Bryan Islip's Blog, page 19
November 15, 2013
Hooray!
The Highland Hospice is quite like the best kind of country house hotel. They are past masters at pain relief and have worked their magic so well for Delia. In fact I am taking her home again next Tuesday. Our local medics and I will keep her cocktail of drugs in their present fine balance.Hooray!
November 13, 2013
Delia to The Highland Hospice
Yesterday morning I stood outside Kirkhill House and watched an ambulance going off down our driveway. Dee was on board; it was taking her to The Highland Hospice in Inverness. The deterioration in her condition has reached a pitch where the combined efforts of the local doctors and nurses - and of course myself - have not been enough to make her pain less than unbearable.
In the ambulance she would have passed by all those wonderful, isolated, off road, off track routes we have discovered for ourselves and our dogs over some eight years of daily one to two hour walks: Laide wood, the watermill, all the climbs down from the road's summit to the rocks, the chanterelle, the Gruinard river walk, the four beaches, the beechwood and so on and so on. Wonderful memories. She would no doubt have been thinking that she would never see them again, never come back home this way. Probably not. I may be the romantic but Dee is always the realist, unafraid to face the truth. There is but one end of a lymphoma as far gone as is my wife's right now.
Two hours after the ambulance left I followed on to Inverness and the Hospice to see her settled in. I have driven there and back again today and plan to do it again tomorrow, and etcetera. I have found the nurses and doctors staffing The Highland Hospice remarkable people with remarkable skills as well as huge understanding and kindliness. My lady is happy there, her pain finally under control, and now even says she will be able to come home to live out her days. I hope so. We shall see.
When that ambulance drove away I have to admit to a set of emotions unprecedented since my first wife Joan, wheelchair bound with advanced multiple schlerosis left me to enter a Nursing Home. (Yes, what a Vale of Tears this is!) Anyway with Kirkhill house now empty I stood in the living room for a long while, in silence, blinking back the tears. Self-pity or pity for my Delia? Who can tell and does it matter? Suddenly this is a house, not so much a home any more. The whole place, as my whole life, suddenly seems empty. I listen to the echoes. I know I must think about the day to day and what might come next, I know I must try to stop mulling over all those past happinesses. Memories should not be food for the here and the now, should they.
I have my painting and my writing and I still have my wife.
In the ambulance she would have passed by all those wonderful, isolated, off road, off track routes we have discovered for ourselves and our dogs over some eight years of daily one to two hour walks: Laide wood, the watermill, all the climbs down from the road's summit to the rocks, the chanterelle, the Gruinard river walk, the four beaches, the beechwood and so on and so on. Wonderful memories. She would no doubt have been thinking that she would never see them again, never come back home this way. Probably not. I may be the romantic but Dee is always the realist, unafraid to face the truth. There is but one end of a lymphoma as far gone as is my wife's right now.
Two hours after the ambulance left I followed on to Inverness and the Hospice to see her settled in. I have driven there and back again today and plan to do it again tomorrow, and etcetera. I have found the nurses and doctors staffing The Highland Hospice remarkable people with remarkable skills as well as huge understanding and kindliness. My lady is happy there, her pain finally under control, and now even says she will be able to come home to live out her days. I hope so. We shall see.
When that ambulance drove away I have to admit to a set of emotions unprecedented since my first wife Joan, wheelchair bound with advanced multiple schlerosis left me to enter a Nursing Home. (Yes, what a Vale of Tears this is!) Anyway with Kirkhill house now empty I stood in the living room for a long while, in silence, blinking back the tears. Self-pity or pity for my Delia? Who can tell and does it matter? Suddenly this is a house, not so much a home any more. The whole place, as my whole life, suddenly seems empty. I listen to the echoes. I know I must think about the day to day and what might come next, I know I must try to stop mulling over all those past happinesses. Memories should not be food for the here and the now, should they.
I have my painting and my writing and I still have my wife.
November 2, 2013
World War One
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month draws near. That was the moment in year nineteen eighteen when the unspeakable tragedy we call World War One came to its bitter conclusion. Little did those who called it The War To End All Wars foresee, a scant twenty one years later, a twin tragedy - the outbreak of World War Two.
The fires of both wars were ignited by one nation seeking to assert its dominance over all others. For me, Germany had no need to resort to war in order to achieve its objectives. Such a strong nation would very likely have done so over time through industrial / innovation / economics. But war / force is the single flaw in the character of all natural bullies, is it not? And with what crazy enthusiasm did my own country and in time its friends join in the opposition!
In nineteen ninety six Delia and I visited the little town of Albert in Northern France. By nineteen seventeen Albert had been reduced by continual shelling to a skeletal ruin. At that time the shattered church still tried to stand, atop it had been a golden statue of the madonna and child, and this statue still managed to hang on, albeit at a wierd angle. The British troops called it the Angel of Albert. The scuttlebutt was that when it finally fell the war would be over.
Close to this church today is an underground pasageway that has been turned into a WW1 museum. We paid our dues and went down there. I shall never forget the experience.On the way out I bought a book - a compendium of WW1 poets. I read it cover to cover in my Riyadh hotel a week or two later. I had this compulsion to do something.. This was / is it ... the italicised words are those of the poets themselves ...
IN
WOUNDED FIELDS
Prologue
We wander down the subterranean shaft
In which the museum at Albert, Picardy,
Conceals from this town’s normal life
The bloody, muddy face
Of World War One,
The stinking trenches
And all the wounded fields.
And you can hear the dying;.
Taste the death down here;
In our strange silence I do not want to stay
Where no words come
But find I cannot quickly take myself away....
In the souvenir shop on the way out
Of the brick-arch tunnel, cold stone floor,
Before reaching the fresh air of the town
We look in silence still
Through sickly memorabilia
And at the history books:
And from a nice French lady buy one
Called;
“Violets from Oversea;”
By Toni and Valmai Holt
(Illustrations Charlotte Zeepvat)
That tells how from chaos flowered poesy,
Avoids the use of the word ‘hero,’
Of poets speaks without hypocricy.
