A Graph Review, 66-68, more at times!
Published by Greenwich Exchange.
9781906 07595 8. Paperback 2016
112pages plus 6 page glossary. (surprisingly useful!)
In the first sentence of the forward, Michael Cullup offers ‘an apology for Matelot, which might in some places, cause offence.’ This is a well-placed warning. However he then explains that the period he writes of, National Service shortly after the Second World War when the Cold War is increasing its pressures, was a time when ships and ship-mates were so much different to the world of today.
We first enter via Victoria Barracks, Portsmouth, 1955 and can follow his naval career through the 24 poems to his final exit, his final V-sign. From training to shipping-out, crewing and stoking and extensive shore-leaves where the events and language become bawdy, violent and drunken.
There is no excuse, life was as it was and we can see the matelots, the characters and assorted other services in their almost bizarre life on-shore as well as aboard. There is violence, there is comradeship and it is an essay on life in the navy for the ordinary seaman, the National Service recruit.
I had a great-uncle who was a ‘stoker’ in the merchant navy during the First World War and I suspect his experiences were more similar to ‘Matelot’ than I could imagine. From reading this collection, as Michael Cullup intended, you see vividly the world they lived in; its intensity and excesses of ‘compensating’ for a cramped male-only, testosterone-filled lifestyle. There are several books available as ‘Matelot,’ make sure you add the author in your search. This is the only one as a collection of poems and taking place in the mid-fifties. It wins on its immediacy, and realism of the events of a life at sea and ashore.
Once you have followed his story, from start to bar, to next-stop, to more bars and ports and the Discharge you may well need to pick a book with some softer escapism. However I found myself picking poems randomly to reassure myself that I could not have survived let alone thrived in ‘stoker’ conditions. All the more applause to Michael Cullup for his oh-so-vivid recall of life and detail.
Boats (about submarines), Emergency: Fishguard and Sea-Time are three poems that I have re-read and would consider as nearest to our imagination of naval life and easily stand-alone poems. But dig deeper into the others for the real-world of the mid-fifties. A great read but not for the soft-hearted.
A small sip: first verse from Leave:
Aggie Westons. / Pompey, Guzz, it always seems the same:/ a canteen, plastic and chrome, / crowded corridors, / matelots everywhere./ at weekends, / kitbags and gear,/ the flotsam of drifting lives, / litter the place. / Everyone seems pissed, / or half pissed.
poetryparc 