Livin' in the shaddah of the bomb: Review of Anne Berkeley’s The Men From Praga (Salt 2009)

[sheenaghpugh]

Back in the 60s there was, in the BBC Radio comedy series Round the Horne, a character called Michael Bane, a skit on M. Caine, played by Hugh Paddick (trust me, it’s possible) who would complain, in thick cockney, of the futility of "livin’ in the shaddah of the bomb".

Born in 1950, I too grew up in the shaddah of the bomb, and until I read this book, I didn't realise how little documented that particular childhood was in poetry, nor how strange it must seem to those who have not had to seriously wonder, as children, if someone would press a red button and end the world. "I lived in fear of the Bomb" (from "Yellow Sun, Green Grass") is literally true for children of the Cold War; not all the time, nor to the exclusion of the normal business of childhood, but it was a real fear and has surfaced surprisingly seldom in poetry. And when it does, it generally comes from the side of protest, from those who were busy marching with CND symbols and negotiating with their mothers for posters of Castro on the bedroom wall (guilty, m'lud). But the father of this book's protagonist was aircrew, one of those for whom the bomb signified strength and safety, as the father himself, though often absent at work, does for the child, so her attitude is interestingly conflicted ("Heaven'd/weep at what my father knew" ("Nav Rad").

In the first half, titled "Co-ordinates", we are mostly in the mind and voice of this child, playing with cap-guns and working out ways to kill the local bully while her elders test more deadly weapons. Being a child, her fear of rats in the basement is always more urgent than the shaddah of the bomb, yet adult concerns leach through into the child's world of let's-pretend:

When the weather clears
I will look for letters
in the hollow
of the old conker tree

Sputnik will track me
so I wear a big hat
to hide my face
from the man-made moon.
("Russkis")

The child's-eye view is sharply observed. Readers who are old enough will find many rueful reminiscences, like the intolerance of fifties adults for anything they considered slang ("you're not supposed to say bike/ it's bicycle", from "My Mother's Migraines"), while readers of any generation could react to the child's whole-body shock on first hearing her father's plane take off close by ("Olympus Mk 301")

I lay on the ground and howled.
The grass itself was shaking in the awful wind.

The adult response to this exhibition of terror, as far as the child can recall, is more or less what one would expect at the time ("Was I smacked? I expect so") and the remembering child is philosophical about it in a very fifties way which comes as something of a relief after some of the obsessively self-pitying child's eye poems of recent decades. It was what parents did at the time; you could whinge on about it in poem after poem, or you could just grow up.

And grow up is just what the voice does in the second half of the book, "Trajectories". It is fascinating, in fact, to see how the child's eye becomes an adult eye, equally imaginative but more conscious. The child who transformed innocent footprints into clues in "Russkis" is essentially the same person in "Chamber of Horrors £2 extra", where waxworks take on a life of their own, or the brilliant "Britannia", where reality and metaphor blur their borders completely:

Careful not to soil her dainty Ferragamos,
the grand piano moves discreetly through the herbaceous border[…]

It's not what it was, she says, the vulgar new building,
every year the path to the lily pond more overgrown-
a negotiation of unripened blackberries and birtwistle.

One of the pleasures of the second half is watching motifs swim back from the first, transformed by the newly adult viewpoint. I know some readers who always start with the title poem; they'll be puzzled if they do it here, because the whole point of the "Men from Praga" is that they are unexceptional, fishermen on the Vistula, and though language still separates the narrator from the scene, they are foreign not alien, a curiosity rather than mythologically threatening like the "Russkis" of part 1. This technique is most powerfully used in "River", another poem where subject and metaphor are more or less interchangeable and the father of part 1 is seen in a new light.

I haven't even mentioned the consistently sharp wit, so evident in the wonderful series of translations of "Baudelaire's Pipe". This is a collection constantly fresh and surprising: unsentimental, keen-eyed, unashamedly intelligent and erudite without being inaccessible.

Comments

6 degrees of separation!

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Enjoyed this review -- thanks. I liked the book too, as I was a Cold War child of a different generation but with the same experience of belonging to the belligerent side. I knew Anne Berkeley slightly when I lived in Cambridge (we attended the same open mic or mike nights; shall we be 50s about it and say "open microphone"?), so in a funny way seeing your review feels like a distant family connection...

Re: 6 degrees of separation!

[sheenaghpugh]

I know Anne from the Glamorgan Masters and was always very impressed with her poems. Nice person too, which isn't always the case with writers one admires....

[(Anonymous)]

I've just read it over my holiday and also enjoyed it. Good review, by the way - makes me want to read the book again with what you say in mind.

(Rob A. Mackenzie)

[sheenaghpugh]

Thanks. I enjoy writing reviews a lot more now that nobody's paying me to do it and I can review what I want.

I am hoping to see that collection make it on to first-collection shortlists.