And outside in the thin October rain
As I look high up to the golden virgin,
Child in her outstretched hands, against grey sky,
That surmounts the Town Hall
(Known to the soldiers as The Angel of Albert,)
And later, reading of those soldier poets -
I know I have to say some thing.
To some of them, anyway.
Bryan Islip
October 96
To
Charles Hamilton Sorley; 19 May 1895 - 28 April 1915
Hello pale youth, lip touched with thin moustache,
Captain, D Company, Suffolk Regiment,
Cross-Wiltshire running old Marlburian:
At you fast sped the unkind spinning lead
At Loos to drill your helmet, still so new.
How all too true your words of how...“Earth...
Shall rejoice and blossom too
When the bullet reaches you.”
Wherever did you stow your socialism,
Your bitter sense of anti-Kiplingism?
When you packed up your old kit-bag, and where
Your liking for Goethe & Rilke, Ibsen?
(Not for Hardy, your love of him had lapsed)
Your marchers...”All
the hills and vales along...
The singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.”
But listen, you could have been one of those
Pieces
of living pulp you so
dreaded having
To carry back across that no-man’s waste:
Or one of those with you at Ypres
who
Had breathed deep of the gently shifting breeze,
Blinked, blinded by its gift of British gas,
Coughed out their sightless time in yellow pus.
You could have been...have been the dramatist,
The best, John Masefield, Poet Laureate said,
Since that Stratfordian, if you had lived.
“I am giving
my body,” you wrote, (I think
He’d like your shocking words,) “To fight against
The
most enterprising nation in the world”
But Charles how straight you stood, your flag
unfurled!
Sighing, you folded; sank spent-muscled down
Into that slime and no-one said soft things:
No bands of angels took thee to thy rest.
They never found you, Captain Sorley, did they?
Though lost you not for minds cannot decay,
And you would know, sweet twenty, soldier prince,
It matters not in what dark earth you lay...
...And after in your muddy kitbag there
They found your cry against what Brooke had said:
Your cry;
“Say only this; that they are dead.”
****
To: Leslie Coulson July 1889
- October 1916
“Who
spake the Law that men should die in meadows?”
You ask and I reply, ‘Man spake that Law,’
(Though in regards to other than himself;)
And in pursuance since the dawn of human
Kind has killed and died in meadows, towns
Upon the seas and hills, now in the air
And after questioned why, and was it fair.
Why? But no-one knows - and fair? Who is to care?
“Who
spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?”
You ask and I reply, ‘You spake that word,
You, Sergeant, for by just being there -
Proud member of the London Regiment
Retreating last from lost Gallipoli
- With all those men, some khaki some in grey
Who’ll fight until one colour wins the day
‘Till thick in lanes the dead, the dying lay.
“Who
gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?”
You ask and I say it was ever thus,
Beneath the beauty always lie the bones
That nourish it, upon which it must feed
As feeds nobility in war upon the lost,
The crying of the dead, the awful dying:
You who vainly fought, near Albert lying,
Your bones now ‘neath the nodding flowers, sighing.
“Who
spread the hills with flesh and blood and brains?”
You ask and know the answer: it is you
Who trained your smoking gun upon the foe,
Who covered hills with screaming shot and shell
To deaden all that runs or flies or grows.
For more than this ask your creator God,
Your fingers stiffly clawed into the sod,
‘Till agony is spent with all your blood.
‘All
the blood that war has ever strewn is
But a
passing stain,’ you wrote... before the start...
*****
To
Francis Ledwidge August 1887 - July 1917
Did you still, “Hear
roads calling and the hills
And
the rivers, wondering where I am,”
At Hellfire Corner, sitting drinking tea
As arced unseen that deadly mortar bomb
Which was to end an Irish poet’s dream?
A long way sure, from Owen, Brooke, and those
Smart young men in smarter khaki clothes
Who never mended any metalled road
Yet were your brothers of the silken verse
And knew as well as you the smell of death.
I wonder what became of all your clan
(Nine children to evicted farming man:)
Perhaps your father was a dreamer too,
Dreaming,
“Songs of the fields,” just as you,
His Celtic longing more than mind can bear.
But what genetic streak of ancient Gael
Gave will to write and sensitivity
To know; “And
greater than a poet’s fame
A
little grave that has no name;” tell me,
You school-less twelve year old adrift, tell me,
Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge, fighting man,
Sometime Slane Corps of Irish Nationalists
Now Inniskilling Fusiliers, enrolled
To kill the foe of She who’s not your friend
And fight for her through hell’s Gallipoli.
And how, I wondered, could a poet write
In winter trenches on the brutal Somme
Of lilting “Fairy
Music” (“Ceol Sidhe”)?
Was still the barred cuckoo so real to you,
In Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?
Always you yearned for mother, Ireland,
“The
fields that call across the world to me,”
And now near where the spires of Ypers stand
You dream your dreams, denied reality,
Beneath your wild
flowers ‘till the end.
To
Roland Aubrey Leighton: March 1895 - December 1915
We searched the lanes, found you in Louvencourt’s
Small cemetry amidst a company
Of stones standing straight-rowed to attention,
Smart white in a slow rain, near where you died;
‘Lieutenant R A Leighton 7th Worcesters,’
Says your monument; said that telegram.
“I
walk alone although the way is long,”
You said, in private lines in your black book,
“And
with gaunt briars and nettles overgrown;”
What pain you meant by this we’ll never know.
Just such a light so bright as yours aligns
The many-splendoured ones on which it shines.
She capitalised your ‘Him’ as godheads do
Whenever afterwards she wrote of you.
