By M. C. –

The Times Literary Supplement

March 26, 2021

To Dirk Bogarde’s biographer John Coldstream we owe the information that this is a year of ‘multiple Bogarde anniversaries”. The actor was born on March 28, 1921. It is fifty years since the release of the film Death in Venice, In which he played Thomas Mann’s doomed composer Gustav von Aschenbach. It is sixty years since Victim, the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual”, and sixty years since a dubious cult favourite, The Singer Not the Song. Twenty years before that, Mr Coldstream writes, Lance-Corporal Derek van den Bogaerde, of the Royal Corps of Signals, made his debut as a published poet, in the TLS.

Attributed to “Derek Bogaerde”, “Man in the Bush” appeared in the issue of august 30, 1941 – well before he became known as an elegant memoirist and novelist, but not long before he saw all too much of the horror of war, as an intelligence officer, around Europe and the Pacific. This poem works on a more modest scale. Its narrator, pressed against a tree, observes his enemy, and waits for the morning mist to give way to the “cautious sun”. The enemy is a single soldier; and the poem seems to reflect what the biographer calls the poet’s “predilection for camouflage”.

I saw him move
his head
behind that green
bush.
I must wait until
he moves again ...
My gun is heavy to
hold,
and my arm is aching.
Man in the bush,
does your arm ache
as you watch me?

And so the poem – which is to be republished in full on the TLS website next week – inches forwards, as rain starts to fall and a pigeon footles about (“I think it was / a pigeon”). Then: “A crack!” That pigeon flies off. “This is the first man I have killed …”

A second poem appeared two years later in the Poetry Review, September 1943, in a selection of “More Poems from the Forces”, by which time Bogarde had become a lieutenant in the Queen’s Royal Regiment. Following the tense stand-off of “Man in the Bush”, he he writes in “Steel Cathedrals” of a different kind of waiting game: “It seems to me, I spend my life in stations. / Going, coming, standing, waiting. / Paddington, Darlington, Shrewsbury, York. / I know them all most bitterly”. It ends: “The station clock with staggering hands and callous face, /says twenty-five-to-nine, / A cigarette, a cup of tea, a bun, / And my train goes at ten”. A third poem, a tribute to Bogarde’s agent Robin Fox, is known to date, neatly enough, form 1971; but that seems to be that. He must have had other things to do by then.

M.C.

Copyright – The Times Literary Supplement

Man in the Bush

I saw him move
his head
behind that green
bush.
I must wait until
he moves again.
The mist is rising,
soon the sun will
come, the cautious sun,
and probe with tentative
fingers into this sombre
undergrowth.
My gun is heavy to
hold,
and my arm is aching.
Man in the Bush,
does your arm ache
as you watch me?
These nettles here are
bejewelled with the
night dew.
And here brambles,
all strung with
liquid diamonds,
clutch at every move
I make.
I saw him move
again
behind the green
Elder Bush, green
with new born shoots.
The mist is risen now
and turned to rain,
soft rain.
My gun and hands
are one.
Are yours too, Man in
the Bush?
Why won’t he move?
This tree is my
protection,
pressed against
the roots I lie
and wait.
A pigeon
cried.
I think it was
a pigeon.
He moved again.
And now, with
stealthy hands,
he parts the greening
branches of the Elder.
I must not move.
Slowly his head,
in steel encasement
rises, gleaming with
the rain.
His face, pale and
haggard,
peers at me;
but I am not
seen;
this pine is my
protection.
Move my gun
slowly
O! so slowly
to the aim.
Stretching himself
yet crouching
he peers unseeing.
Watch his face,
white and muddied,
expressionless.
To the aim.
A crack!
Startled, a pigeon
blusters through the bushes.
A wisp of smoke
eddies in the damp
air.
He has rolled,
a sad bundle
amongst the Elder
branches, a huddled
lump,
with legs and arms
awry,
and the rain
glinting on his
helmet.
This is the first man
I have killed,
And blood, not
dew, bejewels
now the nettles,
rubies strung
on all the trembling
leaves.
And now, with
cautious fingers, the
sun peers amongst
the pillars of the
wood and sparkles
on the barrel of my
gun.
Sad Elder!
And sad the rubied nettle!
A thrush has sung.
It is the Morning.

DEREK BOGAERDE