It’s 18.58 and the festivities are due to start in half an hour or so. The fragrant authoressess and their elbow dressing are probably already on their way to the do. Here’s Spume with a pony he can’t get on, and a betting slip for fucking Hilary Mantel at odds of three to one. You might say, ‘At least you got value, there, Spume.’ Bollocks to value! It wouldn’t matter if I’d got tens about her, since Barabara bastard Kingsolver is going to win the bloody thing.

I’m sorry if I sound bitter, but when you are lucky enough to get somebody inside the stables, it would be nice if they got the tip to you in time to get on. Bum, as Larkin used to say.

Of course, I knew Micky Finn; Mimsy took him under her wing, and he and Marc were frequent visitors to our flat in Brewer Street. But that’s by-the-bye. The point is, I think I might have been ‘slipped a Mickey’ last week. This is the only possible explanation for my missing 72 hours,  of which I remember nothing before waking up on the floor of a burnt out caravan in Capel Y Ffin (oddly).

And who, you ask, would stand to gain from such a dastardly act? I’m naming no names; let’s just say he’s hairy, American, and once made an improper suggestion to me in a Gent’s lavatory just off the Fulham Palace Road. I know who you are; and I shall be avenged!

On a lighter note, who should I run into this afternoon in the Green Room but dear old Simon Armitage and his family? He reminded me of our last meeting; six years ago now. How time flies; and how little there is left of it for Spume. I dug out my diaries from the occasion of his last visit to Botolph Hall, and I reproduce them in full below. Those were happy days!

Monday, August 09, 2004

Terribly exciting news. Dear old Simon Armitage has just called, and asked if he can come and stay for the week. He arrives tomorrow. I look forward to hearing his views on the new football season. Simon is a Man U fan of course, as he comes from Huddersfield, whereas I’m a lifelong devotee of Fulham. Sir Leslie is a season ticket holder at Shrewsbury, and he takes me to home games sometimes. Perhaps we’ll lure Armitage up there for a mid-week match!

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Been sitting up chatting with Simon Armitage, and enjoying some of the fruits of Leslie’s cellar. Armitage has to be up early tomorrow morning, because he’s appearing on ‘Today’, to talk about his dramatisation of ‘The Odyssey’. So he’s gone to bed with ‘Ulysses’. Now I see why he wanted to come and say for a few days; as is well known, my early collection ‘Phtung’ deals with my relationship with my wife Mimsy, and is loosely based on that greatest of myths. He’s more than welcome to pick my brains!
I never met Joyce, but Pound was a good friend to my Father, and I visited him several times in Rome. Like my father, he remained an unrepentant fascist, which was always difficult to square with my own views, of course. In fact, on our last meeting, shortly before his death, he hit me with a stick. Talking of death, and punching, I see old Bernie Levin has gone across; Alzheimer’s, like Iris. Such a loss. Who can forget the edition of TWTWTW when Mimsy got up and punched Bernie on the nose, just because he called her ‘a fat old whore’ in the Colony Club one night. She could be very sensitive about things like that, could Mimsy.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

It has been pouring with rain for days, so much so that I had Mrs. Cutler, the housekeeper, come and light the fire in the library today. As I write, Armitage is curled up in front of the fire, sucking a pencil and working on his radio dramatisation of ‘The Odyssey’, while I have been reclining on the chaise longue, casting my eye over the declared runners and riders for this years Whitbread.

Saturday, August 14, 2004

It has been such a pleasure having dear Simon Armitage to stay; I shall miss him terribly when he heads back for the industrial north tomorrow. Tonight, Mrs Cutler cooked dinner for Simon and my brother Sir Leslie and me, and Leslie cracked open a bottle of the ‘62 afterwards, and he doesn’t do that for everyone, so I know he has enjoyed having Simon about the old place.
A slightly sour was struck at about midnight. Leslie was preparing to take to his bed, and Simon and I were settling down for a chat in the library, (I had been looking forward to sharing my views on the latest crop of Next Generation poets), when fucking old Sid Nolan came hammering on the library windows. He’d been chucked out of the Turks Head again, and knows that he can always get a nightcap at Botolph Hall. I’ve been chucked out of the Turks Head with Sir Sidney on many and many an occasion, and he often comes round to ours if he can’t make it home of an evening, but I wasn’t in the mood for Sid’s abrasive Aussie humour tonight. He was pissed as a bishop, and he told the one about going on the rampage in Balarat with Les Murray, which I’ve heard a hundred times before, and which I could see was not to Simon’s taste. Simon excused himself and went upstairs, leaving me to share a few with Sid, who threw up on the persian rug and passed out on the chaise longue. Really too bad of Sid, who can be a bore when he’s pissed, Australia’s greatest painter and Botolph’s most distinguished citizen or no. Now poor old Mrs Cutler will have to clear up his mess in the morning.