Yes, “Life is
love and love is you, dear, you”
You wrote, prize scholar bursting sweating out
Of your illicit wet night dreams of she,
Who’d written to herself ;’Impressive, he,
Of powerful frame, pale face and stiff thick hair.’
Would you we know had she not loved you so?
Dee likes
to know you in those violets,
Pressed brown and withered, desiccated now,
You sent to Vee from shattered 'Plug Street' Wood,
Picked from red sticky ground around the head,
The horrid face and splintered skull that she
Must never see?... She, Vera of the V A D?
Who, from your sceptic pact with her enticed
Your secret taking of Rome’s hand of Christ?
And I, not knowing of you very much,
Looked in that brass bound book at Louvencourt
Read this year’s batch of private messages
To you, young friend, mostly from those unborn
When that one, shiv’ring in his field grey,
Unsurprised to see you that cold night, glad
Of the Christmas gift, squeezed the steel trigger,
Exploding pain into your youthful frame...
From far and wide they’d come to speak their grief,
So many words to you who wrote so few.
Why stood you there, why dare the guns, Roland?
‘Hinc
illae lacrimae;’* your code...
I still don’t understand....
* Hence those tears’ ....
(Terence)
To:
John McRae: November 1872 - January 1918
Youth steals away from all who live, McRae,
Though weary not the sons the Highlands
yields,
Canadian now (except on Empire Day,)
You’re ‘uncle’ to the boys in Flanders’
fields.
You wrote;
“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow;”
And midst the dogs of war you heard the lark,
Went on; “We
shall not sleep, though poppies grow,”
(If generations new allow the dark.)
They say you wrote it by first morning light
One bloody Ypres
day in May, ‘15,
As German chlorine robbed men of their sight,
Oh, few men see what you, Doctor, have seen -
Seen six out of each ten Canadians
Sans life sans love sans laughter; sans all sans...
Did you, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae,
Veteran of Boer war, Loos and Passchendaele,
For them your prayers say each dying day?
Your healing hands artillery did lay?
But did, for you, sometimes the tumult fade,
Did agonies relent as words unfold?
Recalled within your notebook was peace made;
“A
little maiden fair / With locks of gold.”?
And left you more than she a-weeping and,
Before the war fell you for Lady R...?
Why never did you let a wedding band
Be-threat the edge of sword Excalibre?
I hope you filled life’s chalice to the brim -
And that you knew not Haig, but pitied him.
Then April, seventeen; with crimson end
Was Canada,
enobled nation made -
On Vimy Ridge. And afterwards you penned;
“The Anxious
Dead;” and you were not afraid.
Oh Jack McRae, few men were loved as you:
Men clung to you as shadows cling to men;
Still wear your poppies to hold glorious who
Found glory in a dark beyond their ken.
The horse you cherished led your black cortege,
Turned boots in stirrup irons to say you’re dead,
Men's tears at Wimereux were not of rage
But love for one ashamed to die in bed...
And in the going down of every sun
Some shall recall your words each one by one.
Called
MacUrtsi was each poet to your clan,
Goodbye
Doctor, MacUrtsi, McRae, Man.
****
IN WOUNDED FIELDS
Epilogue
And so I had my discourse with these poets
And with the others from that book
Who’d gone to war with heads held high but knew
Scant glory in the mud, and died,
Yet found their songs and verse
In such a torrent rushed
As might have changed the world
I thought of how wild flowers
In brightest beauty blaze
Where ordure thickest lies -
It's stink by glory overpowered.
This place of peace holds very little trace
Of what had come to pass those years before.
But rust away as may the swords
I shall remember poet’s words
And we shall
remember them
Long after all the blood and all the bedlam,
Long after time has healed the wounded fields.
Bryan Islip
October 96
The fires of both wars were ignited by one nation seeking to assert its dominance over all others. For me, Germany had no need to resort to war in order to achieve its objectives. Such a strong nation would very likely have done so over time through industrial / innovation / economics. But war / force is the single flaw in the character of all natural bullies, is it not? And with what crazy enthusiasm did my own country and in time its friends join in the opposition!
In nineteen ninety six Delia and I visited the little town of Albert in Northern France. By nineteen seventeen Albert had been reduced by continual shelling to a skeletal ruin. At that time the shattered church still tried to stand, atop it had been a golden statue of the madonna and child, and this statue still managed to hang on, albeit at a wierd angle. The British troops called it the Angel of Albert. The scuttlebutt was that when it finally fell the war would be over.
Close to this church today is an underground pasageway that has been turned into a WW1 museum. We paid our dues and went down there. I shall never forget the experience.On the way out I bought a book - a compendium of WW1 poets. I read it cover to cover in my Riyadh hotel a week or two later. I had this compulsion to do something.. This was / is it ... the italicised words are those of the poets themselves ...
IN
WOUNDED FIELDS
Prologue
We wander down the subterranean shaft
In which the museum at Albert, Picardy,
Conceals from this town’s normal life
The bloody, muddy face
Of World War One,
The stinking trenches
And all the wounded fields.
And you can hear the dying;.
Taste the death down here;
In our strange silence I do not want to stay
Where no words come
But find I cannot quickly take myself away....
In the souvenir shop on the way out
Of the brick-arch tunnel, cold stone floor,
Before reaching the fresh air of the town
We look in silence still
Through sickly memorabilia
And at the history books:
And from a nice French lady buy one
Called;
“Violets from Oversea;”
By Toni and Valmai Holt
(Illustrations Charlotte Zeepvat)
That tells how from chaos flowered poesy,
Avoids the use of the word ‘hero,’
Of poets speaks without hypocricy.
And outside in the thin October rain
As I look high up to the golden virgin,
Child in her outstretched hands, against grey sky,
That surmounts the Town Hall
(Known to the soldiers as The Angel of Albert,)
And later, reading of those soldier poets -
I know I have to say some thing.
To some of them, anyway.
