Class Photograph
Renfrew High School, 1956
We were Elizabethan girls and boys,
Too young for politics, too old for toys.
Then Hungary and Suez changed all that,
Or so it feels in tired old retrospect.
Nostalgia corrodes the intellect.
It makes you want to eat your coat and hat.
One foot in childhood, one in adolescence,
Rock Around the Clock made far more sense
Even than The Battle of the River Plate –
Stiff upper lips and Royal Navy dash,
Its Technicolored brio and panache
Heroic, goreless, brilliant, out of date.
Like Ovaltineys in their Start-rite shoes –
It catches up on you, it really does,
This looking back, this old class photograph.
Be-blazered in our uniforms and ties
(Who he? Who she?) – pensioners in disguise
As who they were, a pictured epitaph.
Pillar boxes still red (though not much else is)
And the scarcely visible orthodoxies
All still in place, plus global urgency,
Destructive wars abroad … And yet, God bless
Democracy, dissent and the NHS
Which underpins our civic decency.
That jolt of historical reorientation (“We were Elizabethans”) in line one of Class Photograph reminds us of the poem’s inception. As Douglas Dunn tells us in the introduction to this reading, he wrote it after Carol Ann Duffy allotted him the year 1956 for Jubilee Lines, her anthology to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012.
Three years after the coronation, people liked to describe themselves as New Elizabethans (at least, they did in England – did they in Scotland?). It’s not a designation heard very often any more, though Elizabeth II still reigns. Dunn’s poem may be Elizabethan in more ways than one. Formal in structure, informal in voice, it recalls not only the poetic principles of the 1950s “Movement”, but the resonance of a more distant and musical age. Dunn has negotiated a relaxed and substitution-friendly iambic pentameter, as some of the best Elizabethan poets did. The rhyme scheme (a, a, b, c, c, b) is symmetrical but subtle: placing the rhyming couplets as he does, Dunn avoids the sense of punch-line delivery to which a closing couplet is traditionally prone, and binds the paired lines into the stanzaic narrative. But the emphases of those rhymes are not lost.
Packing the poem with chronological markers, Dunn seems slightly, dutifully amused by his commission. Morally and historically serious, though, he determines from the outset to avoid the cosiness of shared memory. Grim politics, encapsulated by “Hungary” and “Suez”, bolster the early warning against nostalgia. Even those terrible conflicts, which politicised a generation, may become subject over time, like old films and ads, to the sepia effect. The first stanza ends with an angry, slangy dismissal of nostalgia, as if it were an age-related cognitive disorder that “corrodes the intellect” and might lead from falsehood to madness, as suggested by the elaboration of that old saying: “I’ll eat my hat.”
Two media-filtered subjects symbolise 1950s preoccupations in the second stanza. The second world war, a hauntingly incomplete memory for Dunn’s generation, has already been subjected to revision, sanitised and glamorised by the film, The Battle of the River Plate. Closer to home, Rock Around the Clock demonstrates the leap from old-fashioned, parental patriotism to the new generation’s excited self-discovery through music and rebellion. Exotic words, “brio” and “panache”, stand out against the plain English in which the speaker announces that Rock Around the Clock “made far more sense” to the young adolescents – it presumably produced a more immediate impression on their senses, too. The final quartet of adjectives, another decisive closing line, sums up the power and impotence of the war film. It’s revealing that, even in 1956, crucial experiences and insights are delivered by the media.
There’s no sentimentality about rock’n’roll in the cinema aisles. The third stanza moves us on, with a reluctantly affectionate almost parodic nod to a couple of long-lived brand names. The “happy girl and boys” who were the Ovaltineys are enlisted as a simile, and the image of the neatly-shod children of the popular adverts blends grammatically into the “looking back” that “[really] catches up on you …” Nostalgia isn’t so easily averted, and so the speaker’s gaze is drawn more closely to the class photograph.
In a striking reverse chronology, these “be-blazered” students are “pensioners in disguise / As who they were, a pictured epitaph”. The non-recognition is jokily expressed in a contemporary demotic (“Who he? Who she?”), but the explanation moves swiftly from the comedy of reversal to the sad inevitability of the young faces forming their own epitaph. Then, as if in counterweight to the first stanza, the political theme returns, and neat technical footwork makes history fly, from the 50s to the present. An oblique reference to loss of empire (“Pillar boxes still red, though not much else is”) appropriately gets mated with “scarcely visible orthodoxies” before the poem asserts a triad of values, “Democracy, dissent and the NHS”, an ideal that feels far from dated and far from realised in 2018. The “global urgency” and “destructive wars” heighten the relevance.
That closing emphasis on the NHS revitalises the title’s pun on “class”. It’s a reminder that what the National Health Service fundamentally stands for is equality. That’s why it “underpins our civic decency”. So the light touch again firms up, while the tone remains sensible, staunch in its values but not sermonising. Although it originated as a commission, and the poem performs a coolly well-informed objectivity, its speaker is not disengaged. Dissenting moments of personal emotion and an underlying political intensity are allowed to disturb the surface, and the conflict is enriching.
• Class Photograph is included in Douglas Dunn’s latest collection, The Noise of a Fly, which was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot prize.
