Dear Readers, we’ll be back to the Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow, but Thursday is poetry day, and I find ‘Timothy Winters’ running through my head a lot these days. Plus, ‘Eden Rock’ is new to me, and it has an otherworldly quality that I find mesmerising.
Causley really was both ‘the poet’s poet” (he was admired by Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion, amongst many others) and ‘a man of the people’. There is a kind of rage in ‘Timothy Winters’ that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Causley was a teacher for much of his working life, and he writes with such understanding about children. However, he wrote in the old-fashioned styles of ballads and folksongs, and so was largely ignored in his early years. I always imagined him as a Victorian writer because of this, but he was a soldier in World War II, and only died in 2003.
I recommend listening to Causley read both of his poems: Timothy Winters is here, and Eden Rock is here. Listen to the end of ‘Timothy Winters’, where Causley talks about the boy who inspired the poem.
Timothy Winters
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.
When teacher talks he won’t hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the patterns off his plate
And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.
Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren’t boys like him any more.
Old man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier.
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy’s dosed with an aspirin.
The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law’s as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.
At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars “Amen!”
So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says “Amen
Amen amen amen amen.”
Timothy Winters, Lord.
Amen!
Eden Rock
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.
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