Cats and Poems tells of some of the Ted Hughes poems my children listened to regularly in the car when they were in early primary school The poems are not particularly easy but they revelled in them even while they did not understand every word. I think they felt the wildness and subversion of those poems, compared to what children are supposed to be exposed to, especially nowadays and especially in Scotland.
But I think they understood that the a badger was old, important, not just a leader but a king. It doesn't matter. Understanding follows from enjoyment. There is something in a poem like this that is conveyed, that we sense, even if the words are not all understood. It is something that we can't easily put into words.
The Badger in the spinney is the true king of this land.
All creatures are his tenants, though not all understand.
Didicoi red and roe-deer, gypsy foxes, romany otters-
They squabble about their boundaries, but all of them are squatters.
Even the grandest farm-house, what is it but a camp
In the land where the singing Badger walks the woods with his hooded lamp?
A farmer’s but a blowing seed with a flower of crops and herds.
His tractors and his combines are as airy as his words.
But the Badger’s fort was dug when the whole land was one oak.
His face is his ancient coat of arms, and he wears the same grey cloak
As if time had not passed at all, as if there were no such thing,
As if there were only the one night-kingdom and its Badger King.
Ted Hughes, from 'What is the Truth?' (1984)
The Roald Dahl and David Walliams are superb for getting children reading. They appeal to characters like my younger son, children who dive in with a great splash, as they should. But for the quieter mind could there by a better titled book for children than 'What is the truth'?
When I was about nine, I left Africa where the education had been half days at a Sacred Heart school with teachers from many different countries. They were so desperate for teachers that they begged mum, who was a primary teacher to come in, with her active four year old son, to teach an older class. How she did it, I don't know. She said it was hard.
I was a voracious reader, mostly of Enid Blyton, until the Sacred Heart banned me from borrowing those books from the library. Apparently it was excessive indulgence of one author. I was furious, smarted for days at the injustice of it and moped about until I hit on the idea of ordering from the back page of a current book. The parcels took weeks to arrive, but it was exciting to walk the dusty path to the Central Facility for our patch each week, to pick up the mail, to have these treasures winged across the world to my home. I think I started ordering beyond Enid Blyton as I began to run out, but that was fine, because it was on my own terms.
Arriving at a new British Forces school in Germany I was given this poem to read aloud. I remember the struggle with the words, the patience of the teacher, how I seemed to stand there miserable for hours, which was probably less than five minutes, without a clue what it was about nor why she was making me do this, seemingly oblivious to my unhappiness.
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow—
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?’
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied,—
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
'Eldorado', Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
I am not quite sure of the sequencing but I was told, maybe soon after that I was going to skip a year and leave that teacher's class. It wasn't because I was trouble because I was good in those days.
A sensitive child, there was dreadful upset. How would I manage in a class above having struggled so much with the poem with my current teacher? I don't think I ever expressed that. In those days children were not as emotionally aware, at least, we didn't talk about our feelings as much as today. But I was told it was a good thing, soon settled in, did well.
This was another poem from that time. We might have read it in that school which seems to have been ambitious about poetry and children. But I think I found it soon after in the perfect poetry book for children, 'I like this poem'. It was likely a gift from my godmother, who was a primary head. This was opportune because that year I was sent to boarding school where I was deeply unhappy. I must have read a lot there but this is the book I remember, for its solace; that and my Donkey Kong. This is the version I had from 1981, its first publication date. It's funny how we have an affection for the cover of a book we particularly loved. It is still in print.
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
Cargoes, John Masefield (1903)
In the first line there are three impossible words. It must be deliberate. And what but the most precocious child would have had any idea of Palestine? I had lived in Nigeria and picked amethysts out of the ground. For years we used a great chunk of the stuff as a doorstop. But what child knows the colour of topaz? And moidores? Who can pronounce that? But it doesn't matter because he poem is about the lure of the exotic and the very strangeness of the words are part of that.
When you are nine or ten, at least in that era, nobody ever talked to you about contrast or spoke disparagingly about Britain, not in British military circles, certainly. The miracle of a poem like this, for children, is perspective and insight and vistas that they might not have in any other part of life.
The effect of poems like this is like a dream, half-understood, like secret that you only half-realise is a secret at the time, like a spell. You know, or you feel what they do and nobody else knows that you know and you yourself don't even know the significance of what you know. It's magic, really.
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