It’s all been a bit bonkers, really. I’m still in Hay, but it has been a peculiar few days. Things are a little fuzzy, it must be faced.

I woke up this morning on the floor of a ruined caravan which, upon further investigation, turned out not to be in Hay at all, but high up in the Black Mountains, in Capel Y Ffin. How I came to be there, and how I came to have soiled my undergarments quite so severely, I cannot now say for sure. A sheep farmer was kind enough to give me a lift down into town in the back of his Land Rover, and dear old Anne Robinson was kind enough to let me clean up in her room at The Swan.

One bright spot of my lost few days is that I seem to have written a poem! I found it written on a piece of lavatory paper stuck to my shoe when I was disrobing in Anne’s en-suite, and it’s certainly in my handwriting, but because of the nature of its composition, (ie, I have no idea when I wrote it or how it came to be stuck to my shoe) I’ve decided to file it under ‘Found’ poems, of which I have a great many. Here it is…

Dead Teds.

Poor old Ted was 68 when he died.

Ted Heath (out of Ted Heath and his Orchestra) was 67,

Whilst Ted Heath was 89.

An average of 74.66666667 years.

How cruel averages are! How cruel!

I wish we’d had another 6.66666667 years of Ted’s poems:

Lots more stuff about pike, and crows.

Or 7.66666667 years of Ted Heath’s smooth yet muscular Big Band arrangements,

Rather than 14.33333333 extra years of Ted Heath;

Even though we would have missed his service

As Father of the House.

I hear on the wireless this morning that dear Ronnie Biggs has taken a turn for the worse, poor old love.

I first met him in Lucy’s, here in Hay, in 1963, him and a bloke who called himself  ‘Stan Agate’, but who was immediately recognisable as my mother’s occassional caller, Professor C.E.M. Joad. Joad it was who got me my first job with The Third Programme. Everyone knew they were the Great Train Robbers, though I was surprised to witness Joad’s involvement. But since this was Hay Festival, everybody was looking over their shoulders to see if there was anyone else in the pub who was more important that they should be talking to, and so didn’t take any notice of the lads. Joad (or ‘Stan’) gave me a wink, so I kept schtum. Ronnie and I got on famously, and we stayed in touch all through his travails.

Just after my wife Mimsy was lost off Majorca in 1975, my brother Sir Leslie invited me to join his annual reading party to cheer me up. That year the party included (of course) dear old Peter Mandelson, and, for the first time, that little shit Michael Jackson. Unusually, rather than in Tunis, as per, the group had decided to go to Rio for their leisurely month of reading, translation, and amateur versification. I jumped at the chance of a ticket to Rio, but rather than sitting around translating Hegel’s’ Phenomenology of the Spirit’ into Welsh with my brother and his friends, I slipped the leash, and spent a pleasant few weeks with old Ronnie and his toothsome companion. Much drink was taken during the course of my stay, and we made a little film together, which we called ‘The Great Villanelle Swindle.’ I held Mimsy’s old Super 8, while Ronnie railed against lyrical formalism. Tremendous stuff.

Lucy’s has lost all its character now, I’m sorry to say. Tried to get in there this lunchtime, but the dear old girl has gone, and The Three Tuns is turned into something that looks like it would be happier somewhere off the Fulham Palace Road. I took my credit to The Blue Boar, where last year was quickly forgiven and forgotten. It is, of course, pissing with rain here in Hay, so the place is full of exciteable girls from the great London publishing houses in wellies, no bad thing; I might be eighty-three, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to a glimpse of elegant, well-groomed knee twixt summer skirt and rubber boot.

God, I feel bloody. Don’t know why. Hardly touched a drop last night, as the skinflint landlord of The Turks Head proved unwilling to stretch my credit, and if it hadn’t been for Sir Sidney Nolan, Australia’s greatest painter standing me a few pints, I don’t know what I would have done. Gone without, I suppose, as so often.

