F*king awful

Simon Barget is reading out his poem in English class. Simon Barget is reading out his poem which no one is supposed to know is not really his. Simon knows that it isn’t. Simon has been awarded an A+ for this poem and Mr Keenlyside has suddenly announced to the class that it is to be brought to their attention in a reading. Simon is looking at the relevant page in the exercise book and particularly the actual A+  and this A+ and the + in particular has an unreal and holy aspect to it as it sits in the spherical shape that encircles both symbols. It looks like it should be a star or an asterisk but it is a plus, there can be no bones about it. 

 

The author of the poem is really Simon’s absent father, Harry Barget, whose erratic literary ability has often needed to call upon unorthodox avenues for dissemination. Harry Barget contents himself with this limited audience of twelve year-old boys and male English teachers at independent day schools, or in the case of Simon’s sister Caron, twelve year-old girls and female English teachers at independent day schools when it comes to his chef d’oeuvre 'The Plipadis’ which he submitted twice and which was undoubtedly worth him having a double-digit number of children for just so he could get rewarded in all the different independent schools that these unborn children would have attended. 

 

Simon is now dutifully reading and Mr. Keenlyside has a high buglish quality to his voice and wears thick-rimmed Denis Nordenesque spectacles and looks suitably removed and English-teacher-fusty and although he doesn’t actually have his left hand in is pocket and though his body isn’t permanently shuffly and loose - gangly - it seems as if he’ll revert to this default English teacher flounce at any moment.

 

Mr Keenlyside is seeming to squint - at least in Simon’s mind’s eye - as Simon reads out his A+ awarded poem to the twenty odd boys in the rest of the class. Simon has a constant haunting peripheral sense of Mr. K and his squint and his loosish laxish stance and his fustiness and perhaps his moderate rictus for expressing enthusiasm but Simon cannot place Mr. K anywhere in particular as he is so out of his own body and without ballast and it is as if the words are reading themselves out in advance of him and he has to be their container and wait for them to finish drifting out. 

 

Simon cannot even make out the other young men in his English class, as the class today is being held in the drama room, and the light in the drama room is always dimmed and the boys are not sitting or even standing in any consistent location; they are spread around all over the place in an ad hoc formation perched on some or all of those strange perspex shape installations that the school brought in to be slotted together as makeshift stages, and it might well be that half or more of this plagiarism-disclosing class was devoted to drama and only the very fag-end to the handing out of the exercise books with last week’s homework corrected and the unpre-empted exhortation for Simon to read out the poem ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.

 

The Old man and the Sea is not Simon’s favourite Harry Jack Barget poem not least because of its obvious autobiographical content and the fact that a twelve year-old is unlikely to have written about himself as an old man with such authenticity or about himself as an old man at all making Simon even more liable to discovery. The poem has all the familiar sentimentality and facile nostalgia that Barget Senior seemed to revel in or couldn’t help defaulting back to through much of his literary output, this one told through the lens of a wheelchair-bound ‘Bob’ reminiscing about his family from the top of Bournemouth’s East Cliff in a short trip out from the nursing home:

 

Tommy lives somewhere in London

Janice married the lad from Brisbane

Bessy died I think in ’80

 

Then the final lines:

 

Wheel him back to his cliff-top haven

Bob has had enough today. 

 

Harry Barget indulges in the solace of simple pessimism and how can Mr. K in his right mind believe this to be an appropriate sentiment to champion as one that could be identified by a twelve year-old boy?

 

Simon is then wondering: at what precise moment will class and teacher start cackling screaming or hurling abuse, branding him cheat, liar and fraud, Daddy’s stooge, and at what point will a spotlight descend and will the entire English department be called in to cock their ears into the open door by the corridor, and when will Keith Dawson HM himself be notified and how long will he be allowed to get into the seven four-lined stanza poem before time is called on the whole charade? 

 

When will he be notified of mandatory publication in the school magazine?

 

Simon’s eyes keep darting back to the + next to the A, a + which he fears can only be reserved for homework identified as done by parents and so Simon knows that time can be called at any moment at Mr’ K’s whim and behest, and Simon is tempted to let the cat out of the bag right now, but he has also somehow convinced himself that father and son are the same, or at least on the same team and what father produces will be absorbed by son either now or at some later stage in son’s writing career and there is every bit of  Barget Junior who wants to hold on to the + goddammit, an A+ is unheard of, it raises his stock, it makes him feel really good. What amongst all this Haberdashers jockeying for position, he certainly won’t turn down top of the class, it’s like his reputation has been lifted ten-fold, his academic claims bolstered.

