Having been to Majorca several times in the sixties, laddish package holidays with John Gorman and Hewo in Magaluf and Arenal, and quieter family holidays with Thelma, Nathan, Finn and Tom, I had assumed that the island was one huge package resort, a ring doughnut with high-rise hotels sugaring the coast all around and nothing in the middle. But if Robert Graves, a man not noted for his love of hotdogs and Tetley’s bitter, had settled on the island, then perhaps my geography was no better than that of the two tanned girls from Nottingham I talked to at Gatwick on my return.
‘Where have you two been?’
‘San Antonio.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I don’t know, we flew.’
And later this year I’ll be returning to Majorca, where Hilary and I will spend our time trying to prevent our teenagers getting up to what we got up to when we were their age. But this time we’ll be heading to the north-west of the island, to a village that does not display its charms or its residents too readily. For one of the many delights of Deyá is that most people who drive through the village are not tempted to stop. There is no beach, for instance, the Cala is a tiny, secluded, difficult-to-get-to cove at the foot of a cliff, favoured by masochists who relish the challenge of stumbling over rocks and sharp pebbles to swim with jellyfish. The heart of Deyá itself lies away from the main road, up the hill to the church of Saint John the Baptist, where, in the graveyard that overlooks the village and the sea, is a rectangle of sun-bleached cement inscribed simply: ‘Robert Graves, Poeta’.
But the grave wasn’t there on my first visits and in 1984 I was invited up to the Graves house for afternoon tea by Pauline Scudamore, a good friend of the family and Spike Milligan’s biographer. Robert, the revered and distinguished man of letters, had struck up an unlikely but deep and lasting friendship with Spike Milligan, and over the years kept up a warm correspondence that Pauline had now edited, and a casual reader who didn’t know either man might assume from the letters that Robert was the comic genius and Spike the poet.
We sat out on the terrace overlooking the olive grove where, beneath the overhang of a thirty-foot cliff, a small theatre space had been constructed by the poet’s family, which made a magical venue for the poetry events that became a regular feature of my visits. Up to fifty people would make their way down the rocky path to the amphitheatre, some with babies and cushions, others with candles and wine, to sit and listen to poems, and the chime of goat bells echoing round the hillside, as the sun, like a giant ensaimada, set into the sea beyond.
I doubt if ensaimadas, the round sweet pastry indigenous to the island, were on the menu for afternoon tea, but there were sandwiches, home-made cakes and, as the shadows lengthened, red wine. Robert’s wife, Beryl, was there with their children, William, Lucia, Juan, and Tomás, as well as friends of the family including David Templeton, an artist who was to produce a series of moving sketches of the poet during his final months. At this late stage the great man was lost within himself and sat upright in a cane chair wearing his famous black sombrero, a tartan blanket covering his knees, grey haunted eyes gazing wordlessly out into the far distance. But he was handsome still and, having spent a lifetime being admired for those imperious good looks, he posed for David with exalted indifference. He said not a word while those around him chatted about the comings and goings in the village, about plans to widen the road to Soller, not ignoring the man in their midst but rather including him in the warmth of their banter, and occasionally Lucia would say ‘Wine, Robert?’ and her father would sip from the glass held up to his lips. Eventually it was time to make a move and we stood to say our thanks and goodbyes. ‘Roger and Hilary are going now, Robert,’ announced Beryl and, turning to me, said, ‘Give him your hand, Roger.’ So I went over and took his right hand in mine. If I was expecting a brief and feeble handshake, I was in for a surprise, because for a man of eighty-nine he had a fearsome grip and seemed determined not to loosen it. I stood before him, my hand in his, as the minutes ticked by, aware that I was holding the hand of the man who had held the hand of Thomas Hardy, who in turn had held the hand of Tennyson who had held the hand … more minutes were ticking by and, unsure of the etiquette, I wondered if it would be considered rude to use my left hand to extricate myself. ‘He can always tell a poet’s hand,’ said Beryl, and everybody smiled and nodded. It was indeed a lovely thought, but I reckoned on something more basic. My hands have not been hardened and calloused over the years with good honest toil; they are not hairy or muscular and could be mistaken in the dark for a young maiden’s. As he clasped my hand, I believe he was transported back through the darkness to a time when he was holding the hand of a new lover:
Child, take my hand, kiss it finger by finger!
