blame it on the poppies

I see the barley moving as the mowers find their pace
I see the line advancing with a steady timeless grace
And there's passion in their eyes and there's honour in their face
As they scythe down the castles and the courts

Blame it on the fathers, blame it on the sons
Blame it on the poppies and the pain
Blame it on the generals, blame it on their guns
Blame it on the scarecrow in the rain

I smell the smoke of stubble when the harvest is brought down
I see the fire a-burning as it purges all around
And the field is turned to ashes and the only living sound
Are the skylarks as they try to reach the sun

Blame it on the fathers, blame it on the sons
Blame it on the poppies and the pain
Blame it on the generals, blame it on their guns
Blame it on the scarecrow in the rain

I see the barbed wire growing like a bramble on the land
I see a farm turned to a fortress and a future turned to sand
I see a meadow turn to mud and from it grows a hand
Like a scarecrow that is fallen in the rain
Blame it on the scarecrows...

I have always been quite ambivalent about the wearing of poppies at this time of year. I refused to wear one when I was young, much to the chagrin of my father. Robert Fisk's Comment article here makes no bones about his attitude. I have thought long and hard about this and think that the poem in question is not as ambiguous as others have said:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

This is the third stanza of In Flanders Field. How ambiguous is it? Sure, he'd lost friends and colleagues but on the whole he does seem to be saying, "if you don't finish what we've started, we'll never rest."  It's a week or so since the curmudgeonly old sod Lou Reed died and the meaning of one of his most famous songs, Perfect Day is still hotly contested. In truth, it may have been written as a paean to heroin but has since risen to become a song celebrating a wonderful, personal moment in time.  The poppy image itself has become an icon that most people accept. Detractors like Fisk have a point but I still find it difficult to fully agree.

But . . . as a shorthand icon, we all seem to accept that it really symbolises those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Well, I guess the jury's still out on that one. This year I bought a poppy but didn't get round to wearing it. However, tomorrow is actually Remembrance Day so will I wear the poppy or not? Alongside that, I also have the annual problem of teaching at precisely 11 o'clock - just as students come tumbling in to class from break. A two minute's silence? 

There's forty shillings on the drum

For those who volunteer to come

To list and fight the foe today
Over the hills and far away.

summer is in

summer is in
everyone sing
aah! let us begin . . .*

It seems that for a day or two we are able to enjoy some warm seasonal weather down here on the east coast.  It's about time.  The weather has been awful. During half term week I was marking - the annual festival of AS Film Studies exam marking that takes up several weeks of my time.  As the weather was so bad this year I just got on with it and didn't feel that I should be out and about in it.  Or worse still, off on holiday somewhere.  It has been ridiculously cold so far in this neck of the woods.  The poppies pictured are in a field on the road that became infamous a few years ago where several prostitutes were found murdered by the "Suffolk Ripper" or whatever naff name they gave him.  Beauty and calm have returned to a lovely stretch of countryside by the A14.

Still, back to the matter at hand, I did manage to visit friends in my old home town.  We walked in what is now called "Forster Country".  Forster wrote Howards End about a house that is nearby to my old parish church, St Nicholas in Stevenage. The house is actually called Rooks Nest and a friend of mine from schooldays used to be the gardener there. He's a taxi driver now.

We walked up through the churchyard where many of us have seen ghosts - for another time perhaps.  It's quite overgrown in places.  An area of importance for some rare species of plant my friend informed me. The solitude of church graveyards is a wonderful thing in daylight.  The amount of wildlife that lives in them is phenomenal - I hoped to see a jay as there are so many oak trees there. No jays, but we stumbled onto this small mark of Forster's importance to the area.  As you walk past this into the field behind I had a rush of what? Nostalgia? No, but a memory of those long cross country runs we had to undertake from school.  Our school was just down the avenue from the church.

In those days we had to do a real cross country run.  In these days of risk assessments and a paedophile in every hedgerow (nature deficit disorder!!) kids just have to run around the school field a few times.  That's in those schools that haven't sold off their school fields.  Still, hardly a "cross country" run, is it? Running around the school field was a punishment that the science teacher used to excel in when I were a lad. In those days come rain, mud, snow, hail, whatever - rarely sunshine, though - we had to run through the avenue, churchyard, fields. Sunshine was only for those long hot summers we had in those days. After the run, covered in caked mud and feet clogged with chalk, we were forced to go into the communal shower. It was always a bit disconcerting that the P.E. teacher was in there with you, but hey! it was a boy's school.:
"Pass the soap, lad."
"Yes sir." Thing is, he never went on the run with us.

With several skylarks twittering away high over the fields and my friend's dog startling the partridges, it was a great feeling to walk through the years and dredge up some memories.  On the way home a jay flew out of a tree and plonked itself onto the side of the A14.  I knew I was going to see one that day.

Thinking back to the walk through the churchyard and how it is becoming as immaculately unkempt as Francis Rossi's hairdo, there seems to be a synchronicity at large here.  I have become fascinated by the way the the real world - that's nature you know, weeds and foxes and stuff - has begun to encroach into our world more and more.  The urban world if left alone will always be colonised: weeds, after all, were the first things to grow on the bombsites after WW2. So, "only connect" indeed. I get interested in this stuff just as the BBC decides to show a programme about the unnatural wildlife of London. I missed it, of course, but thanks to iPlayer I can sit and watch it in bed with a cup of tea later tonight.  I missed it because I went to see Prometheus last night: a film that concerns itself very much about the nature of life itself. I'll leave it to others to judge its shortcomings but it's an interesting film.  Eric Von Daniken where are you now?

So reading about small wildernesses and the way the natural world finds a way of constantly surviving seems to be cropping up (no pun intended) all over the place.  Here we have a little jungle - a whole ecosystem - sitting happily outside a house with a usually immaculate garden at the end of my road. I find this sort of patch far more interesting - actually, far more beautiful - than an unnatural garden.  I like the poppies and nettles colonising anywhere and everywhere. More on this another time.

When the sun comes out and we start to feel a bit better about ourselves, I enjoy cooking more and more.  Winter's fine with its stews and heavy meals but the summer starts me thinking about more interesting things to do.  Last Sunday I smoked some mackerel. I had hell of a job getting the Rizlas around it but to be absolutely honest, I am very impressed with the results.  We ate it last night and there were no side effects, just the genuine taste of lightly smoked mackerel.  Mind you, the house stinks but what the hey? Next time I'm going up to the local fishmongers and get some really fresh fish off the boat, maybe some prawns too. Home smoked fish, eh? Whatever next?

* Summer Is In by Anne Briggs - recorded in the early 1970s just down the road from here in Little Bealings with Steve Ashley and his short-lived band Ragged Robin.