Rant

Rage, Rage 58

Rage, Rage
58

“What is this sound?”
It is your own death sighing,
groaning, growing
while you wait for it
to devour you.

“What is this feeling”
It is the itch of your own skin
wrinkling and shrinking,
preparing to wrap you
in the last clothes you’ll wear.

“What is this taste?”
It is the taste of your life,
bottled like summer wine
once sweet tasting,
now turning to vinegar.

“What is this smell?”
It is waste and decay,
the loss of all you knew
and of all that knew you.

“That carriage outside?”
It is the dark hearse
come to carry you
to your everlasting home.

Comment:

Moo thinks that his portrait of me is perfectly good for this poem. He told me not to rage, rage against the accuracy of the portrait, but he did tell me to rage, rage against the lack of paper. Où est le papier, indeed. As for the rest of it, he said it’s the same for everyone, so stop making a fuss about it. “You’ve got one last bottle of mescal on the shelf,” he told me. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just swig it down, worm and all, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

Oh dear. The worm in the bottle. They used to sell the gusanos in Oaxaca’s mescal street at a price of five for ten pesos. I used to buy a two litre coke bottle, filled with mescal from a barrel, and drop ten worms in it. They made yellow streaks as they descended through the liquid. Sweet dreams when you chewed on that lot – and an end to your worries. El brujo, the witch doctor, told me to stick a marijuana plant in the bottle of mescal and when the leaves turned white to rub the liquid into my arthritic knees. “Which doctor was that?” one of the tourists in my apartment block asked me. But I didn’t tell her. Nor did I do it. A waste of good mescal. And to think I now have one last half bottle left. And one little squirmy, crunchy, chewy worm.

Speaking of chewy, crunchy – I had never eaten chapulines, fried grasshoppers, until I went to Oaxaca. I didn’t like the look of them. At the first party I attended was confronted by the host who demanded I eat some. I told him they were taboo, against my religion. He shrugged. When he, and the other guests lost interest in my presence, I tried a couple. They were delicious. A real delicacy. I loved their crunchy little legs.

I guess one is always afraid of the unknown – the gusano in the mescal, the chapulines on the plate, that first plate of calamares en su tinta – squid in its own ink. I love bara lawr – Welsh laver bread – or Welsh caviar, as Richard Burton used to call it. I also know that people who have never eaten bara lawr won’t go near it – it looks like cow pats – but luckily doesn’t taste like them. Don’t ask me how I know. Some people get over their fear of the unknown, others don’t. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Rage, Rage 57

Rage, Rage
57

Time’s oxen
have plowed their furrows
in my face.

A silvery thatch
bears witness
to the winter
of my withering.

My broken body
hangs from the coat hanger
of my shoulders,
its worn-out sack
knitted from skin,
bonded with blood.

I walk with two canes,
not just a sick man,
but a stick man.

When I fall asleep,
my enigmatic body
haunts me with
its death-rattle
of drying bones.

Comment

Sometimes no comments are needed. However, when it comes down to it, I guess it’s worth saying that I am raging, raging against the dying of the light.

The dying of the light – in the evening, when the sun goes down, the house grows silent and cools around me. Some nights, when the news is bad or depressing, I feel we are entering another dark age. Luckily, spring is on its way, with summer not far behind. But what will spring and summer bring?

I fear the heat, the gathering of muttering trees, the ambush nature is setting up for humanity. We live among trees. Trees, all around the house. Trees, climbing the hills into the distance. I loved them when I came here first. The maples, the paper birches, the mountain ashes with their spring finery and the light green fuzz of forming leaves. Winter – the firs and pines dressed in their winter coats.

Last summer, fires broke out all over the province. The closest was a mere 30 kms down the road from us. We could smell the fire, see the smoke, and sense the discomfort of the proximity of possible outbreaks closer to home.

As I grow older, I become more fearful. Walking downstairs in the morning – cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipico / each badly placed foot is a fall, each fall is down a precipice. Luis de Gongora. ( d. 1627). Alas, it’s that time of life, and it comes to anybody who, like me, has walked this far.

It’s the animals that I pity. The birds who move on and away and no longer stay with us. The deer who also have nowhere to go when their habitat is destroyed. The moose, the bears, the coyotes, the foxes, the jack rabbits and yes, they have all been visitors to our backyard.