Can true love fade? I do not fear death
But only pity, with forgetfulness
Of love’s timeless vocabulary
And an end to poetry
With death’s mad aircraft rocketing from the sky.
Child, take my hand!
Robert Graves (from ‘The Moon’s Last Quarter’ 1973)
I spent yesterday morning wondering how to spell my name, which is a bit worrying at my age. One of the best jobs I had last year was to write a poem that would be inscribed on a fountain to be built in Williamson Square, opposite the Playhouse Theatre in Liverpool. My gift to the city as it tarts itself up in readiness for its role as European Capital of Culture in 2008.
Not for us the Trevi fountain, but a large rectangle bordered by squares of black granite with the letters inlaid in steel, above which water and light will be projected. A tricky one, this, because the poem has to work from wherever the reader happens upon it, so narrative ballads are out for a start, and a haiku simply will not do.
Inevitably, whenever I’m invited to write a poem, I look to the heavens for inspiration, I seek the sublime. As when the BBC World Service commissioned a poem in the year 2000 to celebrate the millennium total eclipse of the sun. It was August, and I wasn’t sure I could pull it off because I was leaving the next day for Majorca and the family holiday. Without access to information about astrophysics and the history of eclipses, what could I find to write about? Where would I start? I started the very next morning, in fact, when I strolled into the village of Deyá armed with a pencil and notepad. I sat down at a table in Las Palmeras and ordered a café con leche and an ensaimada. The girl put the coffee on the table in front of me, then went back to the kitchen, leaving me still looking to the heavens for divine inspiration. She returned and placed an empty plate before me, and I watched as the shadow of the ensaimada passed over it like a …? like a …? before she transferred it to the plate. Inspiration, not from heaven but from the kitchen. But inspiration nonetheless. I felt as Wordsworth did when he beheld the daffodils, like William Blake before he shot the tyger. Inspiration. An eclipse, but an everyday, common-or-garden eclipse. By the end of the holiday I had written a poem which pleased the BBC, and Everyday Eclipses became the title of my next book. (I felt sorry for the ensaimada, though. Having provided the initial inspiration for the poem, it ended up on the cutting-room floor because pastries, like bottles of syrupy green liquor with twigs in, don’t travel well.)
And so with the fountain poem. Where shall I look to for inspiration? To Liverpool’s great maritime past. To its history as a great seaport? To the Beatles and the cultural explosion of the sixties? Can the essence of all this be distilled into ninety-six words? No. So, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you picture a fountain? Water. That seemed like a good idea, after all there’s loads of the stuff swishing around Liverpool. And so the word ‘water’ became my ensaimada, the key to unlocking the poem, which came out as a children’s chant in the tradition of ‘We all sail on the alley alley-o’. I also tried to bring in the hissing sounds of a fountain jet with the shushing and the sissing sounds of the words. The poem begins:
Water is fountainous is gymnast is flash Water is mountainous is
scallywag is splash Water is mysterious is playhouse is dream
Water is serious is stargazy is steam
and continues in similar vein around a rectangle measuring 170 × 75 metres. Obviously I’m hoping that the poem will be read from the beginning, but I can foresee puzzlement slow-burning into resentment as someone approaching the fountain from the wrong end and walking anti-clockwise tries to make sense of ‘steam is stargazy is serious is Water dream is playhouse is mysterious is Water splash is scallywag is mountainous is Water’. ‘Call that poetry? My five-year-old could do better. Load of rubbish.’
I enjoyed writing the poem once the initial fear had worn off, and I hope that the tourists and the good folk of Liverpool, as they cross Williamson Square when the water is switched off, will, in the words of W. B. Yeats, ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
Whenever I tell people what I’ve been up to they invariably say, ‘How wonderful to have your words and your name set in granite for posterity.’ But I think to myself, ‘Ho ho! This is Liverpool we’re talking about, my home town. Posterity? I’ll give it six months before some scallywags have dug up the letters and carted them away to play Scrabble with.’
Which brings me back to wondering how to spell my name. The architect rang up to see how I wanted McGough to be spelled at the end of the poem. Should the c be large or small? Is it MC or Mc, or with the c like a parrot on M’s shoulder, Mc. I’d never thought too much about it really, as I vary it when signing my name, so I looked it up in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. It’s there on page 348: ‘McGough’.