RUPERT CHAWNER BROOKE, 1887-1915.
Georgian poet. Born at Rugby. Educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge. He was an atheist and active Socialist.
He was a friend of Edward Marsh and worked with him to prepare and promote the first Georgian Anthology of poetry.
After travelling in Germany, and, following his nervous breakdown he went on a long tour to recuperate, taking in the USA, Canada, Honolulu, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, and Tahiti.
After hesitation about what course of action to take at the start of the First World War he joined the navy. He was a witness at the siege of Antwerp before writing his famous set of five sonnets called 1914. Though he had seen the devastation and suffering created by the war he kept it all at an emotional distance from himself, denying the realities of war.
He had a deeply confused personality - given to both ecstatic enthusiasm and suicidal doubt.
Following a mosquito bite he died of acute blood poisoning on board ship on his way to Gallipoli, and was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros.
Minds at War and Out in the Dark contain all five of Brooke's 1914 war sonnets, plus his sombre and realistic last poem, Soon to Die.
THE RECRUIT
Leave your home behind, lad,
And reach your friends your hand,
And go, and luck go with you
While Ludlow tower shall stand.
Oh, come you home of Sunday
When Ludlow streets are still
And Ludlow bells are calling
To farm and lane and mill,
Or come you home of Monday
When Ludlow market hums
And Ludlow chimes are playing
"The conquering hero comes,"
Come you home a hero,
Or come not home at all,
The lads you leave will mind you
Till Ludlow tower shall fall.
And you will list the bugle
That blows in lands of morn,
And make the foes of England
Be sorry you were born.
And you till trump of doomsday
On lands of morn may lie,
And make the hearts of comrades
Be heavy where you die.
Leave your home behind you,
Your friends by field and town:
Oh, town and field will mind you
Till Ludlow tower is down.
A.E. Housman
Vernon Scannell (1922 - 2007)
Portrait: Charlotte Harris
Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where his father, who had fought in the First World War, developed a reputation as a good portrait photographer and the family’s severe financial difficulties began to ease. Scannell left the local council school at fourteen and got a job in an accountant’s office. His real passions, however, were for the unlikely combination of boxing and literature. He had been winning boxing titles at school and had been a keen reader from a very early age, although not properly attaching to poetry until about aged fifteen, when he picked up a Walter de la Mare poem and was ‘instantly and permanently hooked’.
In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The war took him into action in the North African desert and then the Normandy invasion, where he was wounded near Caen and shipped back to a military hospital before being sent onto a convalescent depot. Scannell had always very much disliked army life, finding nothing in his temperament which fitted him for the part of a soldier. So ‘on impulse’, after V.E. Day, with the war over as far as he was concerned, he deserted and spent two years on the run, earning his living with jobs in the theatre, professional boxing bouts and tutoring and coaching, all the while teaching himself by reading everything he could. During this evasive time Scannell was writing poetry and was first published in The Tribune and Adelphi. He was also boxing for Leeds University, winning the Northern Universities Championships at three weights. In 1947 he was arrested and court-martialled and sent to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental institution near Birmingham. On discharge he returned to Leeds and then London, where, supporting himself with teaching jobs and boxing, he settled down to writing.
Scannell won many poetry awards and his war poems, such as ‘Walking Wounded’, are regarded as among the best to come out of the Second World War. A.E. Housman said that ‘the business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe’ and Scannell quoted this with approval. Scannell’s poems, with their themes of love, violence and mortality, were shaped and influenced by his wartime experiences. He had his own distinct voice and was one of the most accomplished poets writing in the second halfof the 20th Century and well into the first decade of the 21st: his final collection 'Last Post' was published in 2007; he had been working on it until not long before his death.
Vernon Scannell died at home in West Yorkshire on 17 November 2007, aged 85. Obituaries were published in the national and regional Press and links to a selection of these are given below.
In 2006 Vernon Scannell selected his poem ‘Casualty-Mental Ward’ for the WPA’s website, saying about the poem that it ‘is a villanelle and I think the repetitions are particularly suitable for the subject, the almost obsessive returning to the same thing’:
CASUALTY - MENTAL WARD
Something has gone wrong inside my head.
The sappers have left mines and wire behind,
I hold long conversations with the dead.
I do not always know what has been said;
The rhythms, not the words, stay in my mind;
Something has gone wrong inside my head.
