ctuVAS REn.

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12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

COMPETITION

CaWAS REGAL

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

Exegetic exercise

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 1631 you were asked to explain, seriously or fancifully, the poem that follows:

Free the Spirit

So polite he could almost have been The villain in a Charlotte Brontë novel — If only he knew what we were about to do! A school bell rings shrilly in the distance And the very seconds prepare to choke On their own significance, marked out by an orange kitchen clock.

Noon arrives nursing its own peculiar threats; No wind and a soft miaowing sound Accompany the last hopes of the vanishing day, and soon It will be more than late enough for a drink.

Leaving, on the other hand, would mean Forking out for a new hair-cut, and arguing The whole thing through with the face man again.

The first time I read this poem, and the sixth, I had no idea what it was, as they say, trying to tell me. I applied at once to two superior exegetes, P. J. Kavanagh and A. N. Wilson, and they confessed to being equally gravelled. Perhaps, among the crop of new pseudonyms this week, lurks the author, with a patient and pellucid answer; if so, I apologise: I failed to spot it. On the whole you were unfriendly to the poem: 'Summing up, I'd say it's bleakly hopeful in mood' (Fergus Porter) and 'It fails to capture the authentic banality of more able poets of the genre' (R. J. Pickles).

Being the examiner, I remain straight- faced and offer no reasons for my mark- ings. The prizewinners, printed below, take away £18 each, and the bonus bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old de luxe blended whisky is won by that evergreen scholar, Basil Ransome-Davies.

The time-punctuations of the poem — bell, clock, the stroke of noon — project feelings of tension and postponement. As the would-be adulterers try to nerve themselves for the act familiar interruptions stir their guilt. The actor promoting a 'lifestyle' aperitif on the off-aired video they are playing is smooth and cordial but has ulterior motives, like a figure in 19th-century fiction. The woman narrator is forced to think of her children at school, of the call of domestic duties. Only alcohol will relax the mood, but they are too inhibited to drink until the conven- tionally appointed hour, and in their anxiety they even let that pass. She wants to leave her paramour's house, evade the issue for a while, but the dismal thought occurs that if she does the trouble and expense of visiting the hairdresser and the beautician to look her most attractive will have to be repeated.

(Basil Ransome-Davies) A businessman is contemplating a proposed second interview with the Inspector of Taxes (who is both the sinisterly polite individual of the beginning and the disturbing face man; leaving to attend the interview would mean arguing! The whole thing through . . . again). As symbols of constraint (the school bell) and computation (the ticking clock) give way to symbols of independence (the miaowing cat and the liberating drink), we sense he will not submit, but strike out. The decision was, indeed, already taken (If only he knew what we were about to do!): the man will burn down the premises, accounts and all, and claim the insur- ance. The we suggests an accomplice — doubt- less some adventurous lady with dreams of furs and champagne. With his spirit freed, there is now no need for the abjectly approval-seeking new hair-cut to appease the fiscal Authority Figure whose threatening image he has now triumphantly exorcised.

(Chris Tingley) There are, of course, no villains, in the accepted sense, in any Charlotte Brontë novel. We are thus, at the poem's very outset, adroitly apprised of its persona's starkly perverse view of reality — an impression reinforced by the poem's increasingly surreal disjunction, culmi- nating in the speaker's climactic confrontation with his own mirror-image — 'the face man' i.e. the alter ego who can so conveniently act (a) as the scapegoat for irresponsible and anti-social actions later disowned and (b) as the constantly available dialectic opposite in the speaker's endlessly self-justifying inner debate. Descried through the distorting lens of paranoia, even the apparently innocuous 'kitchen clock' is fraught with threat (it is, we note, 'orange' — a notorious 'trigger-colour' for certain types of psychotic disorder) both as the possible facilita- tor of terrorist outrage and as the inexorable signaller of life's evaporation (note also the distant 'school bell . . . shrilly' parcelling out the time of those who, though still infant, are yet older than they think).

(Martin Fagg) The subject of this poem is essentially a tragic figure. He has absented himself without leave from the armed services and returned to his home. But his nearest and dearest secretly plan to report him to his superiors ('If only he knew what we were about to do!'). He becomes acutely aware of sounds — the school bell, the clock, the soft miaow of a police siren. At noon he becomes particularly aware that his family is not altogether on his side, and the siren reminds him that he must decide whether to wait for the military police to arrive, or return to his camp to face the music and suffer the obligatory short hair-cut. As the day wears on and nothing happens, he considers going for a drink to drown his guilt, and to prepare himself to argue 'the whole thing through with the face man again' (his sergeant-major).

(Katie Mallett)