leicester around lunchtime, but have the great merit that they have been altogether abandoned by the banking classes. I departed with a fairly secure hope that I would be observed by no one who mattered. I was not quite sanguine enough to be sure that I would not meet someone; but this was the situation I aimed for, equipping myself with a newspaper and a volume of the Letters of Queen Victoria. I have long traced with affection the harmony of that Monarch’s mindset with some of the more sensational reporters.

Thus I was irritated, and unnerved too, I must own, to be addressed by name at the check-in desk. I looked up reluctantly from a condolence letter to Louis-Philippe, and nodded in acknowledgement, but I was relieved when I recognised the face.

“Why, Edward, it has been some time.”

“You haven’t changed,” the other replied. There was justifiably much of envy in his voice, for the same could not be said of him. I had left Edward Mutton a sharp graduate, ambitious and original. He had made an Acherontic descent, into schoolmastering; he was inflated and gnawed down at the same time, his cheeks shining with involuntary tears. But most happily of all, he was of no consequence. He might even, I thought with a little anticipation, prove amusing.

“You’re going to Pisa?” I suggested, thinking of a likely destination for a man of refined taste. Pisa is the gateway to Florence, that lodestone of Inglesi italianati.

“No, to Cannes,” he corrected laughingly. “I’m on your flight.”

This confounded and irritated me out of measure, though I tried not to make that perfectly obvious. Cannes? What would Edward’s kind do in Cannes? Cannes was for the rich and the dissolute; those who fell outside that lofty class could find no real satisfaction there, only a great deal of debt. Perhaps Edward wanted to be rich and dissolute, but that was a separate state altogether, best provided for, I reflected, by Nice.

“Ah. Where are you staying?”

“Oh, I don’t know the town well...I followed some recommendations...a little place called the Soleil D’Or...I wonder if you know it?”

It was that reply which made me realise that my escape was to assume a very different form from that which I had envisaged. Edward Mutton was a schoolmaster, but fate had shifted me into a position where I could not but educate him.

To prove I still do poems - and love ones at that

No socket yet but fails, my love,
Aren't batteries born to give?
The nurselings of the human tongue -
Small miracles, a larger one
A wonder we can talk at all,
Even in screeds and palmistry.

I know my love we are not trained,
Not all of us, to make our tracks -
We're sealed to the human tribe
Whose currency is puzzled loss;
Yet when we have paid as we went
Still we'll have screeds, and palmistry.