Seventy-five Years by Peter Leyland

                                              Seventy-Five Years

  

“TWENTY-FOUR YEARS remind the tears of my eyes.” So wrote Dylan Thomas in 1938. He was, although he didn’t know it, only to live another fifteen years longer, before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in New York during a reading tour of his poems.

 

I first came to his poetry in 1966 when I was in Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, recovering from a cartilage operation. There, as chance would have it, I fell in with a fellow patient, Alan, who spoke enthusiastically of Dylan Thomas and recommended that I read his poems. I duly did so, and my edition of his Collected Poems 1934-1952 which I have beside me now is inscribed Peter Leyland Liverpool. 1967.

 

Now, as I begin my seventy sixth year it occurs to me reflexively that five of them have passed since the beginning of the pandemic in the UK in 2020 when life changed permanently for some and unalterably for others. At the time of that deep interruption to the normal pattern of our lives I was just reaching the grand milestone of seventy and I had recently given a talk at Canterbury Christ Church entitled ‘The Spirit Level and How I became a Literary Activist’. This was about events in my teaching career which had led me into adult education and when I returned from giving the presentation the country was beginning to shut down. I spent my seventieth birthday in 'lock down' at home.

 

The pandemic wrought its much-chronicled horrors on the population of England during 2020 and the following years, and it is the subject of a recent report on the failings of our government’s attempts to tackle it. The findings of the report have been picked up by blogs on this site, most notably by Julia Jones in her powerful post from October 2024. For me, however, it had a divided effect: on the one hand it put a premature end to the adult education I was part of, which relied on a lot of travelling between different centres (which closed down), and on the other it gave me an opportunity to write about how I had used books to keep me sane during those long and empty days that the pandemic caused. 

 

Three books remain in my memory from that time, all of which I recorded on the Authors Electric site: the first is The Plague by Albert Camus which I read because during the pandemic we were encountering the nearest thing to what he was describing in his novel, a suspension of many of the norms of life and a witnessing of deeds both courageous and cowardly. In my June 2020 blog I say: ‘In the novel…newspapers are said to be complying with instructions given to them and I thought of our own largely supine press talking vacuously about the heroism of nurses and care staff, rather than criticising those who had allowed the pandemic to become so virulent. “Optimism at all costs,” says the narrator of The Plague about the press coverage of the situation in Oran and I wondered about the coverage of the clapping for the NHS and the much-feted heroism of Captain Tom.’

 

The second book was War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I used an old copy of the novel passed on by my father-in-law which had wonderful illustrations, and I was captivated by this tale of love and war which took in both dreadful massacres and the most sublime scenes of human affection. The hero in my translation was Peter, or the Russian Pyotr, and I was able to identify with him during his witnessing of both cold-blooded killing and his realisation that he has loved Natacha all along.

 

At this point in my writing, I should reveal that, although I was spared the ravages of Covid, I suffered during the lockdowns a severe bout of influenza and the reading of War and Peace helped sustain me during this. I commented at the end of the blog of March 2021, ‘When we read, we are interacting with writers who may be dead and whose work may be a translation, but they are talking to us, telling us something about their perceptions of life.’ 

 

A hand can reach across the centuries and help us come to terms with what we are experiencing, in my case the isolation enforced by Covid 19.

 

The third book, or books, that I read intensively during that time was The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. It had happened that my wife’s aunt had died in 2020, not from Covid but a natural death . What was unnatural was the considerably reduced number of mourners that were able to gather in the Abbey at Sherborne for her funeral. What I have read in recent commentaries about the privations suffered by those who had died from the pandemic itself reminded me of how fortunate we were to have even this smaller number in attendance. However, Sue’s aunt was a great reader, and after her house was sold, I was bequeathed the Faber copies of The Alexandria Quartet that she owned. The four books are: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, all of which pack a punch. I had joined an online group to discuss the books. This is my comment on Justine:

 

‘The art of friendship can be to have a shared interest in something. As I read further in Justine, I learned that people in the Twitter group were from different parts of the world and as my reading of all of the books progressed, I made a number of new online friends. These are necessarily of a short-term nature as it is unlikely that you will ever contact them again once the reason for the connection is over. It is a bit like having a pen friend as someone suggested to me, an idea that resonated as I recalled the pen friends I had corresponded with when I was younger.’  

 

The literary adventure that had begun with Dylan Thomas in a Liverpool hospital when I was sixteen had continued through the years to a greater and lesser degree and I found books to be a constant companion during life’s ups and downs. ‘Reading great and good literature can help us regain our balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium as a result of illnesses disabilities or traumatic events encountered in the course of an ordinary life,’ I said in my Canterbury talk. 

 

At the age of 70 no celebration was possible, and a takeaway was the best that my wife and I could manage but, at 75 I was able to visit my daughter, my son-in-law and my two grandchildren, swim with them in their local pool, and join with them for several fantastic meals originating in China, Italy, India and Pakistan. This was more than just the takeaway that happened in 2020. At the end of the poem with which I began, Dylan Thomas reflects on a life well lived:

 

              ‘Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

               With my red veins full of money,

               In the final direction of the elementary town

               I advance for as long as forever is.’

 

 

 

References

 

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (1952)

 

‘The Spirit Level or How I became a literary activist’, a paper for the 2020 ESREA Conference in Canterbury by Peter Leyland