Last summer, the local council circulated some ideas on how to prepare for immediate evacuation of our property- what to pack with a day’s notice, three hours’ warning, two hours’ warning, one hour’s warning. I hope it never comes to that. But now, I no longer know, and so I rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Rage, Rage 52 & 53

Rage, Rage
52

A terminus, this waiting
room in which I sit.

This is the hospital’s
forgetting place,
the left-luggage office
where, a human parcel
wrapped in a blue gown,
I wait to be claimed.

Tagged with a label
on my wrist, I find myself
alone with my fate.

53

All choice disappeared
when I came here
and surrendered myself
to the system.

Now I lack free will
and freedom of choice.

Yet I still dream of choosing
my destination, and the ways
and means of arriving there.

Comment:

A terminus – what an interesting word. Terminus a quo or terminus ad quem? Or just a railway terminus or a bus terminus where we sit and wait to change buses of trains? Or maybe just a terminus in terms of being terminal? Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first start to analyze our words in order to see exactly where we might go and where they might lead us.

And what a journey I was on when I first wrote that poem. Sitting in the waiting room, outside the radiation room, waiting for the lady who would wag her finger and point at the machine’s next victim. Would it be me? The man next to me? That woman over there? Many of us avoided each other’s eyes and just sat there stunned – and now you know the meaning, in context, of ojos de besugo – do you remember that from Rage, Rage, 48?. Others chatted. Some sat there quietly while their teeth chattered. Few of us knew each other, except from the hospice where we stayed if we weren’t day patients travelling in on a daily basis and rushing home afterwards.

Libre albedrío – free will. We can say so much about free will and determinism. But when we enter the system, it’s the system that rules. We have free will to enter – and they [the authorities] say we have free will to exit when we wish – but do we? Good question. A very good question. Once tagged, we are as free as the birds, as free as the salmon, as free as the whales – but within that freedom we are tracked, followed, taken in hand, advised, persuaded, manipulated … and whales have a whale of a time when they’re trapped up in fish netting …

Then there are the follow-ups. The appointments. The emails. The telephone calls. The check-ups. The blood tests. The MRIs. The X-rays. The Holter appointments. The various scans. Who is brave enough to get off the wagon or to open the aircraft’s door half way through its flight over the Atlantic and step out? Would you jump from the save-yourself-train – not at all like the gravy train – and think carefully – are you really saving yourself or are you getting yourself into hotter and deeper water? Come along then, let’s open the aircraft’s door and step out over the Atlantic. And tell me, what exactly are we stepping into?

Stop the world, I want to get off! Not so easy to do, my friends, not so easy to do. Not even when you think the terminus in which you are sitting is taking you to hell in a hand-basket. You start to stand up. And the little lady appears, smiles at you, crooks her finger, nods her head, and – as obedient as one of Pavlov’s well-trained puppy dogs – off you go, following in her footsteps.

Rage, Rage 49 & 50

Rage, Rage
49

Waiting in the doctor’s office,
I hear two old women
gossiping about friends
and family, the intimate
details all laid out
to fester in my fertile mind.

Never will I be able
to put faces to those girls
with breast cancer,
to the women
weighed down
with diabetes,
to the old men
with their strokes
and heart attacks.

50

“Just one of those things,”
one of them whispers,
“my husband gone
leaving me alone
with the grandkids.”

“Is it four years? Or five?
I remember his name,
but I forget his face.”

“And our fourteen-year-old,
her belly already swelling …”

“You’ll cope somehow …”

Silence wraps its scarf
around their flapping mouths.
I think of all my own lost loves,
buried before their proper time.

Lives and worlds end …
new ones begin.

Comments:

Lives and worlds end … new ones begin. How true it is. The olde order changeth lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Tennyson, I believe, from Idylls of the King. King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Each of them rode into that dark night, some quickly, some more slowly, but all were lost, as so many things are lost.

That was also the heading of the departures section of my old school magazine. At the end of the year, pupils left the school, many graduating, never to return, and the old order did indeed change. The fourth formers moved up to the fifth, the fifth to Transitus, then to the sixth, and finally, the scholarship students arrived in Ichabod. Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory that used to be. I look at old school photos and I wonder what became of so many of my childhood friends. The website for my old school also contains an obituary section. I consult it, every so often, to see who else has passed on. Fewer names than I would expect. Not everybody keeps in touch. I am in contact with few old boys from school, but nobody from my undergraduate university. Ships passing in the night, all of us. Our conversations lost in the mists of time.