 

Simon hates the way he sees his own curlicue fountain pen scrawl before him as he reads it, he hates the obvious extra effort he’s put in to the script here, the proud flourishes of the title which he’d have never taken the effort to produce if it had been his own work, he hates that this florid handwriting is an obvious signal that he didn’t do it himself. He hates the way it reminds him of his father insisting on dictating, the moments of dictating, the almost demented grin on Barget Senior’s face in proud recognition of his own ability, hearing the words before him, the recognition also of the farce and brazenness of pushing through the poem onto an English teacher of roughly his own age, a man he’d never met, another level of vying for position, his father a business man and creative writer manqué, a man demonstrating he could sell kitchens and write at the same time even if he had to shoehorn it in under his son's name, Mr. K must have applauded the gall of it and failed to see it from Barget Junior’s perspective, failed to see how the fear of being discovered could shake a young man, failed to see that the blurring of lines can rob the child of any sense of their own ability for many years to come and leave him crippled.

 

Simon Barget’s plagiarism started early on in P.5 (age 9) with the doggerel poem ‘Shoes’ and then ‘The Elvin People Ride the Tube’ and continued steadily from there in English French and German homework.  Shoes was started by Simon Barget without assistance:

 

My favourite shoes are trainers

They’re coloured white and blue

My mother bought them yesterday 

And that is why they’re new.

 

The next few stanzas are also his until the last one which Harry Barget shoehorned in and which he delights in reciting many years after the poem’s creation:

 

But Elstree has no station,

At least no underground,

Unless the Elves have built one,

And it never has been found.

 

Simon Barget attended Haberdashers’, Elstree and there were no decent public transport links and he had to get the private coach there and back every day.

 

Maybe Shoes and the Elvin people are the same poem, Simon cannot exactly remember.

 

There were then bits and pieces submitted mostly in English from the ages of eleven to fifteen. There were some which Simon Barget liked and felt more involved in such as ‘The Collector’, a tall tale based on a family deception in which Barget Junior  and Senior collaborated in detailing the scam perpetrated by one member of the extended family who later received their comeuppance coming face to face with the ethereal Collector, the siphon for the afterlife.

 

For many years, Barget Junior’s duties as foil for Senior’s literary creations disappeared completely. There was no deception. But one of the final ones was of a different kind. Barget Junior was about twenty-one when he received a rejection email for a job that he hadn’t applied for. He couldn’t make head nor tail. Barget Senior owned up without reservation, almost with pride, he had applied on Barget Junior’s behalf.

 

————-

 

I have just managed to find the old exercise book in the cupboard. The poem is there, I hadn’t really forgotten it. I don’t know why my father liked to forecast his own death so much, why he always had this premonition of coming a-cropper. He died at fifty-nine. The Old Man and The Sea wasn’t as bad a poem as I want to make out. The last line of the penultimate verse was the line I had forgotten, the crucial line, in bold, the line that the whole piece hangs on:

 

Tommy lives somewhere in London….

Janice married the lad from Brisbane….

Bessy died I think in ’80….

The doctor says I’m getting thin.

 

There are all these ellipses at the end of the first three lines. I didn’t remember the ellipses. They are so out of character, so emphatic.

 

When I see how my father moved away from rhyming, when I see how this verse pulls everything to a halt, when I feel how he is calling time on his own predilection for joking and humour and pervasive deflection which comes out in the rest of the verses and the other poems and stories he wrote for me, when I see the straight-up disclosure and how I wish I could feel for him and myself, how he was calling out to someone as we all are, if anyone will listen just for a fleeting moment. When I am able to let through what he’s actually trying to say to someone….

 

When I think about how he became thin after he got diagnosed. When I think about how he just couldn’t put on weight….

 

And then in a piece I had forgotten: ‘The Last Few Days’, written in the first-person:

 

I died yesterday at four-thirty in the morning. It was rather odd to see my body lying there on the bed, like a lump of unbaked dough that would never rise. 

 

Dad had died at almost exactly that time in Brompton Hospital, November 24th 2006.

 

I mainly remember how his jaw seemed like it had been hinged open.