Wanderlust

I think possibly one of the main formative influences on my life, although I never met him, was my maternal grandfather. He had separated from my grandmother years before I was born, and was subsequently ostracised by his family. I knew him only from the evocative stories my mother would sometimes tell about him. Apparently he dropped out of University, decided to work his way around the world on merchant ships, fetched up in Rio where he met and married my grandmother (working as a nanny, a young German refugee from the great post-WW1 depression), and then somehow blagged himself a job as the manager of a huge horse & cattle ranch in central Brazil.

Yes, my grandfather was a gaucho! And his leather over-trousers ('bombashers' they call them in those parts, apparently), gnarly with age, scoured and pitted from years of battling with thornbushes until they resembled Keith Richards's face, hung on the wall in our dining-room throughout my childhood, looking down on us as we ate, dominating my imagination at every meal. My mother and her sister were born in a town high in the Matto Grosso called Araçatuba - the name has always seemed exquisitely exotic to me, and I hanker to visit one day. Why on earth the family came back to England - on the eve of the War - I'll never understand.

So, growing up with dreams of riding the open range on a distant continent, it was never likely that I was going to settle down to a life of humdrum conformity in a bank or a law firm....

However, I do rather like the counter-balancing view of this Larkin poem - that maybe the impulse to travel, the rejection of a settled life, can be a little too smug and self-regarding... perhaps a conformity of a different kind? I don't think that is the case for me. I hope not. But I ask myself the question every year or two, just to try to reassure myself.

The imagery here reminds me of another powerful formative influence from my earliest childhood - the sea rat, a charismatic sailor-adventurer who briefly meets the heroes of The Wind In The Willows when they first set out on the road in their gypsy caravan (Toad's pre-motor car enthusiasm), and who tempts The Water Rat in particular to pursue such an exotic wandering life himself. I love that book to pieces, and try to re-read it every few years. There is a great tension in it between the allure of travel and the comfort of home. The 'Dulce Domum' chapter, where Mole finally returns home after his adventures, always used to make me cry - and probably still would! However, despite this sympathy with the affection for the familiarity of 'home', the call of 'the open road' always appealed to me more, both in reading the book as a child and in my life subsequently. Parents, beware - books can have a momentous impact on your children's development!

I sent this poem to all my friends back home when I left for China in 2002.

Poetry of Departures


Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off.
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order.
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)