Masefield’s Gallipoli
It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of In the Daffodil Fields emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It’s all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield’s great excitement.
“A swear word in a city slum
—Max Beerbohm
A simple swear word is to some—
To Masefield something more.”
Still, to call Gallipoli “bloody Hell” is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, though, a very remarkable book—a work of genius.
To be cheerful this Xmas would require a coup de théâtre—some sort of psychological sleight of hand.
I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a soul to converse with. Everything comes to me secondhand—through the newspapers, the world of life through the halfpenny Daily News, and the world of books through the Times Literary Supplement. For the rest I listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look into the fire to see the pictures there. …
Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic the world is.
Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hilltop, I could look right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever expected to be again.
“In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery—”
(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I am going out for a walk in the fog.)
Reminiscences
For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times—remote, inaccessible, prehistoric—before ever this Journal was begun, when I myself was but a jelly without form and void—that is, before I had developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a passion for Natural History.
One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my collection, induced me to “swap” them for his collection of birds’ eggs which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little realised—nor did I—the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the deal.
I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds’ eggs, but for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country myself and collect them—I just swapped, until one day our errand boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, “I will sh-how you how to find Birds’ n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods.” So one Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled, he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank, where he—my good and beneficent angel—presently showed me a Thrush’s nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass, in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them—in trying to blow them, schoolboy fashion.
Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds and Birds’ eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds’ wings, Birds’ claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the Boy’s Own Paper, taught me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable backgrounds, in the one case a molehill, looking, I fear, more like a mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an
