Free Six Poets by Alan Bennett Page B

about their necks, their portion sure.
    The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
    Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
    Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
    And the sentry’s challenge echoing all day long;
    A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge
    Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront:
    Marching at ease and singing ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’
    The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.
    The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England –
    Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;
    I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar
    Be always rationed and that never again
    Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags
    And my governess not make bandages from moss
    And the people not have maps above the fireplace
    With flags on pins moving across and across –
    Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,
    Flares across the night,
    Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,
    A cage across their sight.
    I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
    Contracted into a puppet world of sons
    Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines
    And the soldiers with their guns.

    The concerns of writers are selfish and to be born in Northern Ireland is to inherit a set of circumstances which, however painful, are also useful: they are something to write out of. It was less so in MacNeice’s youth, and though, as a child, he was shocked by the poverty of the Carrickfergus Catholics, he seldom dealt explicitly with his divided country. His concerns were generally more personal. His father was a Church of Ireland rector, an Anglican who later became a bishop, and MacNeice’s childhood seems to have bred in him a melancholy and an aloofness that always set him apart.
    Stephen Spender tells a story how, when the Soviet Union came into the war in 1941, the British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr thought he would give a party for British poets with a view to putting them in touch with their Soviet counterparts.
    Throughout this party, MacNeice – sleek, dark and expressionless – leaned against the chimney-piece, glass in hand, looking infinitely removed from his colleagues. At the end of the evening, Clark-Kerr went up to him and said, ‘Is it true you were brought up in Belfast at Carrickfergus?’
    MacNeice said, ‘Yes, it is.’
    â€˜Ah,’ said Clark-Kerr, ‘then that confirms a legend I have heard: that, centuries ago, a race of seals invaded that coast and interbred with the population. Good night.’
    The following is a sad poem about the death of MacNeice’s mother when he was five.

Autobiography
    In my childhood trees were green
    And there was plenty to be seen.
    Come back early or never come
.
    My father made the walls resound,
    He wore his collar the wrong way round.
    Come back early or never come
.
    My mother wore a yellow dress;
    Gently, gently, gentleness.
    Come back early or never come
.
    When I was five the black dreams came;
    Nothing after was quite the same.
    Come back early or never come
.
    The dark was talking to the dead;
    The lamp was dark beside my bed.
    Come back early or never come
.
    When I woke they did not care;
    Nobody, nobody was there.
    Come back early or never come
.
    When my silent terror cried,
    Nobody, nobody replied.
    Come back early or never come
.
    I got up; the chilly sun
    Saw me walk away alone.
    Come back early or never come
.

    When MacNeice did walk away, it was to school in England, to Marlborough, where he was rather hearty, though not wholeheartedly so. MacNeice was never very good at being wholehearted. His closest friend at school was not hearty at all but the very aesthetic Anthony Blunt. At Oxford, it was much the same. MacNeice wrote poetry but didn’t quite fit in. ‘Homosexuality and intelligence, heterosexuality and brawn were almost inexorably paired. This left me out,’ he said, ‘and I took to