Jonathon Coudrille (#119)
Writer | Poet | Author | Musician
Bio
It was inevitable that I would write poetry.
Both of my parents enjoyed playing with words, and for their generation, it was normal to commit whole poems to memory.
"Slowly, and silently now the moon walks the night in her silver shoon..." began my mama.
I interrupted and asked what shoon was, and we decided de la Mare had invented the archaic plural for the sake of rhyme. She went on and got stuck around the thatch and silver latch and sent me to fetch the book; even in the caravan we had bookshelves. She had taught me to read way before my schooling began, at the last of the Dame schools; on days when the weather was too bad for the pony-cart that took the children from the village up the hills to the school, the Welsh taxi driver would improvise little ditties about each of us to the tune that the cowboys took for "Betsy from Pike";
"Now Tom Wallace Jones is a very nice boy; he reads all his books and he plays with his toy - and Daphne and Heather are very nice girls; the one has long plaits and the other has curls...I drive my old taxi and take them to school; and if we get lost then they'll say I'm a fool"
Meanwhile, my Grandfather Oscar had played the piano and sung on the music hall stage with his brother Leonard, the stage where comic ditties were the currency. He would make them up to amuse me, as he had for my dear father who himself became a Variety star, making up parodies for his puppets to sing.
I remember him manic, blasting along the road in his first car, an old wooden Ford V8 Shooting Brake that I nicknamed 'the flying greenhouse', keeping time on the hooter and playing the mouth organ with the other hand; or, in passive mood disconnecting the radio and prohibiting conversation in case it 'distracted the driver'.
Alors, to my own first 'poem'. At a time when I really wanted a puppy (it never materialised) I wrote in blue biro on lined paper, to the tune of my papa's favourite Yellow Rose of Texas,
"We've a moochy little poochy that was born away down south;
you wouldn't think that butter would melt inside his mouth; we'd been shown some pretty pussycats and parrots that could cuss, but the moochy little poochy was the only one for us..." I've forgotten the other verses, but it all goes wrong: "the armchair's his smoking parlour, the cover's grey with ash; while over in the corner, he waxes his moustache..." I think my mother supplied that final line.
My second, serious work attempted dialect:
"It 'appened in the marketplace on Monday <lost a line ending in give, shiv...> A fight was goin' on between O'Grundy and, our Teddy Boy champion Jake the Spiv.
O'Grundy pulled an 'uge jack-knife on Jakey, but Jake, 'e swiftly snatched it from 'is 'and. O'Grundy now was looking kind'a shaky, and now 'e's buried in the graveyard land. Nah when the coppers 'eard abaht this murder, they runs to see wot it was all abaht..." and there my memory fails me. Hardly WH Auden, but I WAS ten years old, if that. My mama pointed out that the market actually took place on Wednesday, so I re-wrote, substituting a clumsy unworkable "O'Lensdy" and losing interest in the whole thing.
By my teens I was composing political satire and involved with a touring concert party based in Saint Ives, where at a highly publicised and attended comic demonstration against the ludicrous Council proposal that the harbour wall should be ridged so that Beatniks couldn't sit on it: "Committees that sat/On their chairs nice and flat/Decreed that the wall should be pointed, and tah/Any person they find with a concave behind/Should be run out of town by and by..." I was recruited by the BBC and continued to write verse and lyrics professionally until I broke my neck in the traffic shunt that killed my career in broadcasting - Luckily it didn't kill me - and catapulted me into print.
You will find his work in:
Book 11: (2025)
1. To a lost Wild Beauty
Listen to his recital of this poem