Free How to Be English by David Boyle Page A

temperament that deeply disapproves of reading. It still exists, though people rarely admit that they share it these days. Until a century ago, it was almost mainstream. When the future Poet Laureate John Masefield was orphaned (his mother died giving birth and his father had a breakdown and died shortly afterwards) he came into the care of an aunt who shared this disapproval with a passion.
    The young Masefield devoured books and wandered, rather as Wordsworth did, ‘lonely as a cloud’ around his home environs (he was born in Ledbury in Hereford, near where his older contemporary Edward Elgar was also wandering similarly lonely as a cloud – they should have got together). And the more he devoured his books, the more his aunt disapproved.
    Strong measures were clearly required, and it was decided that he should be sent to sea. To prepare him for this, Masefield was sent to school on HMS
Conway
, the sail training ship and former wooden battleship
Nile,
then anchored off Birkenhead.
    The three years he spent there from 1891 gave him a fascination for the sea, sea tradition and sea lore, but it certainly didn’t cure him of books. This love of the sea was entrenched even further during his first seagoing position, on a four-masted barque called
Gilcruix
, which took him from Cardiff to Chile, via Cape Horn. Masefield’s diary at the time recorded heavy seas, porpoises and flying fish and a rare nocturnal rainbow, but it ended all too soon, invalided home with sunstroke.
    He abandoned his next ship altogether in New York Harbour at the age of seventeen, became a tramp, a barman and an employee in a carpet factory, where he saved enough money to buy the complete works of Chaucer. Back in England two years later, and through a series of happy meetings, he began to write poetry, thanks to the friendship of some of the most prominent poets of the age, on the fringes of the group that would eventually be known as the Georgian poets.
    Masefield married an older woman called Constance Crommelin, introduced to him by the poet Laurence Binyon (author of the remembrance poem ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old’) and soon there were children on the way. His work for the
Manchester Guardian
wasn’t exactly lucrative. It was time to capitalise on the handful of poems that he had managed to get published.
    That was where ‘Sea Fever’ came in. It appeared for the first time in his 1902 collection
Salt-Water Poems and Ballads.
His other famous poems like ‘Cargoes’ and ‘Reynard the Fox’ were all in the future, but this salt-water stuff sold reasonably well. Later versions changed the first line to the more familiar ‘I must go down to the seas again’ – originally it had omitted the word ‘go’. It has a kind of mystical quality, not only able to conjure up the English love-and-hate relationship with the sea – the compelling way in which English history has intertwined itself with seafaring – but to do so in an era of semi-detached houses, ribbon development and commuter suburbs.
    Somehow Masefield’s poem speaks especially to the English life which gets no closer to the nautical than the garden pond in their semi. It speaks to the yearning for the wild in the commuter and the call of the running tide to those who peer out of their tower block. It is a deeply English poem, partly for the mismatch between the wildness described and the calm rhythm, which was so beautifully used in the musical version by John Ireland, but also in its prevailing melancholy. This is the English soul speaking trapped next to the office coffee machine, but still ‘it may not be denied’.
    Masefield managed eventually to make ends meet as a successful playwright and novelist. His children’s novel
The Box of Delights
has survived, and his other adventure stories –
Dead Ned
, for example – had an obvious influence on children’s