Sinéad Hemsley – The Story of the White Cup by Roger Mitchell

My memory is rather disappointing. I have vague images from those years in the late nineties/early two thousands. They are more impressions than anything else. No full conversations come back to me and I don’t completely trust what I do remember. I don’t know when I first met Michael but I had certainly heard of him before I met him or saw him read. 

I moved back to London in 1997 after I graduated from university in Scotland with my then boyfriend, the poet Roddy Lumsden. We moved into a flat in Stoke Newington above a chicken shop. 
Roddy was out at readings and poetry events most evenings. I worked for a charity at that time and was usually too tired or skint to go out except on weekends. He would come home from nights out and regale me with the brilliant people he had been with at the Poetry Society or seen read. Over time, I got to meet them in person, one of them being the lovely Michael Donaghy. 

Michael would appear for fleeting visits, like film cameos, at the parties we attended and some of my friends were in his writing group at City Lit a few years before me: Andrew Neilson and Kathryn Gray. I think before I attended his class, I babysat for his young son, Ruairi, a couple of times in his house off Green Lanes. 

Back in those days, I didn’t drive and one of the times I babysat, perhaps it was the first time, Michael kindly collected me in his Saab. He was driving along talking and I remember him suddenly pulling over on Stoke Newington Church Street and saying that he wanted to show me something. He got out of the car and I, not quite sure what to do next, followed him across the road into the churchyard next to Clissold Park. I remember walking up a leafy, shaded path and crouching down to peer through railings at an old tomb in dappled shadow. On the side of the tomb, was an inscription about a girl who had died when her clothes caught fire aged 23 and Michael told me that on the other side it said that her brother had been killed by pirates. I can’t have been much older than 23 at the time myself. It stuck with me. 

Remembering this yesterday, I wondered whether I had this memory right but looking up on the internet I found details about Elizabeth Pickett who died Dec 11 1781 “in consequence of her clothes taking fire the preceding evening”. This kind of glittering treasure was typical Michael fare. I always came away from a conversation with him having learnt something new. This morning, I was looking through Michael’s Collected Poems for a poem of his that I remembered him reading to the class at City Lit, and came across ‘Habit’ which is clearly inspired by this tomb. Amazing. I don’t remember him mentioning that he had written a poem about it when he showed it to me at all or having read that poem since. 

The City Lit evening class met weekly in an otherwise empty building, it was up a few flights of stairs in a rather barren strip-lit room with a wall of curtainless windows. The mismatched school desks were all different levels and sizes and had been pushed together to make one huge table. There must have been 15 or 20 people every time I went- like a huge dinner party without any food. Michael would stand at one end of the table and distribute poems to us by poets I’d never heard of. He was full of enthusiasm. Wizard-like. We would read the poem and discuss it and the mechanics and the message would gradually reveal itself through the discussion. 

Michael would share with us how the poem had inspired him, structurally or conceptually to write one his own poems which he would more often than not then read. This reveal, this seeing behind the curtain of his creative process was probably my favourite part of the class. Like the chat between poems at a poetry reading, you’d get a glimpse of his life and thoughts. 

I don’t remember actually writing in class but we must have done. The second half of the evening, there was an opportunity for everyone to read and have critiqued a poem they had brought that they were working on. However ropey the poems were, and they often were pretty long-winded or clunky, Michael was always kind and generous in his comments. He encouraged everyone there to keep going, to make their work better. When the class finished we would adjourn to the pub on the corner. Sometimes Michael joined us for a pint, often times he didn’t.

I don’t remember much about the night he brought ‘The White Cup’ by Roger Mitchell, but this poem has stayed with me ever since and is one of my all time favourites. I’ve been an English secondary school teacher for the past twenty years and I have shared this poem with classes as a stimulus for a creative writing activity almost every year of those two decades. All thanks to Michael. 

The poem really does all the work for you as a stimulus. It is a lesson in how a simple object carries a story – literally and figuratively. It is an exemplar of the advice given to poets ‘to show, don’t tell’. We know this is a poem about a Holocaust survivor without being directly told as much.  The reader pieces together the story of ‘The White Cup’ from the small details: how ’those could not have been exactly the words’; the significance of ‘the guard’ who doesn’t give ‘a cigarette’: the black inside’ of the ‘box cars’. 

Also strange and compelling is the lack of certainty; there is a hearsay quality to the account. The narrator stresses that we can’t trust this version of events and implies that he has told different versions of the story in the past. He undercuts the reliability of the story, the truth of it and the symbolic significance of the cup both before and while he is telling us about it. But instead of undermining the story, this makes the cup’s symbolic importance all the greater for me. I also love the ending of this poem. The way it offers both a completeness and incompleteness at the same time with the deft image of the girl sipping and swallowing the water and our ignorance of what happens to her next.    

The Story of the White Cup by Roger Mitchell

I am not sure why I want to tell it,
since the cup was not mine, and I was not there,
and it may not have been white, after all.
When I tell it, though, it is white, and the girl
to whom it has been given, by her mother,
is eight. She is holding a white cup to her breast,
and her mother has just said goodbye, though those
could not have been, exactly, the words. No one knows
what her father has said, but when I tell it,
he is either helping someone very old with a bag
or asking a guard for a cigarette. There is, of course,
no cigarette. The box cars stand with their doors
slid back. They are black inside, and the girl
who has just been given a cup and told to walk
in a straight line and to look like she wants
a drink of water, who cried in the truck
all the way to the station, who knew, at eight,
where she was going, is holding a cup to her breast
and walking away, going nowhere, for water.
She does not turn, but when she has found water,
which she does, in all versions of the story, everywhere,
she takes a small sip of it and swallows.