Everest is conquered the battle has been won/Hilary and Tenzing their duty they have done still seems to me to have fulfilled all

Everest is conquered, the battle has been won/Hilary and Tenzing, their duty they have done still seems to me to have fulfilled all the requirements of the prize – to wit that it rhymed, that it was topical and heroical, and that it honoured national achievement. I’d gone red and stammered out something along the lines of “Don’t know, sir.” Whereupon he’d turned away in disgust. In the course of asking me for a poem he’d told me he believed I was destined for a career in literature “What do you say to that, Jacobson?” he’d asked me. My English master looked like Dylan Thomas and was reputed to be just as wild. The day after he invited me to submit a poem to the magazine, which he edited, he ran away with a 15-year-old girl from our sister school across the road For a long time I thought it was my fault. Entered for the school magazine poetry prize some months after the Coronation it didn’t even get an honourable mention I was in a different school by then Out of primary and into grammar Now we had masters. He was another one who understood post-telly tristesse long before there was such a thing.My poem fared scarcely better than my tree.

We put the saplings in the ground, tied them to the sticks, shovelled back the dirt, and traipsed back. Coronation over.Every few years, though, the more dreamy among us would return to see how our trees were getting along It turned out that mine was a weeping willow Cock-up by some botanist. So while every other kid’s tree grew big and strong and silvery, mine sighed and drooped aslant the brook, like the willow that convinced Ophelia a watery death was preferable to life with someone who accused you of being a harlot one minute and a nun the next.You can’t entirely blame Hamlet, though. Then the headmaster rang a bell and shouted “Hurrah!” and we all fell to digging holes. We lined up for the official ceremony, boys on one side of the brook, girls on the other, while a person from the local council told us that the trees we were about to put in the earth would be here long after we were dead. How fickle grown-ups were!Two days before the Coronation we traipsed down to a nearby field which had a tinkling brook running through it – the Bowker, I suppose it must have been – each of us carrying a stick, a sapling, a piece of string and a little beach spade. Not always with distinction, but at least once I had chalked them off I could conclude I was a man.The tree I planted was a silver birch Or so they told me.

All of us at Bowker Vale Primary School were given a little silver birch to plant in honour of the Coronation of Elizabeth II. One minute our teachers were weeping openly for good King George, the next they were showing us how to paint paper flags and plant silver birch trees. There were other things I was interested in achieving, but what counted were those three fundamentals – the tree, the poem, the son.I managed them, too. A man was not a man, I remember being told when I was a boy, until he had planted a tree, written a poem, and sired a son I found that useful I knew what I had to aim at.

The final validation.We calculated success differently once upon a time. Who are you, how are you, why are you? – put yourself on telly and find out. Even when what you do isn’t telly, it’s telly that confirms you’re doing it Doing it well, I mean Doing it successfully Doing it noticeably. Soon, telly will be the only way you measure how you’re getting on.