Poems from Wivenhoe

1

Drawn by hunger, hope and happiness, the congregation of villagers was time and again at the Fish and Chips.
A step only, come to think of it, from the village church. The smell, up the slender by-street! No Soviet queue, a handful of locals, artists, intellectuals, the Books, perhaps, the Antiques, and housewives (if the word’s still on). Greetings and head-nodding, and warm small talk, the secret bond of the English.

The shop in memory a large cubby-hole had all the trimmings, salt, vinegar, ketchup, and with them sedate on the counter a pile of ready paper. But the bonus, unique, was a further untidy pile of books left by customers and sold for pennies. Kingsley Amis in Penguins to name but him. And at our backs, as we close in on the prize, famous pargeting. What more could one ask?

And the fish! Fresh from our little port and thither from the wide and near-by at the estuary North Sea – from the Germanic Mediterranean, the English mere ure. Dogger, Humber, Thames, teaming with cod, rock salmon, plaice, first fried in batter by Sephardic Jews, first coupled with chips by a Jewish immigrant, popular with fish-on-Friday Catholics, created in Protestant England but not by us, a gift, and the people’s choice. Hitchcock in his boyhood lived above a chippy. A miraculous catch, our survival through poverty and two World Wars.

Rambling erudition, waiting my turn, over rumbling insides.

After our gathering, each bears away his gourmet dish, this luxury. Carrying it hot back home in weather, maybe, as crisp as batter. Or, through the rain, hugging the heat burning the double wrapping against one’s hands, and, arrived, thinking of the others having likewise the fish’n’chips bursting on the palate.

A modern merry-making. A little day music.

2

A strong south-easterly sun blazes and shadows the Wivenhoe streets where they run between the lines of houses like airy tunnels.

Imagination meanwhile lasers the ground for news of smugglers’ bolt-holes, of the desperate and rollicking eighteenth century. The village, open to all the goodies of the Continent, lapped them up along the tidal reach, muffled some in the harbour, and stowed the contraband liquor in the huddle of taverns. (‘Contraband’: a word from my now underground childhood, like ‘sabotage’, whose mystery meant more than its meaning at the age when difficult words were pronounced slowly.) In darkness and mist, customs men and their quarry scurry with whispering feet and lanterns down the same streets, till smugglers and customers mole into the warren of tunnels. From quayside alehouse to the church – a virtuous move – goes one of these. In the jolly days of piracy, a secret society.

‘Smuggling’, close to snuggling, and it feels like home, having been imported from the Germanic word-hoard. What’s not in a name?

The village has a hidden life, like everyone. Smuggling has to be nobler than mugging, and not only boys thrill to risk taking as heroic. The fascination of the forbidden, I muse, as I fondle a bottle snatched from legality. Set up a law and we’ll break it. You can’t help admiring when odds and numbers are against, when the foxy fraternity abides by strict rules, and consummate hoodwinking attains the aura of game or art. It savours of chaos transformed. Outside the law, someone breaks in, criminality hints of grace.

In the ease of a later now, I sipple a Polish gin brought under wraps to our surprising port by a vessel from Hamburg. We talk enviously of the deeper time beneath our own, in the street, our houses, the pubs, swapping tales of where the tunnels were and where you can still see an entrance. From time to time, when the word goes round, we pass the hot goods from one to another, quietly enjoying our underhand sociability.

3

We drive down the High Street, where I point out Max Headroom’s place, with his name on the lintel. The sky is light-blue-blazer-blue, whereas story, like night, takes one into another world, or this world othered, many of Conrad’s stories being tales told in darkness. Doesn’t a poem also…? Indeed, in broad daylight. We meditate together, as I steer, on life, and death, and puns, our points and rejoinders lightly rocking the car, like a boat in a mild storm. It was, someone says, the 20th ‘Valeria’ Legion who copped this billet on the edge of the world among outlandish natives, only kept going and from revolt by regular cargoes of what was their cup of tea, real wine from home.
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