Fleur Adcock

Thursday

Fleur Adcock

Eva Remembers Her Two Brothers Called James

When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone fairies, it implanted itself in a fertilised egg, to be born in July 1890 and loaded with the same eight syllables: James Arthur Dickson Eggington. He didn’t resemble his first avatar or any of his incarnate siblings at Eva’s wedding, this gladsome imp with his long chin.

Thursday

Fleur Adcock

Shorthand

Might you not have found him a little exhausting, though? If, for example, you were his mother, not given to innovative thinking yourself, and had this youth (in 1920 the word teenager was not current), forever coming up with a new interpretation of Genesis or sketching plans for a contraption that must be at least electrical, if not dangerous. And now this: a small ad in the Auckland Star – SHORTHAND in three hours. New system, easily learned. Send 5/- for course. C. Adcock, Te Rau-a-moa. That was in June; but on reflection three hours may have struck him as less than five shillings’ worth. So in December: SHORTHAND in three days. Write C. Adcock regarding the Veasy system… Oh, yes, ha ha – Veasy: v. easy. Did you make any money, Cyril?

Thursday

Fleur Adcock

Mnemonic

Nothing I write will be as durable as the rhyme for remembering the genders of third declension nouns, stuck in my head ever since Miss Garai’s Latin class. Masculini generis I used to fancy I shared it with generations of English schoolboys, the colonial servant dispensing justice under a tree in the African bush, are the nouns that end in -nis the wakeful subaltern in the trenches before the Somme; but now I discover the rhyme was originally German, as was Miss Garai. The vision shifts: and mensis, sanguis, orbis, fons, the solar topeed official sits not in Nigeria, but in Kamerun; the soldier is on the other side of what looks very much like the same barbed wire, collis, lapis, piscis, mons, writing to his girlfriend.