Roger Lonsdale

Obituarist needed. Email the city of Hull: A wry son has fallen. Carry word north beyond Yorkshire: Alert Barter Books. Light beacons on Eglingham moor And along Alnmouth beach where he flew as a navigator On National Service. Notify London. Divert Dr Burney from his harpsichord To break the drab news. Inform Dr Johnson’s teapot. Ring Yale and Oxford. Hunt Holywell Street high and low. Comb the Music Room. Description: Englishman, pipe-cleaner-thin, In an ever-grey suit, furtively smoking, amused By the Scots at Balliol, still loyal only to Bruce. Yell to Devorgilla. Buzz the Snell Bridge. Wake up those show-offy dons. Tell Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith. Whisper to the buttery staff Who knew his tipple, to the staff of stacked Thorntons bookshop Where once he popped in and bought Burns’s Poems with a poem By Burns in manuscript inside. Let the board of Blackwells wear black And the OUP shop in the High close forever in tribute. Tell tubby Ted Heath; tell tottery Harold Macmillan; Tell Hooray Henry Boris and Hooray Henrietta Ghislaine; Tell all the (im)moral tutees; and take word, too, To Roy Park on the Quinag, to Fiona Stafford, to Nick Hudson out in Vancouver, To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anonymous, and Mehetabel Wright. Tell all the male poets whose Lives he helped sort out And all the women poets he added in nudge after nudge. Tell Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis to tear round To Lonsdale College, but arrive too late. Dislodge the Master from the Master’s Lodgings To speak blandly and raise a glass. Tell the British Academy to wail and update its website. Comfort shareholders in tobacco companies. They will feel this loss. They’ll never hear the like of his dry cough again. Put rare-book dealers on standby. Start them salivating. But now because one sunny afternoon I saw him almost weep In Manor Walk; because at High Table He assured me it was alright not to feel at home, Take news of him to Dick Ellmann heading home in his Saab And to Marilyn and David Butler giving my parents a lift in their Mini Metro, So they can tell all the dead, as I tell the living, Something of this man whose Wikipedia entry Is just two lines long, his errors ‘not indecently numerous’. Slow the traffic to ode-speed on the Woodstock and Banbury Roads. Back-up tour buses beside Balliol’s side-wall. Tell them So the story may spread, even if all that’s remembered Is a shadow, a wave, a quick word. Who can tell?

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