What girls were supposed to be

 

In my youth, I owned an autograph book; I think most girls had one. It was used to collect autographs which at the time was a cool thing to do and was also the place for your friends to write a sententious collection of aphorisms and rhymes which ranged from soppy to nauseating. I remember three which will give you a taste.

Good, better, best,

Never let it rest,

Until the good is better,

And the better best.

 

The wise old owl, he sat in an oak.

The more he heard, the less he spoke.

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Why can’t we be like that wise old bird.

 

And the most sickening if all: “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will, be clever”!

(This last practically encapsulated the attitude to women in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Our school was unusual in having a “careers advisor”. She was an elderly woman and given to telling all in the top classes that we should go to university and study Arts. Being told to go to university was a great leap forward for girls, but I recall that we were generally encouraged to become nurses, not doctors, legal secretaries and not lawyers and possibly other lower tier jobs in the sciences.)

In our teenage we collected other soppy writing and poetry the most nauseous of which was a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. Thanks to the wonders of Google (given that my copy of The Prophet has unaccountably disappeared) I can bring you a flavour of the work.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”

 

Much more endearing was the poetry of Omar Khayyam, in translation by Edward FitzGerald. Herewith some samples …

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two - is gone.

 

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai

Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp

Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

 

All this stuff was very girly. I’d like to bet that no bloke of my generation had ever read either.

At my school, we were also exposed to masses of poetry and drama, especially of course to Shakespeare. I still have the poetry anthologies of my school days which I think did a good job in exposing us to the breadth of English literature. Our English teacher was a remarkable woman called Mrs O’Dell who had been a prisoner at Changi concentration camp in Singapore. She inculcated us with a love of poetry that I suspect most of us still have today. And I’ve written before about how my school celebrated Shakespeare with annual performances, and how I performed famous Shakespearean soliloquies in Eisteddfods.

Oddly, I didn’t study English at university but I think it was this early immersing in poetry and drama which contributed to those talents which I may have brought to journalism and certainly to speechwriting.

I’m feeling most sentimental right now, so I think I’ll end with another Omar Khayyam quatrain:

“I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;

That every Hyacinth the Garden wears

Dropt in its Lap from some once Lovely head.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Sir James Goldsmith: “When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy.”