Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 25
The Mystery of the Evasive Botanist
2.58 a.m. On May 27, 1968, as the student riots that brought Paris and much of a France to a standstill were teetering on the brink of resolution, Mavis Gallant (MG) walked through the rain, making her way towards a confab at La Société de Géographie on the Boulevard St. Germain.
Chinese section of the National School of Oriental Languages meeting to discuss reform of degree they are given, and possible merger with Chinese section of the Sorbonne. … Meet vague writer neighbour with large shopping bag. Ask if atmosphere interfering with his work, say I can do nothing. Am told that writer neighbour has lavish interior life, which always sounds to me like stomach lined with Moroccan leatherwork. March on. Rich interior life produces forgotten marching verse: No bloody sports / No bloody games / No bloody fun / With bloody dames / Won’t even tell / Their bloody names / Oh bloody bloody bloody. The Events in May: A Paris Notebook — 2. May 27, 1968.
I love the image of MG on a cold late May day thumping down the Boulevard St. Germain — the city not quite calm, still littered with the downed live wires of insurrection, coiled and sparking. MG was well-dressed, no doubt; remember, her mother’s only advice to her had been to never buy cheap clothes. A casual observer making a quick assessment as she steamed on by would judge her to be just your garden variety bourgeois Parisienne, market-bound, turning over in her mind the usual domestic questions — “Est-ce que je dois acheter des timbres? Où peux-je trouver des aubergines?” But no, she’s a world-famous writer, and a political beast, what’s more, with enough skin in whatever the game of degree-granting institutions of Asian languages (pourquoi, alors?) that she’s made the time to go to a meeting, to take their pulse. No one watching would imagine that as she walks, briskly, damply, she’s pacing herself by reciting a kind of music hall classic that dates from the time of the First World War. Here’s the full text of “Bloody Orkney,” a snippet of which MG was rum-pum-pumming, not quite accurately, on May 27, 1968.
This bloody town's a bloody cuss / No bloody trains, no bloody bus, / And no one cares for bloody us / In bloody Orkney. The bloody roads are bloody bad, / The bloody folks are bloody mad, / They'd make the brightest bloody sad, / In bloody Orkney. All bloody clouds, and bloody rains, / No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains, / The Council's got no bloody brains, / In bloody Orkney. / Everything's so bloody dear, / A bloody bob, for bloody beer, / And is it good? - no bloody fear, / In bloody Orkney. / The bloody 'flicks' are bloody old, / The bloody seats are bloody cold, / You can't get in for bloody gold / In bloody Orkney. / The bloody dances make you smile, / The bloody band is bloody vile, / It only cramps your bloody style, / In bloody Orkney. / No bloody sport, no bloody games, / No bloody fun, the bloody dames / Won't even give their bloody names /In bloody Orkney. / Best bloody place is bloody bed, / With bloody ice on bloody head, / You might as well be bloody dead, / In bloody Orkney.
And here’s a recording of a sung version, a performance that’s more leisurely that I would think is ideal, but not charmless.
Hold onto “Bloody Orkney” for a minute; we’ll return to it.
In “Between Zero and One,” one of the Linnet Muir stories collected in Home Truths, Linnet remembers the engineering office where she found work for a while; this was in Montreal, in the early years of the war. Refusing to join the other women in the typing pool, she talks her way into a made-up job as a factotum for the pale, defeated, suspicious gents who have spent their adult lives there, calculating with their slide rules, eating wax-paper wrapped egg-salad sandwiches at their desks, remembering their glory days in the last war. None is welcoming or winning, but some are more likeable than others.
Bertie Knox had a wooden leg, which he showed me; it was dressed in a maroon sock with clocks up the sides and a buckled garter. He had a collection of robust bawdy songs — as everyone (all the men, I mean) had in Canada, unless they were pretending — which I copied in a notebook, verse upon verse, with the necessary indications: Tune — “On, Wisconsin!”; Tune — “Men of Harlech”; Tune — “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Sometimes he took the notebook and corrected a word here and there.
If anyone has any notion about what parodies Bertie might have belted to these well-known tunes — better known, perhaps, in 1940 than today — I’d love to hear. “On, Wisconsin!” has often been adapted by college athletic teams, lads in the main, the W. S. Gilberts among them finding scurrilous rhymes that cast aspersions on rival squads, especially vis a vis their manliness. “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing,” is often used as a Thanksgiving hymn, one with which Tom Lehrer made hay — but that would have been well after Bertie Knox entertained Linnet Muir with whatever his rendering. I wonder if the “Men of Harlech” adaptation might have been “The Woad Ode,” evidently written by an Eton housemaster, William Hope-Jones, sometime before 1914, and which found purchase among Boy Scouts early in the 20th century. The text:
What’s the use of wearing braces?