Bryan Islip
October 96
To
Charles Hamilton Sorley; 19 May 1895 - 28 April 1915
Hello pale youth, lip touched with thin moustache,
Captain, D Company, Suffolk Regiment,
Cross-Wiltshire running old Marlburian:
At you fast sped the unkind spinning lead
At Loos to drill your helmet, still so new.
How all too true your words of how...“Earth...
Shall rejoice and blossom too
When the bullet reaches you.”
Wherever did you stow your socialism,
Your bitter sense of anti-Kiplingism?
When you packed up your old kit-bag, and where
Your liking for Goethe & Rilke, Ibsen?
(Not for Hardy, your love of him had lapsed)
Your marchers...”All
the hills and vales along...
The singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.”
But listen, you could have been one of those
Pieces
of living pulp you so
dreaded having
To carry back across that no-man’s waste:
Or one of those with you at Ypres
who
Had breathed deep of the gently shifting breeze,
Blinked, blinded by its gift of British gas,
Coughed out their sightless time in yellow pus.
You could have been...have been the dramatist,
The best, John Masefield, Poet Laureate said,
Since that Stratfordian, if you had lived.
“I am giving
my body,” you wrote, (I think
He’d like your shocking words,) “To fight against
The
most enterprising nation in the world”
But Charles how straight you stood, your flag
unfurled!
Sighing, you folded; sank spent-muscled down
Into that slime and no-one said soft things:
No bands of angels took thee to thy rest.
They never found you, Captain Sorley, did they?
Though lost you not for minds cannot decay,
And you would know, sweet twenty, soldier prince,
It matters not in what dark earth you lay...
...And after in your muddy kitbag there
They found your cry against what Brooke had said:
Your cry;
“Say only this; that they are dead.”
****
To: Leslie Coulson July 1889
- October 1916
“Who
spake the Law that men should die in meadows?”
You ask and I reply, ‘Man spake that Law,’
(Though in regards to other than himself;)
And in pursuance since the dawn of human
Kind has killed and died in meadows, towns
Upon the seas and hills, now in the air
And after questioned why, and was it fair.
Why? But no-one knows - and fair? Who is to care?
“Who
spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?”
You ask and I reply, ‘You spake that word,
You, Sergeant, for by just being there -
Proud member of the London Regiment
Retreating last from lost Gallipoli
- With all those men, some khaki some in grey
Who’ll fight until one colour wins the day
‘Till thick in lanes the dead, the dying lay.
“Who
gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?”
You ask and I say it was ever thus,
Beneath the beauty always lie the bones
That nourish it, upon which it must feed
As feeds nobility in war upon the lost,
The crying of the dead, the awful dying:
You who vainly fought, near Albert lying,
Your bones now ‘neath the nodding flowers, sighing.
“Who
spread the hills with flesh and blood and brains?”
You ask and know the answer: it is you
Who trained your smoking gun upon the foe,
Who covered hills with screaming shot and shell
To deaden all that runs or flies or grows.
For more than this ask your creator God,
Your fingers stiffly clawed into the sod,
‘Till agony is spent with all your blood.
‘All
the blood that war has ever strewn is
But a
passing stain,’ you wrote... before the start...
*****
To
Francis Ledwidge August 1887 - July 1917
Did you still, “Hear
roads calling and the hills
And
the rivers, wondering where I am,”
At Hellfire Corner, sitting drinking tea
As arced unseen that deadly mortar bomb
Which was to end an Irish poet’s dream?
A long way sure, from Owen, Brooke, and those
Smart young men in smarter khaki clothes
Who never mended any metalled road
Yet were your brothers of the silken verse
And knew as well as you the smell of death.
I wonder what became of all your clan
(Nine children to evicted farming man:)
Perhaps your father was a dreamer too,
Dreaming,
“Songs of the fields,” just as you,
His Celtic longing more than mind can bear.
But what genetic streak of ancient Gael
Gave will to write and sensitivity
To know; “And
greater than a poet’s fame
A
little grave that has no name;” tell me,
You school-less twelve year old adrift, tell me,
Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge, fighting man,
Sometime Slane Corps of Irish Nationalists
Now Inniskilling Fusiliers, enrolled
To kill the foe of She who’s not your friend
And fight for her through hell’s Gallipoli.
And how, I wondered, could a poet write
In winter trenches on the brutal Somme
Of lilting “Fairy
Music” (“Ceol Sidhe”)?
Was still the barred cuckoo so real to you,
In Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?
Always you yearned for mother, Ireland,
“The
fields that call across the world to me,”
And now near where the spires of Ypers stand
You dream your dreams, denied reality,
Beneath your wild
flowers ‘till the end.
To
Roland Aubrey Leighton: March 1895 - December 1915
We searched the lanes, found you in Louvencourt’s
Small cemetry amidst a company
Of stones standing straight-rowed to attention,
Smart white in a slow rain, near where you died;
‘Lieutenant R A Leighton 7th Worcesters,’
Says your monument; said that telegram.
“I
walk alone although the way is long,”
You said, in private lines in your black book,
“And
with gaunt briars and nettles overgrown;”
What pain you meant by this we’ll never know.
Just such a light so bright as yours aligns
The many-splendoured ones on which it shines.
She capitalised your ‘Him’ as godheads do
Whenever afterwards she wrote of you.
Yes, “Life is
love and love is you, dear, you”
You wrote, prize scholar bursting sweating out
Of your illicit wet night dreams of she,
Who’d written to herself ;’Impressive, he,
Of powerful frame, pale face and stiff thick hair.’
Would you we know had she not loved you so?
Dee likes
to know you in those violets,
Pressed brown and withered, desiccated now,
You sent to Vee from shattered 'Plug Street' Wood,
Picked from red sticky ground around the head,
The horrid face and splintered skull that she
Must never see?... She, Vera of the V A D?
