claire m. tylee
personal response; as Hill says, he wrote this pastoral elegy for himself. By contrast,
itis the hollow jauntiness typical of Mayer’s adult verse that marks her difference
from the convivial norms of English society and amateur poets to which, on the
surface, her poetry belongs. Her peculiar humour has been likened by Peter Porter
to Stevie Smith’s, where a carefree surface of near-doggerel suddenly splits to reveal
the insecurity beneath (where the reader is suddenly given to understand that the
poet’s waving indicates that she, too, is in danger of drowning). Porter says that,
like Smith, Mayer ‘writes children’s rhymes for grownups’.^87
In fact, Mayer’s use of poetic forms that echo nursery rhymes^88 and hymns in
their simple metre and stanza length comes nearer to real horrified terror than
Smith’s. This is particularly marked in ‘Grandfather’s House’, a poem that starts
with a glorious image of her parents as children sliding down the banisters. It
continues apparently like a nursery rhyme with actions, such as ‘Jack and Jill’ or
‘When the Bough Breaks’ or ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’, as ‘down fell
all.|Down, down, down, and beyond recall’.^89 The poem unexpectedly moves into
a thoughtful cynicism, claiming that it is better not to have been born ‘than to have
seen what I have seen’, before pulling itself back to end with a masking folk-song
injunction to ‘deck their graves with meadow-green’. In a way that is reminiscent
of the German children’s tales of the Brothers Grimm, threats lurk near the carefree
surface. For instance, in the grotesque parody of fairy story which is entitled ‘In
his orchard’ and written in the ballad form of Blake’s songs, near where ‘Lieschen
and Gretchen were dawdling’, the wind blows away thestenchfrom ‘the little ripe
corpses’ that the Giant is growing in an orchard fenced with skeletons.^90
A similar combination of fairy-tale, the Gothic, and Blake’sSongs of Innocence
and Experiencefigures in Eva Figes’s revisionary memoirTales of Innocence and
Experience.InanessayontheatreandfilmrepresentationsoftheKindertransport,
including Diane Samuels’s playKindertransport, Beate Neumeier remarks on their
use of the fairy-tale and the Gothic. Whilst the pre-Holocaust childhood world
of the past is represented as fairy-tale, ‘reality is expressed as a gothic nightmare’,
where ‘the gothic motif of the return of the repressed’ recalls the ‘childhood trauma
of separation and annihilation’.^91 The Gothic is one of European culture’s most
important strategies for dealing with taboo issues, particularly our horror of death
and dead bodies and our fear of threats to the integrity of the self. The Holocaust
poetry of theKinder-poets requires us to deal with those taboos, contemplating both
that horror and that fear. They draw on and combine both English and German
(^87) Peter Porter, ‘The Muse in the North East’,The Observer, 15 Mar. 1981, 33.
(^88) On Mayer’s use of nursery rhyme metre, see Elaine Feinstein, ‘Sparkling Mildew and Doubt’,
Jewish Quarterly, 43/1 (1996), 74.
(^89) Mayer, ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’, inBernini’s Cat: New and Selected Poems(North
Shields: Iron Press, 1999), 34.
(^90) Mayer, ‘In his orchard’, ibid. 32; my italics, to draw attention to the echo of Sassoon, ‘The rank
stench of those bodies haunts me still’.
(^91) Neumeier, ‘Kindertransport’, 66.