A Very Small Spider
Last week, a reader told me about his spider. A very, very small one, so nobody need hide behind the sofa.
Every morning when he went to the car he would find a spider’s thread stretching from his wing mirror to his door handle and each morning, feeling guilty, he had to see the thread break as he opened the door.
Then, last week, he went out to the car and put his hand on the handle, looking apologetically at the mirror. As he did so he was surprised to see the very, very small spider emerge from the very slight gap between the mirror and its waterproofing surround.
He didn’t actually tell me his next action but I can imagine he raised his hat and said ‘Morning! Awfully sorry to trouble you.’
So, having started fantasising, I have indulged myself a little further:
.
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Text and illustrations ©Paul Wigmore 2010
The Port Isaac Poet
One reader is interested to know how I began writing verse. It began close to the onset of adolescence, that time of spots and sudden urges.
The family was on holiday in Port Isaac, Cornwall. It had been a favourite for many years.
I had stood at a window gazing at the distant sea, clouds and gulls and simply thought it would be fun to write a little rhyme about it. It never got further than:
Clouds race like tattered rags
across Port Isaac Bay.
I kept it for years. I was proud of the tattered rags. From that time onwards I have found that completing a satisfactory bit of verse is the best tonic around. Putting words together in an unusual and sometimes enigmatic way can be like walloping a ball at table tennis and seeing it strike the last half-inch of table: you feel unbelievably good.
The actual production of work didn’t start until my early teens, and it was always nonsense sparked off by things happening - and absolutely always for showing to an immediate audience - most often the people who were involved in whatever it was that had happened. I could never keep it to myself; it wouldn’t have made sense. I was essentially a performer, very proud of what I had written 
and anxious to give others the benefit of my sheer brilliance.
This was the limit of my output until my my early 30s, when more substantial stuff emerged. In my forties and onwards it became more thoughtful, but still usually influenced by a place or an experience.
And I have only this moment realised that my ‘tattered rags’ were showing their face and asking me where the hell I’d been for a couple of decades.
Some time in the 1970s the Vicar, The Rev'd Richard Bewes, came up to me after Morning Prayer and said he had just realised that very little existed in hymnbooks on what St Paul wrote to the Galatians about the Fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Would I have a go at writing something about it that could be turned into a hymn? Set to music and sung as a hymn in a few weeks’ time?
The eventual hymn, which is in the form of a prayer, was set to the existing and wonderful tune, Lavendon, by the composer and friend, Paul Edwards. It began:
May we, O Holy Spirit, bear your fruit
And that was the beginning of hymn-writing. Since then some 130 have been published in a dozen or so books. For many of them the composer John Barnard has been responsible for both pointing out the need for hymns on certain subjects and composing the music. His compositions are frequently heard in radio and TV broadcasts of church services. There was one excitement when I asked Sir John Betjeman, whom I knew fairly well, if I might use the first line of his poem Christmas in a new hymn. It goes:
The bells of waiting Advent ring.
Generously, he said 'yes'.
In 1981 I completed the cantata Samuel! for the Royal School of Church Music in Montreal. The composer was Dr Alan Ridout of Canterbury Cathedral and one day, during a rehearsal break, the subject of ordinary poetry came up and he asked to see what I had written. A week or two later back in England I put it all in a brown paper parcel and sent it. He replied, saying he liked it and suggested that I meet John Bishop of Autolycus Press. I did, and having read them he came to see me. He said he wanted to publish.
I was stunned. Me? Published? We began discussing suggesting the design of the book, typography and so on. During the chat he surprised me by saying, ’Did you realise you mention trees an awful lot?’ I did not. He said, ‘I want to break it into two books, one for the trees and the other for the autobiographical sort.' There was more chat. As we shook hands on our Pinner doorstep I said, ‘It’s funny about the trees, isn’t it.’
That phrase stuck with me and, in the lovely setting of Lady Betjeman's Hay-on-Wye home where I was house-sitting while she was in India, I sat down and wrote the poem, It’s funny about the trees. I sent it to him and asked if he would like to add it to the collection. He did, and the phrase became the title he gave to the book. The second collection became A Suburban Boy.
In a couple of months, they were published. Most of them were sold at my readings in local church halls and schools. During the intervals and at the end of the readings our daughter Jane and I were at a table somewhere at the back; Jane did a brilliant job of the selling and I signed each copy purchased.
A friend’s comment after he’d read them suggested that in fact my work was largely pastiche Betjeman. I bridled at the thought. Me? Imitating someone else’s style? But he was right and my only consolation is that even respectable and famous poets and musicians have at least begun by copying the style of their own personal favourites. Me, I just carry on doing what I’ve always done.
Eventually a lot of Christmas carols emerged. It is a glorious subject to write about. One of the most frequently sung is No Small Wonder and it actually began because of a mental tic.
In November 1983 I had that annoying experience, suffered by most people now and then, a short, everyday phrase repeating itself in my head over and over again. The phrase was simply, ‘small wonder’. Someone must have said it within my hearing. I longed to be rid of it. I wondered if just writing it down over and over again several times would do it. So I tried it. The sheet of repeated words made me aware of its simple waltz-like rhythm. (Try saying ‘small wonder, small wonder, small wonder’ aloud, keeping a steady, regular beat.)
And in the hazy, stumbling process that is fancifully called ‘inspiration’, a poem emerged.
On November 18 and fairly pleased with the result I sent it to the composer and a good friend Paul Edwards. He wrote shortly afterwards, enclosing his setting. He said my letter and poem had arrived just as he was about to take his laundry to the local launderette, so he had taken it with him, plus some manuscript paper. After putting his clothes into the machine he had sat down opposite it, watching the contents going round and round as he worked on a tune. And that lovely tune emerged, shining.