The old order changes and the language changes with it too. When I was visiting Spain regularly, my first stop, every year, would be the local barber’s shop. I just sat there and listened while I waited to get my haircut, Spanish style. I listened for the new buzz words, the names that now floated around, the latest jokes, the ideas that were currently in fashion. Change is everywhere.

Covid changed the Spanish language, gave it a whole new set of terms that I do not recognize. The same thing happens with English, French, any language. French is not the same in Moncton, New Brunswick, as it is in Shediac. And the Acadian Peninsula is slightly different. As is the language of Grand Falls, and that of Little Falls, aka Edmundston, the capital of the Republic of Madawaska. The language also changes close to the border of Quebec where Joual can be heard. Same thing along the St. Lawrence river and out from Matane to Mont Albert and beyond. Small changes, sea changes, enormous varieties of change.

I often wonder what is happening in Wales both to Welsh itself and to the English language as it is spoken there. English in Swansea / Abertawe was never the English of Llanelli, nor was it the English of the Rhondda Valleys. How could it be? And Cardiff / Caer Dydd was always different. As was Newport / Cas Newydd. I haven’t been back there since 1988. 38 years of change – friends gone, family gone, nobody left. I couldn’t bear to stay in a hotel in a town where once I lived in my family’s homes.

How does one end a rant like this? In silence, of course. For silence wraps its silken around flapping mouths. I think of all my own lost friends and loves, buried so long ago, many before their proper time.

Rage, Rage 48


Rage, Rage
48

I carry memories
and scars like a snail
wears its shell
and I leave behind me
a slither of silver words.

I’m a broken gramophone,
needle stuck in a groove
repeating the same verses
again and again.
This repetition
drives me insane.

My thoughts just drift.
My body is a ship
in the doldrums,
no wind to fill its sails.

I pick up my paint brush
and paint myself –
lonely and blue
as idle as a long-lost lamb,
alone with nothing to do.

Comment:

The alienation of an alien nation – and I wonder if they really are here, those aliens. So many strange happenings in my life. The silver slither of words drags me through so many lost moments in time. Fray Luis de León, I spoke to him last night, asked me the question – “Es más que un breve punto / este bajo y torpe suelo comparado / con aquel gran transunto / do vive mejorado / todo lo que es, lo que será, lo que ha pasado?”

It’s a lovely verse in Spanish, but not so easy to translate into English. Let’s try – first, word for word – “Is it more than a small dot this low and stupid soil compared with that great sky world where now lives improved all that is, all that will be, and all that has happened?”

A comment on the translation – first, the length of the sentence and the way in which it is complicated by inversions and ideas expressed in words which have little direct translation. Then there is the expression – 1. a small dot – un breve punto – a short moment in time. 2. low and stupid soil – este bajo y torpe suelo – clumsy earth below. That clarifies, a little the meaning. 3. that great sky world – aquel gran transunto – that great sky above. 4. where – do [short for donde – to keep the syllable count] – where – 5. lives improved – vive mejorado – lives a better life.

Here goes: “Is this clumsy earth below more than a short moment in time compared with that great sky above where now lives a better life all that is, all that will be, and all that has happened?” Not great, but we can live with it.

As Miguel de Cervantes said “To read in translation is to look at the reverse side of a tapestry.” So, to imagine the real side of the tapestry we need to count our syllables – they don’t match. We need to measure the length of our lines. They don’t match. We need to sharpen our metaphors and images – they don’t really match. And, last but not least, we have to imagine the Platonic, Terra-Centric universe in which the sun moves around the earth and the earth is the centre of all life.

I should add the cultural association of words. In every language, each word has an “associative field of cultural meanings”. Those “associative fields” differ from language to language. So, even getting the verbal meaning correct means that you do not necessarily get the cultural associations right. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do so. It’s a fascinating world and one which I have explored in various academic articles.

