A GLOUCESTER EXILE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 805, 24 December 1954, Page 15

A GLOUCESTER EXILE

MONG tthe entries for the 1953 Cheltenham Festival in Gloucestershire, England, was a poem by Sidney E. Knight. It was a free-verse, autobiographical poem which did not meet the terms of the competition, and it had to be disregarded when the awards were made. -Nevertheless, the judges were so impressed by Sidney Knight’s poem, Gloucestershire Exile, that they invited the well-known character actor John Laurie to read it to the audience at the | Festival. When Laurie had finished the reading, Richard Church, who was presiding, said: "Tonight you have learned something that the critics cannot teach you, and that is how poetry is made."

The poem was later printed in The Adelphi, where it was discovered by the NZBS Productions Department and recorded for broadcasting by Roy Leywood. Sidney Knight had emigrated to South Africa as a young man, and his poem tells how he was once a Gloucestershire village railway porter. Now he is an old man living in Johannesburg. and he looks out of the window of "this monstrous,/Slab-sided steel and concrete cliff-dwelling" to see "dusty minedumps. rusty corrugated iron roofs,/And one lone peeling bluegum just to remind me | that such things as trees exist." But the poem begins its evocation of Gloucestershire loveliness on a happier note: I_was once a porter on the line at Brinscombe up the Stroud Valley. It was just after the first war and jobs were hard to get in 1919, But the Exchange clerk said, ‘They are signing on Extra men at Gloucester to meet the 8-hour day and you may be lucky." Sidney Knight was lucky, and in the poem he goes on to explain how much the lost days of his youth mean to him now he is in exile. And I remember those lovely summer evenings of 1921, Sitting on the lawn of the Bear at Amberley Drinking deep out of tall blue-black tankards. Then walking home in the twilight past Tom Long’s post at the crossroads, and under The cool, giant Minchinhampton oaks, singine our service sones . . And then to bed to be in the morning by The Massed Bands of the Brigade of BlackIn the gan orchard on the bank across the White the blossom lay, a foamy, lacy tablecloth on the ereen grass. Just like the green rollers of the Cape. ruffled by the south-easter. Gloucestershire Exile, a poem by Sidney -Knight, read bv Roy Leywood, will be heard from 3YC on Tuesday, December 28, at 9.54 p.m.; from 1YC on Tuesday, January 4. at 10.0 p.m. Other NZBS productions this week are P. G. Wodehouse’s comedy Honeysuckle Cottase, and a drama of jet plane test flying, Through the Barrier, Honeysuckle Cottage will be heard from 1YA at 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, January 6: Through the Barrier in ZB Sunday Showcase at 9.35 p.m. on Sunday, January 2.