Not just the sky but grass and trees are red,
The flares and tracers---or I’m colour-blind;
I hold long conversations with the dead.
Their presence comforts and sustains like bread;
When they don’t come its hard to be resigned;
Something has gone wrong inside my head.
They know about the snipers that I dread
And how the world is booby- trapped and mined;
I hold long conversation with the dead;
As all eyes close, they gather round my bed
And whisper consolation. When I find
Something has gone wrong inside my head
I hold long conversations with the dead.
Several people have asked me how I was inspired to write "Emily of Emerald Hill."
One day I was having lunch in Ipoh with my close friend, Ong Su-ming. She told me about a striking monodrama she had seen in London, about Emily Dickinson. I had seen other one-person plays too, so the format was familiar to me. Su-ming suggested that I should write about the life and times of her grandmother, a grand old lady in Ipoh. "Well for that matter I have agrandmother of my own!" I said, and that was how I began to write a play about a strong-minded Peranakan matriarch.
I grew up in a big house in Emerald Hill Road, presided over by my grandmother. Her husband, Mr Seow Poh Leng, died during the war. My grandmother, Mrs Seow, also known as Polly Tan -- ruled over the big extended family that lived in "Oberon."
My grandmother's great-grandfather was Tan Tock Seng (the founder of TTS hospital.) Her family had lived in Singapore for many generations. The men went to Raffles institution and ACS. My grandmother was educated at Raffles Girl's school. She spoke Peranakan Malay at home, but also spoke various Chinese dialects -- Cantonese, Hokkien, and a few phrases of Teochew and other dialects. She wore either the Nonya's sarong-kebaya, or a Chinese cheong-sam. She was of course a great cook in Nonya style. She could play the piano and sing songs by Stephen Foster such as "Way down uppon the Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe."
Thus my grandmother was typical of the English-educated Babas who flourished around the middle of the last century. By my generation, times had changed. As I grew up, the English educational system tended to cut me off from my cultural roots. I did not learn to speak Peranakan Malay, or to cook the food. I do not know a great deal about Peranakan culture. Yet by descent and by heritage, I proudly claim to belong to the Babas, the Straits Chinese, the original assimilated Singaporeans.
My grandmother could be friendly and sociable with all kinds of people, just like Emily. She could also wield the whiplash of her tongue mercilessly. She ran her big household with skill and efficiency. She was also the "Fixer" in the family. Even those family members who had moved to other houses still depended on her for marketing, to find a servant, etc.
So when I began to write this play, I portrayed my grandmother as clearly as I could. I have learned since then that she was very typical of the Peranakan matriarch, in the way she bullies and controls her family. At the time I wrote the play, I was not trying to portray a typical woman -- I was just portraying my grandmother as I remembered her.
I asked myself, "Why would a woman behave the way my grandmother did?" I realised that in a male-dominated society, a woman uses domestic power gain influence. A woman who has been hurt and abandoned as a child, would grab every possible means for control and security. But the life story of "Emily" is not the life-story of my grandmother. Please note, my grandmother, Mrs Seow Poh Leng, did not live the life that Emily lived. Yet this much is true: in the 1960's her mansion "Oberon"was pulled down, and the condominium "Emerald Mansions" was built on its site. My grandmother ended up living alone in a terrace house with only the servant for company, with her beloved grandson dropping by to take her out for a drive.
What then is true? This is not the true story of one woman -- it is the story of a generation. Every family has such stories, of the female ancestor who was married at a very early age, the relative whose son committed suicide. The golden boy who comes to grief, the charming but ineffectual males, the sisters-in-law engaged in incessant power-struggle, every Peranakan family had them. How about Mr Chee, the wily old banker, and Reverend Schneider, the Methodist bishop? Mat the Driver and Ah Sim the servant, Kebun the gardener and Botak the fishmonger, These were the familiar characters of my childhood.
Thus "Emily of Emerald Hill" is derived from my experience of growing up in a Peranakan family in the 1950s. It portrays a world now lost, which survives in the memories of many people of my generation.
Every New Year my grandmother had the kebun hang up the red curtain over the big front porch, and my male cousins flung crackers to explode all over the front drive. You know that ice-cream churn, the wooden tub with the iron canister surrounded by an ice-salt mixture? Every year my grandmother used to make jagong ice-cream for us. All my cousins still remember it … (sigh) … those were the good old days
Stella Kon 2001