Who, from your sceptic pact with her enticed
Your secret taking of Rome’s hand of Christ?
And I, not knowing of you very much,
Looked in that brass bound book at Louvencourt
Read this year’s batch of private messages
To you, young friend, mostly from those unborn
When that one, shiv’ring in his field grey,
Unsurprised to see you that cold night, glad
Of the Christmas gift, squeezed the steel trigger,
Exploding pain into your youthful frame...
From far and wide they’d come to speak their grief,
So many words to you who wrote so few.
Why stood you there, why dare the guns, Roland?
‘Hinc
illae lacrimae;’* your code...
I still don’t understand....
* Hence those tears’ ....
(Terence)
To:
John McRae: November 1872 - January 1918
Youth steals away from all who live, McRae,
Though weary not the sons the Highlands
yields,
Canadian now (except on Empire Day,)
You’re ‘uncle’ to the boys in Flanders’
fields.
You wrote;
“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow;”
And midst the dogs of war you heard the lark,
Went on; “We
shall not sleep, though poppies grow,”
(If generations new allow the dark.)
They say you wrote it by first morning light
One bloody Ypres
day in May, ‘15,
As German chlorine robbed men of their sight,
Oh, few men see what you, Doctor, have seen -
Seen six out of each ten Canadians
Sans life sans love sans laughter; sans all sans...
Did you, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae,
Veteran of Boer war, Loos and Passchendaele,
For them your prayers say each dying day?
Your healing hands artillery did lay?
But did, for you, sometimes the tumult fade,
Did agonies relent as words unfold?
Recalled within your notebook was peace made;
“A
little maiden fair / With locks of gold.”?
And left you more than she a-weeping and,
Before the war fell you for Lady R...?
Why never did you let a wedding band
Be-threat the edge of sword Excalibre?
I hope you filled life’s chalice to the brim -
And that you knew not Haig, but pitied him.
Then April, seventeen; with crimson end
Was Canada,
enobled nation made -
On Vimy Ridge. And afterwards you penned;
“The Anxious
Dead;” and you were not afraid.
Oh Jack McRae, few men were loved as you:
Men clung to you as shadows cling to men;
Still wear your poppies to hold glorious who
Found glory in a dark beyond their ken.
The horse you cherished led your black cortege,
Turned boots in stirrup irons to say you’re dead,
Men's tears at Wimereux were not of rage
But love for one ashamed to die in bed...
And in the going down of every sun
Some shall recall your words each one by one.
Called
MacUrtsi was each poet to your clan,
Goodbye
Doctor, MacUrtsi, McRae, Man.
****
IN WOUNDED FIELDS
Epilogue
And so I had my discourse with these poets
And with the others from that book
Who’d gone to war with heads held high but knew
Scant glory in the mud, and died,
Yet found their songs and verse
In such a torrent rushed
As might have changed the world
I thought of how wild flowers
In brightest beauty blaze
Where ordure thickest lies -
It's stink by glory overpowered.
This place of peace holds very little trace
Of what had come to pass those years before.
But rust away as may the swords
I shall remember poet’s words
And we shall
remember them
Long after all the blood and all the bedlam,
Long after time has healed the wounded fields.
Bryan Islip
October 96
November 1, 2013
Exhibition in Gairloch
EXHIBITION
14 PAINTINGS by BRYAN ISLIP
OIL ON CANVAS
GALE CENTRE, GAIRLOCH, 29 October - 3rd December 2013
1. ‘Good Morning’: 70 x 70cm unframed: £550
Most mornings a small fishing boat sets out from Isle Ewe.
This is it, set into a downhill view from Mellon Charles. I have tried in this
painting to capture the might, the majestry, the timelessness and the beauty of
loch and land contrasted with the relative insignificance of Man.
2. ‘Fast water 3’: 70 x 70 cm and frame £650
I wanted to paint this (based on the Gruinard river) as a background to
a leaping salmon or possibly the multi-coloured flash of a kingfisher. However
my wife told me in no uncertain terms, ‘Enough; the water is the painting all
by itself.’ I think she was right. This is the third of three Fast Water oil paintings.
3. ‘Sunset over Aultbea and Loch Ewe from
above the pier’: NFS
Painted on commission, awaiting collection and therefore not for sale.
I have been given permission to exhibit it by the owner. As its title suggests
I did the original sketches late last summer sitting in the passenger seat of
my car, door open, at the viewpoint above the NATO oil tanks and pier. Apart
from this finished painting, the thing I remember most are those perishing
midges!
4. ‘Stac Polly’: 70 x 70 cm unframed: £550
When I’m painting I will invariably think about the history or the
topography- or at least something about
my subject. I will then turn such thoughts into verse. In this case… ’Here
is a mountain, unchanging, saw toothed, / reaching for an ever changing Assynt
sky; / a distant dare to those who would endure, / or may enjoy the hardships
of this ‘wilderness’ /// She
rises from her rain-soaked moorland bed / by day a curve of greens, rock-greys;
by night / black bitch-face howling at the yellow moon: / carved by that last
great icy age, it’s said / that scraped north Scotland down to lesser height / left
skyline jagged like some bagpipe’s tune
/// From Polly’s crest you’ll see the silver sea
/ across whose puny waves lie Hebrides: / look down upon those many shining
lochs / breathe purest air where all things rest in peace.’
5. ‘Northern Lights’: 70 x 50 cm unframed: £450
The aurora borealis phenomenon
appears but rarely in our winter skies, but when it does! … in fact we’ve seen
it only four times over our twelve winters here in Wester-Ross. However there
have certainly been other appearances, probably as we sit by our fireside
watching some meaningless TV with all the curtains drawn! I wonder how our Highlands
ancestors would have reacted to these magical curtains of multi-coloured light.
