Hello Reader,
Got media pilgrimage?
On Sunday (link) we had the North American premier of the new, exciting BBC mini-series War of the Worlds. I won’t see the series myself, because I won’t pay for the T and E channel, a channel I never even heard of until now. Of course fans of War of the Worlds are excited.
Fans of anime, over in Japan, I hear, do pilgrimages. They travel to see the real locations that anime (Japanese animation) artists use to draw their cartoons for television. (Cartoons that are far, far superior to the noisy ones made in the U.S.A.)
Being a fan of prose novels, I finally did something I have wanted to do since elementary school: Travel to see where HG Wells lived while he was gleefully writing about his neigbors being blasted by Heat Rays. As a boy I decided: Someday I would go up Primrose Hill where the narrator looks out over a desolate London, seeing a gash in Saint Paul’s cathedral. And on my first trip to England, with a detailed map of South England for tracking the Martian advance, I finally did so. What I had never imagined, in my boyhood, was that as a middle-aged man I would be inspired to write a book of poems about the novel, poems that would take place both in the real present and an imagined one. Note: Modern poems don’t rhyme.
I have been posting those poems onto my blog since Christmas, at roughly fortnightly intervals. Here is a poem of my very first hours on English soil. As you may know, the first Martian cylinder landed not in New York or L.A—go figure—but outside the town of Woking, south of London. Soon after my jet screeched down at Gatwick, I hiked down the sidewalk and turned into the Woking historical society. I invited an historian named Duncan to guess why I had come straight from the airport. “You have relatives.” No. “A military connection.” No. (There is a big WWI Sikh graveyard) I said, “I’ll give you a hint: Three legs.” Turns out the high Fighting Machine in the town square, advancing from the direction of Horesell Common, is affectionately known as Tripod. I had a swell time in Woking, staying at two hotels, (my first time ever seeing Downton Abbey, in the hotel cafetria-lounge) but never staying, as it was full, at the HG Wells Hotel. Here’s a poem:
Into Woking
I flew the strato-jet from Calgary to the airport,
from the airport I rode a passenger train to Woking,
from Woking station I backpacked to the historical society.
I met Duncan who expressed his regrets
that Occidental College is now Occidental Shopping Centre.
We both remember how the Martian Heat Ray
blasted the college,
putting the chimney
of Mr. Wells’ house
in line of sight of the Ray.
Crack! went the chimney.
The house of H.G. Wells has a little plaque.
I stood outside his home
with my back to the raised rail line across the road.
Wells knew the station was close yet too far
so he borrowed a cart and drove his wife to Leatherhead.
The cart was borrowed
from the owner of the Spotted Dog.
The horse,
poor brute,
suffered a broken neck.
The owner,
poor man,
was found dead in dark of night.
Wells,
mercifully,
was innocent of
what was to become of Leatherhead.
Today there is no Spotted Dog.
Locals raised on Wells tell me with distaste
a few years ago
a car dealer
levelled it to make a paved lot.
A bar named Ogilvies has a sign of a telescope.
Inside are many old pictures of telescopes—
etchings, lithographs, engravings,
but no mention of Ogilvie,
a friendly astronomer
and a good man
who perished under a flag of truce at the sandpit.
A bar of the Witherspoon chain has a Wells theme.
On the ceiling are two great illuminated glass circles,
a clock face,
and a circle of book pages,
readable from the floor.
A local eagerly asks,
“Do you want to see time go backwards?”
“Yes.”
He rushes over to the secret switch
for the Time Machine.
Someone says George over there
was the model for the Invisible Man.
George raises his glass to salute
while the Man sits alone
in the window
wrapped in his bandages.
I pull out my walking map from the town library.
A drinking buddy tells me the sandpit isn’t marked.
“Just go there, and turn here,” says the friendly man.
No one wants to drink under the gaze of nasty Martians.
Far down the hall to the loo is an old steel etching,
a stiff Martian holds a projector to blast a bridge.
Be thankful those times are long ago.
Sean Crawford
October
Calgary
2019
Sidebar of childhood memories:
Penguin books always had plain covers, (Not for sale in the USA) except for some of the comic ones—and The War of the Worlds. I read it cover to cover while at a thrift store, waiting for my mother to finish volunteering. She said cruelly that I should have waited, because now I had it all finished before I even got home.
Through “the bush” (as we called it) from my home was a high jump sawdust pit at the far edge of the vast school grounds. There pop cans dented the sawdust like crashed Martian cylinders. I remember running to the pit and crying myself to sleep. When I awoke I saw a brown rabbit very close by…
I had often cried from abuse, utterly normal crying, but that was the day I faced a Truth about my life and my mother, a Truth of horrible knowledge and despair, a day I will recall forever, to be used when I wrote of a boy running up the church stairs to cry in a bell tower, to be asleep and safe when Black Smoke smothered the rest of the town. (Archived June 2019 as Losing Innocence, With Martians)
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