Well, they do say that truth is often stranger than fiction, but what I am going to tell you about is probably going to strain belief almost too far. And in a way that’s why I’m going to put it down, because, incredible though it may seem, it was told to me as an unvarnished truth, and anyway it has touch of magic about it which is all too rare in this prosaic world.
Actually it didn’t happen to me at all, but I was told about it by a person I have no reason to doubt.
I should explain how I first heard the story. My pal, Ken, had relatives in Tettenhall Wood, a place which, if you were used to Gornal Wood, seemed mighty close to being exotic. For a start it was obviously genteel, at least in parts, and there were a lot of grand houses about the place and far more motorcars to be seen. It was on a trolley bus route, which was an excitement in itself, and it had an inland sea in the shape of the great big paddling pool on the Upper Green where a fellow could sail a toy boat and get gloriously wet in the process. So whenever I could I would go along with Ken when he was sent there on duty calls to relatives.
Not that there was anything particularly onerous about that. His relatives were all very pleasant people, homely and welcoming, always ready to feed hungry small boys and never minding when we went off to wander round the village in search of adventures.
It was on one of these visits that Ken’s aunt Mary told us the story.
We had been about to go out on some expedition or other when it came to rain, so we stayed in aunt Mary’s kitchen instead, which was certainly the next best thing to going out because there were always tins of biscuits and buns around the place. Through mouthfuls of lemon bun Ken and I were talking about sailing our boats on the Upper Green pool when his Aunty Mary joined in. She said that when she was a little girl she and her brother Billy had been wild about sailing boats. Their dad made one for each of them out of softwood off-cuts that he brought home from work. Their mother sewed the sails and Billy rigged both boats in a cunning way such that when the boom swung over, it moved the tiller to make the boat keep on course.
We wanted to know if they had sailed their boats on the Upper Green, but she told us that when she was small it was no more than a large muddy pond, not a bit like the smart, concrete-lined pool that Ken and I knew. No, she and Billy had sailed their boats on the canal down at Newbridge. Of course there were a number of hazards, swans and passing narrow boats, to say nothing of the rowing boats that were hired out to the people who flocked out of Wolverhampton for a day out at weekends. The best time for sailing boats was on Sunday mornings when there was hardly any traffic on the canal. So, if they could get out of going to church, that was the time they generally chose.
I don’t really remember how it came about, but after a while poetry came into the conversation. Maybe Ken said something about liking learning poems at school? Anyway, aunt Mary said it reminded her that she had once met a real poet and the meeting was all tied up with model boats. And then she told us this story.
It was summertime, she said that it must’ve been about 1902 because she was just turned six, and very proud of the fact. Billy, who is three years older, and she had managed to escape the house early one fine, sunny Sunday morning taking their boats with them and heading for the canal at Newbridge. They usually stayed pretty close to the old bridge over the canal, the one that is just to the south of the road bridge, because it was handy to be able to nip from one side of the canal to the other to push their boats off if they ran into the bank. This particular morning, when they got to the bridge they found a man leaning against the parapet. He had a pencil in his hand and a large notebook propped in front of him. As they crossed the bridge he said hello and, catching sight of their boats, said how much he liked them and might he have a look. Billy let him have his boat and the man looked at it very carefully, obviously interested. He asked Billy all sorts of questions about the way it was rigged, then he held it up to the sky looking at the hull from both ends and said something about its "fine lines". Billy was impressed. He asked the man if he was a sailor and the man smiled and said he used to be.
Aunty Mary said the man had a nice smile, a bit sad, but then his whole face was a bit sad. He had sad eyes, a broad forehead with a lot of floppy hair drooping over it, a whisp of a moustache on his top lip, and his ears were a bit big. She thought he must be very old, but then at six anybody over the age of twelve looks old. Later on she realised he must probably have been only in his twenties. As grown-ups went he wasn’t very tall and when he stood up straight there was a suspicion of a stoop in the way he stood. On the whole she decided she liked him. He had an easy way of talking to Billy, more chatting to an equal than a grown-up talking to a child, and that was pleasant.
