A Poet's Memories

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29952, 13 October 1962, Page 3

A Poet's Memories

The Railway Game. By Clifford Dyment Dent. 218 pp.

The author of “The Railway Game” has already published two volumes of poetry, which place horn in toe first rank of toe writers who have emerged since toe war. He is aware of the industrialised world in which he lives; but in his verses tois understanding is superimposed upon a basis of memories and sensations that come from bis childhood in Wales.

It is to be expected that Mr Dyment would write systematically and directly of those former days that have always meant so much to him. “The Railway Game” is described as “an early autobiography.” It begins with his first memories of life in Caerleon-upon-Usk and ends 10 or 11 years later in Nottingham, where most of bis childhood was passed. The period described seems to extend from 1912 to 1922. Mr Dyment was bom in Derbyshire; but his family went to live in Wales when he was four weeks old. He likes to think of Caerleoh as his “private and adopted native town.” As he says, “it Is a fitting origin for a literary man, especially a poet, to see against his name in ‘Who’s Who’—just as Cardiff is right for a sailor, Stepney for an orphan, Tunbridge Wells for a bishop, East Ham for a pop singer, it’s as rich in romance as a novel by Jeffery FaraoL” Unfortunately for romance, however, war broke out in 1914. The boy’s father was a cabinet-maker, an artist in his way. “My father liked to work with the woods of fruit trees, apple, pear, cherry and he was fond of experimenting with timbers that are not much used, such as young sweet chestnut, laburnum and holly; he made walking sticks from blackthorn, snuff boxes from maple, axe and hammer shafts from ash, egg-cups, napkin-rings, spoons, bowls dolls, horses, little tables and chairs from beech, lime

horse-chestnut and elder.” He was killed in France towards the end of toe war. The family then went to live in circumstances much less pleasing to a future poet, in Nottingham. There was, however, one remarkable consolation. Mr Belton, in whose house the Dyments had their lodgings, had a room full of model railway engines.

He had models of the puffing billy, the Locomotion the Lord of the Isles, Stephenson’s Rocket, the Liverpool and Manchester Lion and dozens more. Mr Belton was a retired railwaymen end with the help of model engines he and Clifford Dyment made counitlees imaginary journeys over the length and breadth of the British Isles. "We’re on a gradient of one in 75 over Shap Fell, fireman, it's grunting and pounding and gasping higher and higher until our engine’s up in the sky and we're dizzy and praying for the long float down to Penrith and Carlisle, we can’t hold on a minute longer'—and we top the hill —just in time! —and we drift down, thanking God, towards Penrith, our fire low, pressure falling, regulator at the first port, cut-off back, until I put on the brakes outside Carlisle and here we are. fireman, tired and dirty, but almost in Scotland—open your nostrils wide, Cliff, draw in the bracing air, and put your head back—can’t you feel the brogue of the Highlands blowing into your face, eh?” As the author remarks, “Mr Belton was my Homer.” In the meantime the boy attended elementary school. “I was called ‘a scholar’ and the class of which I was a member was ‘ a standard.’ We learned to read "The Water Babies’ and The King of the Golden River,’ practised cojpper-plate hand writing with malicious steel nibs, made pastel drawings of houses and flowers on brown paper, worried at mental arithmetic, and were taught to sing from a couple of yards of printed oil-cloth unrolled and slung humpily over the blackboard and called, mysteriously, ‘The Modulator.’ ” It wild be seen that Mr Dyment has forgotten nothing. Of course, this also means that some of his memories are very unpleasant The rough boys in the playground, the episode with cousin Hugh, who was dying of consumption, the death of Mr Belton and the disappearance of all his engines are examples of this. Some years ago another poet Laurie Lee, scored a great success with his book of memories, “Cider With Rosie.” “The Railway Game” is not perhaps quite as picturesque, but most readers will find it equally sincere and almost as amusing.