Aley Howell 1919-1945

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FATHER

In memoriam Aley Howell

My father who died at child-birth

          far from his son. Now I run out of words

and climb the forests to lament him:

          here, he is precious, is air-currents,

pressures weighed in the leaves’ hands.

          An aroma tipped from bracted bowls, passed on

from stem to stem as his breath

          bends them. He is the callid, handy god

mother barred the house to at daybreak,

          who refuses. She found another man grew up,

their son, who loves at a distance

          him & her and his close sisters winding

in his head. But how he loses!

          Voices dent him where they can no entry stave.

All he leans back on lurches off.

          Astounded, as I grow closer his age,

I lament my father.

          He is much younger than his helpless son.

From Inside the Castle, Barrie & Rockliffe, The Cresset Press, London 1969

Born in Copenhagen, Eli Rosenbluth took his wife’s name and changed the spelling of his first name to Welsh-sounding Aley in order to serve overseas in REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) on returning from Australia where he had been interned at Hay – in the Australian outback – as a foreign alien, for the first three years of the war. He was sent to Australia on the infamous Dunera.

L + R – Gideon and Aley (Eli) Rosenbluth, Berlin.

When living in Australia in the eighties, I attempted to visit Hay and a sandstone feature nearby called The Walls of China. I never got there.

WHY I MAY NEVER SEE THE WALLS OF CHINA

As the road unrolls the plain

          light gets steadily worse:

The sun has left a stain

          like that of a crushed horse.

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Less and less can be seen

          approaching an increasingly

Insect-spattered windscreen.

          On we go unceasingly

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In one direction – ahead –

          pausing only to spend the night

On a hotel bed;

          but dressing before the light,

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Eager to get there.

          As day enlarges,

Our little car

          splashes through mirages,

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Underwings decamp

          hurriedly in a flock.

We rattle with each bump,

          Tilt away from the truck

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Rushing towards and past us;

          wondering whether our fuel

And water will last us

          to the next meal

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In a mining town,

          the next chamber

In which to put the head down,

          dream re-runs of camber

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Littered with tyre-shells,

          sheep carcasses,

The crow’s wails

          and the parrot’s raucousness

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When we go for a leak.

          Mostly we drive on

And on without a break

          across the plain.

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‘Do not overtake

          on crests or curves’

Reads as a joke

          where the road never swerves

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And there’s no one to race.

          All the road leads to is road.

Scarcely in one place,

          we are merely a load

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Speeding from sign to sign

          – Stock, Dip, Grid –

Crossing the time-zone line

          as if on a desperate bid

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To beat the clock,

          melt the road’s edges,

Where gourds bake

          among the weeds’ smudges

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Of merging greenery,

          while the middleground

Shifts its scenery

          before that profound

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Place in the distance

          where the trees preserve

Their motionless existence

          at a far remove

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From the dust in our wake,

          the tumbleweed ahead,

The thirst we cannot slake

          To be either quick or dead.

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An axle pulls to the left;

          a shoulder-blade starts aching;

The mind keeps going soft,

          or shudders on awaking

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To the fact of having slept,

          if only for a second,

As the swift road swept

          how many yards unreckoned

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Under the bonnet?

          Having come this far,

We rest for a minute

          out of the car;

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It being extraordinary

          simply to stare

At some quite ordinary

          corner of nowhere.

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Best not to linger though,

          given we’ve got

Some distance to go

          in order to get

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Within sight of the walls.

          Keen to arrive

Before night falls,

          we continue our drive.

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Then the road alters:

          wheels choose a rut.

Minuscule creatures

          easily squashed flat,

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Over and over,

          we roll to a stop.

Have we killed each other?

          Both of us stand up.

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Hurled from our route,

          more lucky than bruised,

Where branches hang mute

          on a road seldom used,

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We have ended up facing

          the opposite way

In the staved casing

          hired for a holiday.

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Turned around and sent

          back the way we came,

Our destination bent

          by a fluke from a larger game.

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So perhaps we tried to bite off

          more than we could chew:

Leaving behind a write-off,

          I sit across from you

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As we trundle home over the plain,

          whether or not we please;

Glimpsing, from the train,

          animals still as trees.