Mind you, when you get to be my great age, unexplained ailments can overtake one at any moment. Here’s an extract from my diary which I found this morning:

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Hay

It is always a huge privilege to be invited to speak at the Hay Festival of Literature, one which has been long denied me. This is a woeful oversight which I have taken somewhat to heart. What do you have to do to get invited?
Imagine my surprise and delight, then, if you will, when my old sparring partner Stephen Spender asked me to share the platform with him at this years festival, subject; ‘Whither Socialist poetry?’
I agreed at once, as this is a subject to which I have given a great deal of thought. On the morning of the event, a car driven by an ex-ostrich farmer from South Africa came out to the house to pick me up, and I was whisked into the saloon bar of The Blue Boar, where I spent a most pleasant late morning, afternoon and early evening in the company of some roofers from Chepstow, who had just been paid on completion of a job of work, and whose free-spending habits reconfirmed my commitment to the working class.
Unfortunately, a pork pie I took for my lunch must have disagreed with me, because by the time of the talk, at 8 ‘o’ clock, I was most unwell. I was sick over Spender’s brogues, and had to be helped from the Festival site.
Now Stephen isn’t talking to me. I’m told that my chance of being asked back have lessened somewhat, to put it mildly. Moral; in future, (and both Ledbury and Cheltenham have put out feelers for next year), I shall avoid solids before my talk.

I’ll be staying in Hay for much of this year’s Festival, and hopefully filing blogs for my loyal readers. I’m packing my valise this afternoon, and heading off in the morning. My needs are modest and few; a change of underwear and my shaving gear, a third class return ticket from Moreton-in-Marsh to Hereford, and fifty quid lent to me by my brother’s companion Eric, who sold a Welsh dresser of questionable provenance to a couple of bug-eyed Yanks at the weekend, and who is subsequently in funds. Cheers Eric! Sing Ho! for Hay!

I hear on the grapevine that Ian MacEwan has won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. The prize is a pig. Just goes to show you. Write something pallid about sulking poetesses sitting around in dustmotes lit by the westering sun, get 30k. Write something funny, get a pig. Not even a pig. You get a pig named after you. It’s like saying to the Nobel winner, oh, here’s a cheque. We’re going to keep it ourselves, but we’re going to name it after you. Drives me mad. Mind you, I wouldn’t say no to the Booker or the Nobel or the fucking pig naming, though my chances are vanishingly low.

The only time one of the glittering prizes fell within my purview was after dear old John B died, and everyone knew it was between me and Ted for the Laureateship. I’d been encouraged to believe that neither working largely in concrete form, or my covert support for the RCPGB(ML) would necessarily prevent my appointment. Larkin had dropped by at Botolph Hall with Monica while on a final touring holiday of the Cotwolds, and insisted that it was mine if I wanted it. What nobody knew except me and Ted was that I’d lost it to him in a game of backgammon, funnily enough while we both staying with old Plum himself, in Le Touquet. 1957, it would have been. Mimsy got us out there somehow, me and her and Ted, and, having nothing else to gamble with, we gambled with our future. That’s when he won his clear run at The Laureateship. I stepped down in honour of that old gambling debt, and the rest is history; Ted in Westminster Abbey, Spume contemplating a pauper’s grave.

Now, Plum was funny. I’ll give him that. The people who’ve won the prize named in his honour, they’re not funny. They’re humourous. Different thing. I’ll tell you who else was funny, and that was old Malcolm Hardee. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children her cunt fell off, that was one of his. But did he win a prize? Did he win so much as a virtual pig? No, he did not. He drowned in ignominious circumstances, dragged down into the rat piss infested waters of Limehouse Basin by pockets bulging with change from a fruit machine. Bloody good luck to him, say I. I’d take it all with me, if I had anything to take other than a few hopeful betting slips, and a perilously over-heated slate at The Turk’s Head, Botolph St. Otto.

Seeing the Queen on telly reminded me of her sister Margaret. Do you know, she once gave me the glad-eye in the crush bar at the Royal Opera House? No word of a lie. This would have been 61, or 62, when she was after pretty much anything in trousers, but still. Terribly flattering. I would have made a move, but my wife Mimsy caught me winking at her, and put the kybosh on it. Bloody rich, in view of the fact that Mimsy was entertaining a great many gentleman callers herself, including most of the staff at the Circus, where she worked on the switchboard between shifts at The Windmill. Who knows what might have come to pass if Mimsy had let me off the leash a little? I bet you I wouldn’t have been sitting here staring into the £78 million blackhole carved out of the poetry budget by Her Majesty’s Government. No, I’d be Poet In residence on Mustique, that’s what, instead of the fucking Potato Marketing Board, no offence.

I’m looking forward to this evening’s Orange festivities, having backed the favourite months ago, and got three to one about her. Mrs. Cutler, our redoubtable housekeeper being in one of her ‘moods’ (a consequence, she always claims in her clearer moments, of her time as a volunteer at Porton Down in the 1950′s), I was only able to extract a tenner from the household purse. Still, all being well, I’ll have forty quid in my pocket tomorrow afternoon, and I’m off for the night in the Brewer Street flat, and who knows what else? I’ll start at the French House; my friend and ally E.G. Pugh (‘Bus Stops of Huntingdonshire’) gets in there early evening, and he’s usually in funds.

Still, thinking over what I’ll do with my winnings caused me to look through my diary entries from other Orange nights. Here’s a short extract from a few years back, which has made me nervous…

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Orange Prize

I hear on the grapevine that Andrea Levy has scooped the Orange Prize this year. It often seems to go to outsiders and I honestly think that it is starting to look like a value bet. The book seems a little unbalanced in favour of the punter who is prepared to have a go on the 6/1, 7/1 shots. Circle it in next years racing calander, if you want my advice.
The Orange has a venerable and distinguished history. It was Virginia Woolf who was the first recipient, in 1936, and I remember seeing the trophy on the mantelpiece of Monk’s House when I was taken to see her as a child. Leonard was a cousin of my mothers, by marriage I believe. My Father was a huge favourite of Virginia’s, and she sent a charming letter of condolence to my mother when he was interred for the duration. I was no more than eight; Virginia couldn’t have been kinder; she listened to one of my first ventures into verse with an indulgent ear, and after tea we played french cricket on the lawn. She had a good bowling arm, and could put a little bit of left hand spin on it if the conditions were right. Terrible loss to the Women’s game.

Why don’t I ever listen to my own advice? Should I have had a pop on one of the outsiders? I could have got twenty fives about some of them.

The only thing of mine which ever won an award, of course, was ‘On The Opening Of The Scunthorpe Power Station’, which won the Morning Star Marxist/Leninist Poetry Prize in 1978.  The editor said at the Award giving at the Soviet Embassy that he wished everybody could have won. Bollocks to that. Twenty quid, that was, which was quite a lot of money in those days.

Now Spume has contacted me to announce that he wishes his contribution to the festschrift to take the form of a ‘blog.’ He has on occasion sent me poems, which I have been pleased to publish on my own blog. He has enjoyed this experience so much that he has decided to publish some of his pieces which have previously only appeared in ‘The Book Magazine’, ‘The Cotswold Review’, ‘Broad Sheep’ and ‘The Tuber’, the house magazine of The Potato Marketing Board. He also hopes to rescue some of the content from a previosly ill-judged attempt to publish ‘on-line.’ It is possible that if so moved, he may write some entirely new material, which may, if we are very lucky, include some new poems.

Here is the short biographical sketch I have prepared for the introduction to the festschrift. I hope that it might serve as an introduction to Spume’s latest project for those who know his work, but little of his life; and also as an introduction to his work for those who are just embarking on a thrilling voyage through the works of the Twentieth Century’s most cruelly over-looked man of letters.

The Spume family have owned land in the Cotswolds village of Botolph St Otto  since at least 1526 when Toby Spume came to live at Botolph Hall. He was Companion of the Stool to Henry VIII. His great grandson Dudley was made baronet in 1611, in thanks for his services to James I. Over the centuries the family have acquired more and more acreage, and the fifteenth and current baronet, Sir Leslie Spume, is now the largest landowner in the area, and Botolph Hall a compact but fine gentleman’s residence, since its restructuring in the late 17th century.

The fourteenth baronet, Sir Bufton Spume, married late in life, after a youth and early middle age spent in somewhat rackety company. Sir Bufton had been close to The Prince of Wales in the period immediately after the first war, and the locals around Botolph St Otto whispered that he was spending too much time at the baccarat table in Le Touquet. But to the surprise of all, in 1924, when he was forty six, he married Dorothea MacFaddean, the daughter of a Scottish landowner, who was then just 19, and embarking on her career as ‘une grande horizontale’. Sir Bufton devised his own method of childrearing, to which his three sons were subject. Sir Leslie (b. 1925), Carol (b. 1926) and Hilary (b. 1927) were largely brought up outdoors. Sir Bufton believed that, as boys were essentially savages, their savagery should be given free rein. The boys therefore lived in three bell tents in the woods around Botolph Hall, largely foraging for themselves, until they were seven, when they were sent to progressive boarding schools. Leslie and Carol both attended Gordonstoun, while young Hilary attended Bedales. Unfortunately for the family, Sir Bufton was also an enthusiastic supporter of the British Union of Fascists, and he was detained for the duration of the Second World War. Hilary Spume did not see his father between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and, when they were reunited, each took an instant dislike to the other. While Leslie was groomed to take over the estate, and Carol had begun his flirtation with Roman Catholicism, which was to lead to his ordination as priest, Hilary found it difficult to establish his identity.