6. ‘Lochan na Ba Caolila’: 70 x 70 cm and frame: £650
‘Lochan of the thin white cow.’ Nobody local I’ve spoken with knows
the derivation of that ‘thin white cow’. But most know well this little water,
situated road-side a mile or so north of Poolewe. Liberally sprinkled with
white waterlilies and with its rhododendron covered dome of an islet it truly
is a jewelled of a wee lochan.
7. ‘Red wine and grapes’: 60 x 80 cm unframed: £500
8. ‘White wine and an apple’: 60 x 80 cm unframed: £500
9. ‘Coffee at the Café Blue’: 60 x 80 cm unframed: £500
I’ve created very few still life
paintings. But I reckon a painting has, in the main, to do two things for its
viewer apart from immediate appeal or one’s appreciation of the artist’s
technical skill. (1) It has to say something other than the simple depiction and
(2) it has to ask a question of the viewer - not necessarily an answerable
question.
10. ‘Plockton in Summertime’: 75 x 45 cm and frame: £525
I did my sketch for this leaning on
the old stone wall by the sea, opposite Edmund Mackenzie’s Plockton Gift Shop.
This is my second painting from that viewpoint, the first having been created in
pastels six years ago entitled ‘Plockton in Wintertime’. Like so many others I
first heard of Plockton through the TV series Hamish MacBeth. It’s a not-so-old village established for the
fishing and now for the tourism. Beautiful.
11. Above Ardessie Falls, Dundonnell: 25 x 30 cm: unframed: £130
We climbed up with our dogs from
the roadside at Ardessie, near Dundonnell to a place above the Falls. That’s
Little Loch Broom below. I was fascinated by the play of peaty water over rock
and boulder, thought about how it’s all part of that eternal cycle … salt
seawater … evaporation … cloud … rain …
fresh water … downhill into mother sea … back again, and again, and again ….
12. Lochan of the thin white cow), near Poolewe: 25 x 30 cm: unframed
£130
This is a smaller version from a
different angle (compared with # 6) of my favourite little jewel of a lochan.
13. Looking over Gairloch: 25 x 30 cm: unframed: £130
I sketched this from the
viewpoint by the war memorial in Gairloch. The shafts of sunlight through dense
dark cloud presented a sort of cathedral effect over the scene of my first fishing
exploits in our small boat, towed up all the way from England’s south
coast back in 1973.
14. Self portrait with Beaujolais 2006: NFS
No comment!
15. Copy: The Fall of Rome?
NFS
In my early twenties I purchased
a ‘how to paint’ book and some books of works by the great masters. By copying
I taught myself the technique and something about the use of colour and
composition, working mostly after the children had gone to bed and deep into
the night. This was amongst my first results. I have completely forgotten who
painted the original, perhaps Carravagio? Probably about two metres wide,
hanging in some famous gallery!
Enjoy the pictures and your day
and the GALE Centre. Cheers!
October 31, 2013
Delia - a bulletin
Our local Gairloch and District Times just published my little thank you verse ...
To those who care
and those who care
for Delia
and those who may know
my lovely lady
I want to say this:
Thank you for knowing
thank you for caring;
and this …
If ever you or I
have to fall victim
to a cancer
(God willing, never)
better by far to be near
such people. Yes.
best by far to be here.
Bryan Islip
I meant every word of it.
For the most part Dee is comfortable enough sitting up in the newly installed 'hospital' bed, courtesy of the NHS. She can lower of raise herself at will in order to watch over the distant hills and the loch alongside which we have so often walked and see how the weather is and the colours of a Scottish Highlands Autumn. But there are times, too, of great pain when her medication gets a bit out of synch, At such times expert help and moral support is always close at hand. Not just help, kindness also.
Kindness: we have many visitors but sometimes I have to tell them, 'no, sorry, doctor's orders'. They always understand, ask me to give her their love, often leave us their gifts of tasty treats and flowers and cashmere bed socks and, oh, all sorts. But love is their most important gift of all. You can't touch it or consume it but we all of us know when it is there, given or taken, do we not?
In the quieter moments I sit by her bedside and we talk and often laugh about old times and the now times of family, friends and the world at large. I think it good not to condense life and one's interest into self, in the way so often of the very old. Dee is not and will never be very old. Oh yes and of course we discuss and theorise about what comes after this; belief, religion, philosphy, call it what you will. There are no secrets. Never have been any. Secrets have no value.
So what of myself? A bit tired at times but physically and spiritually OK, I think. (Nobody can know for certain sure about themselves, can they?) I have one advantage in that I have always been better at reacting than at planning. What was that, written by the Bard ... 'the best laid plans of mice and men go all awry'? Are you listening, President Obama?
My wife is brave in the extreme sense that the very bravest never know or want to know about their own bravery. In this and of herself she lifts up my heart as she lifts up the hearts of all those who know her / us. How lucky after all am I. What kind of a superwoman is my wife, Delia.
To those who care
and those who care
for Delia
and those who may know
my lovely lady
I want to say this:
Thank you for knowing
thank you for caring;
and this …
If ever you or I
have to fall victim
to a cancer
(God willing, never)
better by far to be near
such people. Yes.
best by far to be here.
Bryan Islip
I meant every word of it.
For the most part Dee is comfortable enough sitting up in the newly installed 'hospital' bed, courtesy of the NHS. She can lower of raise herself at will in order to watch over the distant hills and the loch alongside which we have so often walked and see how the weather is and the colours of a Scottish Highlands Autumn. But there are times, too, of great pain when her medication gets a bit out of synch, At such times expert help and moral support is always close at hand. Not just help, kindness also.
Kindness: we have many visitors but sometimes I have to tell them, 'no, sorry, doctor's orders'. They always understand, ask me to give her their love, often leave us their gifts of tasty treats and flowers and cashmere bed socks and, oh, all sorts. But love is their most important gift of all. You can't touch it or consume it but we all of us know when it is there, given or taken, do we not?