I would like to take cultural meanings a step further. In Don Quixote, II, 11 – I quote from J. M. Cohen’s Penguin translation of 1950 (rpt 1961) – Don Quixote says to Sancho ” … if I remember rightly, you said that she [Dulcinea] had eyes like pearls, and eyes like pearls suit a sea-bream better than a lady” (p. 533). I will leave aside, for now, Sancho’s comic mixing of the Petrarchan metaphors and concentrate on the single word sea-bream. To compare someone’s eyes to those of a sea-bream is comical in English. However, the word has several associative fields in Spanish which are worthy of deeper study. Secondary meanings of a sea-bream – besugo – include 1. a mild insult, as in no seas besugo / don’t be a fool / an idiot / stupid. 2. Diálogo de besugos – two people talking and neither one listening to the other. 3. Ojos de besugo – a blank or dazed expression. Quite simply, the translation besugo > sea-bream functions at the literal level, but by no means at the cultural level of the associative fields.

Alas, some days I’m a broken gramophone, needle stuck in a groove, repeating the same things again and again. Maybe one day I will get them right. And maybe I won’t. Better minds than mine have struggled with translating Spanish (poetry) into English (poetry), and most have failed. Many, dismally. We won’t mention names. Sometimes the best translations are not translations at all, but poems that recreate the original in the target language. I am quite happy with my translation of the meaning of Fray Luis de León’s poem – but how sad would be any attempt to transfer the verse form from Spanish to English? Five lines of seven and eleven syllables each – wow! Go for it. But remember – fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Never mind. Maybe tonight I’ll have another little chat with Fray Luis de León and Miguel de Cervantes, Quevedo too, if I am lucky. Maybe their English will be good enough to give me a few hints. I’ll let you know later if any one of them does come to visit.

Rage, Rage 46 & 47

Rage, Rage
46

I fall into
the easy sleep of age,
pencil in hand,
notebook on knee.

Shadows grow longer
as my life grows shorter,
day by day.

Now it is so easy
to stumble and fall,
each slip a steep slope
down which I slide.

So difficult now
to regain my feet.

I must crawl to where
I can haul myself
first to my knees
and then stubbornly
upward until I can stand.

47

Now-a-nights
I fall easily into dreams
that all too often
turn into nightmares
that rise up from my past
to trouble my sleep.

I struggle and scream
and pinch myself awake,
only to find my cheeks
wet with tears and my mind
all shook up by the return
of childhood fears.

Freud and Jung pull the strings
of those mental puppets
that dance in my head.
Some nights I am afraid
of falling asleep,
for fear that I may never
get up from my bed.

Comments:

Coming to the end of Rage, Rage. When it is finished, that will also be the end of the trilogy – Clepsydra [Chronotopos I], Carved in Stone [Chronotopos II], and Rage, Rage [Chronotopos III]. I have written a fourth volume in the sequence – No Dominion [Chronotopos IV], but this is very personal and I will probably only share it with family members and the closest of friends. However, do not despair – I have an alternate fourth volume, but that is still being written. It us under wraps, and may well replace No Dominion. We shall see.

As for Freud and Jung, they certainly do pull the strings of those mental puppets that dance in my head. Moo says that there should be no strings attached. He has therefore drawn all those strange puppet like figures, a but like an Aunt Sally, really, but has left out the strings and the man / men / woman / women / people pulling them. An Aunt Sally or a lovely bunch of coconuts? Time well tell, if you ask it nicely.

Maybe one of my teddies will tell. They all romp around the room with me at night and I am sure they suspect much of what goes on in my dreams. Here they are – a selection of friendly teddy bears. Be very careful, though, they can be very grumpy, especially if you wake them up suddenly. They don’t like things that go BUMP in the night.

Rage, Rage 41 & 42

Rage, Rage
41

Mortal,
this open wound
clinging, crablike,
to my sleeve.

A sudden surge,
this burgeoning urge
to end it all and sever
life’s thread.

How many times
must I jump,
eyes closed, through
hospital hoops?

Blood thinners,
my veins so
delicately untied,
my life blood
leaking meekly out,
dribbling from
my fingertips,
drip by feeble
drip.

42

Nothing left now
but this pain in my heart.

It makes me think
about growing old,
that unstoppable process
of the body’s slow,
inevitable breakdown
from everything
to nothing.

I should go to the doctor,
but what can she,
will she do?
She can’t stop the hands
on my body-clock
and lop ten, fifteen,
or twenty years
away from my life.

