seventy-nine and a future radical

After grammar school during and just after the 39-45 war, I did my National Service in the Education Corps (in this country and Germany) and then did a three-year stint at University in London until 1952, where I gave up my bent for French, Spanish and Latin and switched to English. Though I was active in theatre and literature as a student, I came to three conclusions that have followed me, maybe dogged me, through life. I gave up on the value of examinations (though I was granted a lower second to help me to become a teacher as it turned out and added a supplement to my earnings) and decided the sooner I stopped living in London the better.

Most importantly, though, after producing my first plays and then being treated to a surfeit of opera and ballet by a keen friend, I realised that nothing in my temperament could reconcile itself with the pretences of proscenium staging.

I returned to what was then the country town of Southampton and married in the same September, determined to search for another way of doing things theatrical. For four months I happily dug ditches as a Waterworks Labourer in and around my birthplace. In some ways, it was the most engaging job I have ever had. I left after four months for another three reasons: my wife was pregnant, I needed to earn more than a labourer's wage, and I wanted my evenings free so that I could get on with my theatre intentions, rather than spend nights controlling makeshift traffic lights on country lanes to save motorists from driving into the lurking ditches.

I was happier wallowing in ditches than in being swallowed by education once more, but I was ambitious at the time and couldn't see that I had much choice.

Falling out of love with London (well, not entirely; but as far as culture was concerned) and theatre's all-powerful form of staging, more or less in the same breath, dumped me in the ditches even before I started digging them; and these kinds of ditches I don't think I have ever crawled out of (as far as culture is concerned!).


This blog is going to explore all the paradoxes, the prejudices, the driving convictions this spate of early decisions has ingrained in me. I have lived at 51 different postal addresses, not one of them for more than nine years. I probably qualify as a maverick, have a great suspicion of establishments and top-down authority, honour the ordinary - my website www.rggregory.com is labelled "cathedral of OHS". OHS stands for Ordinary Human Spirit. I have written thousands of poems, few of which have been properly published; many plays for the round that rarely get presented, a novel that agents don't want to read, and scripts long and short on educational and theatrical issues that few other than myself have ever looked at. In all sensible terms I am a failure. I am certainly not part of the paradigm that decides the great and the good of contemporary drama and literature.

So, for anyone stumbling on this blogsite who believes that we are in a golden age of culture, focussing the peak of its achievements on London; who holds that the height of theatre resides in the miserabilities of Beckett and Pinter - my advice must be look elsewhere. You may be right. Mavericks are rarely good judges. I inhabit an alien paradigm (more peopled than the cognoscenti can dare to accept) and one to be rationally suspicious of. Yet it has its merits and has its roots in the Albion that Peter Ackroyd has explored. It is worth singing about. As I shall try to do in this blog.

confession

for all my country poses
my cells belong to a town
grass is symbol-deep in me
but brick dips deeper down

mountains knock me sideways
a moor chills my bones
a field of wheat exults me
i'm awed by ancient stones

but lines of dowdy shop-fronts
mean unpolished streets
sever the green man in me
coddle my heart's retreats

my marrow's grey as asphalt
my brain's a shirley tram
the royal pier dreams fish for me
what southampton was - i am

i'm an ecological liar
a trickster with mother earth
dreaming grass may ravel me -
bricks nourish my birth

thirteener - 12

i hate the arty - those who are sure
they have the right of breeding to proclaim
high art - and preen themselves for it
high art's a complicated game
with rules to make itself obscure

to all but the gifted sensible elite
the rest were best to drop dull heads in shame
culture's mutes immune to culture's cure
grotesqueries cast by art's pure flame
the butt and fishbowl for creative wit

art's not a spiritual furniture
for proper minds - it's a common claim
the rough diamond in everybody's kit

thirteener - 40

so much of london i have grown to hate
the powers skiving there (scheming to be wise)
the suffocating traffic of its laws
plain truths being processed into stately lies
the choicest pickings piled on one plate

london's an eagle with its costly claws
ready to swoop and tear out local eyes
london's interests and the state's equate
london's the jewel - all else is colonies
taxed of much toil and wisdom for the cause

shame then (casting your river) that you bait
me with such beauty to which (dumb fish) i rise
each summons (sprung with longing and applause)