My 'Mr. Pyle' by Tim Veater

When I was five or six in nineteen fifty-five

Surrounded by giants with broad accents,

The smell of sweaty horses and dried cow pats,

The sickly sweet of stale milk,

Pure white in innocence;

Heinemann published Graham Greene's

'The Quiet American”, set in Vietnam.

A Franco-Viet Minh war, far removed from Somerset,

A far-off green unpleasant land.

This other Greene made no impression,

On this nascent mind's blank slate.

The foreign country quite unknown,

Exotic and remote removed

From post-war village Somerset.

The head filled instead by images

Of American wild west, the horse and gun,

Where white-hatted heroes could do no wrong

But not so wild, as that sultry unfamiliar land.

How could I conceive a far-off Vietnam?

A poor and ravaged Vietnam -

Sweltering in monsoon heat -

Humid and heaving with sweating humanity?

An 'S' shaped land bordering the South China Sea,

Whilst little me, safely cacooned in '50's life,

Un rocked by fear of violence, despite

The twelve-bore up against the wall,

The carcass hanging in the kitchen hall.

Running in circles, pegging out, the pig was shot,

It's porcine blood was just as red

As any human's, any Vietnamese.

I watched amazed but wasn't shocked,

Just brutal nature crimson all in tooth and claw.

Not human blood you see.

Meat only for the butcher's shop,

The walk-in fridge, the chopping block,

All scrubbed and clean.

Pyle, the 'Quiet American', all reticent and smart,

A product of his age and author's vivid imagination;

So full of naïve hope and false pretence,

Is introduced within a fuzzy haze of opium.

A drug that caused an ancient war of empire,

Replaced now by high ideals of freedom, liberty,

A metaphor of falling dominoes.

This American, this quiet American,

Sent not to conquer but to liberate again.

In nineteen sixty eight or nine,

When I was in my prime, if such was true,

(I'm sure you can work the ages out)

I picked 'Pyle' up from Temple Meads,

And drove him in my little car all doubled up,

Via Totterdown and Knowle and Temple Cloud,

To Glastonbury, before the bands discovered it,

Known only for its Tor and Holy Thorn,

For Pyle to meet his 'Fowler', sans Phuong.

I remember well the way he ate his food,

With fork, disposing of the knife.

They talked of former times in poor Peru,

Where oxygen was thin and vivid peasants rife.

Where John and Tim were friends until,

John crushed by a lorry nearly lost his life.

Then back again to see him off, the journey flew.

He thanked me in his southern drawl,

Waving a last goodbye from brief detour.

My memory then, him waving from the carriage door,

As off he went to Vietnam to offer 'help'.

John often asked and tried to get in touch,

But 'Pyle' was heard of never more.

Now in 2024 when I am seventy-five,

At last I read the book, catch up with 'Pyle',

And wonder if the fate that waited for Tim there,

Was that of Pyle's - shot dead and disappeared?

“Silly young and innocent.” Idealistic or absurd?

Was he naïve like me or wasn't he?”

Poor Fowler told the story well -

Menage a trois resolved by death.

No greater love was thus bestowed,

No greater treachery sold with a kiss.

The reader left to pose the question,

Who the greater traitor was, the greater fool?

The flailing French or brazen, mistaken States?

With tons of bombs and bullets stained with blood,

The trail. The tale. Ho Chi Minh, Da Nang, Saigon, Hanoi.

Stupid the man who never learns and never could.

END.

26.9.2024: Pointless FB where I waste my time. And this intermittant rain keeps me in. I can't get on with Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast but am enjoying George Orwell's (Eric Blair) 'Coming up for Air', witten in 1939 in the first person but not auto-biographical, although in reference to the social workings of a lower middle class mind, seem to knock the nail on its head. His main character, forty-five year old George Bowling, may have been based on a brother-in-law. He is the son of an honest and hard-working shop-owner, in gradual decline after the First WW now grown complacent and fat. He looks back to his bucholic past that he can never recover, when his obsession was fishing. He is wounded in the war and is invalided out, to pass two or three years in a N. Cornwall outpost, in case of a German invasion from Ireland, with nothing to do but to read books. I can't ignore the obvious parallels. He sees fishing as the ultimate antithesis to war, in all its chaos and depravity. His early married life is a bit of a disaster though he remains dutifully engaged - though unfaithful - to support his two young children. His wife, who comes from an impoverished line of vicars and admirals and who he considers his social superior, only infuriates him to the point of fantacising her demise. As another war approaches, he rues the stability and security of a long lost world. His secreted pond of huge Carp when he returns, has become a rubbish tip.

23.9.2024. In reply to ....  : "We talk a lot of 'love' but it is much devalued by the media and the pop world into a light fuzzy, ephemeral, romantic entity, that has little substance or value. Affection is important but what is probably more so for a child's development, is stability, nurture and routine. Feeling loved as wanted and secure with good solid examples to follow. Like all animals, we are constitutionally programmed to work physically and mentally in a certain way, to which is added the need to follow and imitate the adults that surround them. Ideally that is a loving family. Other substitutes (foster parents, boarding school, the street!) may be for better or worse. The social changes of the last fifty years may have been good for the freedom of the adults but it has generally speaking been no good for the children, who have experienced disruption, confusion and abandonment as a result. Modern ideas of child-centred identity have only made matters worse. Whether any of this applies to you, only you can decide but the behaviour of a certain sector of young people, the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and chemical abuse today, suggest that there may be some substance to what I say above.