He left school equipped for very little, and so his mother helped him find work with the BBC. This necessitated a move to London, where he arrived in 1947, ostensibly to work as a production assistant on The Third Programme. His parents arranged a room with an old school friend of his mother’s, Bunty Haynes, who was now married to a dentist in Wimbledon.

London at that time was like Shangri-La to an impressionable youth, and Hilary quickly found his way to Soho, where he fell into the company of a new breed of poet. He cut a dashing figure, even at the start of his career, with his trademark pink shirts and loose ties. There is some evidence, mostly from his early poem ‘Bunty’s Room’, that he had formed his first amorous attachment with his landlady; certainly, he was not inexperienced in matters of love when he met Morwenna ‘Mimsy’ Trelegget in 1953 at ‘Daddios’, a jazz and poetry cafe in a bookshop basement on the Charing Cross Road. Spume was finishing his early collection ‘A Light Wind’ (1954), where the influence of Housman is perhaps a little too all-pervasive. The discovery of Daddios, and his meeting with Mimsy, changed his poetic style forever.

Daddios was a stronghold of bongo playing goatee beard and sandal wearing beats. Mimsy worked as a stripper at The Windmill, but she was a regular at Daddios where she performed exotic dances to the sound of a tape loop, bongos, and vers libre. After meeting her Spume abandoned lyric verse for the raw excitement of concrete poetry, and his next three collections ‘Splurge’ (1958) ‘Phtung’ (1963) and his masterpiece ‘Centre Point’ (1971) are all firmly rooted in the concrete tradition.

Spume and Mimsy were married in 1957, the same year that Spume left the BBC to live off his wife’s immoral earnings, and their tempestuous relationship was legendary throughout Soho. Their two hour fist fight over lunch at The French House in 1964 is still remembered with great affection, as is the time that Mimsy threw Hilary down the stairs at The Colony Club at the launch party for ‘Centre Point’, a fight that saw them both barred for a week. But theirs was, as well as a blood soaked gladiatorial contest, one of the great literary love affairs of the twentieth century. Their tiny flat in Berwick Street, although a cockpit for the worst kind of domestic horror, was also a warm and comfortable nest for the Spumes, and a refuge and asylum for their many friends from the pub. ‘Phtung’, the title poem of Spumes third collection is both an urgent celebration and a bloodstained map of their passionate relationship.

By the time of the critically acclaimed issue of ‘Centre Point’ the Spumes were living hand to mouth. Mimsy, approaching forty, was in less demand as an exotic dancer, and Spume’s poetry brought in virtually nothing. But, in 1973, a stroke of good fortune came their way when Sir Bufton Spume died at the age of 92. Although his will went out of its way to ensure that Hilary received nothing, the new baronet, Sir Leslie, had always had both a soft spot for his errant younger brother and an intimate and loving relationship with Mimsy. He granted Hilary a small monthly allowance. All seemed set fair for the Spume menage when, in 1974, during a visit to Robert Graves in Majorca, Mimsy  dissapeared; her body has never been found, so it is fair to assume that she is dead.

Spume’s grief knew no bounds, and he considered not going to the pub on his return to London, but felt that this would be disloyal to Mimsy’s memory. He took his accustomed place at the bar, and announced that he was renouncing concrete poetry, as it smacked of bourgeois individualism. He had become a Marxist. He described his ideological position as  ‘a pinch of Stalin, a spoonful of Lenin, and a bushel of Mao.’ He was offered his old job at the BBC, but declined, as the money wasn’t right. His collection of Marxist poetry, ‘On The Opening of The Scunthorpe Power Station’ (1977) is still his best known and best loved work. The Morning Star said of the collection that it represented ‘a smack in the mouth for Trotskyite re-entrist verse.’ He was appointed poet-in-residence of The Potato Marketing Board in 1980, and FRSL in 1983.

Spume returned to Botolph Hall after the supposed death of his mother in 1988, since when he has been working on a collection of nature poems, which combine both strands of Spume’s oeuvre, both concrete and Marxist. Life is quiet for Spume at the Hall, but is not without its surprises. For example, all three brothers were shocked to discover that their mother had not actually died in 1988, but had in fact been living in the Priest Hole at Botolph Hall with her elderly maid, Edith. Mrs Cutler, Botolph Hall’s fearsome housekeeper said that she always thought that food had been disapearing from the kitchen, but had put it down to Eric, Sir Leslie’s companion, who is prone to midnight feasts. The world of English letters waits breathlessly for Spume’s long promised new collection, ‘Mumbles’, but for now must content itself with his work for the Potato Marketing Board.Click to view slideshow.