Tag: Cornwall

Eden Rock by Charles Causley

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They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

This poem was written later in Charles Causley’s life, in 1988 when he was 71. It has since become one of his best known.

Sometimes poems find their way to you at the right time in your life. I discovered this one some years after both my parents had passed on. It might not have made as much sense to me if I had read it earlier.

The poem is a mixture of memory and vision. Causley is thinking of his parents as they were when they were young. He seems to be both longing to return to a happy childhood and also imagining being re-united with his parents in the afterlife. This is expressed by a mixture of realistic detail and other-worldly atmosphere, and finally he contemplates the river that, sooner or later, we all must cross.

There is a sense of time being frozen and the parents being thought of in an idealised way. Perhaps that is always how we think of those we have lost, as an ideal version of themselves.

The striking last line can be interpreted in more than one way and leads us to think back about what the poem has said.   

Seaside Golf by John Betjeman

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You don’t have to play golf, or even to like sport at all, to see what Betjeman is getting at here. The poem is about one of those rare, fleeting moments when everything just seems to click into place and go perfectly. Even the natural surroundings seem to be on the poet’s side. There’s a sense of optimism and positivity about this poem, and after the nightmare year we have just experienced, I think we could all do with a bit of that.   

Seaside Golf by John Betjeman

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear’d the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker’s back —
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp’d it out of sight
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I’d find it on the green.

And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most surely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.


Haunted by the past: E F Benson

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When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.

It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.

Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.

He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.

However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.

The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.

By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.

The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.