24.9.2024:  Is anyone with a grain of sense surprised? The NHS is, and always has been, a 'Mammoth in the room', politicised and essentially unmanageable. It's status as a religious icon - as the recent organised and innane banging of saucepans illustrated - obscures and prevents objectivity. The Covid nonsense was a case in point, and still people refuse to admit it. There are more off sick now than ever, the waiting lists have never been longer, the excess death rate never higher, the finances never worse, but still we stick to totemic ideas. It is apparently government policy to deny the corona virus scandal for at least twenty years! The only time I get letters from my GP or NHS is to encourage me to be vaccinated for the flu. Where is the prevention? Where is the physician/patient relationship? We incentIvise illness because there is no money in 'well-ness', and then are surprised we can't afford a decent NHS. Medicine has been replaced by accountants and drug companies. Of course it's political suicide for any politician to ennunciate these things, which is why they don't and the engrained problems persist, muddling through. And as for Wes Streeting being in charge of the Nation's health, it's surprising we don't all die from laughing.    https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=doctors+drugs  https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=NHS  https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=Health

24.9.2024:  In answer (sort of) to a question elsewhere:  Is nature 'god? Are we gods? Is god a separate being or infused into the essense of everything? Is god good or bad? How do we account for evil without a devil? Was Jesus god personified or just a very good man? Humans are clearly more than flesh and blood, something we call consciousness and we know when it vacates the body but is this any different to all living things or is it a unique 'soul'? We certainly have 'spirit' to greater or lesser degree but is it possible to be filled with a divine spirit from a different dimension? Is there a miraculous cure for pain and guilt, an awareness of god within? These are questions that man has posed since time immemorial and are worth pursuing. They are life's spiritual quest. There must be more to life than power, position, money, sex, musles, make-up, drugs or isn't there? "Seek and (hopefully) ye shall find."

2.10.2024:  After my first job at the Central Health Clinic, I was posted to St. Clement's House, an office block at the roundabout end of Marsh Street. It was a largely open plan office on the third floor above Xerox. For a naive country lad, I found this foreign and disconcerting and the occupants probably thought the same of me. It was filled with characters, all still vivid in my memory, though most of the names have lapsed. Mostly men of various ages with a few females in mainly secretarial roles although there was one female PHI if I remember rightly, a dragon of a woman in an all-male world. It was a sort of socialist-inspired, government bureaucracy, with two distinct parts - the technical/ professional on one side and the administrative/clerical on the other. All the ills of Bristol entered its portals. Each was very pyramidal and I was at the bottom. The latter answered to an ex-Indian Army officer with a neat grey moustache, called Spencer, who thought he was still in it and who I regarded with a mixture of fear and hatred. The other side was headed by George Creech the Chief Public Health Inspector, to whom I owe my later career, the training for which, began two years later. Daily I would walk the streets of Bristol delivering post between scattered offices, taking as long as possible to stay out of the office and away from its mind-numbing routines. Once a week I would attend a day release to obtain the local government basic qualification to be a junior clerk at Victoria Park, a cheery gathering run by Bristol College of Commerce. I was possessed of only one conviction : I would not be a clerk! With the passing years, it is the various characters that lodge in your brain, all having a positive or negative effect on your own. Somehow time sweeps it all away and them with it. All that remains is memories, like plastic refuse, left by a receding tide.

Good News All

We are but flames that briefly glow and then go out,

Extinguished by the tears of parting and regret.

“I hope you soon feel better”,

The sad retort, “I fear I never shall”.

So life and all its memories slip away,

Into that never ending night, longed for or dreaded,

The common denominator. All the same when

All lie prostrate, before its heavenly gate.

The uncovered path still bears the marks of feet,

The remnants of a fence and timber frame.

The open space where once a proud man

With his first-born son, crouched for a photograph.

Who took it is unknown. Perhaps it was his wife?

Here for years people met and sang and prayed

And speakers came and went,

Intent on revealing eternal verities.

Missionaries to the natives here about,

Recently returned from war,

Sceptical of all they had been taught

About a loving god and man's humanity to man.

Yet faith maintained its stand

In spite of insolence and ridicule;

A crazy holding on to the imutable,

A sort of very humble grand.

A sentimental journey back in time,

A signpost on life's little way.

A mutual reassurance in the sinking sands,

Of friendly ghosts that passed this way.

A wooden hut where weekly songs of praise

Ascended like burnt offerings or a funeral pyre,

And hearts were sometimes touched by listless wind

That blows from who knows where.

Whilst high majestic arches span the vale,

Souring to untold heights above this nondescriptive home

Of faith: a wooden shelter that now has all but gone,

Leaving little trace but concrete path and fence,

All overgrown with weed and sentiment,

The people having passed away, moved on,

Discovering if what they preached turned out OK.

Survives with them or too has died?

We now walk past and view remembering.

Look up, look down, in wonder at the works of man,

Who come and go but leave a testament,

To those still left behind,

Directionless, devoid of faith and old.