No Small Wonder seems to have been well-liked from the time it was published; it became the Publisher’s best-seller; the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge performed it for BBC Television at Christmas 2000 and my Performing Rights Society records show that it is being recorded and broadcast from cathedrals and churches round the world every Christmas.
Then, in 2008, I had the excitement of discovering that the BBC Music Magazine had conducted a poll among fifty cathedral choir directors, organists or composers, asking each of them to name which they considered to be the five best Christmas carols, ancient or modern. Out of 50, No Small Wonder clocked in at No 19.
One evening while I was reading to Betjeman from one of his favourite writers, Harry Williams, he looked up at me and said slowly, ‘You know, I can see you’re a poet.’
Now, that sort of thing does wonders for a man.
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Text and illustrations ©Paul Wigmore 2010
The Big Accident
Everyone knows about switching off the light on a winter’s night, getting into bed and watching the pale grey shapes of curtains and furniture slowly appear.
In a photographic darkroom where ultrasensitive film is handled, grey shapes never appear. All is jet black.
Knowing this, you might think that the big accident I once had in a darkroom would have been caused by the total darkness. That would be understandable.
But it wasn’t the darkness. It was just good old absentmindedness.
I was fifteen. From morning till night in this total darkness my job was to develop and fix customers’ roll-films. Something like 2,000 per week came in from ordinary snapshotters who, when their film was full of holiday photos, family photos and naughty photos they would take them to their local Kodak dealer - usually a chemist’s shop like Boots - and next day they would land, in a big crate, on my darkroom working top.
In stygian blackness I would carefully unroll them and hang them from spring clips and then attach a weight to the bottom to stop them rolling up again - they were like springs. I hung each one on a rod; each rod held four films.
When I’d hung forty-eight films on twelve of these rods I would carry four rods at a time to the deep processing tank behind me and lower them into the developer solution. I then set an alarm clock (with luminous figures and pointer) to 8 minutes and immediately began unrolling another forty-eight films.
When the alarm sounded I would transfer the developed films to the water-rinse tank and from there to the fixer tank, which lay behind a lightproof shutter. My assistant in the lightroom next door would raise his shutter and retrieve them after ten minutes for the washing and drying process.
This routine went on throughout the day, from 8.30 until 5.30, with an hour’s break for lunch.
One late afternoon I lowered the last batch into the fixer bath, knocked on the wooden shutter opposite my shutter to tell my assistant they were there. Then, probably with a deep sigh of relief, I went to the light switch and switched on. In the blindingly brilliant light I turned to go to the cupboard where the mop and bucket were kept, ready to give the floor and working top their nightly wash ready for the following day. And as I turned, I saw it.
Forty-eight light-sensitive, unprocessed films hung there, waiting to be developed but now utterly useless to mankind or beast. If developed, they would all be black from top to bottom, or ‘Fogged’. And if the girls in the printing department printed them, all they would produce would be a little pile of rectangular, snow-white, pieces of photographic paper.
With a dry mouth and very nearly wet pants I went out into the lightroom to tell the foreman what I’d done.
The next day I was standing in front of his own boss, the Manager.
‘Wigmore,’ he said in a tired voice, ‘I have just finished signing forty-eight letters of apology to those customers whose films you ruined yesterday. As far as you personally are concerned I’m taking no further action. But I hope it will be punishment enough for you to know there will be a lot of anguish out there. There will be fathers who had taken pictures of a newborn son or daughter, mothers who were waiting to see the pictures they’d taken of their daughter’s wedding, pictures taken on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. You do understand?’
I understood.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
I plan to end this blog in November. If anyone has any suggestions about material for a further series, please do email me. (Click on CONTACT, home page.) I should be more than pleased to consider them.
Words
A musician colleague and I email each other frequently about pieces we are working on and we sometimes amuse ourselves by breaking the rules, to (we hope) comic effect.
Sometimes we follow the Spooner tradition of switching the first part of two words. Instead of writing ‘the tricky bit in the last line’ we would write 'the bricky tit', etc.. We invent words. We spell them phonetically and break them up, as in ‘Idaho pew-end joy jorolody’. (Have a go at that one.)
He once sent me a very long sentence written backwards. The sentence was a straightforward question to which he needed an answer. My answer was No, so, to follow his lead, I replied ‘On.’ He said it took him eighteen hours to work that one out.
Ever realised how powerful short words can be? Try to imagine Tony Blair sounding convincing if he did not plant the little words ‘I mean’ and ‘you know’ at exactly the right points. They give his propositions the confiding, the intimate sound. And the casual listener feels that here is a chap who, I mean, you know, really understands.
And sometimes you can achieve wonders without using words at all.
I was in a bus. We needed to turn left from the stem of a ‘T’ but couldn’t because another bus wanted to turn right into the road from which we were trying to emerge. The junction was tight and both roads were narrow, all three packed with stationery traffic piled up close behind. It was deadlock. And yet both bus drivers simply moved their hands at each other in various ways so that within a couple of minutes everyone was on their way with not a single word spoken. Well, perhaps just one. It was said by our own driver. It was very short and probably afforded him some relief.
Young children’s words sometimes confuse. Take the child who asked his mother for a bedtime story. She went downstairs, chose an attractive children’s book about Australia and took it up to him.
He pulled a face.
‘Mum,’ he said, ‘What did you bring that book to read from about down under up for?’
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
I plan to end this blog in November. If anyone has any suggestions about material for a further series, please do email me. (Click on CONTACT, home page.) I should be more than pleased to consider them.