He said very nice things about both their boats and said, if he might, he would like to watch them sailing. Billy said he could come and join in if he wanted but the man said thank you but no, he wanted to get on with what he was doing. Billy asked him if he was writing a letter? The man smiled and said no, he was writing a poem. Neither of the children had ever come across anybody who wrote a poem before. Poems were things that came out of books, things that Billy learned at school, but it never really occurred to either of them that they actually had to be written. Billy said he liked poems and he had almost learned one or two by heart. The man asked what they were; Billy said one was about daffodils and the other one he could nearly remember was sort of prayer, the kind of thing you said before you went to sleep at night. The man smiled and said he thought he knew the one about daffodils, and felt sure that he knew the kind of thing that Billy meant about the other one.
Mary didn’t share much in the conversation. Although the man very kindly tried to get her to join in, she felt a bit shy and, after all, her mother had said she mustn’t talk to strange men. But Billy, being in his own eyes close to man’s estate, had no such qualms; he and the man chatted away in a very jolly fashion about poems and how difficult it was to make words rhyme. It wasn’t very long before Billy got round to asking the man what his poem was about and he was very impressed when the man said it was about boats, well, ships really. Billy asked if he could read it. The man said it was almost finished, there was only one line to go, then he handed it over to Billy. But though Billy was very good at reading he couldn’t manage to make out the man’s handwriting, so he handed it back and said please will the man read it out to them. And so he did.
They didn’t understand all words, at least Billy said later that he did, but Mary didn’t believe him, but they both liked the sound of it and the general feeling and were very impressed to hear a real poet read out a real poem that he’d written himself. Bits and pieces of what he read out stuck in their minds and long after they had said goodbye to the man and gone off to sail their boats they remembered snatches and bits of it.
When they returned to the bridge on their way home the man had gone. Neither of them ever saw him again.
About a year later a student teacher came to the school in Tettenhall Wood. He was a very progressive young man who believed in introducing children to the latest and brightest things. He read bits of Shakespeare to Billy’s class, and also some poetry, and amongst the poetry to Billy’s great joy and amazement was the man on the bridge’s poem. There it was, large as life and printed in a real book. Billy borrowed the book and carefully copied the poem out and within the day he had it off by heart. In time Mary too learned the poem, and when she told us the story she said she still remembered it word for word. It went,
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
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.
When Mary finished reciting it she smiled at us, took a sip of tea and said "And that’s how Billy and me met Mr Masefield, though at the time we never knew his name, nor how famous he would become. Just think of it, a poet laureate to be, standing on the canal bridge and talking to Billy and me as natural and kindly as you like. It hardly seems possible, does it."
And to my shame I have to confess that even then I thought that it sounded highly improbable, and later on I wondered why on earth she had made up such a story.
But it’s funny how things fall out. Years later, when I was grown up I bought a second-hand copy of Masefield’s collected poems, the Heineman 1926 edition, and there, on page 56, was "Cargoes", by this time a great favourite of mine and one that I could recite, like Ken’s aunt, from memory, a poem almost as well known as his "Sea Fever" and surely as well loved. But this was the first time I had ever seen it printed above the dateline, and that, to my amazement said ‘Tettenhall’!
I was taken aback, I can tell you. Perhaps there was something in Mary’s story after all, maybe she hadn’t made it up. So I set about trying to find out.
It took me some time to piece it all together but, sure enough, John Masefield was close to Newbridge in 1902. He lodged at 141 Tettenhall Road, and worked between January and October as art exhibition secretary at the Wolverhampton arts and industrial exhibition. He should have worked on until December, but the exhibition, which was built in palatial style alongside West Park, turned out to be an expensive white elephant, losing the promoters £30,000 (a considerable fortune at the turn of the last century) in its first six months, so it was closed prematurely to save further loss.
I had remembered Mary’s vivid description of John Masefield, but it was hardly enough. It would have been wonderful to go back to Tettenhall to ask her for every little detail that she remembered. But sadly Mary had by that time been dead for some years, and Billy had died long before her in Flanders in 1916.
Ken and I have often talked about this and kicked ourselves for not paying more attention on that rainy afternoon in that little house in School Road.
But the thing that still puzzles me is how on earth Billy rigged that connection between the boom and the tiller... I never have been able to work it out.