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From Why I may Never See the Walls of China, Anvil, London 1986

Aley’s diary

Aley kept a comprehensive diary of his time in the internment camp. He also kept the zoo at Hay, and he brought back a big lizard which escaped in the blackout at Waterloo Station as he was about to give it to his future wife Deborah (a government veterinary surgeon) for safe-keeping. It was eventually re-captured and this picture by Aley epitomises his “dragon” and his adoption of a Welsh identity (safer than being identifiably Jewish during WW2).

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Deborah Howell – by Aley

Could this be a photo of Hay camp?

Aley and the motor-cycle with sidecar – on which he was killed in an accident, serving as an officer in REME, Naples 1945 (a few weeks before his son was born).

NEAR CLOUDS HILL

He flew over my bonnet like a super-hero.

I had hoped to circumvent the queue

By making a u-turn. Well, it’s down to me,

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But they will hog the hump of the road

As if their tires unrolled the line.

Near Bovington, some ten days on,

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I just avoid two dawdling boys

On bicycles beyond a rise.

When T. E. Lawrence flew off his

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He ended up garrotted by barbed wire.

My father’s had a bad rep with its side-car.

He scowls in front of it in uniform,

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Then takes off for the Opera or for Paestum

In 1945.  I wonder whether those boys

Are alive, or the ghosts of dead bikers?

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From Silent Highway, Anvil, London 2014

Aley as experimental photographer:

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Aley on Erica – Deborah’s horse – at Upshire – her mother’s home on the edge of Epping Forest. Probably taken the last time they were together – before he went with REME to Naples in 1944 – from where he never returned.

UPSHIRE

After I was born the side that had to stand

On its own against them was back full of swords

Where he was the next of the lost. The duck drank in the wild and she

Was painted by Scott but not in a tree.

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The forest was committed over a church mound ago,

And so the white weather-boarded house is part

Of a short line of houses crowning the brow

Of Horseshoe Hill. Would my father’s name

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Climb the tree to an ancestor?

I was standing there on my small stone,

Born in a gazebo where I must have failed in daughters

And all the leather-bound years that hoard

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A suicide view of the barn. On the edge of Epping Forest,

There was a walnut once, my son; and if you could climb to the top

Of it you would get a view of Boadicea’s monument.

There is the small stone gazebo standing on its own in a field

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Where her horses failed her and her daughters

Drank the poison first, in front of her, and round the back

Of the white weather-boarded house

There used to be an old black weather-boarded barn

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And round the back of that a mound, I think,

Where I was sure I had found her hoard of rusted swords.

Swords they were not. With hindsight I guess

They must have been farm implements, but served the child

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I was as swords, and in the white

Weather-boarded house next to ours

There was a ceiling full of birds. I know that

Saint Walnut of Epping died so Hitler could be stopped.

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I have been in Boadicea’s monument of swords.

Are they still there, I wonder – wild duck in flight

Painted by the son of Scott who died in the Antarctic?

Hitler was born on my birthday and committed suicide

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Ten days after I was born in 1945.

My father served. His name’s engraved in stone

On the side of Saint Thomas’s porch.

He had died just before Hitler though, lost in one black month.

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The church was built a little over a hundred years ago

By a Buxton ancestor. I was a child who died of joy

In a field of white. That month engraved

In hindsight with swords was used against Hitler in 1945,

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And if I poison the birds a round house by the hill

Of a hundred leather-bound horses implements the wonder

Of Thomas’s horseshoe and of all my weather-boarded houses

Built round the back of the Antarctic.

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Ten sure days to get to it by stone. I think a Buxton rusted once.

The lost farm found the little guess I stopped.

The porch is part of the joy that should have been there

Crowning a birthday, had he not been lost.

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And did she stand on a brow before a frontline of short swords

As were there of old?  He and I know that first

You should edge them though. Are the swords still there?

In that weather-boarded house the ceiling was on top of her.

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From Songs of Realisation, High Window Press, London 2019

Boadicea’s monument, Upshire, Essex

Aley and Deborah were socialists, whereas his father and his uncle were prominent Zionists. I have engaged with their relationship, and with my own experiences in regard to Israel in two prose works:

The Best Deborah Stories, Manubook, London 2015.

Painting by Dilys Bidewell – which I used on the cover for The Best Deborah Stories

Consciousness (with Mutilation) – Odd Volumes, The Fortnightly Review, Les Brouzils 2019 – click here for details