Book Review

Eagles’ nest in a tin hut

Birds, Bees and Beasts

When he was killed in 1979, John Bradburne left 6,000 pages of poetry in the tin hut at the Mutemwa leprosy settlement in Zimbabwe where he had lived for a decade. One day bees had come buzzing in, wondering, he judged, whether to set up a colony in his only room. He welcomed them and fed them with prune juice and altar wine. He wrote:

Whether their honey is a better thing
Than my unpublished poetry depends
Only on the opinion of the King
Of heather, lime and rhyme

As it happened his poetry survived.

Bradburne sometimes depicts himself as a fool or jester in his poetry. Sometimes his jocularity might give an impression of feyness. But Bradburne was intelligent and he was tough.

After a country childhood in Westmorland, he was educated at the conventional Gresham's School in Norfolk. Aged 18 he went straight into the army instead of university at the outbreak of war in 1939. With the Gurkhas in Malaya he spent a month in the jungle after the fall of Singapore, attempted to sail to Sumatra only to be shipwrecked, but succeeded in a second attempt. He then joined Wingate's force in Burma.

Some time during the war Bradburne had a spiritual experience that propelled him into the Catholic Church. Most of the rest of his life was spent in searching for what to do. His instinct was for a hermit's life. The Carthusians of Parkminster advised him after some months to seek guidance in Rome. Bradburne as a poor pilgrim went from there to the Holy Land, back and forth more than once.

But he was not destined to be another Benedict Joseph Labre. Attracted by the music of Westminster Cathedral, he was given the job by Cardinal Godfrey of caretaker at his house in the country at Hare Street, Hertfordshire, and spent two years of solitude there. In 1962 he wrote to the Jesuit Fr John Dove to ask if there was a spare cave in Southern Rhodesia, as it was then called. Although Bradburne wanted to work with people who had leprosy, he was not called to be an administrator, doctor or qualified nurse. Solitude and service were his twin appetites. In Rhodesia it was only after seven years as caretaker in two Jesuit houses that he got a chance to live at the leprosy settlement at Mutemwa.

The 90 people there had been neglected, and were dying without human or spiritual care. The great difference that Bradburne made was to treat them as human beings. Their medical needs were met by two brave women who arrived to work with them. Bradburne arranged for a little chapel to be built, where he played the harmonium. He talked with the lepers, helped them and championed their cause. It was his fierce defence that indirectly led to his death.

First some officials complained that the leprosy patients' food bill ($5 a month each) was too much; then that their drugs bills were too high. When Bradburne countered, he was sacked. Local people built a tin hut for him outside the settlement, but he had acquired enemies who resented his defence of the leprosy settlement against depredations. During the civil war he was kidnapped, and although a guerrilla tribunal sent him home, he was shot as he made his way on foot.

He died with a reputation for holiness. Favours attributed to his intercession have multiplied since. There can be little doubt that he was a saint.

This background gives his huge volume of poetry an extra dimension of interest. The linguistician David Crystal has built up an almost complete corpus of it online (at www.johnbradburnepoems.com). Now he has selected for paperback publication 180 poems that focus on the animal kingdom, a constant preoccupation of their author. (In a poem from 1949 the author's delight in choral liturgy suggests an antiphonal image of birdsong: "On deacon's side the blackbird sings / Cantoris sings the thrush.")

Bradburne's poetry was always formally structured with metre and rhyme; not many people in the 1970s were still writing ballades, for example. But he was also using poetry as an ordinary means of correspondence and diary-keeping. So a series of poems on watching eagles reads partly like a naturalist's diary:

Today I climbed the majanje-tree
Nearest the great machacha of their choice
And scaled its fifteen feet so as to be
Level with eagles' nest; I shall rejoice
At last when I shall see that eaglet stir, -
Whilst I am pretty certain one is there
I've seen no movement, not the least, of her.

But Bradburne, while loving the creatures for their own sake, is a supernaturalist, not a naturalist. He finds in nature images of his own mystical life with God. (His favourite book was The Cloud of Unknowing, that fourteenth-century English treatise on prayer.) He had long before dedicated himself to the Virgin Mary, his Queen, in a life of poverty and chastity. Now he is watching eagles,

Knowing the eagle symbolised my Queen
Who has one eaglet-child, Christ Oedipus
Her son, her One, her Groom, her Tiercel keen
Whose marriage to His Mother is approved
For ever and shall never be removed.

That is a daring and self-assured image, not the product of light dabbling in verse. Sometimes the smoothness of his composition is disturbed by an inversion of word order or a piece of poetic diction (of which in our generation we have been taught to disapprove). And some people do not like jokes in their poetry, which Bradburne does. In one poem, "Owlcry", from 1971, he likens owls to musicians, and one couplet says, "Bach is all about my tree, / Byrd is willing, heard with me." But the poem does not remain on the level of groaning puns. It concludes with a restatement of Bradburne's conviction that all creation, of which he is a conscious part, gives God praise: "‘Holy, Holy, Holy' cry / Trisagion the owl and I."

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