In the quieter moments I sit by her bedside and we talk and often laugh about old times and the now times of family, friends and the world at large. I think it good not to condense life and one's interest into self, in the way so often of the very old. Dee is not and will never be very old. Oh yes and of course we discuss and theorise about what comes after this; belief, religion, philosphy, call it what you will. There are no secrets. Never have been any. Secrets have no value.
So what of myself? A bit tired at times but physically and spiritually OK, I think. (Nobody can know for certain sure about themselves, can they?) I have one advantage in that I have always been better at reacting than at planning. What was that, written by the Bard ... 'the best laid plans of mice and men go all awry'? Are you listening, President Obama?
My wife is brave in the extreme sense that the very bravest never know or want to know about their own bravery. In this and of herself she lifts up my heart as she lifts up the hearts of all those who know her / us. How lucky after all am I. What kind of a superwoman is my wife, Delia.
October 25, 2013
A birthday party
Like many men, I tend to forget birthdates - even my own. But Wednesday lunchtime a trio of local ladies arrived bearing cards and a complete, pre-cooked three course lunch (main course duck a l'orange). Also a fine birthday cake and an even finer burgundy. Dee came downstairs to join the party, which put the real icing on the cake. So here I am, like the somewhat worse for wear lord of the manor, being waited on hand and foot. Wonderful. Keep it up, ladies!
So how old is old? Seventy nine, I think.
So how old is old? Seventy nine, I think.
October 22, 2013
Corruption or stupididty?
More, yet more!
Whilst the bosses of privatised 'companies' (near monopolistic suppliers of essential public services not long since handed to a grateful City by the unbelievably innocent Mrs T) are loading themselves with great riches at the pain and expense of a debt laden public our government has sold us all down the bloody river, big time.
Instead of investing OUR money in OUR green energy innovation from OUR naturally favourable tides and winds (in that order) Cameron has contracted with a French builder with Chinese finance for the output of a new nuclear power plant, the output of which we should buy on ridiculously Alice in Wonderland, finger in the breeze terms.
Did he not notice what happened to a seaside plant of similar construction in Japan last year? Does he really imagine Great Britain to be impervious to similar tectonic earth movements? Has he decided to bury his head in nuclear shit so as not to notice how his future nation is going to deal with it? Does he really think he knows what the pound will be worth in two, three or four decades time? Or even if it will still exist? Why not one more step? Why not do more deals with China? After all, they do have all of the USA's money to play with. Why not sell them not just the Manchester Industrial City but the City of London or the Houses of Parliament?
Above all, why has he not thought about the obvious solutions to this so-called energy crisis. USE LESS OF IT! Switch off the unnecessary. Ration it out. And above all re-nationalise the suppliers, drop this fraululent falsity of a free market. Energy is not something for good capitalism. It is good fuel for corruption.
Whilst the bosses of privatised 'companies' (near monopolistic suppliers of essential public services not long since handed to a grateful City by the unbelievably innocent Mrs T) are loading themselves with great riches at the pain and expense of a debt laden public our government has sold us all down the bloody river, big time.
Instead of investing OUR money in OUR green energy innovation from OUR naturally favourable tides and winds (in that order) Cameron has contracted with a French builder with Chinese finance for the output of a new nuclear power plant, the output of which we should buy on ridiculously Alice in Wonderland, finger in the breeze terms.
Did he not notice what happened to a seaside plant of similar construction in Japan last year? Does he really imagine Great Britain to be impervious to similar tectonic earth movements? Has he decided to bury his head in nuclear shit so as not to notice how his future nation is going to deal with it? Does he really think he knows what the pound will be worth in two, three or four decades time? Or even if it will still exist? Why not one more step? Why not do more deals with China? After all, they do have all of the USA's money to play with. Why not sell them not just the Manchester Industrial City but the City of London or the Houses of Parliament?
Above all, why has he not thought about the obvious solutions to this so-called energy crisis. USE LESS OF IT! Switch off the unnecessary. Ration it out. And above all re-nationalise the suppliers, drop this fraululent falsity of a free market. Energy is not something for good capitalism. It is good fuel for corruption.
October 18, 2013
More of corruption
Re my recent piece on privatisation (of the Royal Mail) and corruption ...
'Corruption in business' does not simply mean back handers, price fixing and all those other behind the scenes practices. It can be out in the open, there for all to see - and do sweet fanny adams about. Especially when the practitioners are so often cotton-wool protected by our legal system and our lovely government.
This morning we hear that British Gas is raising it's prices by 10.2 %. So, bring on more and more of the food banks. They are going to be needed big time. This morning we hear that the Chief Executive of British Gas is paying himself a bonus of two million pounds. Well surprise, surprise. Shame not just on this person but on all we others who know and let it go on happening. This is the exact opposite of the Holy Sacrament; the outwards and visible sign of an inwards, invisible, decay.
A Minister of the Crown then appears on screen advising us to seek alternative suppliers. He speaks as if to sub normal fourth formers. As if there were dozens of firms out there finding / creating and selling gas and electricity (as opposed simply to selling what they buy from an identical source, delivered to you and me in an identical way). Not a word of criticism from said Minister to the State owned monopoly his predecessors handed over to the tender mercies of the Stock Market some three decades ago.Not a word to the British people about switching off the central heating or street lighting or just donning an extra sweater.
Meanwhile out top 'leaders' are out in China busily trying to sell even more of their / our nation to the Chinese, and begging said industrialists to come here and build us some bloody nuclear power stations, please sir. 'We have no money to do it', they whine, 'And our people have to consume more and more and more no matter what the long term medical and environmental effects.' .
I am a total believer in traditional capitalism, but what we have today, to me bears a remarkable similarity to the latter days of communism - both having been / being steadily eroded and destroyed by an utter contempt for the public and the outright corruption of a small but powerful minority.
