What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

I walked a very long way, across the saddle of Kalk Bay mountain by way of Echo Valley, down past the old silver mine itself, up onto Ou Kaapse Weg, past the woodcutters with their bundles of rooikrans, all the way to a mechanic’s workshop behind the old Sun Valley shopping mall. My car has been in for repairs – it’s been overheating, has had its pressure checked and its system flushed but still the gauge swung up and the rusty-looking water boiled. At last a cracked cylinder gasket has been diagnosed and has been sealed with metal stitching.

      Beth would have given me a lift, or I could have caught the train and a taxi, or walked along the main road and across the avenues, but I chose this three-hour route. The weather was crisp, one of those brilliant, blue-skied late winter days, when the peninsula seems to apologise for unremitting rain.

      As I hiked, focused on my destination but alive to the fynbos and sugarbirds around me, I thought of a friend who once outlined the plot of a novel he planned to write about Cape Town. Various disasters would befall the city, resulting in a massive drop in population and necessitating a gradual return to nineteenth and even eighteenth century forms of transport: steam train, horse-drawn carriage, sailing boat. One of the last big tankers would dock at Simon’s Town and load derelict, obsolete motor vehicles for shipment to the Far East. Pristine nature would return. Dull parking areas in Fish Hoek would be reclaimed by the dune system, tarred roads would decay and eventually be wrenched up, leaving the sandy track of history. The bend between Kalk Bay and Clovelly would revert to a perilously rocky set of steps requiring assistance in descent, and consequently the re-establishment of the old corner toll.

      Once I had listened to this detailed outline – not really a plot, but a beautifully imagined setting – I knew that my friend would never write the book. Because if a writer starts letting out his ideas before he puts pen to paper, they escape, taking their energy with them. This is particularly true if the plot outline or germinal idea is met with rapturous interest. On the other hand, I have noticed on two occasions when I outlined ideas for poems and was met by blank stares, I went back and wrote them with uncanny force, as if to say, See, fool, this is what I meant! Perhaps these observations of mine are true not just of artistic plans.

      I never know if what I say to you is obvious, something you and everybody else have always known, and I only just lighted upon.

      It’s interesting to me that I walked that distance today with ease. I have developed a taste for exercise relatively late in my life. My infantile aversion to physical recreation I put down to the fact that duffers, weaklings, boys without Springbok colours potential, were actively discouraged from partaking in games in my youth.

      In my youth.

      It was all about winning. If one wasn’t good at them, one had no place in games. Then in the army, exercise was only ever a form of punishment, an excellent way to break you down so that you could be re-created in the image of the SADF.

      After I klaared out, I got into the habit of not taking exercise. In my late twenties I would have been puffed by the first leg of today’s hike and prayed for mountain rescue. Now, at thirty-seven, having happily discovered the truth that moving one’s limbs in a coordinated yet non-competitive manner is a simple human pleasure, the hike was exhilarating. I note without comment that the boys who were first-team rugby, cricket, etc. even victor ludorum Ryno himself, are nursing ominous knee and shoulder injuries these days.

      I took water with me on my excursion, and cheese and tomato sandwiches. I’d have liked to carry nothing but a biscuit in my pocket, as Mr Ramsay claims to have done in his youth, but I’m made of more mortal stuff. Or maybe the “biscuit” Mr Ramsay refers to was pemmican.

      When I got back, the sun was starting its early afternoon descent behind the mountain. It’s more of a sudden drop than a descent. Unlike the Atlantic seaboard, we do not enjoy lingering sunsets. But I could see the Brass Bell still basking in a sunny patch so I went down with a newspaper and had two beers on the wooden decks, catching the occasional spray of the rising tide. You can see our house from down there: from a distance it has a certain Edwardian, bow-fronted, St-Ives-ish charm.

      A word came to me to describe myself: insouciant. I know it’s come to be associated more and more often with its pejorative meaning, “unconcerned” (see INDIFFERENCE, says my dictionary), but I prefer “carefree”. I am carefree because I have a half-share in a valuable seaside property; the Feinstein Trust has sent me my contract; I live my life at my own pace. Though I miss you, and long for you, it is also true that without this mood of yearning, I would not be able to write any poetry.

      I read somewhere that the British “poet laureate” Andrew Motion once took or sometimes takes cough mixture in order to simulate the slightly sorry-for-yourself head cold feeling so conducive to verse.

      I’m feeling drowsy after those beers.

      Please don’t think that I am comparing you to cough syrup.

      Sunday 11th August

      7.15 pm

      This morning I bit into an apple and was filled with disappointment and something else, like hankering. The apple was small with a dull, soapy taste that spoke of cold storage. It called itself Golden Delicious when it was neither. What could I expect from a Value Pack?

      I remembered the day we walked through the orchards till we reached the older, more venerable trees. You picked a big, shiny red, polished it on your jeans and said, “Taste this. South Africans don’t usually get this quality – they’re all exported.” The apple was crunchy and intensely sweet; juice dribbled down my chin at the first bite. I was telling you how delicious the taste was – always difficult to find the right words when one’s mouth is full – when it occurred to me that you had intended this moment. You knew when we set out for this apparently casual stroll – “Come, I’ll show you the farm’s boundaries” – that you would stop at a tree familiar to you and get me to taste a real apple. We were not lovers, not yet, but we were doing what lovers do, that shy sharing of favourite things. I looked into your eyes until you looked away and summoned the dogs to heel. I was sure you were thinking about me, and this pleased me immensely. But it turned out that, as always, you had been struck by some thought about the needy.

      “I want Theo to give this orchard to the workers, for them to harvest and develop on their own.”

      I am so wrapped up in myself: you are almost completely unravelled in the service of others. You were, I think, denied self-pity from the very start, when you stood stoically, five years old, on Cathcart station waiting for the train to Queenstown where you were to be a termly boarder. Your three older sisters knew how everything worked: the timetable, the coaches, the seats, the new term. They hailed old friends and messed about with hockey sticks. Your dashing father and willowy mother stood arm-in-arm, still terribly in love, perhaps even – heartlessly – looking forward to a childless break. You held your tuck box and were watchful.

      It was Sal’s first holy communion today, so I made a rare guest appearance at church. Sal has been looking forward to the white dress and mantilla as much as she has been dreading her first confession. She did the confession last week. God knows what she confessed.

      The priest adopted his most ingratiating children’s hour tone of voice, speaking of mummies and daddies and how they must give a big hug to kind Mrs O’Leary, their catechism teacher, who had brought them to God’s great red-checked tablecloth. I’m so tired of these worldly priests. Here is my message to all novitiates: I don’t want to hear your petty prejudices. I don’t want to know about the cake sale or whether Team A or Team B is cleaning the windows this week. I want you to stand there and let God course through you to me. Go get me God. Otherwise, become a floor manager at the hypermarket, or find yourself a car park to guard.

      I leafed through the missal, thinking how all my childhood I heard these beautiful words spoken; their cadences and images – of that which is bound and that which is loosed, of those who look without seeing, of captors who ask for songs, of the vine and its branches, of the last become first, of He who will come after me and baptise with the holy spirit and with fire. And with fire. How my namesake must have relished the power in that. Surely these phrases entered me and stayed, like