Vests and pants and boots with laces?
Spats and hats you buy in places
Down the Brompton Road?
What’s the use of shirts of cotton?
Studs that always get forgotten?
These affairs are simply rotten,
Better far is woad.
Woad’s the stuff to show men.
Woad to scare your foemen.
Boil it to a brilliant hue
And rub it on your back and your abdomen.
Ancient Briton ne’er did hit on
Anything as good as woad to fit on
Neck or knees or where you sit on.
Tailors you be blowed!
Romans came across the channel
All dressed up in tin and flannel.
Half a pint of woad per man’ll
Dress us more than these.
Saxons you can waste your stitches
Building beds for bugs in britches
We have woad to clothe us which is
Not a nest for fleas.
Romans keep your armours,
Saxons your pyjamas!
Hairy coats were made for goats,
Gorillas, yaks, retriever dogs and llamas
Tramp up Snowdon with your woad on,
Never mind if you get rained or snowed on
Never want a button sewed on.
Go it Ancient B’s!
I have searched high and low to find the definitive performance and, rest assured, you need look no further. It is here. It cannot be beat.
So, these were the songs Bertie Knox sang to entertain Linnet Muir, and most everyone else in the office, too.
… His voice conveyed rakish parodies of hymns and marches to every corner of the room. Most of the songs were well-known; they came back to us from the troops, were either simple or rowdy or expressed a deep skepticism about the war, its aims and purposes, the way it was being conducted, and about the girls they had left at home.
Given that the Linnet Muir stories are, as MG would sometimes acknowledge, autobiographical, and given that she did, before her brief stint at the National Film Board, which preceded her time as a features writer at the Montreal Standard, work in just such an office, it’s not unreasonable to think that there was a model for Bertie, a war-damaged colleague, fond of of parodies, and that MG, who kept at the time many notebooks — diaries, story sketches — might have kept track, as does Linnet, not trying to conceal her interest, of the songs she heard. And I wonder if, on May 27, 1968, motoring down the Boulevard St. Germain, more than 25 years after the fact, it was one of those songs that was jarred loose, and rose to the surface. There must be risks and benefits to having a rich interior life. This would be one of them.
“Bloody Orkney,” adaptable to many purposes, has about it the ring of a folk poem, but it’s attributable to “Hamish Blair,” the nom de Bic of Andrew James Fraser Blair, born in Scotland, 1872, died in New Zealand, in Wellington, in 1935. He was a journalist, and spent most of his working life at the helm of various colonial papers in India. He was also the author of a trilogy of novels, futuristic but not enthusiastically so: the best-known of them, published in 1930, is called 1957.
Here’s a thumbnail account of Blair’s life and labours, from the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Kindly note the date the entry was last updated, August 11, 2018. A sign from MG, surely!
And, lest you feel inclined to rush out and purchase your very own copies of Blair’s trilogy, here’s a comprehensive blog entry from ten years back that will probably dissuade you. Whether MG ever thought to look into the history of “Bloody Orkney,” and whether she knew anything at all about “Hamish Blair,” I have no idea; you’d need to look long and hard to find much, which is too bad, really. From what little I’ve been able to glean, I’d say he led a remarkable life. There’s something about him that reminds me very much of Frank Cairns, the remittance man whom Linnet befriends in “Varieties of Exile,” and with whom she engages in a flirtatious book exchange.
Oh, lord. 3.44. Out of time. No time to read this through, errors must stand. Ach. How does this all relate to the American botanist, the young Gertrude Stein look-alike whose story I promised to tell? I will tomorrow. Or Wednesday. C’est une promesse. Gotta bounce, baby. There’s oat milk to shelve. Thanks for reading, xo, B
P.S. Never say I didn’t give you a bonus track.
Some of the "robust bawdy songs" are found here (with a warning for those offended by the strong language) http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/tutorials/intro/trench/songs
Not the three songs you mention, Bill, but some of the trench songs in the link do say what known tunes the new lyrics 'match.'
I can't imagine too many veterans of either war came home and shared the lyrics they enjoyed 'over there' with the family in the parlour. But there must have been some lively choruses remembered in the local tavern/pub/barroom gatherings of veterans!
Thanks for memories of belting out the ‘Woad’ song over many a campfire and pub night.