Nor can her pills,
lotions, potions
gift me in the same way
as the long-sought
Fountain of Youth.

Comment:

I should go to the doctor, but what can she, will she do? She can’t stop the hands on my body-clock and lop ten, fifteen, or twenty years away from my life. Nor can her pills, lotions, potions gift me in the same way as the long-sought, never discovered, Fountain of Youth.

Ah yes, my dear old body clock. Clocks went back last Sunday. My body clock still hasn’t quite caught up with the tick-tock clock with its Westminster Chimes and Nursery Rhymes. I have talked to quite a few people recently who have said the same thing. And it isn’t just the ageing and the aged – even young people, just out of their teens, feel the effects of the seasonal time change.

Apparently, the Insurance Companies notice a larger number of fender-benders, and worse, during the first few days after Old Father Time springs forward or leaps back. So why do we change the clocks and why does my body clock not immediately match the tick-tock clock? Good questions.

Maybe Salvador Dalí got it right. Time is Surreal. It is a clock folding itself over a tree branch or sliding over a waterfall, bent in two, with all its numbers abut to fly off. Moo says that his friend, Salvador Dalí, is jealous of Moo’s lovely painting, shown above. Moo says Dalí said he’d wished he’d painted it. I think that Moo, like all painters, has a little je ne sais pas quoi of the word magician about him. His words are as warped as his art. Who could even envy somebody who painted a clock like that.

I suspect Moo would not be able to ace his cognitive test if he actually drew something like that in answer to the prompt – “draw what time it is”. In fact, last time Moo was asked to do just that, this is what he drew – 10:42 AM. I don’t know about you, but I think Moo is a little bit strange. That doesn’t stp me liking him and using his paintings though.

Rage, Rage 38

Rage, Rage
38

Now, my heart is once more
a time-bomb ticking
beneath her fingers.

I dream of walking tall,
with her by my side,
in the youthful paradise
of a distant,
long-promised land.

My tom-tom heart,
softening clay,
putty beneath her fingers,
thumps out a hoodoo
voodoo beat on its drum.

Victor Sylvester,
and his orchestra,
Sundays on BBC radio,
announces his signature rhythm –
slow, slow, quick, quick, slow –
my mind waltzes to the music
plucked from my heart strings.

Wild winds blow in from the shore
buffeting my heart, breaking it apart.
Blown open, in spite of my dreams,
my secret is not a secret anymore.

Comment:

Absent without leave, I have chased the dreams of rugby and cricket and abandoned my poetry until another today. And here I am, a week after St. David’s Day, still dreaming, still raging, still recalling so many things.

Wild winds blow in from the shore buffeting my heart, breaking it apart. You can see, in the photo above, the wind tugging at the waves. A lurid sky fills with heavy clouds and oncoming rain. My heart is out there somewhere, wave-washed, blown open by the simple beauty of wind and sea.

How many now recall Victor Sylvester on BBC Radio on a Sunday afternoon? Or the Billy Cotton Band Show? That was our Sunday afternoon entertainment long before we had TV. You can’t imagine it, can you? A world without TV. So many things fade away from far too many people.

Who now will talk of my Voce and my Larwood, long ago? How many saw Hammond at his best, with his imperial cover drive? Ken Jones? Cliff Jones? JJ and JPR? Lloyd and Bleddyn? Old visions, buffet my heart, breaking it apart. Frank Worrall in Swansea at St. Helen’s. Everton De Courcy Weekes at Bristol, in the County Ground. I have the photos. I have the memories. And I have a broken heart when I remember things, some personal, some not, that so few people do.

Rage, Rage 36 & 37

Rage, Rage
36

How many times
must I open these
Pandora’s Boxes
packed so lovingly
to give me the tests
I loathe?

Yesterday they gave me
a throw-away plastic potty,
and three wooden spatulas.

I also got
an air-dry sample card,
stamped and dated.

37

Today
a teenage apprentice
prompts me to reveal
my birthdate, then binds my arm
with a thick rubber thong.

She tells me to make a fist
and probes with blunt fingers,
searching in vain for a fresh vein
she can open to extract
and bottle a sample
of my precious blood.

I watch my body’s sap
pumping out
in irregular spurts,
driven by my heart,
that worn-out
flesh-and-blood machine.

