[David Callin]

Consider happiness. When I was ten,
my sister eight, and living on a farm
as carelessly as Marie Antoinette,
time passing lightly and without alarm,

one summer evening Doddy came to town,
for one night only. Dad cleared out the van
and drove us boldly into Douglas, down
onto a prom broadly Victorian

and in its pomp. Trams trotted back and forth,
in search of more or less unbuttoned fun
in this unlikely Naples of the North.
Stacked deck chairs dreamed of mornings without sun.

Largely agricultural, we were
an innocent and undemanding crowd,
ripe for the taking, which he did. He wore
us out at last. We laughed until we cried,

and then we sang, and made our dazzled way
into the seafront’s son et lumiere.
The lights were bright when we turned right on Broadway
where now there’s only seaweed in the air.

The world and his wife have long since moved along,
leaving us to our homely local beers.
but I can bring it all back in a song,
so play me Happiness, play me Tears
(for souvenirs).

[Joe Crocker]

Hi David

I grew up less than 20 miles from Knotty Ash and was always on the lookout for”jam butty” mines. Never saw Doddy, but I remember my parents returning from a rare night out, raving about him. So this is very familiar territory for me. And we were “innocent and undemanding”. The company my dad worked for used to organise an annual works’ outing to star-studded Blackpool. They would book the whole train and we all ate a restaurant with linen tablecloths and more cutlery then we knew what to do with. Blackpool is a sadder place these days. I do hope Douglas hasn’t fared quite so badly and that there is still some unbuttoned fun to be had.

As always, your details (eg emptying your Dad’s van to make room for the kids) do an admirably economic job of recreating that time. (And I loved the van/Victorian rhyme.)

Tatty Bye!

Joe

[Carl Copeland]

This is a nice slice of a life unknown to me, David. I’d never heard of Knotty Ash or Doddy or the two songs or even “the world and his wife,” but I’m glad I have now. I think I know what you mean about a loony comic wearing you out. I thought Rip Taylor was beneath my dignity until he once clubbed me with his corny props and wisecracks long enough to reduce me to hysterics. I doubt he’d get through my defenses today, but I’m still grateful for that refreshing breach. Nitwise, “and without alarm” struck me as unnecessary and rhyme-driven, but it may tie in with “time” by way of an alarm clock image.

[Jim Moonan]

.
There is often an anchoring of your poems to your place of birth and home, like this poem seems to do. But it doesn't impede on the poem's reaching for something transcendent that anyone can see from anywhere and call it "home". In fact, the anchoring is what it needs to transport the reader to a universal experience we each have in our own places where we are anchored.

When I first read this poem I thought it sounded oddly exotic to me, an American, who did not recognize myself in it and didn't find a connection to my own life. But now that I've read it a few times over the past week or so I've come to find it causes me to reflect on those primal memories I have of growing up in New Jersey. Thanks for rousing them.

.

[Michael Cantor]

This was not really my life, but I could go with it and enjoy it - with one major exception. The Marie Antoinette reference in S1 really bothers me. Unless I'm missing something (which happens more often than I like to admit) it has nothing to do with "largely agricultural" life described in the poem, and "Antoinette/ten" is pushing it (particularly in the first stanza) as an irregular rhyme. Off with her head! Find a replacement for "Marie Antoinette" and I'd like the poem lot more.

[Joe Crocker]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

The Marie Antoinette reference in S1 really bothers me. Unless I'm missing something (which happens more often than I like to admit) it has nothing to do with "largely agricultural" life described in the poem,

Didn't Marie Antoinette have a toy farm built in the grounds of Versailles where she could go and play at being a milkmaid or somesuch? Well that's the idyll I think may be referenced in the poem.

[David Callin]

Thanks Joe. Douglas too is a much sadder and quieter place these days. We shall not look upon their like again, eh? Although I don't think Douglas was ever as unbuttoned as I believe Blackpool could be - and still can be, in patches?

I haven't had a Tatty Bye in a while!

Glad to introduce you to Doddy, Carl, and you have reciprocated. I had never heard of Rip Taylor until now. I will take thought about "without alarm".

Hi Jim. Thanks for that. I'd like to see some of your primal memories of New Jersey memorialised in a poem.

Thanks for looking in, Michael. Joe has the explanation for Marie Antionette spot on. On my sole visit to Versailles my wife and I found the rather chichi little spot where MA dabbled in her farming. It seemed very homely in those otherwise overly grand acres (or hectares).

As Joe said, tatty bye!

David

[Clive Watkins]

Dear David

I am, as usual these days, coming late to this.

I very much enjoyed it as a poem, having had no difficulty in picking up the cultural, and indeed the historical, references. (Doddy is historical now, isn’t he?) Understandably, these will be unfamiliar to some readers, but the poignancy of the evocation is effective nonetheless; and of course your opening injunction invites us to ponder, in the light of the poem’s anecdote, the nature of happiness. (It is a topic explored in one of my favourite of Hardy’s poems, “The Self-Unseeing”.)

I see that Joe grew up less than twenty miles from Knotty Ash. Though I was born in Sheffield, I grew up during the Fifties and early Sixties less than four miles from Knotty Ash. Each day my bus to school along Queens Drive took me past the turning to Knotty Ash at Broadgreen. So, the doings of Doddy are very familiar to me, as was his long-running BBC radio show. Like you, I remember very vividly going to see him (in my case at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool) and laughing till the tears ran down my face, and my sides ached. I must have been in my early teens, I suppose, my youthful cynicism ambushed and overcome by Doddy’s comic lunacy.

Your poem had other particular resonances for me. (Apologies to one and all for this personal aside.) Liverpool’s connexions with the Isle of Man are something most Liverpool residents are very aware of. As a boy, one year I holidayed there very enjoyably – fishing, with my brother, off the breakwater at Peel; visiting the Laxey Wheel; pottering around Douglas. On another occasion, I went over with a school team to play tennis against King William’s. A few years later, when I met my wife, I discovered that she was of Manx stock (Sayle grandparents, from the north end of the island) and had a much older Manx foster-sister who grew up on a small-holding near Ballasalla during the Thirties and Forties.

Thanks for the “souvenirs”, David!

Clive

[David Callin]

Thank you very much for that. Clive. "The Self-Unseeing" is a favourite of mine too, and I didn't see the similarity so clearly until you pointed it out. (Talk about the self-unseeing.)

I'm really pleased you found things in it which spoke to you. It is fairly localised, I agree, but I have a sort of vague theory that only the truly local is truly universal (or at least transferrable). That may not stand up to close scrutiny, but it's something I adhere to - for the moment, at least.

Great memories of the Island there, and some good Manx associations. We live in St. John's, which you will probably remember from the outing to Peel. And of course a lot of Manx folk left here for Liverpool in those days, and earlier. One of my aunts married a paratrooper, stationed (briefly) here during the war, and ended up in Woolton as a sister at Alder Hey while he was a Liverpool police dog handler. I can't lay claim to any Sayle connections myself.

Lhiats (as we have started saying again, over here)

David

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Still chewing David,

I spent some time on YouTube last night looking at Isle of Man shorts. I only knew what I had found in researching Bligh (because of Christian and Heywood) years ago which meant I was a tad out of date.

Doddy has me a little beat. Help

L4 S1 is rhyme driven to my ear.

Jan