Our forefathers who invented industry, the ones who built our social superstructure by brain, invention, hand and determinatuin (roads rail factories cities transport etc etc) in the name of Christian morality and legitimate profit will be turning in their graves. Shame on all of us.
'Corruption in business' does not simply mean back handers, price fixing and all those other behind the scenes practices. It can be out in the open, there for all to see - and do sweet fanny adams about. Especially when the practitioners are so often cotton-wool protected by our legal system and our lovely government.
This morning we hear that British Gas is raising it's prices by 10.2 %. So, bring on more and more of the food banks. They are going to be needed big time. This morning we hear that the Chief Executive of British Gas is paying himself a bonus of two million pounds. Well surprise, surprise. Shame not just on this person but on all we others who know and let it go on happening. This is the exact opposite of the Holy Sacrament; the outwards and visible sign of an inwards, invisible, decay.
A Minister of the Crown then appears on screen advising us to seek alternative suppliers. He speaks as if to sub normal fourth formers. As if there were dozens of firms out there finding / creating and selling gas and electricity (as opposed simply to selling what they buy from an identical source, delivered to you and me in an identical way). Not a word of criticism from said Minister to the State owned monopoly his predecessors handed over to the tender mercies of the Stock Market some three decades ago.Not a word to the British people about switching off the central heating or street lighting or just donning an extra sweater.
Meanwhile out top 'leaders' are out in China busily trying to sell even more of their / our nation to the Chinese, and begging said industrialists to come here and build us some bloody nuclear power stations, please sir. 'We have no money to do it', they whine, 'And our people have to consume more and more and more no matter what the long term medical and environmental effects.' .
I am a total believer in traditional capitalism, but what we have today, to me bears a remarkable similarity to the latter days of communism - both having been / being steadily eroded and destroyed by an utter contempt for the public and the outright corruption of a small but powerful minority.
Our forefathers who invented industry, the ones who built our social superstructure by brain, invention, hand and determinatuin (roads rail factories cities transport etc etc) in the name of Christian morality and legitimate profit will be turning in their graves. Shame on all of us.
October 14, 2013
A Sonnet for Robert Burns
A Sonnet for Robert Burns
I’ll sing of the birth of that Burnsian boy
With the songs of a son of fair Alloway
Who though poor, left words of comfort and joy
- riches that glitter to this very day.
‘For all that’, he wrote, ‘A man is a man’
And life is one life for a man to use well
So he lives and loves as true as he can
And writes as clear as the toll of the bell.
The good folk came out in old Dumphries town
To bury the Bard that all Scotland owned
It shall not be forgotten who wears the crown -
This Rabbie, who’s now to all the world loaned.
As I read him again I hear the pipes’ skirl
‘Awake’, says he, ‘Watch our saltire unfurl’.
Bryan Islip
Oct 2013
October 12, 2013
Privatisation aka corruption
Will anybody tell me where I have it wrong? Please?
The day before yesterday I, in common with all other UK citizens, owned one sixty millionth (approx) of The Royal Post Office, a public service of some three hundred years standing.
But after yesterday I own only forty percent of that, the other sixty percent having been arbitrarily taken from me (stolen, some would aver) and sold on without my consent and with none of the proceeds accruing directly to me.
This forcible repossession and sale was facilitated a year ago by a doubling of the costs I then had to pay and will always have to pay for postage through 'my' Royal Mail. This of course turned a viable and venerable public service into a cash cow well fit for milking by the City of London and those who now own and gamble with my missing sixty percent. Any old fool can make a business profitable by doubling its income.
Today the very small percentage of the UK population well heeled enough, unprincipled enough and gambler enough to 'invest' and thereby line their pockets so successfully are counting their easy peasy money whilst putting up the traditional two fingered salute to those miserable souls in the longer and longer UK dole queues and those in the longer and longer queues at UK food banks.
Privatisation is always the Robin Hood in reverse condition. Of course it bloody well is. You cannot hand an essential - often monopolistic - public service over to the City of London gambling syndicates and seriously hope that they will not milk the public to line their pockets. Water, electricity, telephones, rail, you name it. Just take a cool and educated look at how their charges have outstripped inflation - and those in other European countries. Classic rob the many UK poor to fatten up the few UK rich.
Have I ever forced my own nose into the UK privatisation trough? Would my thoughts be any different if I had? Yeas and no. And that is not the issue.
The issue is corruption.
The day before yesterday I, in common with all other UK citizens, owned one sixty millionth (approx) of The Royal Post Office, a public service of some three hundred years standing.
But after yesterday I own only forty percent of that, the other sixty percent having been arbitrarily taken from me (stolen, some would aver) and sold on without my consent and with none of the proceeds accruing directly to me.
This forcible repossession and sale was facilitated a year ago by a doubling of the costs I then had to pay and will always have to pay for postage through 'my' Royal Mail. This of course turned a viable and venerable public service into a cash cow well fit for milking by the City of London and those who now own and gamble with my missing sixty percent. Any old fool can make a business profitable by doubling its income.
Today the very small percentage of the UK population well heeled enough, unprincipled enough and gambler enough to 'invest' and thereby line their pockets so successfully are counting their easy peasy money whilst putting up the traditional two fingered salute to those miserable souls in the longer and longer UK dole queues and those in the longer and longer queues at UK food banks.
Privatisation is always the Robin Hood in reverse condition. Of course it bloody well is. You cannot hand an essential - often monopolistic - public service over to the City of London gambling syndicates and seriously hope that they will not milk the public to line their pockets. Water, electricity, telephones, rail, you name it. Just take a cool and educated look at how their charges have outstripped inflation - and those in other European countries. Classic rob the many UK poor to fatten up the few UK rich.
Have I ever forced my own nose into the UK privatisation trough? Would my thoughts be any different if I had? Yeas and no. And that is not the issue.
The issue is corruption.