Drip by febrile drip,
blood accumulates
and the teenager smiles
with youth’s perfections:
slim body, wit, and grace.

Now, my heart is once more
a time-bomb ticking
beneath her fingers.

Comment:

“Youth’s perfections: slim body, wit, and grace.” Those were the days, my friends, I thought would never end. Then I watched my weight rising, my body thickening, my hips and knees sticking. But I am still me – my own hair, my own teeth, my own limbs, creaky as they are.

I remember. back in the days, watching the TV series – $6 million dollar man.” remember him? Artificial everything and he could out run a car, out jump a kangaroo, outswim an otter, out fight the world’s greatest ever boxers, with one hand tied behind his back. Everything artificial. The willing suspension of disbelief.

Well, I called a couple of friends from my rugby playing days, and guess what? They were all in competition with the $6,000,000 man. An artificial hip… an artificial knee … an artificial shoulder. One of my friends, probably the best player of the lot, had a shoulder replacement, two hip replacements, and two knee replacements. Try going through a metal detector with that lot clanking like Don Quixote’s armor on a warm day.

And DQ was lucky. His magic balsam would heal a man, even if he had been chopped in half by a malignant giant with a sharp sword. Instructions to his squire – “if that happens to me, just join the two halves together as closely and as carefully as you can. Then sprinkle a few drops of the balsam on my body and watch how the two halves grow back together, almost instantly.”

Well, it doesn’t always work like that. I spent half an hour soaking my thumbs in hot water when I got them stuck together using some form of Crazy Glue or Gorilla Glue or Rhinoceros Glue or Elephant Glue or the like. Now there’s a magic balsam for you. However, don’t get into any hot water until the halves are well set and the flesh has grown afresh. Otherwise you might come apart in the bath!

PS Moo did not think this was an amusing piece. So he would only give me a very early cartoon of a ticking alarm clock – well, four of them. And each one set to go off at a slightly different time. Way to go Moo.

Rage, Rage 35

Rage, Rage
35

Now,
once a month, they stick
a needle in my arm
and check the levels
of my PSA, cholesterol,
and testosterone.

Is my blood pressure rising?
Is my cholesterol high?
Are my electrolytes
ticking slowly down?

The doctor keeps telling me
it’s a level playing field
but every week
he changes the rules
and twice a year
he moves the goal-posts.

What game is he playing?
A man in a black-and-white
zebra shirt holds a whistle
to his lips while another
throws a penalty flag.

It comes out of the tv set
and falls flapping at my feet.
Now I know for certain that
I’m living in the Red Zone
and I’m running out of time.

Comment:

Now, once a month, they stick a needle in me! Not always in the same place. But, I sometimes feel like a pin cushion. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” have turned into the “probing instruments of innumerable doctors.” Try repeating those lines at speed and you will end up repeating the message, from lips to ear, like the battalions waiting to go over the top, used to do in the trenches of WWI.

Original message – “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.” Last message in sequence – “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.” Funny how times change. I am re-reading Don Quixote (yet again) and am bowled over by the length and complexity of the sentences. Then I realize how words, culture, times, and attitudes have changed. “Change and decay in all around we see…” – indeed we do.

How many people now know what ‘three and fourpence’ means? And how about LSD – and no, it’s not a psychedelic drug, it’s code for pounds, shillings, and pence. Well, for the original Latin terms for them anyway.

Oh the joys of AI – “The terms libra, sestercia (commonly sestertius), and denarius are the direct Roman ancestors of the British pre-decimal currency system (£sd), which was in use until 1971. The system was adopted from the Roman/Frankish model where a pound (libra) was divided into shillings (solidus) and pence (denarius).”

Oh the wonders of the British pre-decimal currency system (£sd). Four farthings = one penny; 12 pennies / pence = one shilling; 20 shillings = one pound; 21 shillings = one guinea. What fun we had adding and subtracting British coinage in those days, let alone multiplying and dividing for those wonderful state examinations.

Ah well, it’s all forgotten now, as are the jabs, the needles, and the tests. Anyone got a Wills’ Woodbine? Or a Player’s Navy Cut? And how about a Lucifer to light your fag? There weren’t any fags in my boarding school. Fagging was strictly forbidden. As was smoking. And drinking. And loads of other things that we did anyway.