All day it has rained, and I have been stuck
in my hotel room in Saint
Germain-en-Laye. Saint Germain is west of Paris, nearly an hour by Metro and RER
from the Gare du Nord. Here Louis XIV and his predecessors held court before
Versailles was built; and here James II, the last Stuart King of England, lived
out his exile and died in 1701; Queen Victoria came to pay her respects at his
tomb in the parish church, and I wonder if young Claude Debussy came out to watch her,
for he was born here in 1862. I wanted to walk one more time in the Château’s grounds, for I expect this will be the last Sunday I shall
ever spend in Saint Germain; but now, thanks to the rain, I’ve missed my
chance.
For the past ten years I have spent a week
here each June, based at the Lycée International de Saint
Germain-en-Laye. As ‘Monsieur L’Inspecteur de Cambridge’, I
have overseen the Language and Literature exams of students from all over
France who take the British version of the Option
International du Baccalauréat (the OIB, definitely not to
be confused with the IB). It’s a job I have greatly enjoyed, especially because
it has given me the chance to work with teachers, Anglophone and Francophone, British
and American as well as French, who are all committed to an unusual educational
project that is bicultural as well as bilingual.
The OIB has brought me to France four or
five times every year, and taken me right across the country: from Strasbourg to
Rouen, to Lyon, Grenoble and Aix-en-Provence. And of course to Paris itself: to
the Ministry of Education, to the rather grim Maison
des Examens in Arceuil; to schools, to the American University and,
only last week, to the Institut d’études avancées.
Twice a year I have helped to run conferences for teachers: two days each
autumn in Sèvres, at the Centre
international d’études pédagogique (CIEP)
and two days each spring, I have come to St Germain, and run training days for
teachers at the Château d’Hennemont. This
building has some history: though it’s a 19th century folly on a
scale that renders the word ‘folly’ simply inadequate, it was the Paris
headquarters of (successively) the Gestapo and Eisenhower’s SHAFE.
In such settings, my lectures and workshops
on teaching literature (poetry particularly) have doubtless seemed tame enough,
but I have found my role as Cambridge Inspector absorbing and rewarding. I have
made many friends through the OIB and am stepping down now only because I
believe you should never outstay your welcome; and, anyway, if you haven’t made
your mark in ten years you’re never going to. Still, I would have liked to
explore Saint Germain one last time – but all day it has rained.
‘All day It Has Rained’
is the title of a poem by Alun Lewis, a
Welsh poet remembered today, if at all, for the poems he wrote during the
Second World War (he died in Burma in 1944):
All day it has rained, and we
on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our
bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets
spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey
wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing
fine rain ….
It’s not so much the unheroic couplets as the sprawling lines and unpredictable stresses that count here. It is
almost as though the poet – a soldier in training, under canvas, wet and
listless – is writing up his diary: ‘I
saw a fox’, he notes, ‘And wrote about it in a scribbled letter home.’ For the
squaddies, the boredom and discomfort of their present existence makes both
their past life (‘real’ life, if you like) and the actual war seem equally
trivial, equally distant: ‘We talked of girls,’ Lewis records, ‘and dropping
bombs on Rome’. His poem is a succession of ‘ands’ – one damned thing after
another, in no particular order – as he contemplates a day in which nothing
happens, jotting down thoughts as they come to him
…
the quiet dead, and the loud celebrities
Exhorting
us to slaughter, and the herded refugees …
He, too, out on the moors, is herded like
sheep – like lambs to slaughter, in a certain sense. Here, the ambiguity of ‘to slaughter’ reminds
me of Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Can
you Remember?’ …
… where we went
and whence we came
To be killed, or
kill.
But Alun Lewis is thinking of a different poet
and of another country. He recalls a day when he himself, accompanied by a
‘shaggy patient dog’, went walking in the footsteps of his hero, Edward Thomas.
It was a private pilgrimage …
To the Shoulder
o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.
It doesn’t matter that actually Thomas was
killed by the blast of a shell; it may not matter that it would later be Lewis himself
whose song was stopped by a bullet, in Burma. What counts is the aftershock to
the reader when this apparently random collection of rainy-day memories comes
to an abrupt end with the death of a poet.
War does cause abrupt ends. But it’s a reminder, too, that Thomas’s ‘song’,
his poetry, did not end, being read and valued today more highly than ever. Alun
Lewis has played his part in ensuring this is so: back in the 1940s, Edward
Thomas was neither widely read nor known. W.H. Auden was right to declare (in ‘In Memory of
W.B. Yeats’) that ‘poetry
makes nothing happen’. But he was right, too, that ‘it survives’: good poetry matters for what it
is, not for what it does. Verse that sets out to make things happen is
propaganda, not poetry.
I should have liked, very much, to share
‘All Day It Has Rained’ with my friends in the OIB; but, as with my farewell
visit to the Château of Saint
Germain-en-Laye, the moment has passed.
Adrian Barlow
[illustrations:
The Château of St Germain-en-Laye (not on a rainy day!); spiral staircase
in the Château d’Hennemont.
Photos © the author.
I have occasionally written about
my discussions of poetry with colleagues in the OIB:
